Joe Miller: 0:02

In this episode of Titans of Transition I go back and talk to a sage resource. A previous pastor of mine, roger Thompson, joins us today on Titans. Brings great wisdom, how to seek God's will for your life, but it's not a blinding light, as you'll come to learn. He comes in doing the next right thing, so let's jump into it. First we'll start with who Roger is and his background Quite interesting to me. But if you want to skip ahead, please do lots of wisdom here. Thanks again for joining me on Titans of Transition. Pleasure to welcome Roger Thompson to Titans of Transition. Roger and I have known each other many years. Roger was a pastor of a church I attended for probably 11 years back in Colorado, stayed in touch throughout the decades And I had the pleasure of being able to meet up with Roger and his wife Joanne, my wife Barb and I as they were passing through our town here in Port Charlotte, florida. So, roger, welcome to Titans.

Roger Thompson: 1:14

Thank you, joe, good to see you this way and good to connect with you and share some thoughts together.

Joe Miller: 1:20

You know I've talked with quite a few people about transitions in their lives and their careers. These moments when people are sensing that maybe there's a disquiet in their soul, so to speak. They're not sure what the next move to make, and it can be changes thrust upon them, like all the layoffs we're hearing about it, or something health wise it's causing them to make a change. Or things could be going relatively well, but over time they sense that they're not getting all the fulfillment out of their life that they would like. I get together with folks and talk to them about what lessons they've learned, but for you and our joint faith journey together, it would be interesting to connect more with believers out there who are seeking a closer walk with God and figure out how we might navigate that a little differently than others. But before we get into those specific details, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, starting with, maybe, high school we don't want to go back to the cradle and how you got to become a pastor.

Roger Thompson: 2:21

That may take most of our time. I grew up in a town just west of Denver, colorado, called Golden, golden, colorado, and I really had a Timmy and Lassie kind of boyhood if you're guests of that old television show, i could go anywhere in town. I had a paper route. I was really a free kid and it was just the home for supper kind of thing in the summertime And I went to high school there up through my junior year And then my dad, who was a pastor, received a call to another church in Rialto, california, which is right next to San Bernardino, which is right next to Purgatory. This was 1966, and the Fontana Steel Mill was belching sulfuric fumes 24-7. He was driving 400 cubic inch engines. There was no pollution control and the smog was as thick as a brown cloud every day. So I went from a blue sky Colorado setting to what I think was a Purgatorial setting for my last year of high school. I did okay, but I didn't make any friends When I had the opportunity to go to a school, a Christian liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, california.

Roger Thompson: 3:38

I'm not so sure it was a deeply spiritual decision, as much as it was an escape. I was in where I was, and I also went there because I wanted to run, track and cross country. I walked on to the team there and went to Westmont College for four years in Santa Barbara, which I now look back on and say, oh, that is just the Edenic place on earth as far as I'm concerned. But you can't afford to live there, that's for sure. But I ran thousands of miles on the roads there and competed in cross country and track and graduated with a degree in psychology. And then I was dating my last year, my soon to be wife Joey. We got married in August of 1971. So that will date me. I'm in my 75th year. We got married back before the earth was cooled and they hadn't invented soft lead and pencils. Yet The technology that the high point of technology at that time was the IBM Selectric typewriter, which I envy because I went from college to Denver, back to Denver and went to seminary for four years. How?

Joe Miller: 4:42

did you get there?

Roger Thompson: 4:43

I had grown up in a context where I had an early faith. I had an early trust in Jesus Christ, who is my savior and Lord, and I went to many camps and I was listening to my dad preach every week, and I'd like to say I'm one of the pastor's kids who had a great experience in that regard. There are some, and along the way there's always this teaching and the truth that God has a plan for your life, and by that I don't mean that it's a rigid, deterministic plan, like he knows what kind of vegetables you should eat tonight for supper. He knows that, but he doesn't determine that. But God has a plan for us And he also. We read later in the New Testament that he's given us unique capacities and gifts and none of us have them all. So there's a combination of humility and expectancy in the Christian life. So I grew up hearing tales of missionaries and people who had given their life in great sacrifice to serve God as he called them into their life. I believe my dad did that, my mom did that. So I grew up with this whole backdrop of saying I want my life to count. And for it to count. It doesn't mean that I self-determined. It means I listen for how God is calling me, and I believe a lot of early experiences help us determine that or at least we follow those pathways.

