Jeremy Stalnecker: A Marine who Ministers Healing

00:05 - Speaker 1 I'm fired up today to have on Brave Men. Jeremy Stelnacker and you were in Kuwait waiting for the order as we, as we do this recording right now. You basically were waiting for the order and the order came to move across the border in Operation Iraqi Freedom. What was that moment? Like man, is that as you kind of? I mean, it's got to be tense. 00:29 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it was a crazy. There's so many emotions involved in that and, yeah, I really do appreciate the conversation and the time to be able to talk today. I've been thinking about this more than normal, probably because that was 20 years ago, so we're talking about the 20th anniversary of the invasion in Iraq. I remember having a conversation with my parents before, before going to Kuwait and then, you know, eventually making our way into Iraq, and my mom who you know is a mom and loves me and and wanted to make sure everything was going to be okay she she kind of pulled me aside a few days before we left and said are you sure you're doing the right thing? Are you sure that this is what we should be doing? Do you believe in the cause? 01:11 And as you remember and a lot of our audience would that at the time people were pretty convinced that some things had happened in Iraq that would require us to go, but not everyone was convinced, and so there was a lot of discussion about whether or not we should be there, and I remember my mom asking this question just a mom, right and my answer to her as a 25-year-old guy, was I don't have to worry about that, I'm a Marine. It's not my job to decide whether or not it's the right thing. It's just my job to decide if we should go and to do what I'm told to do yeah follow the orders. 01:45 And it's funny because, um, as we were pushing toward the border in the middle of the night on march 20th as march 19th, into the day march 20th, going into the country, um, I had my mom's voice echoing in the back of my head. 02:00 - Speaker 1 are you sure this is the right thing, right? 02:02 - Speaker 2 Because it it does. There's a reality that confronts you. From the time I was pretty young, I had wanted to be a Marine. I had always wanted to be an infantry Marine. I worked hard to get there and I was. 02:14 - Speaker 1 Well, Jeremy, you ended up in Quantico right. 02:17 - Speaker 2 I mean you ended up in. 02:18 - Speaker 1 Quantico for officer training and everything else. 02:22 - Speaker 2 Yeah, my, my parents, parents, um, you know, my dad was a pastor and I talked to him when I was, I think, 14 years old would it be okay if I didn't go into ministry? He said do what God wants you to do. That's the right answer. I said I think God wants me to enlist in the Marine Corps. He said God can't possibly do something else. Um, wait a minute. He's a dad, you know, but very supportive of course. And he said look, if you believe that's really what God wants you to do, then all we ask is your parents, is that you go to college first? 02:51 Right and so I went to college because my parents, you know, asked me to, and I got a criminal justice degree because I didn't think it would be that hard, and so education was not my goal. But while I was in college I went through a commissioning program, which was awesome. I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in Marine Corps. When I graduated and it did, it took me to Quantico through officer candidate school and then through a year of training in school before I came back out to Camp Pendleton. So what all of that means practically is that I was leading a platoon that was navigating for a battalion, and so, as we crossed the berm into Iraq, I was one of the first vehicles back during the navigation that crossed after the breach was made. So yeah, crazy time. It was, in a lot of ways, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It was what I had worked toward and thought about. 03:45 - Speaker 1 Read about stories from world war ii. This is this, but this is hot war and we had casualties and I remember the photos of the eeriness of the flames, you know, and the things that were going on at that time and and it was like, uh, some of it looked like you were going into a different world. You know it was like some of it looked like you were going into a different world. You know it was. 04:06 - Speaker 2 It was a different world. I mean it was. It was crazy so. So on the one side, this is what I'd always wanted to do, and then, on the other side, I was in an environment that I had never been in before. No one that I was around had ever been in before. It was. It was a different world, it was like going on to a different planet, the, the. 04:25 The first objective of the war was what they call the gas oil separation plant. So it's where you know the. The oil lines came in and then they did whatever they did to separate it out, and the Iraqi military had set those on fire. So it was the middle of the night. We were bombing. The United States was bombing the mess out of that area so that we could get in safely. So overhead you have rockets, things exploding, you have those oil lines on fire, smoke in the air. Our MVGs didn't work because there were so many particles in the air. And then you had tr had tracer rounds coming our direction. Right, I had done a lot of training up to that point. Tracers only went one direction and and now we're in this crazy environment, in this crazy moment in time, in the middle of the night with all this chaos, and the tracer rounds are coming back. 05:20 - Speaker 1 So, yeah, absolutely kind of insane environment yeah, that was, and, and then, of course, the thing was to head straight to baghdad. Right, it was to bypass a lot of the in a sense, it's kind of pierce straight to the central objective, which was going after, uh, saddam hussein. Yeah, and you know that you've got to, uh, at that point in time, what are you thinking about? Right then, Jeremy? What's the thought pattern? 