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Canyon Pathways Podcast

Canyon Pathways Podcast

By: Canyon Pathways
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The Canyon Pathways podcast invites men into the journey of sonship, and invests in them through creative content, honest conversation, and inspiring stories of men around the world so that the listener leaves encouraged and equipped to live like a son and lead like a father.

Our goal with the podcast is twofold: 1) to invest more deeply into our existing community and provide ongoing content and community spaces for them, and 2) to expand the community by inviting more men around the world to this global campfire.

So, welcome to the table of sonship—we’re glad you’re here!

© 2026 Canyon Pathways Spirituality
Episodes
  • Spiritual Direction: The Lost Practice for Men Who Lead Everyone but Are Led by No One

    Spiritual Direction: The Lost Practice for Men Who Lead Everyone but Are Led by No One
    Jul 19 2026

    Most men in midlife leadership have accumulated the tools — executive coaches, counselors, mentors, books. And yet something stays unintegrated. The professional self and the father, the husband, the man of faith never quite come together. In this field note episode, Canyon Pathways founder Noel Bouché introduces spiritual direction: an ancient, relational practice that is at once counter-cultural and deeply relevant to the canyon of midlife leadership.

    Noel traces the field note's core definition — spiritual direction as one person walking with another, listening together for what the Spirit of God is doing and saying — and then opens up a personal metaphor from summiting Kilimanjaro. The guide, Charles, didn't choose the mountain or the route. His job was to attend: to watch, to listen, to walk alongside. That image becomes a template for everything spiritual direction is and is not.

    Three brothers from the Canyon Pathways community — a commercial pilot, a pastor-attorney, and an IT professional — share their own experiences in brief testimony clips, describing what changed when they entered this kind of relationship. And Noel closes with an invitation: if you've been on a Canyon Pathways retreat and want to go deeper, the spiritual direction pathway is the next step — a 10-session journey into living more fully as a son.

    This episode is the field note prelude to a full conversation episode with Sherman Bradley, Jason Lee, and Paul Kimball — men who are now stepping into spiritual director roles within the global Canyon Pathways community. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

    Key takeaways

    • Spiritual direction is a relational practice — not teaching, not coaching — in which one person walks with another to listen together for what the Spirit of God is doing in that person's life.
    • The guide doesn't pick the mountain: a spiritual director doesn't set the agenda or the destination; they attend to you on the journey you are already on.
    • Spiritual direction moves at the pace of the Holy Spirit — slower than executive culture, and that slowness is the point, not the problem.
    • Men who feel like they are leading everyone but being fathered by no one describe spiritual direction as finally having someone seek with them and listen for them.
    • Canyon Pathways offers a 10-session spiritual direction pathway for men who have attended a retreat and want to integrate sonship more deeply into daily life.

    Resources

    • Subscribe so every episode drops right into your feed.
    • More field notes: canyonpathways.org/blog
    • Bring our table to your inbox — the weekly devotional: canyonpathways.org/meditations
    • About Canyon Pathways: https://www.canyonpathways.org/about
    • Learn about our retreats: https://www.canyonpathways.org/retreats
    • The Heart of Man Film: http://heartofmanmovie.com
    • The Canyon Pathways Spotify playlist: https://canyonpathwayspodcast.com/cpspotify

    Produced by the team at Maroon Harpoon LTD. Thank you to our donors who make this venture possible — and thank you, friend, for being part of this Canyon Pathways community as we together live like sons and lead like fathers.
    Show More Show Less
    25 mins
  • He Found The Messiah Alone in Iran — No Church, No Community, Just Jonah | Kewmars Kazemzadeh

