314 | Tackling Fear in a War Zone, Modeling Courage, and Embracing Your True Identity (Jamie Winship: Part 1)
Episode Description
Jamie Winship is no stranger to conflict. From working as a police officer to living in international war zones, he learned how to tackle fear with faith—and he modeled it for his children, too. In this episode, Jamie details some of the dangerous situations his family faced as they followed God’s calling. Plus, he’ll inspire you to hang onto joy, even when fear tries to swallow you whole.
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Jamie Winship is known for bringing peaceful solutions to some of the world’s highest conflict areas. His work in law enforcement and education led his family around the world, including South Asia and the Middle East. Jamie and his wife, Donna, are co-founders of Identity Exchange and have three adult sons.
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· When living in a high-conflict area—whether a warzone or your home—you have to gamify preparedness with joy instead of fear.
· There are times when you may need to pray to be invisible.
· If you’re afraid to fail, you won’t be able to model courage in front of other people.
· God cannot invite you into greater challenges in the future if your only goal is self-protection and self-promotion.
· The greatest gift you can give your kids is the truth of who you are.
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Podcast Intro: [00:00:01] Being a great father takes a massive amount of courage. Instead of being an amazing leader and a decent dad, I want to be an amazing dad and a decent leader. The oldest dad in the world gave you this assignment, which means you must be ready for it. As a dad, I get on my knees and I fight for my kids. Let us be those dads who stop the generational pass down of trauma. I want encounters with God where He teaches me what to do with my kids. I know I'm going to be an awesome dad because I'm gonna give it my all.
Jamie Winship: [00:00:39] I think as dads, we have to always remember that the situations that we find ourselves in, it's not just think, how does this affect me? It's how does it affect my kids? How does my reaction to this affect my kids view of the world, of God, of other people?
Jeff Zaugg: [00:00:56] Gentlemen, welcome back to DadAwesome. My name is Jeff Zaugg. And today, actually a few days ago, we celebrated the six year, six year mark. Six years of DadAwesome. Six years of the DadAwesome podcast. So, way to go. Throw a handful of confetti if you want to celebrate with us, that's what we would recommend. The second recommendation for celebration would be to buy from the DadAwesome store. So go to dadawesome.org and check out the store link. Buy a coffee mug, buy a t-shirt, buy a sweet track jacket. You got some options. You got some hats there. That would be a way to celebrate with us. Because as people ask you, hey, what is DadAwesome? Or, hey, what's that jacket you're wearing? You can explain, a little bit about and share a little bit about our mission, our vision. And that would be a way to celebrate six years as a ministry, as a podcast. Guys, in the last couple of years, one of the very most recommended guests for us to invite on to be a guest at DadAwesome, on the podcast is Jamie Winship. So Jamie is the author of the book Living Fearless. He leads an amazing organization called Identity Exchange. They have some amazing courses and resources and conferences and coaching. And he's got a, 21 day free resource you can download off his website. Jamie, I heard him, the first pass was from my friend, Troy Magnum had him on, his podcast, the Kindling Fire podcast. And then I bought his book and have kind of done a deep dive into this themes around identity. Am I living in my true identity as a Son of God? Because, man, it affects my role as a dad. So on our six year anniversary episode, it's an absolute gift to tee up the first half of my conversation with Jamie Winship. Thank you for joining us today on DadAwesome.
Jamie Winship: [00:03:05] Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Really an honor to be with you.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:03:09] I thought it'd be fun to start with a story. And, I don't pray often, God, make me invisible. I don't pray that prayer and with my kids. Now we do tell superhero stories. And we talk about, I've created this invention called boots suits, where my little girls have special boots that can turn into any kind of suit they want with a press of a button. So the boots kind of envelop them into special suits. So invisibility maybe was in one of my stories, but I've never prayed God send, send invisibility to me and my family. Could you kind of lead into our conversation with that story of praying that with your family?
