As a Man in My King, I Have Agency and Power!

The past year has been full of some pretty amazing things. Since early 2020, God has had me focus on a few things, including uncovering where my fears reside and why they exist, and giving my childhood self his voice back. He’s also ramped up speaking to me about my life in some very specific ways. I am happy to share some of these with you here.

Rather than repeat myself, here are links to several recent blog posts where I’ve already written about each of these at length:

·      The Importance of Sharing Our Stories

·      Out of the Dark: Joseph’s Story

·      Regaining the Lost Voice of My Childhood

·      Taking Ownership of My Journey

·      Challenging Our Views of God

In my post, Taking Ownership of My Journey, I describe how God revealed to me how the earliest known wound in my life sabotaged my ability to freely engage with my own life as I desired. This wound became the foundation for most of my life’s decisions and made my interactions with so many people painful and problematic. God has been getting teachable moments out of that wound for many years now; I wouldn’t be surprised if He finds more in the days to come.

Pushing Past Resistance

In this post, I’d like to share some tidbits of gold God has given me recently.

The first is learning to fight for the things I want to engage in, even when I encounter resistance from people in my life. In the past, all it took for me to reconsider was an odd comment or a look on someone’s face. It astonishes me that some people press through this kind of resistance with ease; then again, if you’re one of them, you may be just as stunned by how easily a person’s agency can be cut off.

The most recent of these was a desire to participate in retreats by Brothers Road.[i] Several men who help lead these retreats told me in personal conversations that there would be something in them for me.

But I had a hunch this was one of those organizations that some in our circle of related ministries had strongly cautioned against.

Until God began challenging my fearful thinking, my usual response was to fear whatever lay on the other side of that line and heed the warning without question. I may even have passed that warning on to others without first testing whether it was true.

Could there be something good for me in what this organization offers? Could it be that I might come across people who don’t share my values and perspectives? Just because their website communicates about same-sex attraction in a very different way than First Stone Ministries, does this mean what they offer is questionable, or worthless to us? These are some of the questions that swirled around in my mind.

But I had the witness of men I trusted who are volunteer leaders for their retreats. If they were trustworthy enough, then perhaps I might find something of value there for me after all.

Journey into Manhood

Not knowing how to defend my reasoning, I attended Journey into Manhood (JiM) in the fall of 2025 under the cover of personal vacation.

Words cannot adequately express how deeply I was impacted by this experience.

As the name implies, this is a rite of passage into manhood, designed for men who experience same-sex attraction (SSA), though men who don’t experience SSA have attended and loved it too. Since then, Brothers Road has added a similar non-SSA retreat, A New Man, to its offering.

Journey into Manhood is an experiential retreat from beginning to end. I’m not permitted to describe its details, but I can share what I got from it.

Tears come to my eyes as I recall the meaningful moments of that weekend. What stands out most is the excellence that ran through the whole thing, from the administration to the curriculum to the hands-on activities we all took part in.

I processed childhood wounds in ways I hadn’t before. I let them engage my body, my will, and my emotions in some very healing therapies, one of which was psychodrama, also known as carpet work, or guts work. There was also an opportunity to speak openly and safely with a brother—something the leaders themselves cautioned against doing outside the context of a Brothers Road retreat. They gave us opportunities to step right up to the edge and say things we otherwise might have never spoken aloud. This was one of several deeply empowering experiences.

After one of my sessions, I wept deeply as I thought about the reality that many men who could have been told about this wonderful ministry but weren't because of unnecessary fear held by their counselors and ministers who cared for them. This would have been my plight had God not found a way for me to partake.

Learning by Experience

One thing I love about ministries like these is the opportunity to put into practice the things we are being taught. The modality I’m used to is to sit under teachings and take copious amounts of notes, then perhaps come forward for prayer ministry. I had grown tired of being a sponge of someone else’s knowledge. I didn’t realize it, but I’ve been needing immersive, experiential ministry to engage my emotions, my body, and my mind. One of those volunteers told me before I ever attended that men need physical encounters and experiences, perhaps more than intellectual ones. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but we men do need adventure and physical ways of interacting with each other and our world. Brothers Road has found practical ways to offer this alongside the deep healing their men so desperately need.

Journey Continues

Because I’d had such a profound experience at JiM, I set out to attend the second of three retreats, Journey Continues (JC), this year.

As I amassed feedback from journeyers who had done JC, I picked up that I might not feel the same way about it as I had about JiM. Well, duh—JiM was a primer to the Brothers Road experience, so JC, as part two, would naturally feel like a path I was already walking. And it did.

This is where my post Taking Ownership of My Journey came from. God really used this retreat to bring me closer to my original wound than I had ever come before. He could have done so elsewhere, but He chose to use their offering to bring healing and resolve to my battered and wounded childhood self.

My kingly statement from JC became “As a man in my King, I have agency and power!”

I am truly grateful for the ministry of Brothers Road and what it has afforded me in my life.

Wisdom Over Fear

To wrap up, I’d like to share the perspective God used to help me press into something I had been cautioned against by well-meaning loved ones.

I was taught to heed unreasonable fear based on black-and-white thinking regarding organizations like these (see Challenging Our Views of God).

I’ve since come to realize that wisdom should operate like guard rails protecting us from spiritual chasms we might fall into. For instance, instead of telling your teenage son he cannot walk down Unsafe Street on the way to hanging out with his youth group, it’s better to teach him about the kinds of unsafe things he might encounter on the street. You can teach him that he has agency and power he can employ along his journey to stay safe. This way, you’ve taught him to use his understanding to engage with the world around him—wisdom rather than fearful avoidance. Fearful avoidance is a trap too many religious people find themselves in—at least that’s my hunch.

I believe we should be teaching each other how to live lives of adventure while trusting that God knows how to keep us safe. To teach fear first is to miss the whole point of the freedoms God has given us.

Fear emasculated me and cast me to the ground to be a doormat for black-and-white thinkers to walk over as they asserted their wisdom. God’s love is teaching me that I was created for freedom and that I have agency and power to live an abundant life of freedom in Him.

The story of David cutting off Goliath’s head feels apropos here. My Goliath has been fear communicated in various ways, mostly by those closest to me. The kingly statement I fought for in Journey Continues is a witness to what God has been leading me to stand in.

As a man in my King, I have agency and power!

Thankfulness

I am grateful to those who support my work. If you’re one of them, thank you!

If you are interested in becoming a donor, please visit the link here, or below, for more information.

[i] Brothers on a Road Less Traveled (“Brothers Road”) is a non-profit, multi-faith, international fellowship primarily of men from bisexual or same-sex-attracted backgrounds who — for our own, deeply personal reasons — typically do not accept or identify with the label “gay” and prefer instead to explore and address underlying issues and embrace our authentic masculinity. https://brothersroad.org/about/

Joseph Thiessen

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