Fathered by God, Part 3 –The Warrior: Fighting Fewer, Truer Battles
This post continues my series on masculine initiation during what began as a three-month vow to live alone with God in the mountains of Park City, Utah. That vow has now stretched into five months.
The night I drove into the mountains, I was not chasing peace. I was running out of excuses. The business wins no longer filled me, and the fights I thought were noble had left me tired, angry, and alone. So I packed a bag, and drove until the city lights vanished behind me. When I reached Park City, I told God I would give Him three months: no deadlines, no plans, no noise. Just space.
Context for New Readers
The journey started right after I completed the Wild at Heart Retreat, John Eldredge’s immersive experience in Oklahoma. During the four-day retreat, I confronted deep wounds from my past and learned that my desire for adventure, a meaningful battle, and a loving relationship were essential parts of who I am. But I needed to live it.
When I returned home, I made a promise to step away from the noise of ambition and the constant battles of business, choosing instead to spend a season in the wilderness with God as my only mentor. I wanted no agenda and no timeline, only space to unlearn the patterns that had kept me in constant conflict with myself and others. Those first few weeks felt like detox. Eventually peace came, followed by confrontation.
This mountain season has become my classroom for the six stages of masculine initiation described in John Eldredge’s book Fathered by God: Boyhood, Cowboy, Warrior, Lover, King, and Sage. Each stage forms a man in distinct ways and prepares him for the next.
If you want the backstory and tone of this journey, start here:
- Part I: Embracing the Ancient Paths: A Wilderness Journey of Masculine Initiation
- Part II: The Cowboy Stage: Risk, Wounds, and the Wilderness That Still Calls My Name
How I’m Learning to Fight the Right Battles
In this chapter, I turned the page to the Warrior stage in the Fathered by God journey. I expected armor and action. What I found instead was something harder and far better: discernment, restraint, and power under control.
For most of my adult life, I have been the kind of man who rarely retreats from a fight. I am a former tech founder in my forties, built to act, quick to lead, and relentless when pursuing a goal. I have rallied people, raised capital, and driven teams to victory. Yet I often struggled to build the quieter structures that sustain trust after the adrenaline fades.
My battlefields have changed over the years. They have looked like boardrooms, church pews, and living rooms where small offenses echoed louder than they should have. The older I get, the more I realize that my former choices carry a long tail of consequence.
At the time, I called it courage. I thought standing my ground made me strong. But the truth was far less noble: it was pain looking for a target.
When someone crossed me, I went to war. When I felt misunderstood, I escalated. I fought because it felt like survival. The result was predictable: I lost people. Over time, I became the man others admired from a distance but feared up close.
There is a phrase that has followed me for years:
“You would burn down the city just to rule over the ashes.”
I remember one night years ago, standing in my kitchen after an argument that had gone too far. My voice was still raised, even though my wife at the time had walked out. The silence afterward felt heavier than any victory. The look in her eyes before she left — tired, guarded, done — stayed with me longer than the words we had said. I remember thinking, Why can’t she see I’m right? The words had barely left my mind when a quieter voice answered, Adam, do you want to be right or to be whole? I did not know it then, but that was the first crack in my armor. My version of battle was winning the argument but losing the person. And I carried that same pattern into boardrooms and friendships, mistaking control for strength and dominance for leadership.
A Confrontation I Couldn’t Avoid
When I reached the Warrior chapter of Fathered by God, I could no longer dodge the question it raised:
If God is a warrior, and I bear His image, why do my battles look so little like His?
Scripture gives us a glimpse of how to be a warrior:
“Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”— Psalm 82:3
God fights for people, not against them. He confronts evil, not image-bearers. Somewhere along the way, I reversed those two.
That realization was sobering. I started to replay old scenes from my life as if reviewing battle footage. In my marriages, I fought against my spouse instead of for our covenant. In partnerships, I treated fear-driven decisions as betrayal and responded with scorched-earth tactics. In friendships, I mistook distance for disloyalty and met it with control.
Everywhere I looked, I saw the same pattern: I was not fighting evil; I was fighting people. I had turned sons and daughters of God into enemies, and in the process, I lost the war for my own heart.
The Turning Point
That clarity finally came one morning as I sat on a ridge above Park City, reading Scripture and watching the sunrise burn through the fog. My eyes landed on Ephesians 6:12:
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
The verse reframed everything. My enemies were not executives, friends, or ex-spouses. My enemy was unseen. I sat there with my Bible open, arguing silently. But Lord, they were wrong. They lied. They left. The answer came slow and steady: That was their battle. This one is yours. I realized that not every wound was mine to avenge. Some were mine to release. And every time I directed my anger toward a person, I was aiming at the wrong target.
I began to think differently about how to fight my enemy:
“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.” — 2 Corinthians 10:3–4
That became my new request: not for victory in my battles, but for alignment with God’s. Not for more strength, but for right aim.
I started to see that formation, not fury, is the true proving ground of a warrior. God was not asking me to be less strong; He was asking me to become well-aimed.
Power Under Control
The warrior I am becoming rejects two distortions of masculinity. The first is passivity, which avoids conflict and calls it peace. The second is aggression, which makes conflict an identity. Neither is holy, and both are rooted in fear.
The narrow road between them is what Jesus called meekness. I used to think meekness meant weakness, but now I know it means power under control.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”— Matthew 5:5
Meekness is the inner strength of Christ in the wilderness, resisting temptation when He had the power to end it. It is His composure in Gethsemane, choosing obedience over vengeance.
“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”— Matthew 26:52
That is true strength: the courage to restrain yourself when destruction would be easier.
Before I Move Forward
Maybe your battlefield does not look like mine. Maybe it is a strained marriage, a demanding boss, or the quiet war inside your own thoughts. The terrain is different, but the question is the same: Are you fighting to be right, or to be whole?
God’s invitation to the warrior is not to stop fighting, but to fight like Him. To stand for what is good, true, and beautiful without turning His image-bearers into enemies.
Where I Stand Now
These months in the mountains have shown me that life is not about avoiding battle, but learning which ones are worth fighting and how to fight them with clean hands and a guarded heart.
The war for integrity is daily. The battlefield is often invisible.
“Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.”— Ephesians 6:10
I still feel the warrior in me rise when I sense injustice or cowardice. The difference now is that I pause. I ask, Is this my war or His? Sometimes I still want to pick up the sword anyway and do. Old instincts die slow. But most days, I can hear His voice before I swing: Lay it down, son. And I do.
That shift, more than any visible victory, is what strength redeemed looks like.
