1KHO 632: Joy is a Skill | Max Lucado, Tame Your Thoughts

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Ginny Yurich

Parenting, Kids & Family

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this life-giving conversation, Max Lucado joins Ginny Yurich to talk about something every overwhelmed parent and anxious teen quietly craves: a way out of “stinking thinking.” Drawing from his new book Tame Your Thoughts, Max shares how a 20-year-old “converted drunk” became a pastor, bestselling author, and grandfather who now spends his days helping people rewrite the ruts in their minds. Together, he and Ginny dig into the reality that we think around 70,000 thoughts a day. About 80% of those thoughts tend to be negative yet both Scripture and neuroscience insist we are not stuck. Our brains are changeable, our patterns can be retrained, and joy is not a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a learnable, repeatable skill. For families trying to raise kids in a world of social media, materialism, and nonstop mental noise, Max offers concrete tools: “picky thinking,” uprooting lies and replanting Scripture, anchoring kids’ hearts with simple practices, and getting outside to actually look at the birds and lilies Jesus talked about. Through vivid stories Max shows how God can use even disaster as the start of a better story. If you’re weary from worry, buried under guilt, or watching your child struggle with anxiety, this episode will help you tame your thoughts, plant tiny daily “seeds” of truth, and discover that joy really is a skill you and your children can practice for a lifetime. Get your copy of Tame Your Thoughts here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Gin here, I'm the founder of 1,000
0:05.1	Hours Outside. And every once in a while, I get a chance to talk to someone. I never in my life
0:11.7	could have imagined that I would get a chance to talk with. Max Lekato, welcome. Thank you. It's a great
0:16.8	treat. What an exciting podcast and what a source of energy and joy you are. Well, thank you. I have been a fan of your books. We've read so many of them over the years. I have your newest one here. It's called Tamer Thoughts. Such an important topic. Three tools to renew your mind and transform your life. But I have other ones. I have God is with you every day.
0:37.9	These are just the ones that were around our house.
0:40.0	I have this one.
0:40.8	I have Anxious for Nothing, which is a gorgeous book.
0:44.6	And incredibly important, finding calm in a chaotic world.
0:48.3	And as we were doing breakfast this morning with our kids,
0:50.7	I looked over by the coffee pot max, and there was another one.
0:55.0	Oh my goodness, you just can't get away from me.
0:58.0	They're all over the home.
0:59.0	Can you tell us about your path to it?
1:01.0	I know you're a pastor, you're a speaker, and a best-selling author of so many books.
1:05.0	What was your path to becoming those things?
1:07.0	Well, I'm a converted drunk, first and foremost. I'm saved by God's great grace. I came to faith when I was 20 years old. I was well on the path to alcoholism, and my friends convinced me to come back to church, and by God's provision, I heard a few messages on God's
1:29.8	forgiveness, which is exactly what I needed to hear. And when I trusted grace, it was because I
1:37.1	didn't have a plan B. I knew what had happened to several members of my family because of
1:42.8	alcohol, and I was on the same path.
1:45.4	And so, by God's grace, I was able to straighten up my lifestyle a bit.
1:50.7	And then I decided I wanted to be a missionary.
1:54.1	And so I spent most of the 1980s in Brazil.
	...

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