I grew up in a evangelical Christian home — earnest, sincere, and well-meaning, but sealed off from much of the world. Faith was clear, but narrow. I had no mentors, no models of integrated manhood. When that bubble finally broke, I was flooded with new voices — philosophy, psychology, science, the broader Church — and realized how much truth I had never been taught. It was disorienting, even painful.

Like many men my age, I walked through deconstruction, not because I wanted to lose faith, but because the version I inherited couldn’t hold the weight of reality. I began to wrestle with the incarnation of Christ — with what it means to live as a whole person, body and soul, in a world that fragments us.

Inside the Church, I saw faith turned into a brand — marketed, politicized, or hollowed out for relevance. Outside it, I saw the same hunger dressed up in different clothes — self-optimization, performance, and the quiet exhaustion of always trying to prove yourself. Neither looked anything like the life Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount.

Was He exaggerating? Or was He inviting us into something deeper — a way of being that refuses both cynicism and comfort?

Travail was born from that question. It’s a opportunity for men who sense that Jesus meant what He said — who want to learn how to live it out in the real world, not as heroes or critics, but as apprentices. A yearlong journey of rediscovering faith that’s embodied, honest, and whole.