05:49 - Speaker 2 I was. You know and people always say this, and they did say it before we went in there is that you always fall back to the level of your training. You know, you've heard the saying or the phrase you don't rise to the occasion, you fall back to your training. And we had trained so much and prepared so well. That, really, what I was thinking about was how do we accomplish our mission? How do we do the job? That we clearly understood. We were there to do One of the curve balls that was thrown at us. We were told that we would be making this movement into Iraq early morning, into the day, because the oil lines were lighted on fire Right. That was moved up 12 hours, so now we're moving in the middle of the night. So it became much more complex, but the mission was the same. We had trained to do this before and so we executed. So on the one hand, it was that, but on the other hand, I remember the crazy feeling of of shooting live rounds at human beings and the things that we were seeing. 06:53 It was this I've been told my entire life that these things are not supposed to happen, and now we're there to make these things happen. And so just a crazy you know crazy environment, but but, but ultimately, what drove us forward? Was we trained to do this? We prepared to do that? 07:08 We were in Kuwait in January which meant we had two months while we were there to game plan, to talk about things, to look at pictures. You know as crazy as the environment was. It didn't feel like I had never been there because we had seen so much and planned so much to be there that we we executed what we had planned on and trained to do. 07:29 - Speaker 1 I'm talking with Jeremy Stalnecker, and Jeremy, you're the CEO of the Mighty Oaks Foundation and that you know you were. You were Christian when you went into the military. Your dad was a pastor. You're a follower of Christ. You go through these traumatic events.And now you come out of that, you're a pastor, you've got children, and then you look around and there's 22 veterans a day attempting or committing suicide and we hear about this, ptsd and PTS and now this opportunity Mighty Oaks, tell me about that and how did that shift basically your fundamentally your life? 08:19 - Speaker 2 So when I came back from Iraq, I'd already made the decision to get out of the Marine Corps. So we hit the ground at March Air Force Base, air Reserve Base, marino Valley, california, the beginning of June and July 1st. I was working at a church. I was an associate pastor at a church, and so I transitioned out of the Marine Corps from combat to working on a church staff, and I won't tell the whole story, but I just had a terrible, terrible time with that transition and in order to get back on my feet, I needed to have a pastor who confronted me, and a wife who, you know, cared for me and confronted me, and other people come around me, and in that process I struggled to find my identity. God worked, but in order for me to move forward, I had to go. Okay, the Marine Corps was a thing I did, but I'm not looking back there anymore. So I didn't keep in touch with anyone. I didn't stay connected to anyone and about 10 years later, nine years later, one of the Marines that I had served with he reached out to me, through social media actually, and and said hey, I met this guy. He's starting this thing called the mighty Oaks foundation. I don't know what it is, I don't know what they do, but several of us from the old platoon are going up to Colorado to be a part of this and it's just getting started. He's trying it out. Would you be interested in coming? 09:34 And I again not talked to any of those guys in almost 10 years. So I was pastoring a church at the time then up in Northern California and Fremont, california. Um, had really put that life behind me and was proud that I brought my Marines home and proud of what we did but that was again something that we did. That was in the past and met up with those guys again in the mountains of Colorado. Um, it was neat to see them, to hear their stories. One night we sat around a fire and I just sat and listened and learned about how many of the Marines that I served with Marines that were in my platoon, marines I cared for and took care of had either taken their lives, came home to marriages that didn't last, were struggling even to get by, and and learned in that process that my responsibility to serve those Marines didn't end when. 10:30 - Speaker 3 I left the Marine Corps, yeah. 10:33 - Speaker 2 And I needed to continue serving them, and so that it did it. It it pivoted my life. God used that. I met Chad Robichaux, who was he and his family had started Mighty Oaks and I was pastoring. Chad was newly saved. He was a new Christian, super energetic, super type A, and he said hey, I need help figuring this thing out and getting this thing off the ground. Would you help me? 10:57 - Speaker 1 And that's what we've been doing. And Chad, Jeremy, chad was dealing with PTSD right. 