Module 6 · The Hunt for Souls · Lesson 1 of 2
Why the wins go hollow
You were built to pour out. A man who only takes in does not get full, he goes stagnant.
Module 6 of 6
There is an emptiness that arrives after a man gets what he was chasing, and it is different from disappointment.
Disappointment is when the thing was not as good as expected. This is when the thing was exactly as good as expected and it still did not touch the place it was supposed to touch.
That is because you were built to pour out. A man who takes in continuously and never releases does not become full. He becomes stagnant, and stagnation feels precisely like the emptiness he was trying to solve by acquiring more.
So the answer to the hollow is almost never another acquisition. It is a direction. Something outside you with a legitimate claim on what you have got.
Most men will not go back for anybody because they are convinced their own house is not clean enough yet.
That standard would have disqualified every single person God has ever used. Read the genealogy of Christ sometime and notice who was left in it. Nobody cleaned that list up.
The men who reach other men are not the ones who arrived. They are the ones who remember. If you wait until you are finished, you will never go, and the thing keeping you home is not holiness. It is fear wearing holiness as a coat, because fear that looks like humility never has to be examined.
One thing genuinely does, and it is worth being honest about.
Contempt. If you look at a man in the state you were in and feel disgust rather than recognition, you are not ready. He will feel it before you open your mouth, and he will close, and he will be right to.
Contempt is usually a symptom of something unfinished in you. Men are hardest on the version of themselves they only just escaped, because proximity to it is frightening. That is worth taking to God before you take it to another man.
The test is simple. When you see him, do you feel superior or do you feel a draught. If it is a draught, you are ready.
Half the men you have written off are not dangerous. They are hollow, and hollow men are loud in ways that read as threatening.
That is not naivety about actual harm. Some men are genuinely dangerous, and you use judgement, and you do not put your family in front of somebody unstable to prove a point.
But the default read most of us carry, that a man behaving like that chose to be that, is wrong most of the time. And it is precisely the read that keeps us from ever getting near enough to find out.
You were probably somebody's write off once. Somebody decided you were worth the risk of being wrong about.
The workEight questions
Three are answered in your head and never collected. They are marked, so you know before you start which is which.
Describe the emptiness that comes after you get what you wanted. When did you first notice it, and what did you do about it?
What have you been acquiring to solve something acquisition cannot solve?
What actually stops you going back for somebody?
- AI do not feel qualified. My own house is not clean
- BI am afraid of what it will pull back up in me
- CI am comfortable and it is easier not to look
- DI judge them, and I know exactly who I judge
Name a man you wrote off who was probably just empty. What did you decide about him, and on what evidence?
Do you feel superior when you see him, or do you feel a draught?
Who went back for you?
- AOne man, and I have never properly told him
- BMy mother or grandmother, and no man ever did
- CNobody. I got out alone and it shows
- DGod, through a situation I still cannot explain
Write what you would have needed somebody to do for you at nineteen. Not say. Do.
Fear wearing holiness as a coat is still fear. Write what you have been calling not being ready, and what it is actually protecting you from.
DeeperThree reflections
Longer than the questions and harder. Nobody reads these but you. Write them anyway, because the ones you would not say out loud are the ones doing the damage.
- 1
Write about the moment you knew you had made it out, and what you have owed since then.
- 2
Write to the man who went back for you. Everything you never said. Then decide whether he gets to read it.
- 3
Write about the man you gave up on. What you would say to him now, with no pride in the way.
Before you close this
You are not being asked to try harder
Everything above was written to corner you, because a man does not change
what he will not name. But conviction without Christ is only shame with better
vocabulary, and shame has never made a man free. It has only ever made him
quieter.
He walked into hell unarmed and came out holding the keys. That is not
encouragement. It is the reason the thing you just named can actually die
instead of being managed for another ten years.
Take the last question you answered. Tell one man. Do the one small thing
you wrote down. Not the whole plan. The one thing.
Written for men who are done pretending.
The Hunt · Module 6.1