#23: The Cost of Not Telling the Truth with Lorenzo Monge

UPCOMING PILGRIMAGE: https://www.rucktheway.com/pilgrimageSome people show up in your life with a story so layered you can't quite hold all of it at once. Lorenzo Monge is one of those people. He's been a pastor, a church planter, a youth worker, a clothing designer, a musician, a bodyguard. Today he's a military chaplain serving the French armed forces in French Guiana — the slice of France that sits on the northern edge of South America, surrounded by the Amazon. The week before this conversation, he crossed the equator on a Navy ship with a thousand soldiers, got sunburned in patterns that look like ugly frames around his eyes, and came home to sit down with two friends who have walked a lot of road with him over the years.Chris met Lorenzo twenty years ago in Charlotte. He and his family then moved to France and spent ten years planting a church alongside Lorenzo and his wife Marie-Lise — a friendship built so completely in English that even after Chris became fluent in French, the two of them never switched. Gabe and Lorenzo share a different thread: both men have lived the strange seam between ministry and military, just in opposite directions. This conversation lives in that seam — what God does in the space between who you were and who you are becoming.What follows is a conversation about pain you can't outrun. About the news Lorenzo received at age 48 that rearranged his understanding of his own life, one month before he deployed to the desert for four months. About what it costs men — in churches, in marriages, in uniforms — to refuse the truth. And about why the chaplain who serves Special Forces operators isn't afraid to tell a hardened soldier, eyes locked in, exactly who he's been. If you've been carrying something heavy and pretending you aren't, this one is for you. Lace up. Come walk with us.Walked Through in This EpisodeScriptures, ideas, and references that came up along the way:John 16:33 — "In this world you will have trouble." The promise from Jesus that Lorenzo says nobody puts on their wall, and the one that may matter most.John 17 — "In the world but not of it." The frame Lorenzo uses for chaplaincy: standing in the same danger as the men he serves, but a step outside the chain of command.Luke 17:10 — "We are unworthy servants." Lorenzo's quiet reminder of what a pastor actually is: someone who washes dirty feet.The seam metaphor — Gabe's frame for transition: the space in your story where one stretch of fabric becomes another. The space of becoming.The November 2015 Paris attacks — The moment that turned Lorenzo from pastor to chaplain. Worth remembering as you listen.