Unveiling Your True Purpose
Life isn’t about conforming to the status quo. Embrace the rogue journey and find your true purpose.
Daron Earlewine returns after a six-month break, sharing insights from his break and the challenges he faced, including a herniated disc and an allergic reaction to a hornet sting. He introduces his new venture, the Rogue Collective, which aims to awaken individuals to their true purpose by embracing a “rogue life” rather than a rebellious one. Daron discusses the four transcendent themes—freedom, blessing, flowing, and loving—that guide this approach, and hints at diving deeper into these themes and their application in future episodes.
Key Takeaways:
- ⚡️Understand the difference between living as a “rebel” and a “rogue,” and how embracing a rogue life can lead to discovering and creating future possibilities.
- ⚡️Gain insight into Daron Earlewine’s personal journey, including his challenges and triumphs during a recent sabbatical and surgical recovery.
- ⚡️Explore the four transcendent threads — freedom, blessing, flowing, and loving — that are essential for living a rogue life.
- ⚡️Find inspiration from the concept of “rogue bees,” which underscores the significance of every individual’s unique contribution to the collective good.
- ⚡️Learn about the Rogue Collective’s mission to awaken individuals to live out their true purpose within the marketplace and beyond.
Notable Quotes:
- “I don’t want to be just a part of perpetuating the status quo. Like there’s something more for me in life.”
- “Saying yes to God is always a really good strategy for life.”
- “The rogues were literally creating the future for the collective, for the hive.”
- “Your life is a conduit. So I have to live free and I have to live my life where my life is a conduit of blessing to others.”
- “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
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Links to the Daron Earlewine Podcast
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TRANSCRIPT
I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to fall in line with what everybody else is doing. I don’t want to be just a part of perpetuating the status quo. Like there’s something more for me in life and I don’t know how to express it. I don’t know how to walk into it. I don’t know what the operating system of that would be. So I’m just, I’m just going to rebel. Created on purpose and for purpose. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Daron Earlewine podcast.
It has been a minute and by a minute it’s been like six months. As you guys know, if you an avid listener to the podcast, we recorded our last episode back in May of 2024 and here we are in October, end of October of 2024. And that last episode we let you know that I was taking a sabbatical for the first time in 24 years of full time ministry and did that this summer. Eight weeks of sabbatical. It was a phenomenal break.
Needed good, interesting. Maybe we’ll do an episode here in the future where I kind of go through some of the things I learned through the sabbatical. Maybe that’ll just come out naturally in future podcast episodes. But yeah, it was interesting. I did it because I felt like that’s what kind of God was saying for me to do. And so saying yes to God is always a really good strategy for life. And so did that and had eight weeks to prep for that. I mean, eight weeks to participate in. That was great. Came back first of August and I was chomping at the bit and I was ready to go to get back to work.
As we talked about, we’d launched the Rogue Collective, this new company that’s about speaking, coaching, consulting, having people become who they were born to be in the marketplace. And so had a lot of opportunities, a lot of things I was jumping into. Get two weeks back from sabbatical. I was actually down in Nashville recording a podcast with, with Bildwit, great company out of Nashville that works in the software training area, specifically in marketing with, with the construction industry, what they call the dirt world.
And I was down in ash for recording the podcast, getting a little workout in, you know, like you do at the hotel gym, and herniated a disc in my back, which was awesome if you’ve ever done that. But yeah, it was evidently a 6 millimeter herniation, which they said is a lot. And so yeah, after two weeks being back from sabbatical, I spent the next two months in pretty much constant non stop pain, nerve pain. So when you hernia disc that bad, usually what they call impinge nerves.
And I impinge nerves between my C7 and T1 vertebrae, which means my whole right arm felt like it was being electrocuted all the time. Which was great. Exactly what I was looking forward to for the fall. It’s kind of, it felt like this, like, you know, if you ever hit your, your funny bone, how that feels. Basically on and off throughout every day for about two months. It felt like I
Anyway, so got scheduled, the solution was spinal fusion surgery. And so got all that scheduled, was ready to go for September 16th. And then a kid threw a basketball at a hornet’s nest in front of our house and broke it in half. And so I went out to fix this situation of hundreds of hornets that were really mad. I failed to do any Internet research on the appropriate time to spray a hornet’s nest. Evidently it’s at nighttime when they’re asleep, not at 9:30 in the morning when they’ve just had breakfast and are angry.