Roger Thompson: 6:04

So I had been working at I actually worked at summer camps for five summers. Three of those summers were at a church camp in Big Bear, california, and I saw the life transformation of children and young people. They would come on Sunday afternoon, they'd leave Saturday morning And they would just really have significant spiritual steps in their life. And that happened to me too as a child And as a young adult, and so I really saw that. And then I spent two summers at a camp called Sea and Summit, which was a lot like outward bound And we took delinquent boys from the camps of California minimum security camps And we would take them on 21-day expeditions. It was a stress camp. They were put what they thought they were being put in danger in exposed situations in the water and also in the high seas.

Roger Thompson: 6:57

We would take them on a 14-day high Sierra hike, and that's a long time to live on dehydrated food. And these kids have never been out of the city. And so we put them in all kinds of stress situations to build teamwork, to build trust, to show them men that they could trust, but also to teach them discipline. And I realized from that experience and I loved it because I was athletic, i loved the outdoors, it was just everything I wanted to do. But I realized from that experience that they asked me the right question. I could probably give them an answer from the Bible, but they weren't asking those questions.

Roger Thompson: 7:33

And I realized that I didn't have the knowledge to bring a worldview to a kid who was raised in the barrios of Pasadena and didn't have a dad. And I felt I need more biblical knowledge, i need a broader worldview. And so that's ultimately what took me to seminary, thinking that I would go into camping ministry. That's interesting Which would have been a total disaster. Why is that? Because when you're a camp counselor, you're out doing stuff with the kids. When you're the camp manager, you're worried about septic systems and insurance and high review.

Roger Thompson: 8:11

Yeah, all this stuff, i would have been terrible at that. So what happened is My wife and I were newly married. We visited a small church that was being restarted And there were about 40 people there the first time. And when we went to this church, we were immediately welcomed and we just sensed an energy there. So we began attending there and the pastor there expected this church to grow. He had a philosophy of ministry that said churches should grow, and both our dads were pastors and they were pastors of typical small town churches of about 200, and the new family was a family that came three years ago. So we were in this church and it was every Sunday. People were joining this church.

Joe Miller: 8:53

Was this in Denver?

Roger Thompson: 8:54

This was Bear Valley.

Joe Miller: 8:55

I was gonna say, was this Bear Valley? Yeah, it was in back in the day, is that Frank?

Roger Thompson: 8:59

Frank Tillipon And that just excited us basically said hey, how about if you take the junior high group? And I said I don't know anything about junior hires? And he said I don't either. He had the what I call the Darius method of leadership development. Maybe your listeners will recall the story of Daniel in the lion's den And Daniel's or at the time his king was named Darius and Daniel was gonna be punished for worshiping God, and so he threw him in the lion's den for three days and he came back three days later and Daniel was still alive. So I view this as Frank's method of leadership development. He threw me into the junior high, came back a few days later and said you're still alive, you've got the job.

Roger Thompson: 9:46

So that was really even though I'd grown up in the church. That was really my first incidence of needing to show up every week with something to feed people who weren't in my family, and junior hires especially. And I went from that to a part-time youth director and I worked at different jobs and maintenance during seminary during the summer so that I could pay for my school. And one thing led to another and I came on staff in that church but I had no desire to preach. I didn't think I was gonna be a preacher. I'm basically an introvert. I've gotten over that, but I really was very shy.

Joe Miller: 10:21

You'd be amazed at how many introverts would be considered to be in the public forum, and we used to have a view of introverts as being just shy. But it's much more complex than that, really. If we come to find out that you need to get away and recharge your energy, yes, yeah.

Roger Thompson: 10:41

And all this time by the way, that's part of the reason that I've run all my life is I can be alone. When I do that, i recharge, doing that. I had a terrible experience in seminary in what is called preaching class. It was very sterile, very artificial And I thought, okay, i won't do that, i'll just work with young adults. I'll work with young married people, i'll be the utility infielder on the staff. And so I came on staff of that church in my final year of seminary when I was about 25 and just did all kinds of other things. But then Frank came to me about a year later and said hey, we're bursting at the seams. We've got two services already, we need a third one and I think it's your turn. So this is the story of my life Interesting.

