The Compass is not a self-help program. It is not a syllabus to be taught or a curriculum to be completed. It is a map. A man picks it up knowing roughly where he stands and uses it to walk. The destination is not mastery. It is faithfulness.
There are four pillars: Body, Being, Balance, Business. They are not sequential. A man does not finish one before beginning the next. He lives in all four simultaneously, the way a house rests on all its footings at once. Some pillars are strong. Others have cracked and settled over the years. The Compass helps a man see which ones need attention — not to shame him, but to give him clarity.
Every pillar uses the same four stages to help a man locate himself:
Pillar One
Body
Stewardship of the physical life: sleep, food, movement, and the quiet discipline of tending what you have been given.
Why the Body Matters
Paul wrote that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). That word, temple, is easy to skip past. But sit with it. A temple is not a trophy case. It is a place where something sacred dwells. You do not optimize a temple. You tend it. You keep the roof sound and the floors swept. You treat it with the kind of steady care that says: something important lives here.
The stakes are practical before they are theological. A man who sleeps four hours a night is short with his kids. A man who has not moved his body in years cannot play in the yard with his grandchildren. The body is not separate from the life. It is the vehicle for the life. When it breaks down, everything in the back seat feels it.
This pillar is not about aesthetics or performance. It is not about the number on the scale or the weight on the bar. It is about being present, being capable, and being faithful with the one body you will carry from here to the grave.
The Four Stages
The Ground
Most men know where they actually stand with their bodies. They know about the weight they've gained, the sleep they've lost, the checkup they keep postponing. The Ground is not about discovering something new. It is about saying out loud what you have been quietly carrying. Not shame. Just clarity.
The Path
The Path is a direction, not a program. Sleep is where most men should start — not because it is dramatic, but because it touches everything else. Seven to eight hours. A consistent time to bed. Less screen light before sleep. Food comes next, and simply. Movement follows. Find movement you will actually do on a Tuesday in February.
The Walk
What marks The Walk is not consistency without failure. It is return without shame. The man who threw out his back and spent three months on the couch, then started walking again. The man who gained thirty pounds during a hard year and began, slowly, to eat with more care. Aging is part of this pillar, not an enemy of it.
The Guide
A Guide in the Body pillar is not a trainer or a nutritionist. He is a man who has tended his own body long enough to speak honestly about what it costs and what it gives. He has failed and returned. He knows the difference between discipline and punishment.
Questions for the Chapter
- When you think about your body honestly, what is one thing you have been avoiding?
- What did your father teach you, by word or example, about caring for his body?
- Where have you confused stewardship with vanity, or used one to avoid the other?
- What is one small physical practice you have kept faithfully over time? What made it stick?
- How has a season of poor health, injury, or exhaustion shaped the way you show up for the people around you?
- If you are honest, do you treat your body more like a tool to use up or a place to care for?
Recommended Reading
- Earthen Vessels — Matthew Lee Anderson. A theological case for why the body matters to the Christian life.
- Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker. Most men will finish this and go to bed earlier that night.
- Atomic Habits — James Clear. The best book on building small, sustainable practices.
- The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk. For the man whose body carries more than he realizes.
Pillar Two
Being
The inner life: prayer, self-awareness, emotional honesty, and the question of who a man actually is when no one is watching.
Why Being Matters
Solomon wrote, "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it" (Proverbs 4:23). Everything. Not some things. A man's words, his decisions, his patience with his children, his capacity to love his wife well — all of it flows from the inner life. When the inner life is neglected, everything downstream suffers.
A man can look like he has it together. He can show up to church, lead his family to the car on Sunday morning, say the right things at the men's breakfast. And still be hollow. Still be running on fumes from a faith he inherited but never made his own. The gap between what a man does in public and who he is at 10pm on a Tuesday — that is the territory of Being.
Most men do not drift from God or from themselves in a dramatic moment. They drift slowly. Prayer gets shorter, then stops. Self-reflection feels indulgent. Emotions get compressed into two settings: fine and angry. And one day a man realizes he cannot name what he feels, what he believes, or what he actually wants.
