Highlights from Recent Episodes of the On Adventure Podcast
By Josh Self
There are lessons that only come at a cost. They show up in the middle of something hard—when you’re out of breath on a ridgeline, sitting across from a family receiving the worst news of their life, or listening to thunder echo through a gorge from inside a tent. In our two most recent episodes of the On Adventure Podcast, I sat down with a neurosurgeon and a bishop whose stories remind us that the edge—wherever we find it—is where the real formation happens.
The Surgeon Who Learned to Stop
Dr. Hilal Kanaan is a neurosurgeon in Greenville, North Carolina and the son of Palestinian immigrants who rebuilt their lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan after his father was expelled from the West Bank. Hilal grew up with hardship in the background—never the whole picture, but never erased. His parents walked a fine line between honoring their roots and letting their boys be fully American.
That tension shaped his own approach to fatherhood. When his kids asked for a book about religion, Hilal didn’t hand them the Quran. He wrote them one—eight pages, hardcover, titled A Book About God. Its message: be kind, express gratitude, and know that people of different faiths are simply using different languages to say the same thing.
But the moment that stopped me cold was a story from early in his career. He’d taken on a tough surgery, made a decision that made it tougher, and suddenly found himself guiding a patient toward death. He told himself: stop. Ask for help. You’re making it worse. The surgeon he called came in without accusation, focused entirely on the patient, and saved a life. From that day on, Hilal said he wanted to become the doctor others would call when they were in trouble. He still walks the hospital thinking, “When I grow up, I want to be like him.”
That kind of humility—the willingness to stop and ask for help—is one of the hardest skills to develop, whether you’re in an operating room or on a mountain. And when I asked Hilal what he’d say to someone in a season of real hardship, his answer was simple: your feelings are valid. This is not the rest of your life. And you are not alone.
The Bishop Who Kept Walking
Bishop Mark Beckman, the fourth bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville, has been pairing faith and the outdoors since a young parish priest took his youth group hiking at David Crockett State Park. Early in his priesthood, on a Good Friday, he walked into a forest at Radnor Lake and found the floor carpeted in spring wildflowers. He thought: where have I been all my life? That was over thirty years ago, and he has never stopped walking.
His greatest physical journey was the Camino de Santiago—500 miles across Spain over six weeks. He learned that the first third is a physical challenge as your body adapts to the pain. The middle, the Meseta, is flat and monotonous, and the struggle becomes spiritual: enduring the ordinariness. His daily prayer was simple: God, help me to see today with my eyes. Help me to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch. When someone later asked if he’d just picked the best days for his photos, he answered: every day had its own beauty.
One of the most striking moments in our conversation was a story from the Grand Tetons. Bishop Beckman was sitting on a bench with an agonizing toothache, and his first instinct was self-pity. But as he kept breathing and looking, something shifted: if I’m going to be in pain, I’m grateful I can look at something this beautiful while it’s happening. That night, instead of fighting the pain, he simply noticed each sensation—breathing in and out—and found a peace deeper than the suffering. It’s a lesson I keep coming back to: suffering equals pain plus resistance. Lower the resistance, and something opens up.
What the Edge Teaches Us
These conversations left me with a few lessons I keep turning over. Humility is strength—knowing your limits and acting on that knowledge is one of the bravest things a person can do. The best lessons cost something—a family’s displacement, blisters on the Camino, a failed surgery. Monotony is its own wilderness, and the answer isn’t escape but presence. Community makes the summit possible—Bishop Beckman wouldn’t have reached that Colorado fourteener without friends beside him, and Hilal wouldn’t have saved his patient without the willingness to call someone. And if you’re in the middle of something hard: you are not alone, and this is not forever.
Stay safe and stay on adventure.
— Josh