Roger Thompson: 11:26

I was on the first time staff at this church camp. The camp had never been open before. We were the first staff. I was on the first staff of seeing some at this stress camp. And now here I am in a situation where I'm the first pastor that a lot of people are going to experience at this church.

Roger Thompson: 11:44

So I've often been called into situations where there isn't much of a precedent and I don't have any experience, and so I've been pulled in the side door of leadership And I'm not the guy who would say give me the ball, give me the ball. You know what I mean. Let me take the shot. But God, in his providence, has always put people in my life who have been pulling me towards something, saying here's something we feel you can do, and sometimes it was desperation. Other times it was perhaps seeing something in me that I couldn't see myself, and so I became a preaching pastor at about the age of 26 and was there for another seven or eight years, and then I went across town another first time. Situation to a church that had been on a glide path for 20 years had gone from 600 people down to under 200 people. Most of them had white hair and I was 32 years old, and they called me and said would you consider being our pastor?

Joe Miller: 12:50

I met you.

Roger Thompson: 12:51

Yeah, and that's where I met you, joe, and I was essentially sent there with the blessing of Frank and the church I was serving, along with about 40 people who came with me.

Joe Miller: 13:02

There's some things that coming out here that are bubbling up. You used the word being called. You weren't seeking these things You had. The other thing that I think of is that someone saw something in you and posed the opportunity. I'll call it to you. There were mentors in your life, trusted individuals who challenged you. Yes, and I think the biblical examples that I think of. It's interesting how God uses people who don't themselves seem equipped. I think of Moses, for example and there's many examples where God uses people who don't think. I mean Peter.

Roger Thompson: 13:47

I identify with Timothy in the.

Roger Thompson: 13:49

Testament, timothy was the protégé of Paul, and Timothy was very differently wired than the guy who turned the world upside down named the apostle Paul. And it's obvious, as you read Paul's letters to Timothy, that Timothy needed Paul's encouragement. He needed Paul to paint the picture of here's who you are Fan into flame the gift that you have. You don't recognize it yourself, but I see it in you. And so you're right, joe, there've been mentors in my life that we probably didn't call each other that, but I was watching them, i was trusting them. And the other thing I think that's a thread of commonality here is that all this has been done in community. My wife and I have always been in community. We haven't just been employees at a church, we've lived among the people, and so I think what you're also hearing is I think it's probably encouraging to a lot of people, because a lot of religious people, especially people out of my sort of background, have what we would call a Damascus road experience, which goes back to the calling of the apostle Paul, when he's struck down by a light on the road And he does a total 180 just within minutes. And often people think that's the normative experience of everybody who either goes into ministry or makes a significant life change. But I've never had that experience. That's been God and people and mentors and community pushing my compass needle over two degrees at a time until I find myself going 90 degrees to where I was headed in the first place, and it's been progressive.

Roger Thompson: 15:38

Maybe what that says is I'm a slow learner. I don't know if oblivious is too strong a word. I'm a bit dull to step into my own strengths. I'm a high duty person, i'm a high loyal person, and so for much of my ministry life I did the things that nobody else would do. But in doing that I also didn't allow myself to grow in the areas where I had strengths. In other words, i was a weakness fixer in myself, and so I've needed people to hold a mirror up to me and say don't you see this? This is what you bring when you come in the room. This is what you bring, and I go really.

Joe Miller: 16:19

Yeah, that's interesting.

Joe Miller: 16:21

I see that's a universal thing that I've seen, regardless of where the person is in terms of faith I think that is a universal thing I get whenever I've coached people is they are oblivious to their strengths. And the other thing that I think it was taught from the management and leadership gurus out there was that if someone was weak in certain areas, that's where you needed to focus. You need to bring them up to some sort of baseline level of acceptability, and The amount of energy it takes for an individual to make up for the weaknesses is crazy. They exhaust themselves. The other thing is it doesn't have the return on the investment. There's no reward in it. There's no reward in it. It's just getting to sufficient.

Roger Thompson: 17:15

Yeah, and even if you do it, even if you complete a project or you don't want to do it again, No, you don't want to do it again, and sometimes other people don't want you to do it again either.

Joe Miller: 17:24

Exactly, Exactly. So that's interesting Yeah.