11:04 - Speaker 2 He was, and that was you know for Chad. That was the was dealing with PTSD. Right, he was, and that was you know for Chad. That was the genesis of starting the Mighty Oaks Foundation is a man came into his life, led him to Christ, began discipling him and through that discipleship process, chad stepped back and went. Other men need this, and so I'm going to start a way for them to get this. I'm going to start something that I can bring men together and they can do this. So he had the idea and he had the motivation, and when we connected, he said I need curriculum and I need structure and I need to know how to put all this together. And so it was, yeah, his passion for sharing with others what had been shared with him. And then for me it was a realization that I needed to continue serving. 11:46 - Speaker 1 And you had officer training. You also had a college training. It had theological background to it. You were pastoring a church, so it's like it all came together at the right. It's just a God thing, man. 11:59 And and I noticed something, I noticed something that we read a lot about PTSD and I noticed something. I noticed something that we read a lot about PTSD. It's called post-traumatic stress disorder and we have millions of men and women who are dealing with this not only military, but first responders, a lot of different types of things that cause this. In fact, now we're finding that in terms of child abuse and so forth, but you guys are dealing particularly with military. But also notice on your website, which is MightyOaksProgramorg. Mightyoaksprogramsorg is that you and your legacy program for men. You didn't call it PTSD, you called it PTS. Right, tell me about that and what's. What does that mean? What does all this mean? 12:50 - Speaker 2 Yeah, we, we wrote a book on this. It's a. It's a smaller book we handed out to veterans and service members and the title of our book is the truth about PTSD. Pt and S are all capitalized. Capitalize the D as lowercase. Clinically, the DSM-5, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental and Emotional Disorders, version five. It's got a great name, it's really catchy. That is what therapists, doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists use to diagnose different disorders and they call what we're talking about post-traumatic stress disorder. But we look at everything in the world as Christians, from a creation standpoint. So we step back and ask the question did God create us so that when bad things happen to us, we can no longer function? Are we really disordered, as in broken beyond repair? 13:49 And the answer to that question, if you view the world from a creation lens, is obviously not, and so we spend a lot of time talking about post-traumatic stress. What is it? And I won't spend a lot of time breaking that down, but very basically it is our built-in defense mechanism. God created us so that when traumatic events come into our lives and it can be a lot of different things but when traumatic events come into our lives, subconsciously we store the information around that event Not only the event, but everything about it. What things were happening outside the sights, the sounds, the Not only the event, but everything about it. What things were happening outside the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings all of that is stored information. It's stored subconsciously so that if we find ourselves in a similar situation at some other point in our lives, our brain triggers and says you've been here before, and last time you were here triggers and says you've been here before and last time you were here, something bad happened. 14:52 And so you find yourself in a similar situation, but maybe not the same, and you experience rapid breathing and perhaps sweating, and things smell the same and sound the same. What is that? That's God creating in us something that is for our good and our protection. Now, responding to that at the wrong time and in the wrong place can be detrimental, of course, and so we have to talk about that. But dealing with trauma and processing trauma, the way that God created us to process those things does not make us broken. In fact, it means God cared enough about us to create us with a defense mechanism. However, again, so often people then respond poorly. 15:27 An example we use in our book and I think this illustrates if a Marine is sitting in his tent or his sleeping area in Iraq, he's in a forward operating base, so there's a fence around their area, it's protected, but every afternoon mortar rounds come in the enemy mortars. Their position Happens every day, day after day after day, and they're not very effective. So the mortar rounds hit the ground. But one day it happens, a Marine jumps up to his bunkmate who is in that space with him. He says, hey, we've got to get out of here. We've got to get to shelter. The mortar rounds are coming in and his bunk mate says this happens every day, nothing bad's going to happen, and a mortar round drops on top of him and kills him. That marine who was standing there has stored all of that information. 