Your Call to Adventure: Your story of the world changes who you save and serve - like Christ
As men, we've been given a world that is alive with God, and our job is to notice it, work with it, and turn it into something better - because that's what heroes do.
ABOUT THIS SERIES: Chris Mann and Dominic de Souza are two movie-loving young dads, who work fulltime with Heroic Men. The ‘mind of Christ’ is not a sermon for smart people, but a mini-series for men who want more out of life. Get a practical adventure into a heroic identity, a heroic call to action, and a summons to heroic brotherhood. This 3-part conversation challenges you to clear out the stinking thinking between our ears.
By the end of each episode, you’ll be inspired to try the simple prayers we pray, and test out the simple practices we follow. More than survive: we must learn to live as men fully alive. Let’s seek heroism like the saints and stories that matter most, and let’s step up to think and act like Christ.
Men cannot live well in the world until they know what kind of world they are living in.
“What if reality is way more loaded than it looks?” Dominic de Souza asked at the start of the conversation. “We’re walking through life seeing maybe 1% of what’s actually happening, and the rest is this massive, invisible layer of meaning and grace you’ve been trained to ignore.”
For Heroic Men, that changes the call of manhood. Men have received a world that is alive with God. Their work is to notice it, receive it, work with it and turn it into something better.
“As men, we’ve been given a world that is alive with God, and our job is to notice it, work with it, and turn it into something better,” de Souza said. “Because that’s what heroes do.”
Seeing the world like Christ
The episode builds on the first part of the series, which focused on divine friendship and the identity of a man as a son of the Father. In this second conversation, de Souza and Chris Man turned outward.
If the first movement is vertical, heaven to earth, sacramental imagination is horizontal, they said. It is about how men see, imagine and act in the world around them.
“A sacrament, as defined by the Church, is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace,” de Souza said. “The key here is that it is that outward sign. It is something that doesn’t happen in our minds. It doesn’t happen in our hearts. It’s something outward. It’s visible. It’s tangible. And that matters.”
Mann said imagination does not mean pretending something false. It means becoming conscious of realities that are present but unseen.
“When we say imagination, we simply are talking about the exercise of making conscious that which is invisible,” he said. “When I encounter the world, there are things that I see, I hear, I touch, I smell. But there are things happening in the world that are not available to my senses.”
That imagination, de Souza said, determines how a man acts.
“If you imagine that your story of the world is, ‘It’s an awful place, and I’ve got to fight my way up, and there’s nobody going to carry my water for me, and it’s all on me,’ well, if you think about the world that way, that it’s harsh and difficult and against you, you’re going to push your way up against it the whole time,” he said.
But another story is possible.
“If you interpret it as St. Francis does, where everything is alive with the glory of God, and I’m here to bring the Gospel to everything, to the bees and to the moon and to every plant, now that doesn’t mean life’s going to be easier,” de Souza said. “It’s going to be as hard as it is for everybody else. But you’re now completely able to interpret everything in a new way.”
The call to adventure
The story a man believes about the world changes who he notices, who he protects and who he serves.
De Souza said men need to ask what story they are living, because their decisions come from that imagination. A man who sees only danger may become defensive. A man who sees only pressure may become exhausted. But a man who sees the world as gift can begin to act like Christ.
“What Christ does, he takes everything that happens at him, and he’s careful about how he chooses to reply or how to take action,” de Souza said. “So that when he does take action, something better happens, something better is introduced into the world that is going to heal people, strengthen them, give honor to them, give honor to God, orient life in the right way, build a better life.”
That is the call to adventure. Men receive life, gifts, talents, relationships, work and suffering. Then they decide what they will do with them.
Mann pointed to the Old Testament “wave offering” as an image of that pattern. The priest would lift the offering before God. On the surface, it can look strange or useless. But Mann said it reveals how men are made to respond to God.
“You give your kid a coloring book for Christmas and some crayons, and they make you this beautiful picture, and they want to come and show it to you,” Mann said. “That’s what a wave offering is. Lord, you gave us this beautiful weather. You gave us this grain. Look, I turned it into bread.”
The point, he said, is relationship.
“It’s not about function,” Mann said. “It’s about showing God, ‘I’ve received your gift. I have done something good with it, and let me show you because you’re my Father, and I love you, and I want you to see and love me.’”
Talents, pressure and becoming who God made
The conversation turned to the parable of the talents and the pressure many men feel when others define their gifts for them.
De Souza said many men grow up hearing that they have talents, but that can become a burden when they do not understand what they are called to do with them.
“I think we can really struggle with that, especially when other people are defining for us what our talents are,” he said.
Mann said God’s vision is larger than productivity.
“God does not need me to be a doctor to be pleased with me,” he said. “I’m his son. He loves me.”
That distinction matters in a culture that prizes output and measurable achievement. Man said men often reduce gifts to practical use, while God delights in the person.
“I think God the Father knows that we love climbing trees, and he sees us climbing trees, and that is the gift,” he said. “That is the talent at work.”
For men, the call is not to perform for God, but to become the sons God made them to be.
Glory as a way of life
Mann said the command from 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God,” is broader than many men imagine. “God is glorified when I recognize that the world is a gift and when I bring myself to that truly,” he said. “When I try to make it a better place.”
That can happen in small, concrete acts. Mann described playing bingo with his 4-year-old son, even though the game itself does not interest him.
“When I sit down and I say, ‘Buddy, I’d love to,’ and I sit down and I play bingo with him, I am being a father to him,” he said. “I am paying attention to him. I am showing him that he is beloved.”
Glory, he said, is not a spiritual layer added on top of ordinary life.
“Simply by trying to be who God made me, I bring him glory,” Man said.
Men as signs of grace
De Souza said men themselves become signs in the world when divine life becomes visible through their actions.
“There is a divine life inside us that is not ours, that was gifted to us, that we have to cultivate and then convert into the decisions and the actions and the life-building and the life-making and the safe-making and the healing,” he said.
That is why men need brotherhood, he said. One man alone cannot hold the line. “You hold the line with your brothers.”
The call to adventure becomes practical when a man can name the people in front of him who need his strength.
“Who are people who are suffering that you can sacrifice or go to work for?” de Souza asked. “That makes it real. That makes it not about you.”
Giving the world back to God
Mann closed the conversation by returning to the cycle at the heart of sacramental imagination: God gives, men receive, men work, men offer it back.
“We receive the gifts of God, and then what do we do with it? We offer it back to God,” he said. “God creates us. We engage with the world. We take what we engage with in gratitude and openness. We improve it. We give ourselves to it so that we can then present it back to God.”
That, he said, is the mind of Christ.
“It’s to see the world as an opportunity to love the Father,” Man said.
For de Souza, even the sign of the cross can remind men of that whole vision: heaven to earth, friend to friend, the man himself standing where the lines meet.
“You wake up one day and suddenly realize, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m a son of the Father. I have divine life coursing through my veins, so I can’t phone it in,’” de Souza said. “I’ve got to actually get to work so that this life continues to stay in me and then radiates out for me to help other people.”
The adventure is not abstract. It begins with the world in front of a man, the people beside him and the Father who gave it all first.
“Be grateful for what God has given you,” Man said, “and do your best to give it back.”