Hello friends! Welcome to the Walk Humble podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Cox, and every week or two, I’ll drop a new episode as part of an ongoing conversation about life, faith, and relationships among people who don’t have all the answers and aren’t afraid to admit it!
I wanted to introduce myself in this intro episode so you can put a story with the voice. I’m married to a highly skilled therapist named Angie. We live in Northwest Arkansas (Rogers-Bentonville, the home of Walmart, Tyson, J. B. Hunt, and the Arkansas Razorbacks). We have three kiddos – a daughter in college and two boys at home and our fluffy little dog named Piper.
I’ve been a pastor since I was 19 years old, serving in little rural churches on up to one of America’s largest churches, Saddleback Church in southern California under Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life.
In 2011, we moved home to NWA to start a church in our community and things went extremely well. When 2020 happened, everything changed (for all of us).
We endured a pandemic, a renewed emphasis on civil rights and social justice, and a crazy political season that culminated in the January 6 insurrection attempt at the capital. During all the chaos, I went through some stuff, as most people I know did.
Burnout, depression, and exhaustion.
A crisis of faith, so to speak, as I started asking BIG questions:
- About God, the Bible, and the worldview I’d always held to.
- About the church and its representation of Jesus in the culture.
- About myself, my identity, and my future.
I’ve come a long way in the last couple of years. I’ve experienced a lot of affirmation about who I am, confirmation about many of the things I’ve come to believe about the world, and a whole lot of healing on spiritual, mental, emotional, and relational levels.
I can now connect a lot of the dots and see how two and a half decades of involvement in Christian ministry, plus overcoming some major hurdles, have brought me to this place of wanting to be a good steward of my knowledge and experiences.
So I’m launching Walk Humble – a website with a blog and this podcast – to stimulate an ongoing conversation about life, faith, and relationships among people who don’t mind admitting that we don’t know much and don’t have it all together.
To walk humble implies…
Forward progress, but…
Without pretension
I want to release an episode every week or two tackling subjects I know people are struggling with.
We’ll talk about
- What it means to be human
- How to make the world more just and equitable
- How to wrestle through big questions about God and the universe
- Current events, but hopefully in a constructive way
- How to love yourself
- How to love other people
- Personal growth and development
All the while, guided by 7 core values…
1. Love trumps everything else.
2. God is Mystery.
3. Healthy is holy.
4. Everybody matters.
Everyone possess inherent dignity, value, and worth. Our worth is not determined by our economic standing, social stature, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. All human life is precious and everyone deserves to be loved and to flourish.
5. We do justice.
6. We love mercy.
7. We walk humble.
Humble is a frame of mind, a state of being, and a way of living life. We walk life’s pathway with a sense of humility about who we are in relationship to God, self, and others. We will stumble and stray, but humility and love will restore us and guide us home.