16:15 He finds himself at home five years later, ten years later, he's trying to get his three-year-old out the door for a soccer game and she's not getting her shoes on fast enough. Tensions are high, are high. If you've ever had kids, you know that's how it works. Anyhow, right, but tensions are high. He's trying to get her to put her shoes on. She's taking too long and something in his brain says last time this was happening, you were trying to get that guy to put his boots on and he died. You're trying to get your three-year-old to get her shoes on and your brain kicks in, body responds. And now that mechanism that's supposed to keep you safe in the wrong place. You have a choice. You can. You can respond by screaming and yelling and dragging your you know a little bit. 16:54 - Speaker 1 It becomes. It becomes so, uh. So basically, you can shut down or or tune up. 17:00 - Speaker 2 In other words, it can become rage, or you just walk away and you're done, and so you need to understand what it is, how it works, and then pre-decide how you're going to respond, which includes sometimes just staying out of those situations, recognizing what it is when you feel that way. But unfortunately, what a lot of people do is they justify bad behavior because of what happened to them, and so they say well. 17:25 - Speaker 3 I'm responding this way. I am a victim of what happened to them, and so they say well, I'm responding this way. 17:28 - Speaker 2 I am a victim of what happened to me. I am responding this way because something happened to me and so it's justified, and there is no justification ever for bad behavior. But you have to process through that so you're not disordered, you're not broken. 17:43 - Speaker 1 You're responding normally. Yeah, you're a human, and this is why, you know, this is the thing that sometimes, particularly in our Western mindset, we're so talent oriented, performance oriented, versus. You know, we were built not to perform for God, but to be in relationship, right, right, form for God, but to be in relationship, right, right, you know. And so what happens, though, is we build these things around and we say, well, I didn't do this right, didn't do that right, and we basically start living some sort of christian karma thing. Yeah, it's like, it's like. Hey, the reason I got this flat tire is because I yeah, right, right. 18:22 That kid in seventh grade right you know, and no, sometimes a flat tire is just a nail. 18:28 - Speaker 2 Yeah yeah, and we, we can do with that what we will, right, yeah, we need to respond to that. And a great quote. I don't have the quote down right, but uh, victor frankel, who wrote an incredible book, he's got an incredible story, um, but victor fr Frankl said it's not us that's broken or disordered, it's the trauma we experienced, like the situation was disordered. Right, we're not broken, the situation was broken. We're responding normally to that. Some have summarized that to say it's you know, post-traumatic stress is the normal response to an abnormal situation and we have to understand that. And you're right not accept the victimhood of that, not to believe that if something bad happened to us, then maybe we didn't do enough good or God doesn't like us. It's just a part of being alive. So what do we do with that? 19:15 - Speaker 1 yeah, it's. Uh, you know we go back to. Frankl was great because he was dealing with identity, and and what we've talked about with christian's network is identity is the story you tell yourself about yourself, and for so many of us, we're framing that story with somebody else's words and I look back. I look at John 21,. There's this picture of Peter. You know where Jesus brings him back and asks him three times do you love me? Which is basically brings him back to the same framing of the three times he denied Christ yeah it's the only two places in the bible where there's a charcoal fire. 19:52 So it brings him back to the atmosphere, the smell, the fragrance, the moment, and then deals with this shame. And the difference, Jeremy, that I found is that guilt. In some ways it's easier to deal with guilt because guilt is basically saying, hey, I made a mistake. 20:13 It's basically getting real. I made a mistake, but shame is believing you are the mistake. Yeah, that's good and that's what seems to happen with our men and women who come through these traumatic things, whatever that trigger is. Yeah, I'm the reason. I'm the reason that happened. Yeah, we talk. 20:36 - Speaker 2 How do you frame that? Well, we talk about the difference and this is actually a discussion that people outside of the Christian world are having too the difference between trauma and moral injury. And what you're talking about is moral injury and the way I just kind of very basically try to break the two down trauma is something that happens to you, and moral injury is when you happen to something else. So it is I've hurt someone, I've, you know, done something that did damage. But moral injury, really, it's much deeper than that. Right, it is exactly what you just said. 21:13 It's it's shame, it's saying I am the problem, I am the reason this happened, I am, it's entirely focused on me. So trauma you can focus on someone else or something else. You can say well, it's because of that, it's because of them. Moral injury is it's all about me, and that impacts us at a different level. And the only solution to that, the only answer for that, is understanding what it is to have a relationship with God through Christ, because all of that hinges on an understanding of redemption and forgiveness. 