Formed to Serve: John Halsell's wake-up call on alcohol, fatherhood and the kind of brotherhood that saves lives
Construction owner Joe Halsell says Exodus 90 changed his life, AA kept him alive, and service became the answer when his family got hit with cancer, leukemia and the grind of learning to live well
Joe Halsell runs a construction company, and drank hard to handle life. Then Exodus 90 forced him to face what was actually enslaving him.
AA made it real by dropping him into a “barrier free” room of men offering unconditional help — “24-7, here’s my cell phone number.” It taught him to shut off the spotlight, strip away ego, and live by a hard rule: “Your very life depends upon the degree to which you serve others.”
Now he’s turning that arc into a book and a practice — daily prayer, examen, and Friday bed deliveries instead of the bar — aimed at the man who thinks his life’s over, because “it’s not… it’s just beginning.”
A yellow pad, a diagnosis, and a deadline
Joe Halsell has run his own construction business since getting out of college, starting “from the absolute ground floor,” he said, “literally digging the footings and lining up payroll estimates and all that kind of stuff.”
The book idea started as business advice. “I’m gonna write this book one day,” he kept telling himself, scratching notes on a yellow pad: how carpenters become contractors, how to build a company, how to survive the day-to-day.
Then life got heavier.
“As the family matured,” he said, “real problems come up — whether it’s marriage or illness or just all kinds of stuff.” His notes stacked up. And when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the book stopped being a someday project.
“My dad got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier,” Halsell said. “He’s still in the middle of chemotherapy, and it seems like it’s working. But now I gotta finish this book. I have to read this to him before something bad happens.”
Exodus 90, and what happened
Halsell traced the real change to one decision in 2019.
“I started Exodus 90 with three of my brothers in 2019,” he said. “We have done it every single day since we began it six years ago.”
At first he didn’t want it.
“When my little brother invited us, I told him he was crazy. You can’t give up 13 things all at one time. It took me about a week to buy in. Something was speaking to me,” he said. “So I said, ‘Hey Paul, if you’ll do it, I’ll do it.’”
He expected “mass failure.” Instead, he said, the program started exposing what had him “shackled.”
“You begin to understand what is enslaving you,” Halsell said. “From food to alcohol to sex, laziness… You’re getting confronted by all of it.”
When asked what hit him hardest, he didn’t hesitate.
“For sure the most difficult was alcohol,” he said. “It was just front and center. I can give up all this other stuff. I can do cold showers. I don’t need sugar or snacks. But alcohol was the hardest.”
“I know how to take care of this and not feel it anymore”
Becoming an alcoholic wasn’t crazy. It seemed slow and organic, the kind that looks like normal adult life.
“Sit on the back porch, have a beer with your wife,” Halsell said. “That kind of makes the stress of the day go away. And then I started drinking a little more. A little earlier. You try to find people to have lunch with who will have a beer or two with you.”
Then the hard stuff hits.
“When difficulty really hits hard, I know what to do to not feel it anymore,” he said. “I’m going to drink more, and I not think about it anymore.”
After the first 90 days of Exodus 90, he told his brothers he needed more.
“I told them I know for sure need 90 more days here,’” he said. “The writing’s on the wall.”
He also saw something older than himself.
“For us too, it was this generational thing that’s undeniable,” he said. “As far back as we can go in our American history … alcohol takes a hold of the men in our family.”
A year later, he still hadn’t changed his drinking habits. And then the confrontation he needed finally came.
“One of my brothers challenged me and said, ‘Hey, I thought you were going to stop this,’” Halsell recalled. “ The devil has got this front page paper written, and he wants to print it. It says, “I finally got Joe.” … He’s going to hang your head on his wall.’”
Halsell called it a “huge wake-up call.”
“I wouldn’t have been ready for that had I not gone through Exodus,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been ready to take that step.”
“Don’t be faithful. Just go look at the evidence.”
Halsell said Scripture made him feel less alone. “I was feeling hopeless about it all,” he said. “Why can’t I just stop what I’m doing?”
Then he started seeing the pattern.
“Noah had some problems and so did all the Israelites and so did David,” he said. “Saul, David — these guys really screwed up a lot. And they were leading God’s people.
“Just go look at the evidence. If you want some proof, just go read that darn book. It’s been proven.”
AA, and the room that felt like heaven
He stopped drinking and walked into Alcoholics Anonymous.
“Your eyes become clear,” Halsell said. “I finally accepted there’s real problems. I have to go deal with them head on now. I can’t just numb these things away.”
He talked about business pressure, kids heading to college, and the strain that shows up once the coping mechanism is gone.
Then life hit again.
“Six months later, one of my 15-year-old boy got leukemia,” he said. “He’s with us today. He just relapsed a couple months ago.”
He and his wife rotated hospital shifts, mostly living apart.
“For about 18 months, we were apart,” he said. “But the man I was becoming … was being nicer and more patient and showing up instead of going away.”
When it got easier, the meaning question followed.
“This cannot all be for nothing,” he said. “God didn’t take us through this to just go back to our life. He did not do that.”
AA changed how he understood brotherhood.
He walked into a warehouse meeting — “they call it the factory” — and heard laughter.
“It sounds like a party is going on,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’m in the right place.”
But it was.
“It’s a whole bunch of dudes who are super happy and they’re laughing. They’re talking, they’re hugging each other,” he said.
