Podcast Justin Mcroberts

I used to think the phrase, everything in moderation sounded like wisdom. I mean, it was the piece of wisdom folks would dole out when we talked about work-life balance and we talked about alcohol. And we talked about video games, everything in moderation, everything in moderation seemed like the thing that one would say that the goal would be to f…

A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of a call with a client, an artist I'm coaching. When? Well, we talked about the project he was doing, which is a project, by the way, that he'd been dying to do for three or four years. We finally created the time we got some money involved. And he was able to put this project together. And what he said to me i…

During the first round of the 2023 playoffs, Stephon Curry of the Golden State Warriors, my favorite team, was on the sideline, and his head coach, Steve Kerr, came to him and said, I'm going to rest you for a little while to save your energy. Now, let me hit pause here and confess, admit to pointing out, yes, you are getting a sports analogy. And …

One of the conversations that I've been in for many years led to the desire to put together the book, Sacred Strides. And one of the conversations that comes up now that the book is out in the world has to do with burnout; you have most likely been around or been privy to or been in a conversation about burnout. One of the pivotal scenes or moments…

I have had a somewhat unusual summer. And so far as I've taken a little bit of actual vacation time, I actually don't vacation much. I've never been one to enjoy vacation very much. Which isn't to say I don't like getting away. I do like the getaway; I like having days off. I like adventure, all that kind of stuff, vacation. It just has had histori…

The more conversations I have about the book sacred strides and dig into the themes in the stories, the more I find myself going back to some of my own source material, which is not to say the stories I wrote about my own life, but the words and the reflections and the teachings of the people who informed that life again, it's not experience that w…

My last couple of weeks, two weeks really almost at the mark right now, have been turbulent; I would say they'd been rough. But that's mostly just been turbulent. It's been hard. Not because I wasn't a part of and doing some really great things, I was. I had a wonderful time in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I was in Santa Cruz with Young Life staff. An…

I have been, in some way, shape, or form, engaged in conversation about AI technology and our relationship with technology for a really long time. In 1999, or 2000, I read Ray Kurtzweil, his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. And I was shocked if it was way beyond my understanding the terms he was using the vision he was painting of how life woul…

You have used the phrase or heard the phrase, 'let's make some memories' or 'let's make some moments.' If you pay attention to the podcast, you know that for the last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the passage of time. It's one of the things that came up a lot as I wrote the book Sacred Strides. I'm not just thinking about the way we exp…

It has been said, and I've come to believe this as a truth, that writing for an author is as much as anything else, a process of self-discovery, that one of the things that happen necessarily, in the process of writing, actually writing is that I see myself, I look into my own soul, I recognize things about my own life patterns, history, my moments…

If you pay attention to my life in any way, shape, or form, you know that I have a 12-year-old, almost 13, and a six-year-old; she just turned six. My six-year-old, I call her the bird. She has a really unique and interesting relationship with time. And over the last, I don't know, three, four years, I've been paying attention to and learning from …

I talk a lot about seasons, seasons of life, seasons of ministry seasons of work. I love the concept. I love the idea. I love the notion that for long stretches of time, somewhat indeterminate stretches of time, certain things are true certain things work. I like that there isn't a stringent timeline; when we talk about seasons, we can be in a real…

Sarah Billups is a Seattle-based writer who has been speaking at and about the communal practice of religion for a number of years now. Most recently, she's collected a number of those thoughts in a book called orphaned believers. It's a wonderful book actually deeply insightful. And I was thrilled to have her on the podcast to talk not only about …

Welcome to the At Sea Podcast I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. I don't speak to a lot of other coaches, I talk to a few, but it's not a regular part of my conversation I actually fell into in some ways, the coaching job, just discovered myself doing it after a number of years. And so when I get to actually sit down and talk with someone else, worki…

Welcome to the At Sea Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. When I first read Kevin Sweeney's initial book The Making of a Mystic, I found a bit of a kindred spirit that's somewhat unlikely person in the pastorate as well as a relatively unlikely person when one thing because of terms like mystical or contemplative. You might remember that conv…

Welcome to the At Sea podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. I met Jess Ray a number of years ago at a conference where she was helping to lead songs and realize there was some of her music that I had heard before. Maybe you had that experience where you're paying attention to someone or something, you hear something and you realize, like, oh my…