21:48 And so it's. It's really not about you, it's about what Christ has done in you. To me, the clearest picture in the Bible of this and this is just the way I think but Romans 7,. The apostle Paul says O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? Right, like this body of death, this is who I am. And then chapter eight and verse one. So you go down the next verse. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. It takes the attention from him who I am, what I am, the mess that I am, to what Christ has done in me. That's the only way to move forward when you're dealing with shame, when you're dealing with that level of guilt that says I'm the problem. 22:28 - Speaker 1 Yeah, you know the thing is and and for. Uh, my friends that are listening here to brave men podcast uh, sponsored by the christian men's network cmnmen, is where you can find tools for discipling men, uh, in your local church or wherever you may be, parish wherever, maybe in 38 different languages. But for me the thing is, I look at it, I go, you know, uh, God made us so. He knows we're human, right, right. 22:53 - Speaker 2 So there are times. 22:54 - Speaker 1 I get to give myself a break. 22:57 - Speaker 2 Sure yeah. 23:04 - Speaker 1 Because in this Western culture, this performance thing we were talking about, it's like I don't give myself a break, and so this trauma becomes bigger, more pronounced Right right becomes bigger, more pronounced Right right Now, with the Mighty Oaks and we're talking with Jeremy Stalnecker, who's the CEO of the Mighty Oaks Foundation and a former pastor and a Marine- yes. 23:26 I have a friend, great friend, who was inietnam, uh, as a marine. And we were talking about it one day and I, I turned uh, made the terrible mistake of introducing myself as my friend hughes, former marine. He just hit me. He hit me. No, no, I'm a marine, right, I got it. I got it. I'll never do that again. But uh, talking with Jeremy, with all that that background, and then the Mighty Oaks, you've got a legacy program for men, legacy program for women. Yeah, how do you help somebody begin the path to healing? 24:02 - Speaker 2 Yeah, how do you actually slow down that journey? What's interesting is it's not complicated, but man God has really used it. It's taken us a long time to figure it out, but what we do really, really simply is we acknowledge that trauma happens. It happens to everyone. We try to demystify it. Right, the fact that you were in the military doesn't make you unique as it relates to trauma. Maybe your trauma was unique, but I mean sexual assault and child abuse and so many other areas. It could be a car accident. A lot of things cause trauma. You're not unique in that. 24:39 So trauma is a human thing. It's something we all deal with as humans. Let's talk about what it is. We define it, we talk about it, we look at it. But we spend the majority of the week that someone is with us at one of the legacy programs not talking about trauma but talking about the fact that God, the creator, has a plan for our lives and if we will learn how to align our lives to the life he created us to live. Trauma is still there. The hurt, the pain, the brokenness, it's all still there, but it doesn't have a hold on us. We move forward into the purpose for which he created us, and that's what allows us to move beyond whatever trauma we have dealt with or are dealing with yeah, so you basically refocus the lens, correct? 25:20 - Speaker 1 that's right, yeah that's right yeah. So now I'm not because we get so myopic, we get, we get so internalized. It's all about us, it's, it's, uh, uh, elijah, you know it's like he's. This is a story in the old testament. 25:36 Uh, if you don't know who this guy elijah is, I know Jeremy you know, but I'm just saying for my friends who might be listening this guy in the old testament, he's, he's this guy, this prophet, he's, he's hardcore, amazing. He raises a kid from the dead, he calls fire from heaven, right, right. And then, and then this woman who's a queen puts a, puts a contract out on him and he runs for his life in a moment of basically, he's tired, right, he's tired. And then he disconnects himself and he's sitting under a tree and he goes God, you might as well kill me. And then God says no, no, I got 7 000 other guys, yeah, and I'm thinking there, it is right there, Jeremy, there, it is right there. He disconnected him. So how come he didn't know one of those guys? 26:23 yeah why didn't he? Why, wasn't he connected with one of those guys? So that's well, yeah, yeah, we can isolation. 26:29 - Speaker 2 right, that's a big issue for sure. But, yeah, exactly, that's exactly right. It's changing the focus from me and for a lot of people. I mean, I talked about this today on a podcast Regret, right. What is regret? It's focusing on what happened in the, when you're focused on what God is doing in your life right now and where he's taking you right now and what he wants to do with you right now, then your past is still there. 