Jamie Winship: [00:03:44] Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, that's an interesting concept because, it's that that's actually happened to a couple of times, but the, the one with our kids was the first where it even, you know, entered our mind. It's that idea that Jesus says you have to be like a little child sometimes, to really come to the Father. And so, yeah, we were living in Indonesia at the time and working in the international school, my wife and I, we were teaching in this international school, and the government of Indonesia was collapsing. And, I don't, most people probably haven't been in a country when the government completely collapses. But we've worked in a lot of war zones, mostly conflict zones, in our whole career. But to be in a situation where you're actually, we were actually waiting for the government to collapse, which meant there would be no military, no police, no law, just absolute, you know, chaos. And it's like, it's like all the horror movies that you've ever heard. There's just no law. It's just roaming gangs. And so we were waiting for that to happen. And I'll just say, before the, the particular incident that as, as foreigners living in that country, as expatriates living and working in that country, our State Department, and we had lots of coworkers from different countries, all of their governments were getting their people out because they knew it was going to collapse, everyone knew it was coming. And so our our school was owned by a large corporation, were saying, you know, here's here's the tickets, get out of the country. You know, we don't want you there. And so most of our community left pretty immediately. But Donna and I were praying about it and our question, and and this is the thing about being a parent, kids learn to be afraid of things from their parents, fear, and they learn not to be afraid of things from their parents, lack of fear. So we knew, it wasn't just a matter of like, you know, what's the safest, most expedient thing to do? The thing was, God, what is the best thing to do for our kids? And we would think immediately, well just protect them, like in every way. But it's a different thing when you're asking the Lord that question. And so we believed, and I believe this is a difficult time, but that the Lord wanted us to stay and not leave. And because all of our neighbors were Muslims who couldn't leave, who were going to go through the collapse, and they would in effect and this is what I thought about my sons looking at me going, wow, dad, you, soon as it got hard here, like we just abandoned our neighbors for our own safety. And, and then our Muslim neighbors thinking, wow, you guys talk about faith in Jesus and all that, but when hardship comes, you're gone. Like, you have the capacity to bail out, and we don't, and you're just going to leave us. All of that. And so I really felt like the Lord was just inviting us to stay, and I wouldn't, I had coworkers I love and respected. I would never tell them what to do. It completely up to the person and their walk with the Lord. It's no guilt there. I'm just saying for us, the Lord invited us to stay. So in that process of staying. It's like you do it with wisdom. And so we had cash hidden up in the ceiling of our of our house. We, our kids, we told our boys they were, they were like, like sixth grade, fifth grade, and third grade, something like that. And so they knew what was going on. And we told them, like, pack a bag of what you want to take. If we had to wake up in the middle of night and go, we practiced evacuating our house down into these rice paddies if we got separated. Here's where you guys meet up with, like all of that. To make it a game, you have to. Fear comes from not knowing and the enemy can play with the hypothetical. Faith is built on the things that we know. Faith substance of things we hope for, the evidence of things not seen. It's very, it's measured and beautiful. It's not, it's not just insane. And so and we just made it into a game with them. It's like, you know, this is going to happen, people can come down the street. And so it was funny because when Donna was checking their little bags to see what they took, you know, the two older ones had back like clothes and and our youngest son, all he packed was the Little House on the Prairie book series. That's all he had in his bag was Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods. He was like, this is our third grader, if I'm in an emergency, I need good reading. That was his whole view on life, it's probably smart, I don't know. Probably smarter than the rest of us. Anyway, so it collapsed, the government collapsed and it as horrible. And there was looting and houses were being burnt down and all that. And, our Muslim neighbors and this is all things are, it's funny because our kids, two of them are married to Arabs and one of them lives in Dubai, and the other one is in Palestine a lot of the time. And this is all because of what they witnessed growing up. And so anyway, they, the collapse and and so and it was mayhem and, you know, God was there and we, lots of crazy things happened. So it calmed down a little bit. It had calmed down a little bit. And so I told our kids, let's, there's a community pool, indoor pool, you know, not far from us. And I figured, people in the city that weren't pillaging and rioting. If they're anywhere, that's where they're going to probably be congregating. So I told our kids, let's get in the car and we had some other kids with us. Let's go. I'll drive you and we'll go to this pool. So we get in the car, me and my wife in the front seat. And these, our kids behind us in this little van, and we're driving down this, we're in a city of 5 million people. And and but it's pretty the streets are pretty quiet, and I turn, I turn down this street. And when I turn down the street, there is this mob coming down the street, and they have headbands on and their carrying, you know, boards and, and they're smashing windows and, I don't know, it was, it was, it was, it was packed like the street was packed. There was no way through them. And there was, I couldn't back up. There was no, there was no turnoffs. As soon as I turned I was like, oh. And they were it was like a tidal wave coming towards us. And this, we had friends of