The Four Stages
The Ground
The inner life has gone unexamined, maybe for decades. Emotions are either suppressed or expressed as frustration. A man at The Ground is reactive. He does not know why certain conversations make him shut down. This is not a place of shame. It is a place of naming. "Search me, God, and know my heart" (Psalm 139:23).
The Path
The Path is where a man starts paying attention. He notices his patterns. He begins to name what he feels, even when the vocabulary is clumsy. This looks quiet from the outside: five minutes with an open Bible, a prayer that drops the formal language and says what is actually true. A man telling another man, for the first time, that he is struggling.
The Walk
Years pass. A man who stays on The Path will encounter seasons when God feels distant. The Walk is long obedience in the same direction. He has walked through doubt and come out the other side, not with all the answers, but with something sturdier than answers. He knows that faith held in the dark is worth more than faith that has never been tested.
The Guide
A Guide in Being is a man who has done enough inner work that he can sit with another man's doubt, confusion, or pain without flinching. He does not rush to fix it. He does not quote a verse to close the conversation. His inner life is integrated — he is largely the same man in public and in private. He says: "I have been where you are. I stayed. Here is what I found."
Questions for the Chapter
- When was the last time you told God the truth about where you actually are with Him?
- What are you afraid you might find if you actually got quiet and listened?
- How do you know the difference between peace and numbness?
- What is one thing you believe about yourself that you have never said out loud?
- Where in your life are you performing instead of being present?
- What would change if the men in this room knew the real you?
Recommended Reading
- Emotionally Healthy Spirituality — Peter Scazzero. Connects emotional health to spiritual maturity in a way most church books avoid.
- The Ragamuffin Gospel — Brennan Manning. For the man who knows he is supposed to believe in grace but has never felt it.
- A Hidden Wholeness — Parker Palmer. About the gap between the inner life and the outer life, and what it costs to close it.
- Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership — Ruth Haley Barton. For the man who leads others but has neglected his own interior.
Pillar Three
Balance
Relationships: marriage, fatherhood, friendship, rest. The question is simple and hard: who gets the actual you?
Why Balance Matters
A man can be faithful in the technical sense and still be absent. He comes home. He provides. He is there for the important events. But being there and being present are two different things. His wife knows the difference. His children feel it even if they cannot say it.
The stakes here are not abstract. A marriage can survive years of distance before either person names what is wrong. Children grow up watching a father who is physically in the room but mentally somewhere else, and they learn that this is what love looks like: a man who shows up but never arrives.
Balance also includes rest. The Sabbath is a command, and a strange one — God tells His people to stop. To trust that the world will hold together for a day without their effort. Most men treat rest as weakness. The Sabbath reframes it as faith.
And it includes friendship. "A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity" (Proverbs 17:17). Most men have acquaintances. They have colleagues. They do not have someone who knows how they are actually doing. The Balance pillar asks why.
The Four Stages
The Ground
The drift is slow. Staying late at work one extra night, then two, then it becomes normal. The phone replaces conversation. The evening becomes parallel silence. A man at the Ground has usually made peace with this arrangement. He tells himself his family understands. But if he is honest, something has gone cold.
The Path
One real conversation with your wife this week. Not about the schedule — a conversation where you ask her something and listen to the whole answer. One evening where the phone stays in the drawer. Sabbath enters here as a practice, not a rule. One day where you stop producing and sit with your family without an agenda.
The Walk
The marriage that has survived a hard season, a real one, where both people wanted to leave and neither did. The father whose adult children still call, not because they have to but because they want to. At sixty, The Walk looks like a man whose family actually knows him. Not the public version. The real one.
The Guide
A Guide in Balance can sit across from another man whose marriage is struggling and not flinch. He asks: how are things at home, really? And he stays quiet long enough to hear the actual answer. He has earned the right to ask because he has been honest about his own failures.
Questions for the Chapter
- If your wife described your presence at home this past month, what would she say? Would you agree?