26:57 You don't forget it. Forget it Right, but it doesn't hold you back anymore because you're not staring at it. 27:03 - Speaker 1 Wow, that's so good. You're not. You're not staring at it. It's hard to move forward and navigate forward when you're always looking back. That's right. You've got a podcast called March or Die in Situation Report. Is that right? 27:16 - Speaker 2 Yeah, march or Die is a podcast I do that talks about just that. We can either march that's moving forward or we can stay where we are and die, which is hopefully not physical, but emotional, spiritual, relational. People give up. So how do we march? How do we move forward? I give principles and talk about that. And then the situation report is another podcast that we have that talks more to worldview issues. We live in a crazy culture, so how do we navigate that in a way that reflects, you know, biblical value, and so we talk about that as well. 27:46 - Speaker 1 I think culture has always been crazy. I mean, there's always been issues. That that is right. Yes, you just didn't know about the issue in mendanao you know, it's like right because of what we have now. 27:57 We've got all this stuff gets on top of us and all of a sudden we're upset yeah, something's happening off of jakarta. Yeah, because jakarta is sinking and and there's something wrong with the, I don't know. You know the city's sinking. So now that's part of this global climate change thing which then gets us upset because this guy's and now all of a sudden we're stuck. Right, you wrote a book called Path to Resiliency and you wrote that. Did you write that with Chad? Who's the I did. 28:33 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it was a again a resource that we wrote to talk about spiritual resiliency. The crazy thing is it's a small book. It's about 10,000 words and it's like, physically, a small book. We give that out about 40,000 times a year. We are able to give it out to active duty military members, to recruits at Marine Corps recruit Depot in San Diego. Um, God has just blessed it and we've been able to give out again about 40,000 copies a year. 29:00 - Speaker 1 I mean, I, I love this because it it talks resiliency. I, I, you know endurance, james one, the whole thing. Resilience, stalwartness, uh, the resilient man. Every man falls down, it's the resilient man. Every man falls down, it's the resilient man that just gets back up. Right, that's right and uh so, but you hit something there. I love the, uh, your us marine adage, the seven p's yeah, yeah, uh, it's, it's something. 29:25 - Speaker 2 It's a common adage, right? Um? Proper prior planning prevents piss, poor performance, and we love that dude. If we fail to prepare, we have failed, right, and so that's what that's about. Yeah, then that's, you know, failure to prepare is preparation for failure. 29:41 - Speaker 1 That's it, yeah, and uh, you know, uh, one of our board directors, robert berger, out of lima, peru, says preparation proves you trust God so so the fact is is that, is that when we so part of what I see you doing here is giving me tools to prep my life for that moment where that, that reminder comes back, the trigger moment, if you will. 30:09 - Speaker 2 So there's a difference between recovery and resilience, and even in our programs we talk about the difference and we would say that we do different things. One is recovery, one is resilience. Recovery is I'm on the ground. What do I do now? Okay, right. Resilience is I'm gonna make a decision that when I get knocked down on the ground, I'm going to get back up. So I've made the decision before the event happens. It's establishing this is my true north. So when I get knocked off, course I have something to come back to so often. Recovery is I got knocked down. I didn't expect it, I didn't see it coming and I don't know what to do now. And hopefully you have the right people come alongside who can help you get back up and get you back on course. But I think one of the foundational principles of resiliency is pre-deciding. It's deciding, before the craziness comes into your life, what you're going to do when it does. 31:03 - Speaker 1 Somebody asked my wife and I the other day we've been married 51 years and somebody asked us you know how do you do that. 31:10 And Judy said I thought she was going to say something like well, my husband's a romantic right, her number one, her number one. Answer, uh, Jeremy, was uh, well, we just decided divorce would never be on the table. And I thought later, I thought, okay, well, you know, okay, so you know, I want it. Maybe. I maybe romance was number two or three or something. But the bottom line is is that she was right though, because that's right, it was a decision made ahead of the stress. 31:43 Right, because stress doesn't make a man, only reveals a man for who he really is. So at that moment it's like you know you're going to your mom's. No, you're going somewhere uh, whatever all that sort of thing. 