ours who had been driving to the airport to get out, had been stopped on highways and, and had earrings ripped out of their ear. It was brutal. The whole thing was brutal. And so here I am sitting in this van and I see this wave of hostile, crazy, screaming people coming towards us. And we're foreigners in a car. We're the only one on the street and they're just coming towards us. And I just don't know what to do. I have no idea what to do. And so our son, the oldest one who lives in Dubai now, he said he just yelled out. He said, oh, I said, I said, pray that we're invisible. Let's pray that we're invisible. And, and so he just repeated me. And so we did. We were just like, God, just make them not see us, like, please. And and so we all just sat really still. And they came, they came right at our car. I mean, it was just like a wave and it just they just separated right at the front of our car. And our car actually rocked back and forth with the power of the crowd. It rocked back and forth, but and no windows were broke and nothing happened. And they just, and we just sat there for like, forever as the crowds just came past us, moving our car back and, rocking our car back and forth. And and then they were gone. And then it was gone. And we just sat there in silence for a minute. Didn't, nobody said anything. And so I said okay. And so I started to drive forward. Let's just go to the pool. And I started driving, and that is my oldest son, he goes, dad, make us visible again. Pray that we're visible again. Because he was concerned about driving around invisible the whole time. But yeah, so those kinds of, I don't know what happened in that prayer. All I knew was that however God responded to that they didn't see us or whatever. Our kids, our kids, you know, I was just with our kids that live in Dubai. They were here for Christmas, you know, and we're talking about stuff. He had just gone back to Indonesia, the oldest one. He wanted to take his kids to where he grew up, and he was telling them that story and other things that happened there. And these are just, these are just times where the Lord, I think as dads, we have to always remember that the situations that we find ourselves in, we and I know this is what you guys do so well, Jeff, what you do so well, this is to not just think, how does this affect me? It's how does it affect my kids? How does my reaction to this affect my kids view of the world, of God, of other people, you know, or Muslims, bad people that we got to run away from in life, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah, so we've we've actually used that, we've actually prayed that tact, tactically with in other places with, I've, we've done that with adults in military situations where we were pretty sure we were going to, and we've actually asked God to just make it so they don't see us. Where did I learn that? I learned that in Indonesia with my kids.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:13:45] With your kids on the way to the community pool. And I love that at end of the story, you're like and, well, we'll just continue on to the community pool versus get out of the country. Look what just happened. I want to, I want to take a couple side paths on this story. The first is around the decision for you and your wife, Donna, to pray versus do what the corporation, who own the school, said to do of get out of country. And I just want to be a dad who approaches small and large decisions, safe and potentially dangerous situations in a prayerful posture versus a oh, we got this one on our own strength. We got this one, God. We don't need to ask Your wisdom in. How did you learn that and how would you coach me to listen to God's voice on decisions?
Jamie Winship: [00:14:36] Well, I mean, I learned it's I think the only way any of us learned anything is from a model, really. You know, we can read books about it, but it's, you know, in an discipleship, father son mentor, mentee relationship is where, where you watch another person actually live out because Jesus never says anything that He doesn't do at deeper level than most of when He'll ever ask us to do, right. And so to, I learned it from I mean I can it's three different guys. That's, that's the unfortunately that's the number of people I've seen in my life that actually do, do what they say. I'm sure there's lots more. But in my journey, there was three of them and I watched them, especially in Indonesia where, I where the guy that trained me, McCullum, he, I watched him do this all the time, you know. On littles, on little, and he, he would be threatened but in a situation and he would say, he would say, God, either transform the person who's threatening us or just walk us out of the situation. His, his first reaction was never like, let's get out of here, never. That's never how he responded. It was always, God, what do you want me to know? And what do you want me to do? We all learned that from the scriptures, for sure. But but to read it in the scripture is one thing. And and then to watch someone live it out in front of you is another thing. And so that that to me is how I learned it. And that's why it's important to me to be able to do this with other people is so, you know, like I I'll do it in front of you. I'll do it in front of you and then, which takes a certain kind of courage for the person, for the dad or whoever, because you can't be afraid to fail. You can't be afraid to fail. If you're afraid to fail, you won't be the, you won't be a model that can do it in front of other people. Because you'll be concerned about, like, what if it doesn't work? It's going to ruin the guy I'm coaching. Already you've lost. Already it's over.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:16:45] So you said, God, what do you want me to know? What do you want me to do? Two steps, which I know the, what do you want me to know, often is part of the identity piece. And, like, this is, let's get these, these huge blocks as a foundation before the doing, it's the knowing. But I guess I would love for you to pray that prayer right now during our conversation around this conversation, Jamie, like, what do you want me to know? And what do you want me to communicate or do or say to Jeff and the DadAwesome audience? Can we just pause and pray that now and guide us?