Anyway, so I went out, tried to spray the hornet’s nest, a hornet came out and stung me. Right in the forehead. That is correct. Right in the forehead. And in the next 20 minutes I discovered a little known fact, an unknown fact about myself, which is evidently I’m highly allergic to hornet stings. Yeah. So I began the process of going into like an anaphylactic shock situation, rush myself to the er.
They pumped me full of a bunch of steroids to keep me from swelling shut everywhere. Yeah. And you can’t have that many steroids in your system and get a surgery. So we got to wait two more weeks to get the surgery. But as you can see from this wonderful scar on my neck here, on September 30th I went in and got spinal fusion surgery. That was about three weeks ago. And healing up great. Pain’s gone and I got a little titanium cube between my C7 and T1 vertebrae, which is, you know, a nice little thing to have extra in your life. I feel a little bit like Ironman or Bionic or something. Actually. I just feel old and humbled. But I’m back and I’m ready to go and I’m excited to get back and get back into regular episodes with all of you. I want to thank you guys. We’ve seen still really great download numbers from the podcast. So the great part about having hundreds of episodes of the podcast is some of you are never going to. You won’t hear this episode till like next year sometime when you catch up and you’ll be like, oh, wow, I missed a lot.
Some of you do listen and keep up with this week to week. And so you’re like, okay, cool, man, thanks for the update. And so that’s that. I’m back in the mix. I have some titanium spine, I know I’m allergic to hornets and I’ve got a wonderful scar that will be cool for the rest of my life. And so what I want to hit you guys with over this next series here, we talked a lot, or at least some right before I left on sabbatical about the way that I feel like God’s been leading me to launch this a for profit company called the Rogue Collective. And so kind of teased that, explained kind of what led up to that. But I want to take you through kind of an intro to what we’re doing.
And what we’re doing with the Rogue Collective is honestly exactly what I’ve been doing for the past 24 years is doing my best to awaken people to become who they were born to be. Missionally, the, the sandbox of the playground is going to be a little bit different. As you know, if you followed our ministry with Blackbird Mission, what we’ve done with pub theology and radio theology, everything that I’ve always done because my, my design and calling in the kingdom of God, right, is more of an evangelist or what you might call a connector.
I’ve always been drawn to have kind of one foot inside the church and one side and one foot outside of it, doing my best to reach people that are outside or maybe just on the outskirts of the kingdom. And so we did that with pub theology, we did that with radio theology. And now for next foreseeable future, we’ll be doing that with what we’re doing with the Rogue Collective, going out into the marketplace, into companies and building relationships. The keynote, keynote, speaking through coaching, consulting, to help people in that environment take their steps to become who they were born to be, to begin to live what we call the rogue way, which I’m going to unpack for in these upcoming episodes.
And you know, if somebody steps into this process and they begin to live a better life, they begin to walk in greater consistency with their destiny when freedom, living for love, right? And they’re actually moving that step. That’s wonderful. It’s not going to be a situation where anybody that comes in as part of the Rogue Collective, like, you know, they have to, you know, you know, pray a prayer to follow Jesus, to be a part of our, our collective. It’s not going to be an exclusive or exclusionary type of thing, but our heart, our heartbeat behind it all is that through this process, as people come and begin to be awakened to become who they were born to be, that if they don’t know the personal, amazing, powerful, life transforming love of Jesus, they would come to know that.
And at that point, our desire is then to walk with them for years after to help them become a disciple of Jesus that makes disciples of Jesus. And so there’s kind of a two part process there with the rogue collective and Blackbird mission where we want to reach, we want to awaken the masses and then we want to equip the few. And that’ll be the work of what Blackbird mission does, to actually equip folks to follow Jesus and make disciples, who make disciples and then empower them to innovate on that and do that in their own life. And so there’s a five minute overview of the vision of what we’re trying to accomplish, and a lot of that is going to be broken up into helping people step into understanding a rogue life and then living by the rogue way. So for these next four episodes, here’s one of our five episodes. I want to walk you through a quick overview of that, of what does it mean to be a part of.
To live a rogue life. And then we’re going to jump into the rogue way, which is what I want to call as kind of the operating system of what we’re doing to awaken people to become where they were born to be. And we’ll walk through those, what I call the four noble quests. The four noble quests that help you understand that operating system. To walk into live a rogue life. Okay, so let’s jump in and let’s talk about this rogue life.