Roger Thompson: 17:29

I've been through several significant transitions, all of them by my own choosing, in the sense that I was the one who moved into them. I haven't been fired, thank God, yet, but I have transitioned out of several ministries and all those transitions were difficult in terms of just determining is this the time?

Joe Miller: 17:47

Yeah, I don't remember and we don't need to get into the details, but I remember when you left the church that we were together at and you went to the church in Minnesota, Apple Valley, Berean. That was extremely difficult for you And I think it was. You felt the call, There's no question, but that strong sense of duty going back to what you were just talking of made it really hard for you to go through that. Yeah, Painful.

Roger Thompson: 18:17

And I think for me and I've shared this with other people in transition it wasn't hard for me to know that I was feeling called or I wanted to go to the new place, but it was hard for me to know am I done here, Am I done at this place? And traveling to a new place was easy at that point. Yeah, And, by the way, Joe, I didn't leave because of you.

Joe Miller: 18:38

Thank you So relieved. So there's definitely some lessons there that we've unpacked. but now am I correct in? you said that you haven't been fired yet, but at this point you're going through another transition as well, because you were on sabbatical but you retired from that church at this point In Minnesota There's a bit of a story behind that.

Roger Thompson: 18:59

Oh no, okay, back about, basically about 2013,. I would have been 64, 65 years old, and not because of my age, but because I felt like when you've passed her to church for 26 years or whatever it was, at that point the church begins to look like you in some ways. That might be good if you have good character, but it also begins to look like you demographically. And I realized, even though I don't feel I didn't feel my age, feel 20 years younger. Still some young adult walking through the doors, going, hey, look at the old guy up in the pulpit. And I wasn't feeling downhearted about that, i just felt like that was a factor. I felt like, also, the church needed to go some places that, frankly, i wasn't ready to muscle up and do it. There were areas where I was not really gifted and good at. And, thirdly, i felt like there was another adventure, another assignment that God had waiting for me.

Roger Thompson: 20:00

A meaningful passage of scripture for me was Joshua, chapter 14, where Caleb and the rest of the children of Israel finally go into the promised land. And Caleb was 40 years old the first time he saw it. But if you remember the story about the spies. The people rejected it. Caleb and Joshua were the two men who said, hey, well, we should go in. We got a 40 year delay in doing that, and so he's 85 and he says to the Lord I'm now 85 years old, i'm as strong as I once was. Give me this mountain. I wasn't 85 at the time, but I felt like I'm ready for a Caleb challenge.

Roger Thompson: 20:38

And so, anyway, i instigated my own transition. I wanted to do it when I was healthy. I wanted to do it when I was healthy spiritually, where the church was growing and stable. The staff was solid. The other board was totally with me on that. So I wanted to transition. I didn't know exactly to what, and I thought initially I would fade away slowly and the new guy would come in and I would mentor him. But that's not what happened.

Roger Thompson: 21:02

Make a long story short I ended up staying at the church half time, primarily in men's ministry, and then I took on another ministry half time through a ministry called man in the mirror, which is a nationwide discipleship ministry for men. So I was doing what I call 260% jobs for about six years And I really loved it. It was working with men, discipling men And the pastor who came behind me was excellent in many ways, but he ran into some trouble And so he left us under a cloud, and that was November 2019. So the elder board asked me if I could take a leave of absence from man in the mirror and come back to the burial in full time, and it only took an instant of thought for me to say of course, and I thought that would be a year, maybe a year and a half, but it ended up being three years.

Roger Thompson: 22:03

Now we just have brought in a new lead pastor about five or six months ago, and so I'm coming now to another transition point. I'm still full time here, but it's going to change And I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to what my wife calls it, not a retirement, but just to have a different rhythm and again try to let go of some things that occupy my time, that are perhaps not my joy, my passion or my strength, and zero in on some things that I feel are what God wants me to do, what I want to do and the motivated steps that I have.

Joe Miller: 22:42

So a couple of the transitions. This comes to mind. You've mentioned moving in into a different area, not being sure whether or not you would be gifted in that area or not. It's a discovery process over the years, isn't it? Yes, it is, and some of those things have been surprises. You didn't think you'd be a preaching pastor.

Roger Thompson: 23:01

No, and I think six years plus, and I certainly didn't think that would be one of the gifts that people would identify with me as a strength, i thought, okay, i'll do it, but I'm probably more of a counselor than a preacher.