Jamie Winship: [00:17:22] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Lord, thank you for everything about You, Lord is an invitation to us. Everything You do is an invitation to us to be in relationship with You. To be in relationship, in a right relationship with ourself and and right relationship with others, the great commandment. And so, Lord, in every instance in the day, is an invitation from You. And in those invitations, even listening to this podcast, this talk that Jeff and I are having, even for me, even for Jeff, even for the listener, it's an invitation for us to know things that we either need to hear again or we don't know. And this is, this is what beautiful discipleship is about. Obedience in Hebrew is to hear and respond, to hear and respond. That's what it is to hear and respond. And so, Lord, I just pray, through the together, this relationship between Jeff and I and the relationship with the listener, Lord, that I would know what You want me to know. And that from that I would know what You want me to do. And that Jeff would know what You want him to know and what You want him to do, and that every listener would come to You and say, God, what do You want me to know from this and in this? And then, what do You want me to do? Because being informs, doing all ways. And so, Lord, we ask that we submit ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in this as the ultimate, ultimate example of the one who can hear and respond to the Father. So we commit this to Christ, in His name we pray. Amen.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:19:08] Amen. Jamie, any, any whisper, any nudges, any direction on what you need to know right now in this conversation and what to say?
Jamie Winship: [00:19:22] Yeah, I think, I think it's you led into it by asking about that story about invisibility. Like immediately it comes to my mind, I think the, I think the thing is fear, for most of us, the biggest issue that we deal with is fear. And so if I was, if I was listening to someone talk about being a dad, that would be that, Bbecause my dad was a very fearful man. He was very fearful. And the way he, the way he compensated with his fear was through violence by trying to prove that he wasn't afraid. And, so, anyway, so, I've always wanted to like how do we deal with fear? And then as a parent with my own kids, fear is such a large thing and and fear is learned, right. Only the fear of falling and loud noises is is innate in us, but all other fear is learned. And so I would want to say to your listeners is, what are you afraid of? Like, that's the most important questions. Like, what am I afraid of? And this is a daily question. It's not a one off. It's a daily question. It's even incident into incident. Why am I afraid right now? Fear is beautiful because it's a warner, it's a, it's a flashing warning light. It's an invitation to transformation. It's an invitation to a conversation that leads to transformation. God, why am I afraid right now? What am I afraid of? So in Indonesia, the prayer is like God, what do you want me to know? The very first thing He wants you to know is the truth about who he is, then the truth about who you are, and then the truth about who the other is. That's what He wants you to know. Hit Him first, what do you want me to do? Why would you not stay? That's his quick, why would you not stay? Because you can't protect me here, that's why. That's a huge lie. But that would be the main quick motivator of like, I got to protect myself. That's why it's not even worth praying about. And, and so, so God wants me to know I can protect you in any situation. Though a thousand fall on my right and 10,000 fall on my left, yet will I stand? Okay, so, God's, I want you to know that I can protect you in this kind of situation. How would I know that? By staying. By staying, right. Why would you want me to know that? Because in the future are greater challenges than this that I want to invite you into. But I can't invite you into them, if the goal of your life is self-protection and self-promotion. Because if that's, that's how fear works. And if your goal is self-protection and self-promotion, it will become the goal of your kids. So, so let's teach them other than that worldview, right.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:22:30] And then tactically, from that, you moved into, as a way to like, demonstrate to your, your three boys that that were not afraid, you actually did some preparedness through gamification. If I got that right that you gamified the preparedness. Is that, is that correct?