And the rogue life is, is a lot about rogue bees. And so if you’ve seen any of the rogue collective stuff out there, you’ve seen our, you know, the color schemes, yellow and black, and the logo is a bee and it’s a hex. It’s like a, you know, hexagram. Hexagon. Yeah, hexagon. That’s a bee. You’ll see it if you see it, when you see it and you go, Daron, what’s the deal with bees? Why are you so obsessed with bees?
And then obviously ironic that now I know that I’m allergic to hornets and I haven’t done enough research to know if hornet venom is the same as bee venom. I don’t think it is. I think hornets are a completely different thing. I think they’re like demon possessed. They’re terrible. I hate them. That was aggressive. But no, I’m not cool with hornets anymore. I’m not sure about bees, but I’m not trying to.
I’m not trying to figure that out experientially. If anybody wants to reach out, send me a text. 317-5505-070 if you know about the difference of venom or whatever it’s called. Bees, wasps, hornet. Are they. Are they the same, different? I’d love to know informationally, not experientially. But here’s the deal with the bees is this idea of living a rogue life for me is kind of a breakdown of how I’ve lived my life.
And the difference here is bring a differentiation between what it means to be a rebel and what it means to be a rogue. And I’ve told you this story before, it’s actually a whole chapter in my book. The death of a dream Rogue, not rebellious. And it comes down to this is a lot of times many of us feel like we don’t fit in life, that we don’t make sense. We feel like, man, here’s the city I was born, here’s the family I was born in. Here’s the denomination maybe I was born in. If you’ve grown up in the faith, here’s the job I’m living. Here’s the job I’m working is something doesn’t feel right.
And so often when we don’t feel comfortable in our own skin, it. It begins to manifest itself in our life through rebellious activity. I feel like I don’t fit. Therefore I assume there’s something wrong with me, there’s something wrong with me. Then I’m going to act out in a way that may be rebellious against what I see is against me or where I don’t fit. And that was consistent with my life. And then I remember many years ago, a good friend of mine came and sat down and he said, hey, Daron, have you ever heard of rogue bees? And I said, no, I have nothing.
He said, man, I’ve known you since college and here’s the deal. He said, a lot of times I’ve seen your life and it seems like you identify more with being a rebel. And he said, I don’t think you’re a rebel. I think you’re a rogue bee. I said, I don’t know about rogue bees. So could you explain? I said, here’s the deal with rogue bees. He said, in every hive, about 90% or so of all the bees are worker bees.
And if you’ve studied bees at all, you probably know, like, they do the little waggle dance with their bodies to communicate to the other bees of where the nectar is. They go get the nectar, they come back somehow, they make honey. It’s phenomenal. Tastes great. Okay, so 90% of bees are worker bees, but there’s about 10% of them that they call rogue bees. And researchers would. For years, they would watch the activity and the action of these rogue bees, and they go, man, these guys are just rebels.
They’re not following the waggle dance. They’re not sticking for the status quo. They’re on these crazy adventures, just flying. It seems haphazard. Doesn’t seem there’s like a rhyme or reason to. It just seems like they’re out risking their life and not helping the hive. And they’re a problem. They’re rebels. And that’s exactly how many of us have felt in our life. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to fall in line with what everybody else is doing. I don’t want to be just a part of perpetuating the status quo. Like, there’s something more for me in life, and I don’t know how to express it. I don’t know how to walk into it. I don’t know what the operating system of that would be. So I’m just. I’m just going to rebel.
Researchers continued to study these bees, and they started realizing this. You know what? There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to what they’re doing, but there is a purpose. And here was the purpose. The rogues were not being rebels. The rogues were actually going out to discover the next food source, the next source of nectar for the hive. The rogues were literally creating the future for the collective, for the hive, without their risky.
And it is risky in the process. A lot of rogue bees die in their adventures, but a few of them find the future and actually begin to create it. They find the next source of food for the hive. The hive then communicates that they go find that. And without the risky, exciting adventures of the rogue, the hive eventually dies. But without the hive, the rogue loses its purpose. And so when my friend explained this to me, I thought, this is exactly what I want to call this new venture, because I want to reach out. I want to connect with the masses of rogues out there.
