17 min read ⭑

Patrick Morley understands father wounds. He’s endured his fair share of them — and he knows millions of other men have, too. But he’s also experienced the healing that only Jesus can bring, the kind of healing every broken boy needs to walk in his God-given calling as a man.

Patrick has spent decades discipling men through his Bible studies, 23 books (including his bestseller “The Man in the Mirror”), 750-plus articles and speaking engagements. Today, he’s giving us a behind-the-scenes look at how God has healed (and is still healing) his father and mother wounds, his fascination with Formula 1 racing, and the resources that have changed his life.

The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

It’s very interesting when I think about a meal that stands out. It’s not the food; it’s who I ate it with. My wife, Patsy, and I just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary not too long ago. When we were dating, I wanted to make sure that my wife liked me. I liked her a lot. I fell in love and wanted to spend my life with her. She was a believer. I was not, but I thought I was. I grew up in a Christian home that didn’t know Christ. (I was in America, so of course I was a “Christian.”) She would ask these religious questions, and my answers were not that satisfying, so I just basically tried to figure out where she was coming from and then lied. I kind of tricked her into getting married.

When we got engaged, she thought she would get a ring, but instead, I gave her a terrarium. You should have seen the look on her face. I said, “Look a little closer.” I had made a ring tree inside. My favorite picture of my wife is when somebody snapped a Polaroid when she saw the ring. It’s just precious. At a rehearsal dinner, I made a little symbol, a circle, with a big line through it. “Through all, we will be one” — that’s what it meant. I had a wood woodworker make it and collaborate on it. “Through all, we will be one” has been our marriage symbol.

On our 50th, I bought another terrarium and put it on the table. Patsy said, “Oh, that’s nice.” I said, look inside. A friend of ours is a custom jeweler, so I had her make that symbol “Through all, we will be one” into a pendant, put it on a nice chain, and put it inside the terrarium. I changed “Through all, we will be one” to “Through all, we have been one.” You go through a lot in 50 years. Honestly, I can’t remember the meal itself, but I think I might have had salmon. I’m supposed to have salmon three times a week, so I do.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?

God does not make a distinction between sacred and secular. Everything is holy to the Lord. I do seasons of different activities, and I wouldn’t really call them nonspiritual. But from a physical standpoint, I love camping and hiking. Since I got my hiking app, I’ve logged over 400 hikes and over 2,000 miles in hikes. I just finished doing the Grand Canyon two Novembers ago. I hiked rim to rim. Last November, I went to the Havasu Falls at the Havasu Indian Reservation next to the Grand Canyon.

Hiking is truly a passion of mine. I just enjoy seeing the majesty of God in creation. I love looking across the canyon and seeing a little slide of rocks, thinking, If I were to go over there and manually move that slide of rocks a hundred yards away, it would probably take me three years to do it — and I’d have to get a lot of help to do it. When I was done, nobody would even notice that I had done the work. Creation is so big and we are so small. The idea that Jesus would reduce himself to human flesh so that we might be able to comprehend this incomprehensible God just always blows my mind. And so, I just really enjoy being out in creation. Maybe it’s not spiritual in some sense, but at the end of the day, I think everything is spiritual.

At the other end of the spectrum is Formula 1 racing. My daughter and I went through a six-week summer education program at Oxford University at the Center for Renaissance and Medieval Studies. A friend of mine owns a place in Sherburn, England, and he let us stay at his place. During that time, the British Grand Prix was playing, and it was televised. I was actually less than an hour away from the race, but I was watching it on television for the first time ever.

I became enthralled with the technical excellence. Excellence is one of my values, and Formula 1 is the pinnacle of excellence. I love anything done really, really, really well. And if I’m quirky in anything, if I have a proclivity, it’s that I love anything done well. I even love watching somebody collect the garbage with panache — a little style, a little class, a little enthusiasm. Formula 1 is the pinnacle of motor racing, so I haven’t missed a single race since 2000, when I watched my first race.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?

A little bit of background: My dad’s father abandoned my dad and his family when my dad was two years old. He was the youngest of four children. Because of that, my dad grew up in poverty. He went to work when he was six and had two jobs. With his older brother, Harry, my dad had a paper route and worked on the bread truck at age six. As he grew from a little boy to a man, he never felt the scratch of a father’s whiskers. Never heard his dad’s soothing voice reading him a bedtime story. Never tossed about a ball in the backyard. Never had his hair tussled, never wrestled and never heard a truck door at the end of the day indicating that a dad was about to reenter the family orbit. So he was basically left to guess how to be a man, husband and father. I know he wanted to break the cycle, but he didn’t know how.

