Post by Jared Musgrove, DMin.

He grew up in the Netherlands without God, without faith, watching American television. He chased what he saw and moved to New York. He fell in love with the country, its people, its virtues. And on September 2, 2019, after nearly twenty years of living here, he raised his right hand and became an American citizen. Years later visionary director Jon Erwin asked him to write the origin story of the original American Founding Father. Diederik Hoogstraten is the screenwriter behind YOUNG WASHINGTON, opening this weekend nationwide; a film that takes George Washington out of the marble and puts him in the mud, the wilderness, and the wreckage of his worst military failure at age 22. What emerges is hardly a monument. The flim shows us a man forged by loss, by brotherhood, and by a mother who refused to let failure write the final verdict. In our just-released conversation on Man to Men podcast by Beta Upsilon Chi, Diederik shared openly about depression, dark seasons, and the long road back to faith alongside his wife. And then he described what it meant to write a band of brothers into Washington's story; men who stayed when it cost them something, who held him accountable, who showed up after Fort Necessity when every reasonable person would have walked away. "Growing up, I did not have a brotherhood," he told me. "...I wish I had been part of something like yours," he said, referring to BYX. That sentence hit differently coming from a man who just wrote the founding story of America. At Beta Upsilon Chi, we believe that brotherhood as a formative force. It shaped young George Washington. It's shaping thousands of college men on campuses across our 250-year-old country. And it doesn't stop when you graduate. The full conversation is on Man to Men, wherever you listen to podcasts. If you have a son, a brother, or a young man in your life who thinks his failures have already defined him; this podcast and this powerful new film is for him. https://lnkd.in/gphS3y_i