Welcome to the At Sea Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. What does it mean to lead well? Heck, what does it even mean to lead period? And specifically, what does it mean to lead and lead well, in a religious context, when we talk about ministry, we talk about Church we talk about religious culture in general. Nowadays, the question of what g…

If you are around or in conversations about mental health for much time at all, you probably hear the word trauma used relatively often. And if you are in or around conversations at the intersection of mental health and religious life, you'll probably hear the phrase church trauma, or religious trauma used, at least as regularly. Those conversation…

Welcome to the At Sea podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. Molly Lacroix is my guest on this episode. And as a marriage and family therapist, she engages in the kind of art I find inspiring, incredibly rare, and necessary. She takes what would otherwise be, perhaps even frustratingly, wildly difficult concepts, things out of the reach of the a…

Welcome to the At Sea podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. One of the points of conversation we are returning to over and over during this series we're doing at the intersection of mental health and spiritual practice has to do with the benefit or the problem of familiarity with mental health issues, mental health terminology, and with diagnos…

Hello, and welcome to the At Sea podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. This episode of the podcast takes us deeper into the ongoing conversation here at the At Sea podcast. At the intersection of psychotherapeutics and spiritual practice, this time with author, pastor, speaker leader, and coach Nicole Unice. I think you'll pick up in the conver…

Early on in my vocational career, I was on staff with a ministry organization. I was hoping to plant a church, making some music. I was around a lot of people, and a partner of mine, a friend, someone I knew who I was working with, described my overall posture as that of an ambulance chaser. They intended to point out that I tended to lean into dif…

I met Stephen Roach a number of years ago at an event he curates called the Breath and the Clay. It's a conference, an Arts and Faith Conference in North Carolina. And I'd heard about the Breath in the Clay through artists who had participated in the conferences, as presenters. And then some folks who had attended the thing. And, and all of them ha…

Welcome to the At Sea podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. The emphasis I've placed so far this season on the practice of poetry actually positions us to have some conversations well to continue some conversations that I care a whole lot about. Really specifically beginning with this episode of Focus, concentrated focus on the intersection and…

Among the many gifts I got early in high school was an F I got on a paper from an English class, a paper that the teacher said was too poetic. What he didn't mean by that is that I had written great poetry in the wrong place. What he meant really, in large part, is that it was really poorly written poetry. A lot was going on for me at the moment. O…

I don't remember the exact details surrounding my introduction to Gregory or his work. I do remember that upon my first reading, I was captured. In fact, one of my favorite live performance moments ever was sitting with my friend David dark, who's also been a guest on this podcast several times, at a reading of Gregory Orr's at Mount Holyoke Colleg…

On most Sundays, I get the privilege of gathering in my house with a group of preteens and reading through bits of the scripture and talking about them. And then praying together, it's a thing we call the good news Club, which borrows from a tradition we've gleaned from. One of my favorite parts of these gatherings is that we don't just read from o…

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel them both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth, you might recognize that as the opening stanza to the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. It's the poem that ends, Two roads diverged in the wood, and I took th…

Welcome to the At Sea Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. I'm recording this on December 21, 2022. It is the winter solstice, the day where I live that features the least amount of light. The night is longest. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not feeling great. I don't know if I quite have the flu yet, but I might. Because my daughter does. A…

It's possible, if not likely, that if you are remotely pop culture aware and spend any time on social media platforms, you'll see news about or posts about the death, the passing of dancer, DJ, choreographer named tWitch. I was struck by the moment I heard about his passing. A fan of his, I've liked his work, I've liked him on TV. I've liked his po…

I'm recording this introduction a few days after Thanksgiving. And if you're listening to this when the episode comes out, it'll be roughly a week, maybe a week and a day or so after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is to say this is the holiday season. And between Thanksgiving and maybe some things that happen in between. And the Christmas holiday …

In 2002, I wrote and recorded a song called love. And I've been waiting to write some kind of follow-up to that song pretty much since I released it. It was a song that meant a lot to me at the time because I was trying to publicly and personally redefine the word and my experience of the word love for myself. And for people that were interested in…

I’ve long lived with Seth Godin’s suggestion that art is anything you make that forges a connection between people. Over time, and in that light, I’ve also come to recognize that the depth and sustainability of my professional art life has a lot to do with the particular people I am connected to in/through my work. Which brings me to my now 12yo so…

It used to confuse me when, as people talked about relationships, romantic or otherwise, they would refer to the relationship as, like a third entity, there was the person and a person, or a few people. And then there was the relationship that they're in like it was this other thing. You, me, and then the relationship. But it turns out there's actu…

I've never really enjoyed fighting. And while I know there might be some folks who come to a different conclusion, depending on their experience of me, the reality is that while I certainly did Hone some skills in the art of argumentation, I've always actually hated what it's cost me to fight. Which brings me to the question, what is worth fighting…

My social landscape does not look the way I expected it to a few years ago. Some of that comes on the heels of religious difference or political disagreement. And as sad as that stuff can be, it's also a bit cliche and predictable. If I'm being honest, what's been harder, is recognizing that the more I've grown into who I am, and the more distance …

When I first started playing music professionally, it wasn't the beginning of a dream. It wasn't the culmination of a wish from my youth, not really. I thought of playing music. I thought it would be cool. But it's probably most true to say about that moment, the moment in which I decided to see what it would be like to have a career in music was t…

So I've been really enjoying this new feature of the podcast, taking a question from my Monday q&a sessions at Instagram, and digging just a tad deeper into one of those questions, specifically, those questions when you seem to resonate with those questions and my response. This past week, I got a question that I've been around and asked a lot as a…

You've probably had the bad experience that I had recently, that I'm about to tell you a story about, in which when your mind is already focused on something. You're already thinking about something regularly, and you start noticing it or connections to it everywhere. That happened the other night while I was reading a book to my daughter to help g…

I want to spend a few moments dissecting and maybe even dismantling this phrase. This idea that comes up in coaching conversations and has come up for a long, long time. In my 20-plus years in pastoral ministry as an artist and is the phrase work-life balance. I've got a lot of issues with this. And not just theoretical, but more so as a practical …

Mike Edel is a very talented singer, songwriter, and producer from Canada. And full disclosure a dear friend of mine, he's also which is a gift to me, a client. He's someone I've had the privilege of coaching over the last couple of years. And as I am with many of my clients, I'm really proud of the work they do, the work they've done. And the way …

Last week, I introduced a new element to the podcast; namely, bringing part of my Instagram Q&A sessions to this space and providing a longer answer to some of the deeper or, in my opinion, more pressing questions. On Monday, during the Q&A, this question really stuck out to me: “How do we manage over-pouring ourselves when there is an unending wel…

Part of how I answered the question on Instagram was to say that it depends on what my priorities are. Here’s what I mean: “Church,” as I understand it, is largely a way to intentionally practice the Divine gift of life with other people. Certainly, there are facets of regular church attendance that means I can “worship” God, particularly in music …

My son and I recently went to see the most recent Marvel release. It's a movie about Dr. Strange. He's one of the primary characters in the Marvel Universe. And he is, according to his title, a master of the Mystic Arts, which begs a little bit of a question about what mystic is. See in the films, him being the master of mystic arts is manifested i…

While the experiences of displacement and disorientation play such a significant role in conversations about cultural place, institutional belonging, and even interpersonal relationship. I am moved and inspired not only by the stories of those who endure and triumph over that sense of displacement or dislocation but in fact sometimes even choose di…

For a number of years, my favorite event in the country was The Festival of Faith and Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The festival host, a gentleman named Ken Hefner would stand up in front of headlining artists' audiences and challenge those audiences to be as prepared for the show, as the band that we were about to see. He would say, "That you w…

One of my favorite characters in all of literature is from a Dostoevsky novel called The Brothers Karamazov. The character's name is Father Zosima. Father Zosima doles out wisdom throughout the course of the book and its particular instance stands out to me, it's one of the moments that solidifies him as a favorite character. He's counseling. a con…

One of the surprising benefits changes fruits in me, that have come from partnering with folks who work in the anti trafficking world has been a different understanding and a deeper understanding what it means to live in the body, or in a body. For instance, partnering with Amy Lynch here in the San Francisco Bay Area, who through her organization …

A few episodes ago, I shared a short story about being what I called misnamed at an event. The organizer called me a singer/songwriter when I was there to speak. Now, part of that setup for me emotionally was I was actually in the process of reinventing. I had been playing music for many, many years. And I had been speaking a little bit at the time…

Reinvention is one of the hallmarks of a long-term career as an artist. The ability and the desire, the capacity to take something that used to work a certain way during a certain season and do something new, something different with that same material with that same pattern with those same skills. One of the things I've admired about Christa Wells…