So when he became a man, we became part of a church. I’m projecting here, but apparently, there was no manhood advice at that moment. You know, when a young man brings his wife and four young children (I’m the oldest of four boys), you have to ask, “Why did he just do that? What are the problems he’s trying to solve? What does he need from us? How can we give that to him?” And so my dad had a good work ethic and he went to work, but then by the age of 40, he got burned out, and we quit church. I was 16 when we left church, and I ended up quitting high school. I joined the army. My next brother followed in my footsteps. He quit high school — I think because of me. He eventually died of a heroin overdose. My next two brothers had way more than their fair share of problems. And my dad just never saw it coming. The thing is that even though the intentions were really wonderful, my mom and dad might as well have set out to do it on purpose. What happened to our family was out of ignorance, not malice.

Nevertheless, we were very dysfunctional as a family. I have no recollection of hearing the words “I love you. I’m proud of you. I believe in you. Here are some things you could do with your life. Here’s the meaning and purpose of life. Here are some things you could think about with regard to the opposite sex. Here are some things you could think about with regard to education or a job opportunity.” We were also not a physically affectionate family.

When my mother died, I was 53 years old, and I had been a Christian since I was 24. I thought I’d patch things up. I had gone back through my family. We were talking words of love to each other. We’d broken down many barriers. But when my mom died, I didn’t feel anything. It was really strange. I wasn’t sad, didn’t cry, and didn’t miss her. So I went to see a counselor, who helped me understand the father and mother wounds I’d never been able to articulate. My counselor assessed me as experiencing gross abandonment. So my kryptonite is that even though I’m talking to you now, I have a really hard time believing that you would really care about me. I can be oversensitive and have a tendency to take things the way that people don’t intend. Anyway, I’m a broken boy, and I have been all of my life, but I have healed through the power of the Holy Spirit and through this counseling, and I am fully alive in Jesus. And I have been for a long, long time now. For the most part, these wounds are gone, but every now and then, it’s kind of like cutting a piece of string in half. You know, every time you cut it in half, half goes away and half is left. And so you just keep cutting. Well, my little piece of string now is pretty short, but it’s still there.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

I’m a men’s author. I’ve had it out with God about it many times. “Why did you call me into this men’s space? It’s so hard.” And the only answer I’ve ever gotten is that it’s because I’m a strong-willed, determined, persevering, not-giving-up kind of guy. I feel like maybe the Lord sent me over here in this little corner of the vineyard, and I’ve been faithful. I have a dashboard with three gauges on my dashboard. Number one is the son, number two is the steward, and number three is the servant. The first gauge is the mindset of a son: What is the loving thing to do? The second is to be a steward: What does faithful look like? And the third gauge is to be a servant. Jesus says when you’ve done everything you were told to do, you should say, “I’m an unworthy servant.” Most people are asking the question, “What do I want out of this?” But I think a servant asks a different question: “What does the master need?”

I’ve written 23 books, including this new one, “From Broken Boy to Mended Man: A Positive Plan to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Break the Cycle.” About seven years ago, I took a lot of notes when I was going through counseling, and I spent a lot of time researching all these different things about men with childhood wounds and father and mother wounds, and I had this idea that I should probably put that in the book, but I didn’t want to throw my mom and dad under the bus. I love my mom and dad, and they came to realize they loved me, too. We had a great last couple of decades together before they passed away. We really started the reconciliation process when I was 35, so we had about 20 years together. So I didn’t want to throw them under the bus, but God had also healed me, and there were these beautiful changes taking place.

Men have been falling deeper and deeper into dysfunction over the last century, especially guys in their 20s, 30s and early 40s — more than ever — who really do have childhood wounds that have not been processed. So I had this idea that I should take my experiences and my learning — not as a clinician, but more as a fellow traveler or maybe an older brother who’s been there before — and put that into a book. So I ran that up the flagpole, and Tyndale House Publishers loved the idea, so I wrote the book “From Broken Boy to Mended Man.” I would say I’m pretty obsessed with it. I’m an author, but I now have six contract employees working on different pieces of this, trying to help as many men as possible to heal their childhood wounds, break the cycle and become devoted (or more devoted) followers of Jesus.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

The Holy Spirit is my best friend. When I say the Spirit is my best friend, I also mean the Spirit of Jesus is my best friend. I have had a cascading series of experiences with God that just keep taking you deeper and deeper and deeper, and it’s fascinating how often getting to the next level requires pain and suffering instead of moving from success to success.