Joe Miller: 23:14

There's a side buyer there for those folks listening in. Many of us alumni from the church in Denver which was Trinity Baptist, where you got us through the pandemic, roger, we were tuning in to your church at Apple Valley to bring in Yeah, yeah. And a friend of mine and I talked weekly and we would be. Did you see the last one? Yeah?

Roger Thompson: 23:40

that's a good one. He really challenged us it was great.

Joe Miller: 23:42

So it's interesting, your gifts, they get confirmed in practice.

Roger Thompson: 23:48

Here's a statement that you could put in your show notes if you write it down, but you can't write it as fast as I'll say it. Here's something that I had under the glass on my desk when I was a young pastor a young insecure pastor. But I still need this as an old, insecure pastor. And it said this when you search for yourself, you'll probably find nothing, Not because there's nothing to find, but because you don't know where to look. Your only hope is to give yourself away in love and let others tell you what you had to give.

Roger Thompson: 24:30

I think that's a direct application or paraphrase of what Jesus said that if you seek your life, you won't find it, you'll lose it. But if you lose your life for the right things, you'll find it. And I think it's also boiled down. That's how we discover our true gifts, other people who are honest and who know us. We need to ask them. Can you tell me what am I bringing to the stew? What happens when I walk in the room? What difference am I making? It's not a selfish question. I've had to learn that that's not a selfish question, and it's also not a question you can ask to anybody, because many people will want to flatter. You want to make you feel good for the wrong reasons. You want to feel good, but you want to feel good with the right input, and I've had several wake-up calls in my life of men who said this is what you bring, don't you see that? And I go nope.

Roger Thompson: 25:28

I've been trying to be this and all along. Here's what you're saying Again. You can call me a slow study, I don't know, but for me it's always been this incremental two degrees of the compass needle changing, And I also think that God can bless certain gifts at certain stages of your life that are needed, And so I don't think we're just static in terms of we have this one trick that we do all through our life. That's not what I'm talking about.

Joe Miller: 25:59

That's very interesting. You did also mention you were a teaching pastor but you viewed yourself as a counselor. Is that right? Yes, i may not know the many hours that pastors spend in deep conversations, counseling type conversations where people are in turmoil or they're seeking God's will for them or they're trying to figure it all out and they come to you. In the context of this discussion, i suspect you've had many conversations about what should I do next? And it's interesting, on the shelf right behind you you have your book Do The Next Right Thing. Funny how that's placed up there, funny how that's there. And we're going through that study actually in our men's group here in Florida. It's interesting. I'm wondering was that birth out of some of these conversations?

Roger Thompson: 26:51

Absolutely, joe, it was. I mean people and, by the way, I don't view myself as a therapist, i view myself more as an interventionist. At this stage in my life, i prayed for the gift of referral, the gift of referral. So I really try to refer people who need good counseling to someone else. Partly I just don't have the bandwidth for it. But this book Do The Next Right Thing, this phrase I didn't invent it, i borrowed it from somebody, but I'll take credit for it. Now it really came out of.

Roger Thompson: 27:24

People will come to me and they will, in a half an hour, will unwrap this tangled web, this story of struggle and abuse and defeat And who knows what. I listen with empathy but, because I'm a pastor, a lot of times they'll turn to me and say well, what is God's will? What does God want me to do? now? And I've had to say maybe not quite this bluntly, but I don't have a clue. There is no one thing you can do to get yourself out of bankruptcy court. There's no one thing you can do to untangle this abusive relationship. I can share with you the love of God. I'm going to pray with you, i'll hug you if you want me to, i'll encourage you, but what you need to do is the next right thing. So maybe you need to call your attorney, maybe you need to make that phone call and set up an appointment with somebody. Maybe you need to change the oil in your car. What's the next right thing?

Roger Thompson: 28:31

And I really believe if we do that and it accumulates, the horizon begins to change for people, including myself. Well, i don't know exactly what to do about this transition, but I can start writing down my thoughts, i can start talking to people. I can take a trip to Port Charlotte, florida, and ask my buddy Joe. In other words, there's a lot of incremental. I've said I'm a raging incrementalist because there are just so many things.