That right now are feeling like rebels. And what I want to help them do is to be awakened, to become what they were born to be, to embrace this rogue life where they don’t have to live like rebels. They can actually embrace. This is who God made me to be. And I am actually called. I’m actually equipped, I’m actually empowered to go out and to create the future. The future for my family, the future for my business, the future for my community. And I would say even going even transcendent, above that is create the future that’s currently on the heart and on the mind of God, that he’s looking for some rogue children of his to band together, to come together and to serve the collective, to serve the hive, if you will, and to step out and to create the future.
And as we look into this, what we have to realize in this rogue life is that. Is that there are some, what we call transcendent threads that are a key to living this rogue life. And so much of this, I’m so indebted to Dave Gibbons, who’s become an amazing mentor of mine. Over the past year. He’s taught me a lot of this, has trained me to understand it, to teach it to others. And so through the next, who knows how long, you’re going to hear me talk about Dave Gibbons from time and time again.
And I love Dave. He’s been such an influence of mine. If you’re looking for some new books to read, he’s got a bunch out there. But Dave helped me unpack this, that there are four what we call transcendent threads or transcendent themes, okay. That guide the rogue life. And here’s what they are. We’re going to walk them very quickly. Okay? First one is freedom. The second one is blessing. The third one is flowing in. The fourth one is loving.
These are threads and what we might call transcendent threads that run through our life. And so often when we begin to mistake a rebellious for rogue, right. We begin to thread our life together with things that are a lot less noble, that are a lot less transcendent in the process. And if you’re there, I want to encourage you with this. I want to encourage you with the fact that it’s once again another chapter from my book, Woven, not wasted, is you may have been threading together some really rebellious threads into your life. And you look back and you go, gosh, man, I’m so glad I’m listening to this podcast right now. Dude, I’m so glad that you’re talking about this rogue, not rebellious, but man, I’ve woven a lot of rebellious into my life and I feel like I’ve just wasted my life. Here’s what I wanted to tell your friend. You happened.
Those threads are not wasted. They may not have been the most constructive, but here’s what I know about God, is that he wants to actually use those, to begin to weave those together into the tapestry of your future. So nothing is wasted, it’s all being woven together. But what I want to do is help you get connected to these noble, these transcendent threads that I think as you begin to embrace them and begin to live your life threaded around them and have these threaded through you, you’re going to become who you were born to be. The first one of these, okay, is freedom, is God has created us to be free. You look at right from the beginning with Adam and Eve, he created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and guess what? They were free.
And if you’re going to live the rogue life, you have to embrace this idea of freedom. And that means that you don’t just stay in line, right with the status quo. You don’t just take life as it’s given to you by this world. Because what I have found in my life, and I think maybe you’ve experienced in your life, is so often when we follow the status quo of the world, what it does is it leads us into captivity, not into freedom.
And a lot of that is us buying into the myth that we are human doers, not human beings. That my life is going to be defined, what I do, what I accomplish, what I build for myself, instead of understanding, no, I was created by relationships, for relationships. And so I have to embrace this idea of my freedom actually comes through the relationships that I have first and foremost with God, then with others.
And what we do is we grow in our character, in our relational constructs, not what we actually create outside of ourselves. If we’re not careful with that, what happens is we begin to consume our way into greater captivity instead of actually serve our way into ultimate freedom. So if you’re going to live the rogue life, you have to embrace that you were created for freedom and you have to fight for it and you have to move towards it. The second thing is this is blessing, is that my life is actually threaded through with the transcendent thread of blessing, that my life is not meant to build for my own glory, build for my own benefit. This is not a consumption based life, but the structure of my life. And this goes all the way Back to the ancient Jewish scriptures, right? And it’s in the Bible, too. But the Pentateuch, where when God begins this relationship with Abraham, he says, here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to bless you so you can become a blessing. If you’re going to live the rogue life, you have to embrace the idea that I’m blessed to be a blessing, right? As Alex McManus has once said it to me 20 some years ago, right? That the gospel, or any good thing, it always comes to you on its way to someone else. Your life is a conduit.
So I have to live free and I have to live my life where my life is a conduit of blessing to others. This allows me to live outside of the status quo. This allows me to stay away from going into dangerous, rebellious patterns. But my life is shaped by how live for freedom and how I live to bless other people. I love this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He says this. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
And that tees us up for our next transcendent thread, which is this flowing, or you might call it flourishing. I believe we’re going to live the rogue life. We have to live for freedom. We have to live for blessing, and then we have to live to flow. We have to live, live, live to flow. And I’m going to unpack this in another episode. But it’s this idea of finding and stepping into and fighting for becoming who you were created to be in. This is about moving continually. It’s about responding to what God is inviting you into.