    He Found The Messiah Alone in Iran — No Church, No Community, Just Jonah | Kewmars Kazemzadeh
    Jun 19 2026
    Kewmars Kazemzadeh grew up in post-revolution Iran in a secular, partly Jewish family — navigating a society where the government was imposing an ideology on a people who had not asked for it. He had no religious upbringing. His first prayer was a teenage bargain with God over a girl who wasn't paying attention to him. What started as a transaction became a conversation — and the conversation, carried on alone for years, became the foundation of a faith that would survive solitary years in Malaysia, being robbed with nothing left, and a grueling season of caring for a father he had never been close to.Kewmars describes his conversion not as an emotional event but as an intellectual concession: the simplicity of 'do to others as you would have them do to you' showed him depth; the impossibility of 'love your enemy' showed him power. 'Zero possibility for any human being to be able to say that,' he says. 'This is not human.' From that moment he was in — not into religion, but into a relationship with a friend he did not yet know how to name.This conversation, anchored to the Canyon Pathways word for the episode — confidence — traces how Kewmars's self-confidence gave way to what the host Luke Smith calls Christ-confidence: not certainty about outcomes, but trust in a Father who hears, heals, and provides. The episode covers the Jonah morning that reframed his entire adult life, a decade of solitary faith across two countries, Holy Spirit encounters he did not have categories for until years later, a father's miraculous healing from late-stage Parkinson's, a business idea delivered in a vision, and a dream in which a King told him — against his protest — 'You are my son.' Kewmars closes with a prayer for every man who is walking alone and needs to hear: fear not, God is good, and he cannot disown himself.Key takeawaysConfidence built on self is exhausting — Kewmars describes arriving at this realization around 2015: 'I had achieved things that I had planned for, but what bothered me was it was so difficult… maybe the problem was myself, maybe I should not have put my confidence in myself.' The shift to Christ-confidence changed the texture of his life.Simplicity and impossibility are both evidence, not obstacles — Kewmars explains why 'treat others as you want to be treated' and 'love your enemy' moved him toward faith rather than away from it: 'If you want to explain something in a way that other people can understand it, you have to have very deep knowledge about it.' And: 'If God is God, it should be impossible.'God uses ordinary strangers at turning points — twice in the episode a stranger appears at a moment of need (the Muslim friend who offered a Bible in Iran; the man by the pool in Malaysia who knew of a job). Kewmars reflects: 'The second time now you've had just a random guy show up in your life that's meeting you at a point of need.'Sonship can be received before it is understood — Kewmars walked in the confidence and boldness of a son in Iran for nearly two years, telling people about God in a government factory, without knowing the language of sonship, without community, and without having read the Bible. The host notes: 'You were receiving like a son' — and traces this to Kewmars's own answer that receiving had always been the easiest of the three retreat words.The dream that names the show's entire mission — Kewmars recounts dreaming of a King whose face he could not see, who said 'You are my son,' and whom he argued with: 'My father is not a king. How can you be my father?' He later shared the dream with a pastor who said: 'The disbelief that showed up in my dream is also the story of all of us. We don't want to believe that we are basically a prince and our father is a king.'Discussion questions (PDF) — use this episode for personal reflection or with your small group. ResourcesSubscribe so every episode drops right into your feed.More field notes: canyonpathways.org/blogBring our table to your inbox — the weekly devotional: canyonpathways.org/meditationsAbout Canyon Pathways: https://www.canyonpathways.org/aboutLearn about our retreats: https://www.canyonpathways.org/retreatsThe Heart of Man Film: http://heartofmanmovie.comThe Canyon Pathways Spotify playlist: https://canyonpathwayspodcast.com/cpspotifyProduced by the team at Maroon Harpoon LTD. Thank you to our donors who make this venture possible — and thank you, friend, for being part of this Canyon Pathways community as we together live like sons and lead like fathers.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 35 mins
  • Confidence: Why You Don't Have to Lead Alone - Field Note

    Confidence: Why You Don't Have to Lead Alone - Field Note
    Jun 2 2026

    Confidence is a tricky thing in midlife leadership. For some of us it's been quietly draining away — through a loss, a reversal, an injury, or pain we've carried a long time. For others it's a newer ache: there was once a confidence tied to our wins, and now a fresh challenge has us rattled. Either way, the higher we climb, the lonelier it can get. We "mask up" for the day, hold it together for everyone around us, and tell ourselves we can't show the cracks.

    In this field note, Noel sits with that tension and then does what we love to do here at Canyon Pathways — he goes back to the word itself. Confidence comes from the Latin confidentia: con (with, together) and fidere (to trust). Tucked inside it are the words confide, confidant, fidelity — every one of them about trusting someone outside ourselves. Which turns the whole thing on its head. Confidence, it turns out, is less about belief in ourselves and more about belief in others. Self-confidence may even be a kind of oxymoron.

    But to live like a son is to live in abiding confidence — always trusting that we are seen, known, covered, and provided for by a faithful Father who has already prepared a table for us, right here in the valley. That's a confidence the canyon can't take away.

    Pull up a chair, brother. We'll stoke the fire while you settle in.


    What we explore in this field note

    • Why confidence wavers in the canyon — and how the isolation of leadership quietly erodes it
    • The word behind the word — confide, confidant, fidelity, fiduciary, and what the Latin root reveals
    • The difference between a confidence and a secret — one unites, the other divides
    • Three takeaways:
      1. The confidence we usually imagine is born out of individual experience — "I've done it, so I can do it again." But over the years that can curdle from I can into I must, only I can — and that's where the isolation begins.
      2. Confidence is inherently relational. It literally means together-trusting. We were made for the "we will do it," not the lonely "I can."
      3. The deepest confidence is the confidence of sonship — we're not a hired hand whose contract is running out. We're sons and heirs, with a Father who has already prepared the inheritance, and the table.

    A line worth sitting with

    "It's not that I can do it, it's that we will do it. And by the way, we will continue to do it. That's the essence of Psalm 23."


    Scripture & references

    • Psalm 23 — the Shepherd, the valley of shadow, the table prepared in the midst of it
    • Hebrews 4:16 — "Let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace…"
    • Epicurus — "We do not so much need the help of our friends as we do the confidence of their help in need."
    • Back to the Future — George McFly as the unlikely patron saint of confidence


    Coming up next

    We're staying with confidence — but moving from the field note to the fire pit. Next episode, Luke Smith sits down with Canyon Pathways brother Kewmars Kazemzadeh for a conversation about his own journey into sonship and how the Father has guided him through his life. You won't want to miss it.

    Resources

    • Subscribe so every episode drops right into your feed.
    • More field notes: canyonpathways.org/blog
    • Bring our table to your inbox — the weekly devotional: canyonpathways.org/meditations
    • About Canyon Pathways: https://www.canyonpathways.org/about
    • Learn about our retreats: https://www.canyonpathways.org/retreats
    • The Heart of Man Film: http://heartofmanmovie.com
    • The Canyon Pathways Spotify playlist: https://canyonpathwayspodcast.com/cpspotify

    Produced by the team at Maroon Harpoon LTD. Thank you to our donors who make this venture possible — and thank you, friend, for being part of this Canyon Pathways community as we together live like sons and lead like fathers.
    Show More Show Less
    19 mins
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