31:56 And if we haven't made that decision, if we have sort of made marriage contractual rather than covenant, right, and we're like, yeah, okay, good, I'm good, yep, and so that decision had to be made ahead of time, and that's what you're talking about. And so I want to mention again the Mighty Oaks Foundations. It's mightyoaksprogramsorg, I mean. If you just put in Mighty Oaks, you guys show up. 32:26 - Speaker 2 You're going to find it yeah. 32:27 - Speaker 1 And you're doing programs and you've got got stuff. And, man, my prayer, Jeremy, is that this thing continues to grow. I I hope we can put an imprint on it, just saying, hey, here it is to our friends. I want to see this thing because everywhere I turn right now, how many veterans we have in the united states right now? I'm just talking about america. We've got listeners in, yeah, 40 countries. 32:52 - Speaker 2 But yeah, the number. Obviously the number changes a lot, but about 18 million veterans in the United States. 32:59 - Speaker 1 Okay, and and but we're dealing with. The highest rate of suicides is within veterans. 33:04 - Speaker 2 That's, yeah, that's what we're told. So the number officially is it's. It's gone from 22 a day to 20 a day, to something else. But uh, even recently a report was done, a long-term study, that says it's probably closer to maybe double. That we just don't know exactly, but it's extremely. That is the real pandemic. If you want to talk about pandemics. That's the real one you've got. 33:26 - Speaker 1 On top of that, you've got divorce rates. Uh, you've got, uh, millions of men and women who basically just go like, yeah, I'm done yes it was that old. It was that old, uh, that old proverb uh forget who said. It's been attributed to a lot of different people. But is that, uh, most men die at 70? No, most men die at 50. 33:50 - Speaker 2 We just bury them at 70 yeah, yeah, it's like dude, you know you know what it's like you went to. 33:56 - Speaker 1 You went to high school in slovenia, cal, there riverside county. Yeah, uh, you know you've met men that you grew up with, yeah, your age in your mid-40s and you're going, dude, this guy's a toast, he's just. 34:10 - Speaker 2 Yeah, he's done, he's just coasting for another 30 years, and that's that's when I, you know, my podcast is called march or die. For that reason I mean that's exactly what it is is like you, you give up. Like you look like you got it going on. You look like you're doing, but you're, you know you're dead and there are so many people that way. 34:28 - Speaker 1 You're absolutely right and where did how did that become alive? How did faith in Christ become alive for you? Jeremy Stahlnecker, pastor's kid, you know which means two things. One you knew you had to have a testimony and there was no way to get one. You know. 34:46 - Speaker 2 Yeah. 34:47 - Speaker 3 The other side is. 34:48 - Speaker 1 You know everybody's looking at you all the time. How did it actually become vibrant? 34:54 - Speaker 2 Man. So I would say a couple things. I accepted Christ when I was young. My parents were very faithful to share the gospel and were very faithful people. I know a lot of kids grew up in pastor's homes and they rebel against it because what they see publicly is not what they see privately. And I'm very blessed to have parents who lived out their faith privately and so I never doubted that I was a Christian, that I was a believer. I wanted to live for God and do that. 35:26 But it became real to me honestly and I'm not just saying this because of this conversation. It became real to me honestly, and I'm not just saying this because of this conversation. It became real to me in Iraq. It became real to me when I realized for the very first time in my life as a 25-year-old guy that the enemy doesn't care who I am, that it doesn't matter where I grew up, who my parents are, where I went to school, it doesn't matter. God is sovereign, I'm not, and he's the only one that's in control of what is happening. And then I have a responsibility to do what he's given me, to steward over, to live out. 35:59 That was the first time I actually went through that process of thought and then, from there, the process that we call sanctification. It's a. It's a. It's a lifelong process of growth as a believer. Um, different circumstance, different situations, having kids coming home from, from Iraq and and uh, in a lot of ways acting the fool and needing to be confronted, and growing and being taught and trying to help other people, and growing and learning. And it's a lifelong process and God becomes more real to you the more you have to lean into him. So, even though we look at difficulty and trial as something to be avoided, that's what makes us fully devoted followers of Christ. 36:42 - Speaker 1 I believe that yeah, you know, let me ask you this, and you're a dad and I want to finish our interview today on Brave Men and I really appreciate you taking the time. I've seen Mighty Oaks again, as I mentioned to you off air before we started. I had seen this a number of times through different groups and men telling me about it, and so when I got on there, I went, man, I got to talk to one of these, I got to talk to one of these guys. I want to talk about this, I want people to know about it and what you're doing. And also, even if even if they don't end up at a legacy program, you know, maybe this starts them on a journey of something else that helps them. But let me ask you this as a dad, how do you pray for your children? How do you? Oh man, it's. 37:29 - Speaker 2 It's so I I am at I think we talked about this before we started recording my kids are. I have two young adult kids and then two teenage kids, and so I'll tell you it's it's been different over the years. My wife and I actually just sat down yesterday and talked through some of this. Um, the way I pray for my adult kids is that God will protect them, that God will give them wisdom. My son is getting married in a few months. 