Roger Thompson: 29:05

When you keep pursuing something step by step by step, we walk with God. We don't pull vault with God And he takes us at a pedestrian pace And what happens is the horizon tends to open up, not only because of what we discover, but because, i believe, what God shows us, and it may not be a blinding light, it's just somebody comes along with new information And there you go. Or help, somebody makes child's play out of what we thought was a hopeless snarl of complexity. So that's what the book is really about. How do you walk when you don't have the final answer? You just know that it's foggy and you need to do something.

Joe Miller: 29:52

And pulling out. You call them handholds And I love the metaphor, the climbing metaphor. It's so powerful that you use in pulling out those lessons from 2nd Peter 1. Very powerful. And this incremental thing connects with me too, because on a number of conversations that I've had with people, there seems to be this assumption that we should know the target, you know the spot, the bullseye. What is that one thing that God wants me to do or that I should be doing? And I'll be totally messed up if I don't hit that bullseye. And life is more like climbing a mountain where you come over these summits and you think you're going to reach that. You're going to hit that bullseye on the next summit, But you see another it's just a shoulder. And after you summit three or four of those shoulders, you begin to wonder if it's about hitting the peak or if it's about the journey. Yeah, And how you navigate that journey.

Roger Thompson: 30:53

Yeah. Well, i think it's especially prominent with Christians that they feel like there ought to be a simple answer, the whole thing of what is God trying to teach me? Well, he is teaching you, but it may not be one lesson. It may be make the phone call, you know. Change the way you talk to your wife, change the tone of the dinner table conversation, try to reconnect with your daughter through a text. Today, there's a thousand things that God may be showing you that you already know how to do. It's not a blinding light or a new galaxy that is going to drop on you.

Roger Thompson: 31:35

So I don't want to oversimplify it, or I don't want to be rude of supernatural power or miracles, but I think that's the way most of us need to navigate, so at least that's the way I do it.

Joe Miller: 31:48

If you were to catapult yourself back in time to talk to the young 20-plus year old Roger and whisper on his shoulder some of those lessons we have touched on, some of them. Listen to those around you that you respect. Be open for the challenges. What are the kinds of things could be unpacked that would be lessons learned.

Roger Thompson: 32:10

That was raised in an educational system that said you can be anything you want to be. Of course, we still hear that It's a complete lie. You can certainly be more than maybe what you thought or what people are telling you, but you can't be anything. And I was a good student. I was a straight A student. So I thought, well, I could be a scientist or I could be a pastor, I could be an artist, I could be a violinist, I could be a pole valter Whatever I set my mind to I could do. Well, that's false, But I brought that into my adulthood and especially into my ministry life, thinking I can learn this.

Roger Thompson: 32:45

And I wish I had listened to people who said you needed administrator, No matter what it costs. I wish I had somebody beside me saying here's how you deal with conflict, because I didn't grow up in a family that had conflict, at least not outwardly. It certainly was a very peaceful home. Not everything's nice and fun in ministry life and there are conflicts and I wish I had. I wish somebody had told me how to use a secretary. This is more my wish list than my lesson.

Joe Miller: 33:18

It ties into what we've talked about before, about leaning into your strengths and being realistic about that in a way, and not buying into what the world says to all of us, that you can be anything. I mean in my family. I remember the story that my father told me about his mother This is going to be ancient history, before there was a moon. and when she was applying for work, a secretarial job my grandmother was interviewing and the gentleman said to her can you run a comptometer? People go what is a comptometer today? It's like an adding machine, i think. And she said of course I can, just no problem, i won't have any problem with that. She'd never even touched one because she was going off of the.

Joe Miller: 34:04

I can learn anything And that was preached in my family You can do anything you want. My mother used to say that to me all the time And, yeah, there was a lot of skin to knees, so to speak, as I grew up.

Roger Thompson: 34:17

Yeah, it's a good thing in terms of overcoming laziness, just because you haven't done it before. Okay, you can fix a faucet, you can do that, you can figure that out, but it's a bad strategy for joy.

Roger Thompson: 34:29

Yes yes, you know, find joy in what you do. Yeah, I think the other thing is that I asked too little of my staff, and that doesn't mean I should have been more of a tyrant, not at all. I didn't ask Big to tap the talents and gifts of some of my staff along the way. Some of them wouldn't have responded. I didn't always have hey people, but many would have gladly taken the challenge if I'd said hey, this huge thing, I'm not good at this Study, this pray about it. Come back in a month with a proposal because I need your help. I would always try to do it along with them, beside them, And that wasn't necessarily bad in terms of brotherhood, but I think it slowed things down And then I always end up being the one doing it.

