Building a Legacy of Faith and Service

once i was in i kind of gravitated to that kind of lifestyle and you know there was a lot of discipline which i was very familiar with growing up and we didn't fly a lot of places uh we if we went somewhere we drove that's just how it was i've never flown in my life in my second year of an avr otc at rice university i got to go on an s3 viking which was a navy twin engine jet of those two weeks i was flying you know just the smell of the jet fuel the guys walking around in their flight suits uh strapping on an airplane and get and being able to fly and you go out and do really cool missions and come back and that's when i knew i wanted to fly it's a feeling of exhilaration [00:01:16]

my wife me had two children and it was a lot of separation as much fun as flying was as much fun as the navy was you know you you don't get to see family a whole lot that's when i realized that i'd be leaving the navy but god was always there you know god took care of my family we were we came back to our home church which was very comforting i i'm convinced god put a pastor in that in that uh in that church at the time he was a retired army colonel chaplain [00:02:00]

my pastors told me about promise keepers and said well i want you to come with us on a bus for a 37-hour trip to washington dc and we're going to go to a promise keeper rally called stand in the gap and there were several hundred thousand men we couldn't even get as close as the washington monument and they were on the capitol whenever they started it got quiet and washington dc is a very busy city and it was a saturday morning my recollection and it was just quiet and a speaker after speaker would speak and there would be uh great men who sang songs and you listen to these guys singing and you know it was it was a special time [00:02:31]

and then there was this one uh pastor got there named dr tony evans and when he started speaking it was just an amazing uh that's a result in a messed up state that will reside in a messed up country that will bring about a messed up world so if we want better worlds composed of better countries inhabited by better states made up of better counties that are composed of better cities inhabited by better neighborhoods illumined by better churches made up of better families we better go home better men it starts with our own commitment to be men of god [00:03:12]

this might be a glimpse of what it's like in heaven you just you stand around you're you're hearing god's word miss spoken and you get to hear you're singing and then there's times of prayer and it's just quiet and still and it was just amazing when the uh when they called us to pray how quiet it would get uh what i really realized was that god was giving me an opportunity to serve in his church and to uh to he was giving me an invitation and he always had been giving me an invitation to be a worker in his kingdom [00:03:47]

i think the thing my wife and we did right was we did raise our children in church and we did make going to church a priority my wife and me were very good about teaching them that it's for them now to write their own story it's for them now to to go make their mark in the world for them to go determine who they want to be but we gave them the foundation and we uh we taught them the bible we taught them the love of god and we've taught them the importance of corporate worship and private worship and prayer and and being there for people and if you say you're going to do something go do it [00:04:14]

but that's up to them now to go to go uh take what we've taught them and you know take that forward and teach it to their kids that promise keeper experience was something like that you know so yeah i as far as legacies don't really care that people know i'm a pilot i don't really care they know i run a lot it's really more important about my kids in the life they're going to live [00:04:53]