What shocked him wasn’t the format — a story, then reflections — but the attitude.
“All we need is you to want to improve here,” he recalled hearing. “Just get in here. Try not to do it again. If you do, that’s okay. Come on back here. We’d rather have you here than out there.”
Then came the part he still can’t get over.
“A 23-year-old kid reaches out to me and says, ‘Hey, 24-7, here’s my cell phone number,’” Halsell said. “ ‘You’re in the top of my favorites now. It will ring even if everybody else is on silent. Anything you need.’ And he just met me that night.”
Asked what it felt like, Halsell answered in one word.
“Love,” he said.
“Like unconditional love,” he added. “Eighteen out of eighteen guys in that room would do the same thing for you their whole life.”
He called it “the kingdom of heaven on earth,” with a practical explanation: “barrier free.”
“They just can’t call it that there,” he said. “Can’t say ‘love,’ because guys wouldn’t enter the room if they did.”
Masculinity without the spotlight
The change, he said, was learning to stop performing.
“Turn the light off — the spotlight — turn it off,” Halsell said. “Don’t expect it. In fact, that’s in your way. Get rid of self. Get rid of ‘me.’ Totally set it to the side.”
He described the group’s shared warning: the phrase that signals trouble.
“Once I said, ‘Hey, I got this,’ … that’s the worst,” he said. “Don’t say that here. Don’t say it.
“You don’t have this. You don’t have anything,” he said. “God has it.”
Then he said the line he wanted repeated.
“Your very life depends upon the degree to which you serve others,” Halsell said.
He tied it to consequences he’s seen.
“An alcoholic … starts drinking and driving again. He starts coming home late again … mistreating his children again. He loses his job again,” he said. “Those things are real and they are tangible.”
He pictured relapse like something waiting outside.
“I know I won’t just start drinking again,” he said. “I’m going to start drinking as if that habit was a gorilla in the parking lot doing pushups waiting for me to come back out.”
Old practices, daily rhythms
Halsell said AA didn’t introduce a new spirituality as much as it forced him to live what he already knew.
“I immediately went, my gosh, this is exactly what my church has asked us to do,” he said.
He ran through it like a checklist.
“Realize you’re not the star of the show. Let God take over,” he said. “Step four and five is do an examine and go to confession. Then start working on your vices by practicing their corresponding virtues. Lead a life of daily prayer and meditation, at the service to others.”
He said the Ignatian spiritual exercises “nearly mirror the 12 steps.”
His daily rhythm is plain, repetitive, and non-negotiable.
“Holy hour … before you do anything else,” Halsell said. “No emails, no social media.”
“Now exercise,” he added. “I do a rosary pretty much at lunchtime.”
He shuts work down early.
“I leave work 4:30 — it’s over — and I don’t drag it home,” he said. “I’m present for the kids at dinnertime.”
And he ends the day with an examen.
Service as an antidote
Halsell’s replacement for the bar is an organization that builds beds.
“Sleep in Heavenly Peace builds beds for kids who are sleeping on the floor in their towns,” he said. “There’s like 300 or 400 chapters across the U.S.”
On Fridays, he delivers.
“Instead of going to the bar on Friday … I do deliveries on Friday now at 3:30,” Halsell said. “We go deliver like five to eight beds to three or four families whose kids are sleeping on the floor.”
He described what it does to a man’s perspective.
“Instead of ending the week with ‘let’s pop a few and forget about what happened,’ we get to end the week with total gratitude,” he said. “Understanding your problems are very small compared to what real problems are out there.”
He said women in the community have started reaching out — moms, wives, grandmas — asking if he can pull struggling men into that kind of work.
“They can tell it’s the antidote,” he said. “It’s the antidote to what’s happening in their lives.”
The book, the site, and the man he wants to reach
Halsell’s book and materials live at FormedToServe.com, he said, along with a daily discipline guide, “12 guarantees,” and a workbook he called “The Workbench.”
“It’s pretty old school,” he said. “It’s hard. And it’s the most rewarding thing you’ve ever done.”
When asked who he wants to be a hero for — without defaulting to God or family — he answered with a target audience.
“The man who thinks that the book’s over,” Halsell said. “That the chapter has been written — because it’s not.”
He quoted a line he heard during one of Bishop Robert Barron’s homilies.
“Where you stumble, dig for treasure,” Halsell said. “When you think you’re at your worst, that’s where treasure’s buried.”
Don’t assume the pit is proof of failure.
“If you think you’re down near the bottom of that pit, rejoice and start looking for — tap, tap, tapping — for that treasure chest,” he said. “Because that’s exactly where God has got you, so that you’re open finally to listening to him.”
He sees the lost sheep story differently now.
“I don’t think it’s one out of a hundred,” Halsell said. “I think it’s like 87 out of a hundred, or 93 out of a hundred.”
And he kept the ending simple.
“The guy who thinks the book is written — it’s not,” he said. “In fact, it’s just beginning.”
He looked back on his own life and refused to call it chaos.
“When you look back and go, my gosh … that wasn’t some crazy up and down mountain-valley thing,” he said. “It was this beautiful arc that the Lord needed me to live and experience. It was his beautiful, smooth plan that now I can see I’m a participant in — and I need to be there to show another man that he is living a beautiful arc, not some failed life that’s over.”