Jamie Winship: [00:22:47] That's right, that's right. Because perfect love casts out fear, right. Not bravery. Not all that stuff. Perfect love casts out fear. And so, so when you, so the whole thing becomes this act of love and joy, and we love our neighbor, so we're going to stay with them. That's why we're staying. We're not staying to be brave, we're not staying to prove anybody. We're just staying because we love our neighbors and they are going to stay. And if they suffer, we're going to suffer with them. But I said to my kids their whole life, this is all the game. In the in the walk with Jesus, there is no win lose scenario. There's no such thing as a win lose scenario in a walk with Jesus. But all of us are convinced every day that everything is a win lose scenario. Everything is like, well, this could go south on us. This, it's not true, but it's what we're taught. And so then we have, as soon as you think, wow, there's a possibility of losing in this, then you have to self protect, self-promote. But if you realize, well, we can't lose. So if we couldn't lose, what would we do? We would we, we might find joy in this thing, right. We might. And so then, well, what would Joy look like? Well, let's make it into a game. Later when we, when our kids were in 11th grade and 8th grade and one was in college when we were in Baghdad, you know, height of the fighting and the war. And we lived in a regular neighborhood and no military and all that stuff. And, so we would be driving, walking down the road or something and I would say to my kids, okay, car pulls up, four guys jump out. What do you do? And they would take off in different directions like and so the I would just constantly like hey, and then at night in their room, I would just burst open the door in their room and they would jump out the window. And it was like this big game we played, right. But it's teaching them and training them, we're not doing things because we're afraid. We're doing things because we have wisdom, because we've thought through this and there's a kind of joy in it. So, and a lot of our team was killed in Baghdad. I mean, they knew that they lived in that reality. Guys they knew, men they knew, and women were killed. And so it's not, you're not, you don't want to live in any kind of denial, but the interesting thing was, when they experienced that, we think of death as losing, right? That's our other lie that we live in and if you died, you lost. Or because if you're successful, you live. And yet then you read the scriptures and you're like, well, that's not really the case, is it? And that's the victory, that's what the disciples said to Jesus, well, if you die, we lose. And He's like, no, if I don't die, we lose. Dying is winning, you know. Right. So all those lessons in there. But yeah, to gamify it, yeah. To make it a joyful, yeah. It's love, joy, peace, patience, the fruit of the Spirit.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:25:59] Yes. But we're not going to move to being the dads that can gamify fearful, stressful, dangerous situations, if we haven't experienced some of that inner peace that God gives and that right view of ourselves and that identity, even though what you just talked about of, heaven being the goal, not making it as long as possible here being the goal. So maybe as we just pan out for a moment, you, as someone wrote this of you, actually, Jamie, they said, you know, you're about bringing peaceful solutions to some of the world's highest conflict areas. That's just part of what I heard, you know, in a write up. And it's interesting because some of us today, when we think of the world's highest conflict areas, we can, we can point to areas of the world, but we can say, no, that's actually my house. That's my house right now in the dad life, in my marriage. That's the spot. And so could you explain your heart, what you get to do with identity exchange, your writing, teaching the courses? Like pan out for a moment in the elevator, this is what you get to be a part of with your wife. And then, but both globally and how like that even could impact the household?
Jamie Winship: [00:27:08] Right. Yeah. So. Well, yeah. So, you know, when we were, so, I went from a police officer, you know, then interviewed by some State Department people about what I was doing in the police department, and then their question to me was like, can you do that in another country? Can you do what you're doing in the police department overseas? And and at what I was doing in the police department was, was asking God these questions. I'd be in a situation. I'm trained. I've been through the academy, you know, I've got experience on the street. I had a training officer for 12 months. I have all that. But then I get into scenarios where that none of that applies. So my question was, okay, when none of that works, what can God can you talk to me about what to do right now in this situation? That was my big and I just started to experiment with that on the smallest level of at home and at work. Little small things. It's nothing massive. It's just little steps of faith that build, that's how God works. Slowly and when you fall, He picks you back up and says, let's do that again. What did you learn? Let's try it again. Failure is not failure, it's learning. Anyway, so, so then when we went went overseas, the question was, in the simplest way, God, what is the cause of conflict in the world? Like, what is it? Because if it's different and because we've worked in so many different countries, I don't even know. I can't even remember. If the cause of conflict different in every region of the world and every ethnic group and every generation? Then we'll never, we'll never find the solution. Like we'll never figure it out. Because we'll have to adjust to everything. Of course, just like you said, and the cause of conflict is, James says is, James chapter four, the cause of conflict and the reason you have wars in the world is because you have wars in your heart. That's, that was, that's the