Week 1 The Foundation
Noticing Your Life
Telling the truth about where you actually are.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Matthew 5:3Read these slowly, aloud, before you say anything of your own.
Hyperēphania
Pride
The Rational Faculty
Denying your dependence on God — assuming you are morally and existentially self-sufficient.
Pride is the lie that you’ve got it handled — that you don’t really need anyone, not God, not your parents, not the men around you. It dresses up as confidence, but underneath it’s just a refusal to be honest. The desert fathers called pride the root passion: the one all the others grow from, because it’s the one that cannot say ‘I need help.’
‘Poor in spirit’ is the exact opposite. It doesn’t mean weak or sad — it means coming to God with open, empty hands, honest about your need. Jesus says the Kingdom belongs to that man. So week one asks the humblest thing first: look at your real life, without the spin.
Where in your life do you act like you’ve got it all together when you really don’t?
What’s the difference between real confidence and pride — between strength and just pretending?
Journaling • the skill of noticing
Before you can change anything, you have to see it clearly. Week one isn’t about fixing your life — it’s about taking an honest look at it. No shame, no judgment, just a real snapshot of how you actually spend your time, your attention, and your energy.
There’s a story worth telling: a man stuck in a season of overwork — a workaholic who knew it — was outside one freezing morning splitting firewood, praying about how stuck he felt. A neighbor yelled across the street, ‘You’re working too hard.’ Then he walked over, set a bigger axe down, looked the man in the eye, said it a third time, and left. The man’s read on it: God sees me. God knows me. God is right here in the middle of it. But he could only hear it because he’d been paying attention to his life.
The practice this week is the simplest in the whole course: noticing, supported by a few minutes of daily journaling. Take an ‘audit’ of your life — where do your hours and your attention actually go, and do they match what you say matters? Most of us resist this, because there’s usually a gap between the life we want and the life we’re living. This week we don’t close the gap. We just measure it.
Voices from the desert, the cloister, and the long line of men who walked this road before you.
“Be attentive to yourself, that you may be attentive to God.”
Basil the Great · Homily on “Be Attentive to Yourself” 330–379
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Augustine of Hippo · Confessions 354–430
“I saw all the snares of the enemy spread out over the earth, and I groaned and said, ‘Who can pass through these?’ And I heard a voice saying, ‘Humility.’”
Anthony the Great · Sayings of the Desert Fathers c. 251–356
“Nearly all the wisdom we possess consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
John Calvin · Institutes of the Christian Religion 1509–1564
A word for you, the one who leads — how this lands in a thirteen-year-old's real week.
Thirteen is the age of the curated self. Every young man your guys know is running a highlight reel — the feed, the story, the version of himself he shows at school. This week teaches the one skill underneath everything else in the course: telling the truth about your own life, first to yourself and then to God.
To a teenager, ‘poor in spirit’ can sound like losing. Help them see it’s the opposite. The kid who can admit ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I need help’ is the one who actually grows. Pride keeps a boy stuck. Keep this week shame-free and curious — and lead by sharing your own gap first.
If you took an honest audit of one normal day, what do you think would surprise you most?
Who is one person you could actually say ‘I need help with this’ to this week?