Joe Miller: 35:16

Was it hard for you to let go of things?

Roger Thompson: 35:18

then Not really I'm a releaser of people. I guess I was just reticent to say, hey, this is a big load, but you can do it.

Roger Thompson: 35:26

Which ironically, that's a position I've been put in over and over again and I've responded to it. Yeah, I wish I had asked more of people in the right way, in the right brotherhood, collegial, encouraging context, saying you go, girl, because you got the juice. I'm going to really need you to do this for me, us Or brother, I figure this out. I'm stumped and I need you to help out here.

Joe Miller: 35:52

Back to your time with Frank Tillipaw, right Yeah, when he may be wanting to be a little bit more like him.

Roger Thompson: 36:00

Yeah, he was a real releaser. He would have said, yeah, and that's still my DNA. I want to release people to do. I've learned a lot about that, but I wish I'd had known that earlier.

Joe Miller: 36:14

Yeah, and I think even if you're feeling a call to move into a different area, if you also have what you're referring to now going on, it might be a little bit hard, it might create a little drag for you to make a shift. So if you're thinking I want to really lean more into one area, but you need something else to be taken over, it's a little bit hard to let go of it.

Roger Thompson: 36:42

Yeah, yeah, i just read a really good book.

Roger Thompson: 36:46

I think I might have shared it with you. It's called Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud, and it's a book written for the marketplace, but he uses a biblical metaphor throughout the book the metaphor of pruning that our lives like a vineyard produce a lot more life than we can attend to. There's going to be a lot more branches on the vine than can actually bear fruit, and so the metaphor is they need to be pruned so that those that do grow are fruitful. It's a very good metaphor And he just talks about there are things that necessarily need to come to an end, and unless we embrace that reality, we won't shed the skin we've been wearing and molt into another new beginning, and we will just keep hitting cul-de-sacs or hoarding and cluttering our house, the house of our life, with all this old stuff that we need to get rid of so we can move on. It's easy to say that, but it's not always easy to experience it. But it's a very good book I'd recommend. Well, i think I'm going to have to read that.

Joe Miller: 37:52

That's very convicting to me because I'm supposed to be retired, but I'm probably more busy than I was. Oh, really, yeah, Yeah, that's great. Any closing thoughts from you? What I will do is I will put in the show notes some links to your book and into the website where the video series is up online. Thank you, anything else that you would want to?

Roger Thompson: 38:19

leave with us. I'll be 75 in a few months And what I have planned is more streamlined. But I just want to encourage especially men, and you, joe. The American system of retirement is a killer And it leaves a lot of bench strength sitting, and so I just want to encourage men in particular, but women also. As you approach different significant transitions in your life, always ask what is the next thing. And it may be scaled back, it might be very different, but there's got to be a next thing. We are purpose driven human beings, and so I hope I have another decade to pursue what I believe God's calling me to do, and it will be busy but, i think, also rhythmic. I won't be tied to a solid schedule all the time. I'm looking forward to that. Anyway, i guess I'm saying life is good. I've been very blessed and very thankful. I'm healthy, i'm as strong as I was Still running those long distances.

Roger Thompson: 39:26

No, i want to say with Caleb give me this mountain, give me another challenge. I want another challenge suitable for my stage in life, and I believe that will happen.

Joe Miller: 39:36

I think there was a song country Western song. Don't let the old man in Go along with this a little bit. Thank you so much, Roger, for coming on the show. I appreciate it And, as I said, I will leave the contact information for you in the show notes and look forward to hearing more about your next endeavors. All right, I'll pass it on.

Roger Thompson: 39:57

All right, man, thank you, take care, god bless. Thank you. God bless you. Bye-bye.

Joe Miller: 40:04

Thanks again for joining me on Titans of Transition. Do support the channel if you would, by liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends and family, doing all those things. If this particular episode has blessed you, has encouraged you, has motivated, you would love to hear from you. Also. Go to my YouTube channel, Leave a comment, Subscribe there If you want to actually see the interaction between myself and my guests. I have other material I put up there as well. So thanks again and for visiting Titans. Look forward to having you join us again.