With regard to how the Spirit invigorates me, when we started the Bible study in 1986, I was very successful in business. I had started 59 companies and partnerships. I had fulfilled all my dreams, but I found that success didn’t really satisfy me. My first life philosophy was that success would make me happy and money would solve my problems. But it turned out that the more of those things I achieved, the less happy I was. And so in 1986, I was sitting on top of one of Florida’s 100 largest privately held companies and thinking, There must be more to life. This can’t be it. That’s when I started this Bible study. I became a follower of Jesus 14 years before that, and looking back, I think I just basically added Jesus to my life as another interest. I was already a materialist and a moralist, too. My dad gave me the gift of integrity, which I appreciate. Integrity is my life word, but I was also a materialist. I was really trying to have my cake and eat it, too, for the first dozen years. I called a time out, which I thought would be a couple of weeks — I’m a smart guy, I thought, I’ll figure it out — and I saw that my friends were getting a very different result from their faith than I was.

I was reading the Bible every day, but I was reading it with an agenda. So if I would see a verse on the left page that was going in the direction that I wanted to go anyway, I would say to myself, I love that verse. Sometimes I would underline it, sometimes I would memorize it. Then I would see a verse on the right-hand page that seemed to veer off in a direction that I didn’t want to go, and I would think to myself, I wonder why God put that one in there. That wasn’t much of a problem at the 2- or 3-year mark of my spiritual journey, but by the 10-year mark, it was really starting to become pretty dangerous. So I called this time out and thought, Lucky God. Imagine how happy and fortunate he’s going to be when he has me on his side. He said, “Well, now that I have your attention, I have a few things that I want to show you.”

I spent two and a half years in this incredible molasses swamp. I couldn’t move. I was just stuck in the Spirit of God. It completely transformed me. I was a different man. I came out of that in 1986 and I wrote in the front of my Bible, “I want to live the rest of my earthly life for the will of God.” That was my first really huge, long-term encounter with the Holy Spirit.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?

I like things with a single metric, and I like using a single metric with regard to the Bible: I am going to read it cover to cover every year. I use Bible reading plans, and I’ve read them all. I’ve read most of the different translations at one point or another. So if I get five days behind or if I have to do three days in the last half of December, I don’t worry about it, because I know that I’m going to read the Bible cover to cover every year. I think that’s the uber metric.

Then I have another single metric with regard to daily time with God, and I don’t fuss about it. If it’s five days instead of seven, I don’t fuss about that. When I do my devotions, I don’t have an ending time. I get up at 4 a.m., so I can do it as long as I want. In the morning, I sit down and pray six set prayers — rote prayers — almost every day. Then I read the Word. I ask God to meet with me and abide in me as I seek to be with him and abide in him. My metric for that is that I’m not going to stop my devotion until I have what I call a moment of humility. It might be through prayer. It might be through reading. It might be through journaling or might be through singing. I’m waiting for that Holy Spirit moment when I’m just overwhelmed with a palpable sense of the presence of Jesus. Where he’s either speaking to my heart, quieting my soul, giving me peace where I’ve had anxiety or whatever it is — there’s that moment where I have quieted myself enough to experience the presence of God unmistakably. Sometimes it’s exuberance; sometimes it’s solemnity. Every now and then, it’s tears. I actually had a laugh with Jesus one time. I was praising the Father, and Jesus said, “Well, what about me?” I’m thinking, Wow, you know you really achieved quite a level of intimacy with God when your Jesus is poking you.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are three resources that have impacted you?

My glib answer would be Moses, Jesus and Paul. There’s always a little kernel of truth in those jokes. Right? But I’m a book person. I love books. Interestingly, I don’t believe in the ministry of Christian literature because I write books. I write books because I believe in the ministry of Christian literature. It’s been fascinating to me over the years how often a man will get hold of a book, and then God uses the book to get hold of the man. I’m a book person, and all my resources are people and books. So books would be one resource.