- When was the last time you had a conversation with your wife that was not about logistics or schedules?
- What do your children know about you beyond your role as provider?
- Where does rest rank in your life? Do you treat it as earned or as given?
- Is there a friendship in your life where someone knows how you are actually doing?
- If your kids grow up and build marriages like the one they are watching right now, would you be at peace with that?
"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." — Matthew 11:28
Recommended Reading
- The Meaning of Marriage — Timothy Keller. The most honest book on Christian marriage most men will ever read.
- The Tech-Wise Family — Andy Crouch. A practical look at how technology reshapes family life.
- The Four Loves — C.S. Lewis. Affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Essential reading.
- Sabbath — Wayne Muller. A gentle, persistent argument that rest is not laziness.
Pillar Four
Business
Work, money, vocation. Not about building wealth — but whether a man's labor serves his life, or his life has become fuel for his work.
Why Business Matters
A man's work reveals what he believes about himself. Not what he says he believes. What he actually believes: what he's worth, what he owes, what he's afraid of losing.
Most men never stop to ask what their work is for. They were taught to provide, and they do. But somewhere between the first paycheck and the twentieth year, work became the thing that defined them. Ask a man who he is, and he will tell you what he does. That is not an accident. It is a confession.
Paul writes that a man's work belongs to God, not to him. "Your labor is an offering, not an identity." The moment a man grasps that distinction, his relationship to work changes completely. The parable of the talents is not about financial returns — it is about what a man does with what he has been given. Fear buries. Faithfulness builds.
The Four Stages
The Ground
Most men are working hard and not asking questions. A man earns, he spends, he provides. His identity and his occupation are fused together. Money is the other silence — most men do not know, with any honesty, where they stand financially. They carry debt or anxiety or both, and they carry it alone.
The Path
The Path begins with honesty, not strategy. A man looks at his actual numbers: what comes in, what goes out, what he owes. Then a small step: give something away. Regularly. Generosity is not a financial strategy. It is a declaration that money does not own you. The question: is what I am building worth what it is costing me?
The Walk
Measured in decades, not quarters. The man who lost the business at 38 and learned that he was not his company. The man who changed careers at 45 because the work no longer matched the man he had become. A man at The Walk holds his work loosely. He still shows up fully, still brings excellence — but he is no longer gripping.
The Guide
A Guide in Business is not a financial advisor. He is a man who has wrestled with work and money long enough to sit with another man's fear. When a man confesses he is drowning in debt, the Guide does not lecture. He says: "I have been there. Let me sit with you while you look at this."
Questions for the Chapter
- If you lost your job tomorrow, who would you be? What would remain?
- Do you know, honestly, what you earn and what you spend? When did you last look?
- What is your work costing you that does not show up on a balance sheet?
- Who taught you what it means to provide? What did they get right? What did they get wrong?
- When was the last time you gave something away and felt it?
- Is there a conversation about money or work you have been avoiding?
- If your work is an offering, who is it being offered to right now?
Recommended Reading
- Every Good Endeavor — Timothy Keller. The best book on work and Christian vocation.
- Business for the Glory of God — Wayne Grudem. A short, clear case that profit and ambition can honor God.
- The Total Money Makeover — Dave Ramsey. For the man who has never looked at his numbers honestly.
- Visions of Vocation — Steven Garber. For the man asking what his work is for.
How a Guide Uses The Compass
A Guide does not teach The Compass like a class. He navigates from it. Before a Chapter meeting, he reads the section most relevant to the current book. If the book this week touches marriage or family, he opens Balance. If it touches prayer or the inner life, he opens Being. The Compass follows the book. It deepens the conversation the book has already started.
Pick one section within a pillar — not the whole thing. Read a short passage aloud. Start with yourself. Before you ask the men in the room where they stand, tell them where you stand. The room will only go as deep as you go first.
End with The Round. Each man says one thing he is taking with him from the conversation. One sentence. No commentary from the group. Just a man naming what landed.