answer. So conflict inside produces conflict outside. Okay. So beautiful. So okay. So it's so when we go to China or wherever we're working, the goal is the heart of the person that we're dealing with. Okay, what's the cause of internal conflict? Fear. Okay, what's the cause of fear? Wrong view of God, yourself and others. That's it. Wrong identity. Wrong identity about God, wrong identity about yourself, and definitely a wrong identity about who your neighbor is. And so that was we call that the conflict narrative. External conflict produced by internal conflict, produced by fear, produced by false identity. What's the shift? The shift is not in, stop the war, bring financial aid, change religions. None of that stuff has ever worked. It's a, it's a transformation of the human heart, which the whole Bible is telling us. And we're, like, looking for some other solution. Spiritual transformation in your own, you're living in a false identity. It's a shift into the true identity, which can only be known in Christ. Shift into true identity moves you into courage. It encourages you, which moves you into internal peace, which makes you able to create external peace. That's what it is. And so we just started working that in our own life with our own kids. It's dramatic in our own family. I mean, it probably saved me and Donna's marriage. It did save our marriage. Our kids today, they're, our oldest one is 38, 37 and 34. They will today say they can articulate watching me and Donna go through that journey, figuring that out. And they they always say to us, what we love about you as parents is to watch you transform. Like you knew when you were wrong about something, or you were missing it and you would figure it out and transform, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. They said that was, not that you did wrong stuff, that you, that you knew how to change. They thought that was the greatest thing.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:31:12] How old were they? How old were they in that chapter that they watched and observed some transformation? When was a lot of that happening?
Jamie Winship: [00:31:19] Yeah. In in middle school. Yeah, when they were middle school. Yeah. Indonesia was a big one. And before that, you know, they saw brokenness. They saw broken. They've seen brokenness through the whole thing. But but they they would say they here's the three things they say all the time, that when I ask them about, because I don't often talk about parenting, because parenting is very about the identity of the dad. That's why, like, the greatest gift you can give to your kids is the truth of who you are. Like, that's your greatest gift. So when I say be a good dad or be a good husband, give your spouse and your kids the gift of your true identity. It's your great, it's your gift to the world.
Jeff Zaugg: [00:32:04] As you can tell, there is still more to this conversation. We're about at the halfway mark, so there's about 27, 28 more minutes of this conversation that's going to drop next week on episode 315. So guys, thank you for listening. This week, you can already jump over to Jamie Winship, to his organization, to the courses and coaching, and to the book Living Fearless. That's all going to be linked at our show notes at dadawesome.org/podcast. Guys, thank you for leaning into this topic. We always say this, we are, we are a movement of dads who take action. Man, we are activating dads to lead with wonder, but not to ponder. Not to just intend to do good things, but to hey, let's actually step in. Let's, let's go into the deeper levels of, man, I want to experience healing. I want to experience and hear God's voice. I want to know what my identity is so that I can walk in that true identity and help my kids do the same and not pass on pain to them. So I would encourage you guys so strongly to, to dive in to more resources from Jamie Winship. All right, until next time, we're going to jump into part two, next week. So, thank you for being dad awesome for your families. Have a great week, guys.
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· 20:13 - "Only the fear of falling and loud noises is is innate in us, but all other fear is learned. I want to say to your listeners, what are you afraid of? That's the most important question, what am I afraid of? And this is a daily question. It's not a one off. It's even incident into incident. Why am I afraid right now? Fear is beautiful because it's a warner, it's a flashing warning light. It's an invitation to transformation. It's an invitation to a conversation that leads to transformation. God, why am I afraid right now? What am I afraid of?"
· 21:34 - "God wants me to know I can protect you in any situation. Though a thousand fall on my right and 10,000 fall on my left, yet will I stand? God says, I want you to know that I can protect you in this kind of situation. How would I know that? By staying. By staying. Why would you want me to know that? Because in the future are greater challenges than this that I want to invite you into, But I can't invite you into them, if the goal of your life is self-protection and self-promotion. Because that's how fear works. And if your goal is self-protection and self-promotion, it will become the goal of your kids. Let's teach them other than that worldview."
· 29:39 - "External conflict produced by internal conflict, produced by fear, produced by false identity. What's the shift? The shift is not in, stop the war, bring financial aid, change religions. None of that stuff has ever worked. It's a transformation of the human heart, which the whole Bible is telling us. And we're looking for some other solution. Spiritual transformation in your own heart. You're living in a false identity. It's a shift into the true identity, which can only be known in Christ. Shift into true identity moves you into courage. It encourages you, which moves you into internal peace, which makes you able to create external peace."
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