It’s this idea of my life is defined by. By movement, not by stagnation, of actually discovering what does it look like to live in the zone, if you will, of what I was created to become. You have to flow once again. We’ll unpack that a little bit in another episode. The last transcendent thread to live this rogue life is loving. And that’s no surprise. The scripture teaches us, right, that God is love in his essence. So would be consistent that if we’re going to live in connection or relationship with God, then love is going to be something that defines this rogue life and what we’re trying to do and embrace this rogue life and invite you into this rogue way of living.
This is not religious at all. And I love the work that I’m doing right now in the marketplace with working with leaders in rogues that they’re not currently following Jesus. And like I said, and what we’re trying to do, it’s not like, hey, to be able to partner with us and for us to serve you and help you. Here’s your the tenets of faith. You have to agree to all these things. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re not trying to create something religious, but we are very much trying to create something that’s spiritual, that’s living in the flow of how we’re created as human beings. Because I’ve said time and time again, I don’t believe if you’re not living spiritually, you’re living half of a human existence.
Because the way human humanity was created is God created us out of the dust of the ground and then he. He breathed his life or his spirit into us and we became human beings. For human beings to become what they were born to be, they have to be physical and spiritually. They have to be brought to life by the breath of God and live their life hearing from, being led, guide, directed and brought to flourishing through the Spirit of God. So what we want to help people do in living this rogue life, right, is to move from, I have a great IQ.
Some of us have great IQs, some of us average. And we hear about that growing in your iq, but we also, there’s more study that’s been done about EQ that you’re an emotionally intelligent person. Important. But what we would help do is bring somebody to a holistic understanding where it’s not just iq, it’s not eq, but you’re growing in what we call sq, right? Your spiritual intelligence. This is what Jesus taught us, right? When he says, I only do what I hear the Father doing, and I only say what I hear the Father saying.
In John, when Jesus talked about that he was going to go away and send to us the Holy Spirit, he said he’s not going to speak on his own, Right? He’s going to. He’s going to communicate what he hears from me and what I hear from the Father. And we will be with you. We’ll be in you. We will guide and we will direct you. He was talking about actually coming to the place where you’re living, loved and you’re flowing with what you’re being given by God’s Spirit.
These are the transcendent themes, transcendent threads that help us and guide us to live a rogue life. And I am so stoked about what this has done in my life. I feel like the past 46 years of life, it may have been me trying to figure out how to stop being a rebel and start being the rogue that God created me to be. And that’s been through a lot of joy, it’s been through a lot of pain, it’s been through a lot of breakthroughs, has been through a lot of setbacks.
But I feel like it set me up to not only understand this and live this, but be able to help guide you to take the steps that you need to take, to not waste your life. To not waste your life. And the mistaken identity of, I’m a rebel. I’m going to do this. You know, I’m not going to go down with the status quo. I’m living my own life. But to actually realize, no, here’s what it really looks like to embrace your identity as a rogue.
Because there’s a future that needs to be created. And it’s human beings like you and me that have been brought to life by the spirit of God and are in partnership with him that actually can move in freedom and in flowing and in loving and in blessing people to live the rogue life. So I want to unpack for you the operating system of this rogue life. We call it the rogue way. And I want to unpack that over the next four episodes.
Once again, so excited to be back with you putting out new content. I would love to hear from you. If you got questions, you can always text me, 317-550-5070. You can always email me: daron@daronearlewine.com comes right to me. Would love to hear from you. Or you can comment on the social posts we put out there or all the different platforms. Once again, the podcast is out on all social platforms. Video stuff’s out there, YouTube audio’s out and Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you find it.
But we would love to hear from you. I love putting the content out, but I have such great joy when I get a chance to have conversations with you. So stay connected and we’ll be excited. And I’m excited about this next episode that’ll come out next week that you can download, you can listen to, you can watch. That will help you begin to walk through and understand if this is what God’s created me to be and I am a rogue and I’m going to live this rogue life. Then what does it look like to walk and live the rogue way?
And we’ll walk through that in the next couple episodes. Once again, thanks for downloading this episode. And until we talk again, remember these three things. God is for you. He’s not against you. He is near you, not far away. And he’s created you on purpose and for a purpose. Thanks for downloading this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast.