Latest / Intentional Guy / The Harmless Little Hobby
Transcript
- Michael Chestnut: For hours, and I do mean hours, I sat alone in my garage smoking a pipe. I wasn't hurting anyone. I wasn't bothering anyone. Just me. A chair, the smoke, and the quiet. No websites, no secrets, nothing I'd have to hide if you walked in. If you asked me what I was doing out there. I'd have smiled and said, just enjoying my little hobby. And that harmless little hobby was quietly eating my life. Today's episode is not about my struggles. It's about yours. Welcome back to The Intentional Guy. I'm glad you're here. If you've been with this show for a while, you know I talk a lot about pornography, addiction, and lust. There's a reason for that. It's my story. It's the fight I know from the inside. And I'll never stop talking about it because too many men are drowning in it alone. But I also serve as a leader at Celebrate Recovery. And at CR, we don't just say addictions, we say hurts, hangups, and habits. All three. Because not every man listening to me right now is fighting what I fight. Some of you have never touched porn. But you've got a bottle in the garage refrigerator, or a vape in the truck, or a game that eats your hours a night. Or a phone that never leaves your hand. So today, this episode is for you. Not my struggles, yours. The one that's specific to you. We're going to talk about escape, the place we run to when life feels like too much. And I'm going to start by telling you about mine, the one that doesn't show up in either of my books. Here's something you may not know about me. I deal with depression and anxiety. Have for a long time. That's not a confession. That's just a fact about my life. And a few years back, when the weight of my life got heavy, I picked up what I called a harmless little hobby, a tobacco pipe. Now hear me. This is not an episode about tobacco. This is an episode about what I did with it. Because here's what my hobby actually looked like. Life would press in, work, stress, the weight I carried in my own head, and instead of dealing with any of it, I would walk out to the garage, pack the pipe, and sit down. And I would stay there one hour, two hours, three. My wife was in the house. My family was in the house. My Bible was in the house. And I was in the garage. I told myself I wasn't bothering anyone. And on paper, that was true. Nobody was getting hurt out there. Nothing shameful was happening out there. But let me tell you what wasn't happening out there. I wasn't with my wife. I wasn't leading my family. I wasn't reading the word. I wasn't writing. I didn't make a single episode of this podcast. The calling God put on my life sat parked while I sat in a lawn chair blowing smoke. I haven't fallen back into my old sin. I was clean. And I think that's exactly why I didn't see it. I'd already beaten the big monster, right? Surely a pipe in the garage couldn't take me anywhere. I wrote about this pattern in my book Exposed. I called it the false positive. The enemy plays possum with you and you poke at him. Nothing. You get a little braver and poke again. Still nothing. You start thinking, I've got this now. And the second you turn your head. He's got you. He doesn't always come back through the front door that you locked. Sometimes he comes through the garage door you never thought to check. I had surrendered to my escape. I just did it slowly enough that it never felt like surrender. Now, your garage probably isn't a garage. Maybe it's the bottle. Not falling down drunk, just two or three every night because you need it to unwind. Maybe it's the game. Maybe it's your phone. And the endless scrolls. Maybe it's the gym. Yes, even the gym. Two hours a day while your kids eat dinner without you. Maybe it's the boat. The deer stand, the golf course. I'm probably stepping on some toes here. Maybe it's staying late at work because work is the one place you feel like you're a winner. Here's what I want to be really clear about. Hobbies are good. Hobbies are healthy. God is not against you having a boat or a game or gym membership. A man needs things that fill his tank. The question is not, is the thing bad? The question is, what is the thing helping me avoid? A hobby restores you back to your people. An escape removes you from them. Same activity, two different directions. One sends you back into the house a better man. The other keeps you. In the garage. and under every escape, there's a hurt. Mine was depression and anxiety. I felt overwhelmed. And the enemy whispered the oldest line he's got. You need this. You deserve this. This is how you cope. He'll let you keep the pipe. He'll let you keep the bottle, the game, the boat. He doesn't care what the escape is. He just wants you out of the house. Let's take this to the word. First Corinthians chapter 6, verse 12. Paul writes, I have the right to do anything you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, but I will not be mastered by anything. Read that again slowly. Paul is not talking about the obvious sin here. He's talking about permissible things, allowed things, things you could defend all day long. I have the right to do anything. That was me in the garage. Show me a verse against a pipe. Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but I have the right. Paul asked two better questions. Is it beneficial? And has it mastered you? Here's my test for you. If the thought of giving it up for 30 days makes something inside your chest tighten up, it's got a grip on you. A hobby you can set down. A master you can't. And I'll give you one more verse because it wrecks me every time. Genesis 3 9. Adam has hidden himself and God comes walking in the garden and God asks, Where are you? The first question God ever asks a man in the Bible, not what did you do? Where are you? Men have been hiding ever since. Adam had trees. I had a garage. You've got yours. And God is still walking in, still asking the same question. Where are you? All right, let's get practical. There's four things that I want you to walk away with today. Number one, name what's underneath. The escape is never really about the escape. The pipe wasn't about the tobacco. It was about depression and anxiety that I didn't want to feel. Your bottle isn't about the taste. Your game isn't about the game. Every escape is medicating a hurt. So ask the harder question, not what am I doing, but what am I avoiding? Overwhelm? Grief? A marriage that feels cold? A failure you never talked to anyone about? Name the hurt, and the habit starts losing its power. Number two, run the hobby test. Does it restore you to your people or remove you from them? That's it. That's the whole test. When you come back from the thing, are you more present, more patient, more ready to lead? Or did the thing just eat the hours and hand you back nothing? A hobby gives an escape will take. Number three, add up the hours. This one hurts, but do it. Two hours a night in your escape is fourteen hours a week. That's over 700 hours a year. Now ask, what did God design those hours for? For me. Those garage hours were supposed to be my wife's, my kids, my Bible, this ministry. The escape sent me a bill every single week. I just never read the invoice. Now number four, don't just quit it. Replace it. You cannot white knuckle an empty space. If you drop the escape and put nothing in the hole, the escape moves back in by Friday. So decide ahead of time what goes in that slot. Maybe the first 30 minutes goes to your wife at the kitchen table. Maybe it's the word. Maybe it's calling a brother. The time was always meant for something. Give it back on purpose. You know how we do it here. One challenge, singular, easy, something you can do tonight. Here it is. Name your garage. Not quit it, not fix it, just name it. One sentence written down on paper or in your phone. It should say something like this My escape is blank, and it helps me avoid blank. You fill in the blanks now. That's it. That's the whole challenge. Because here's what I know from my own story and from years of working with other men. Nothing changes while the thing stays unnamed. The moment you write that sentence, the escape stops being background noise and becomes something you can actually deal with. Light beats dark every time. But you have to turn the light on. And if you want to take it one step further, show that sentence to one man. That's not required, but that's where freedom lives. If today's episode put its finger on something, I want to hand you a tool. I wrote a book called Are You Ready? It's 12 chapters. You can read each one in about five minutes. It's built for the man who's done hiding but doesn't have time to read 300 pages because he's drowning today. It's the book I put in the man's hands when we meet for coffee. And if you want the whole story, How far down I went and how God pulled me back, that's my book Expose. Both links are in the show notes. So before I let you go, if this episode hits you, if somewhere in the last 15 minutes you saw your own garage, whatever it is, I want you to do one thing. Put the word garage in the comments below. Just that one word. You don't have to explain it. You don't have to name the escape publicly. But when you type the word, you're telling me and every other man scrolling by. I know exactly where I've been hiding and I'm naming it this week. And men, when you see Garage in those comments, pray for that brother. He just turned on a light. Let's get coffee. Let me be your brother. Let me walk beside you. And until next time, just keep being intentional.