I also believe we are made for relationships. I’ve already said I’ve been married 50 years, and Patsy’s my best friend. But I’ve always had a guy or two I meet with one on one. It’s good if people want to meet in small groups, and I recommend that all the time. But here’s the thing: Because I am a broken boy, I am very cautious about who I share the deepest secrets of my life with and the things that I’m wrestling with on a day-to-day basis. There was one man I met with once a week for 32 years who was 30 years older than I am. He’s passed away now. My wife’s father and I met once a week for eight years until he passed away. He was my business mentor, and he would say I was his spiritual mentor. He was one of those guys who did all the right things in church and loved Jesus, but nobody ever discipled him. Discipleship is my thing and what I help men do. So people would be the second resource.

Lastly — and I’ve already mentioned this — is daily time with God through which I try to see a little larger glimpse of him. What I’m trying to do is remind myself every day of what I call the “awe gap.” In other words, when I became a believer, I knew that God was bigger than me, but I didn’t know that he was that much bigger. The more I learned about him, the higher he got, and then one day I looked around at myself and said, “Look, I’m not as big of a deal as I thought it was. Let’s call this the awe gap and let’s keep it growing.” So God is continually getting bigger and bigger and in my understanding, and in my mind, I continue to become more and more humble and small.

In short, I would say reading books, being in relationship with people — especially my wife and individuals — and spending time with God are my three biggest resources.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it’s done for you.

There’s a book called “Enlightenment Now” written by an atheist named Steven Pinker. He has 75 helpful graphs in his book that show how we are much better off in nearly every single possible area of humanity in terms of physical life. Now, our moral, spiritual and relational standard of living might be going way down, but everything else is going way up. For example, in terms of poverty, we have taken a billion people off the rolls since the 1950s.

As a believer, my mind tends to focus on what’s not working. But imagine what could happen if we focused on the positive and the possibilities. I hired a 31-year-old technology expert and social media strategist to help me with one of my books. I said to him, “What do you think the ultimate purpose of technology is?” He didn’t really have an answer. So I said, “The ultimate purpose of technology is to help fulfill the Great Commission. That’s why God has given us AI. It’s going to help fulfill the Great Commission.”

Seeing the positive aspects of our world today can help us do what God has called us to do. I’m fascinated by Pinker’s take that the world is better and his more positive view of what’s possible. We don’t have to demonize social media. After all, we’re not going to change it, it’s not going away, and it’s not going to stop being a part of people’s lives. Instead, think of how much good it does. So I’m thanking Steven Pinker, my atheist friend, for restoring the positive attitude I used to have.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m really focused on broken boys, and how we can take care of and feed their souls is important to me. I’ve got some things going on in that area. I have a Ph.D. in leadership and organizational change as well as management and decision sciences. I’ve always been fascinated with decision making.

I went through a program at the Harvard Business School when I was in my early 30s. While I was there, I read a monograph that said that we really don’t understand how people make the most important decisions. This stuck with me, so I wrote my very first article of 750 articles, and the first one was titled “How to Make Major Decisions.”

That’s been a consistent theme throughout my whole career. I help men make extremely difficult decisions. My favorite thing is meeting with guys one on one, helping them solve their problems and make sense of their lives.

These are the two areas that I’m going to dive a little deeper with broken boys, and that’s helping them to take care and feed their souls and helping them figure out how to make extremely difficult decisions. The idea of giving them practical help that they’re looking for and need. That’s my thing.

In today’s confusing world, it’s hard to know how to be a man — especially a good man — when you didn’t have a father to teach you how. And that’s not based on mere anecdotal evidence; science agrees. One study revealed that fathers have a direct impact on how their sons walk out masculinity. Even more interesting, the more religious the father, the more impact he had on his son’s masculinity.

What does this mean for men who didn’t have healthy father figures while growing up? As Patrick pointed out earlier, it can bring a lot of brokenness and wounds that need healing. Thankfully, we serve a Healer who’s never met a sickness too difficult or a wound too deep for him. And he can teach us a better way.

“‘I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters,’ says the Lord Almighty” (2 Corinthians 6:18, NIV).

Patrick Morley, Ph.D., is the founder of Man in the Mirror, a global ministry impacting thousands of churches and millions of men. Motivated by his own search for meaning and purpose, he started a Bible study in a bar with a handful of guys in 1986 — a study that now reaches thousands of men around the world every week at patrickmorley.com/mimbiblestudy. He has written 23 books, including The Man in the Mirror, named one of the 100 most influential Christian books of the 20th century. Morley’s newest book, From Broken Boy to Mended Man, will release on March 19, 2024, from Tyndale House Publishers.

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