37:55 My daughter is, you know, finishing college and getting into a job that's already set up, and and just pray that God would continue to give them wisdom and then continue to give them passion for him, you know, continue to put them in situations and circumstances where they'll follow him, and I'm so grateful that they are follow him and I'm so grateful that they are pursuing him and I pray that that will continue. And so, man, praying for these big adult things, you know, with my younger kids, my teenage kids, I pray that God would continue to work in their hearts and work in their lives, that God would give us wisdom as parents to know how to lead them, how to help them, how to speak into their lives. I've got four kids. Everyone is different, so how do I speak specifically to each one of them? And it's a constant adjustment and prayer for wisdom, really. 38:45 - Speaker 1 What did you learn from your dad that helps you with your children? 38:55 - Speaker 2 dad that helps you with your children. My dad did so many things, I think, right when I was growing up and I look at a lot of things but I think probably the thing that he did that helped me the most was just he was just present. 39:05 He just spent time with us my dad is. You know, when I was growing up he was not an overly affectionate person or those kinds of things. I mean, he hugged us, he told us he loved us, but it wasn't that. It wasn't, you know, even a sit down like every Thursday night and we're going to go through a formal discipleship process. It wasn't anything like that, it was just. It was just consistency. He was always present. We talked about everything he would always take time to. This is what the Bible says about that. This is how we should think about that. It was just very organic and very real, but it was consistent. 39:39 - Speaker 1 That is a huge word right there man, it was consistent. 39:42 - Speaker 2 My dad he started a church, so he was doing that during the day. He was bivocational, so we worked all night. For a while he was homeschooling my sisters and myself, and still, if there was a game that we were involved in or an activity that we had, I don't know how he did it, but somehow he was there and I never doubted that. You know, my dad was on our side. 40:07 Come on, there you go and he'd confront us if we needed to be confronted, but that he was going to speak into our lives if he felt like that's what needed to be done. He was just very present, yeah. 40:20 - Speaker 1 Consistency, decisiveness and strength the three things that God wants in a man. 40:24 - Speaker 2 Consistency decisiveness and strength. It's also the three things that every woman wants in a man? 40:28 - Speaker 1 Yeah, sure, and every child needs in a dad. Hey, Jeremy Stalnaker man, it's been great meeting you and talking about Mighty Oaks. Do you want to hit anything that that before we end the broadcast today? 40:40 - Speaker 2 The only thing I would say is, if you are listening and you have served in the military, are serving in the military, you're a first responder or a spouse, you qualify for our program. Go to our website, fill out an application. It doesn't cost anything to attend and we even cover the cost of travel to get to one of our locations across the country. So there's no financial output for you. It's just a matter of time and we'll work all that out. So I would invite you, please go and check that out. 41:08 - Speaker 1 I mean and God bless Chad and your families and Robo Show and the guys that are all involved MightyOaksProgramsorg. Mightyoaksprogramsorg and Jeremy, my prayer for you would be that God grants you this remarkable sense of what it means to multiply what you do, that God gives you a wisdom strategy and you and your team that, because what you're doing, what I'm hearing and what I'm sensing and feeling is is something that so many different people need and I just bless you for it, man, and your wife. I pray your children prosper because of what you have given your life to. So thank you, Jeremy Slonek, for being with us on Brave Men today. 41:55 - Speaker 2 Well, thank you, Paul, I really appreciate it. Great conversation, thank you. 41:59 - Speaker 3 Brave Men is a production of Christian Men's Network, a global movement of men committed to passionately following Jesus on the ground in over 100 nations worldwide. You can receive the Brave Men motivational email, find books and resources for discipleship and parenting at cmn.men. That's cmn.men. Your host has been Paul Louis Cole, president of Christian Men's Network, and if you haven't yet, please make sure you subscribe to the Brave Men podcast wherever your fine podcasts are downloaded. Thanks for hanging with us today. We'll see you next time on Brave Men.