421 | Jamie Winship FROM THE VAULT - Fear, Faith, & Fatherhood in a War Zone - PART 1
Episode Description
What would you do if a violent mob was heading straight for your van — with your kids in the back seat? In this fan-favorite episode pulled from the DadAwesome vault, Jamie Winship shares the incredible true story of praying for invisibility in the streets of Indonesia, why fear is the number one enemy of great fatherhood, and how your true identity in Christ is the greatest gift you can give your children.
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Jamie Winship is a former police officer turned international peacemaker who has spent decades bringing identity-based conflict resolution to some of the world's most dangerous places. He and his wife, Donna, have three sons and have lived and served in conflict zones including Indonesia and Baghdad. Jamie is the author of Living Fearless and teaches globally on identity, courage, and hearing God's voice. This is the most downloaded DadAwesome episode of all time — pulled from the vault and too good not to reshare.
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— Kids learn to be afraid from their parents' fear — and learn courage from their parents' faith.
— Fear is an invitation to transformation, not a signal to run. Ask God: "What do You want me to know? What do You want me to do?"
— The greatest gift you can give your kids is the truth of who you are — your true identity in Christ.
— External conflict is produced by internal conflict, produced by fear, produced by false identity.
— Transformation starts in the heart.
— In the walk with Jesus, there is no win-lose scenario. When you believe that, you can gamify the hard stuff and find joy even in danger.
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Jeff: So fun to start with a story. And I don't pray often, "God, make me invisible." I don't pray that prayer with my kids. Now we do tell superhero stories and we talk about — I've created this invention called boot suits where my little girls have special boots that can turn into any kind of suit they want with the 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 invisibility to me and my family." Kind of lead into our conversation with that story of praying that with your family.
Jamie: Yeah, and it's interesting, that's an interesting concept because that's actually happened a couple of times, but the one with our kids was the first. Where it even 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 an international school, my wife and I. We were teaching in this international school and the government of Indonesia was collapsing. 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 we were actually waiting for the government to collapse, which meant there would be no military, no police, no law, just absolute chaos. And it's like all the horror movies that you've ever heard. There's just no law, just roaming gangs. And so we were waiting for that to happen.
And I'll just say, before the particular incident — as foreigners living in that country as expatriates, 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 come. Everyone knew it was coming. And so our school was owned by a large corporation. They're saying, "Here's the tickets, get out of the country. We don't want you there." And so most of our community left pretty immediately.
But Donna and I were praying about it. Our question, 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 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, we'll just protect them, 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. 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, as soon as it got hard here, you just abandoned our neighbors for our own safety." And then our Muslim neighbors thinking, "Wow, you guys talk about faith in Jesus and all that, but when hardship comes, you're gone. 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. I had coworkers I love and respected. I would never tell them what to do. It's completely up to the person in their walk with the Lord. 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 house. Our kids — we told our boys — were like sixth grade, fifth grade, and third grade, something like that. And so they knew what was going on. And we told them, "Pack a bag of what you want to take if we got to wake up in the middle of the 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 us. All of that to make it a game. Fear comes from not knowing, and the enemy can play with the hypothetical. Faith is built on the things that we know. Faith is the substance of things we hope for, the evidence of things not seen. It's very measured and beautiful. It's not insane. And so we just made it into a game with them.
And so it was funny because when Donna was checking their little bags to see what they took — the two older ones had packed clothes — and our youngest son, all he packed was the Little House on the Prairie book series. That's all he had in his bag — Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods. He was like, if I'm in an emergency, I need good reading. That was his whole view on life. Probably smart, I don't know. Probably smarter than the rest of us.
Anyway, it collapsed, the government collapsed, and it was horrible. And there was looting and houses were being burnt down and all that. And our Muslim neighbors — and this is all — 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. This is all because of what they witnessed growing up.
And so anyway, it collapsed and it was just mayhem. God was there and lots of crazy things happened. So it calmed down a little bit. And so I told our kids, there's a community pool, indoor pool, 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 in. We'll go to this pool."
So we get in the car, me and my wife in the front seat, and these kids behind us in this little van. And we're driving down this street in a city of five million people. And it's pretty — the streets are pretty quiet. And I turn down this street. And when I turned down the street, there is this mob coming down the street and they have headbands on and they're carrying boards and they're smashing windows. And it was packed. The street was packed. There's no way through them. And I couldn't back up. There was no turnoff. As soon as I turned, I was like, "Uh-oh." And it was like a tidal wave coming towards us.
We had friends of ours who had been driving to the airport to get out and had been stopped on highways and had earrings ripped out of their ears. 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 ones 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 — I said, "Pray that we're invisible. Let's pray that we're invisible." And so he just repeated me. And so we did, we were just like, "God, just make them not see us, please."
And so we all just sat really still and they came right at our car. I mean, it was just like a wave and 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 no windows were broken, nothing happened, and we just sat there for like forever.
Crowds just came past us, moving our car back, rocking our car back and forth. And then they were gone. And then it was gone. And we just sat there in silence for a minute. Nobody said anything. And I said, "Okay." And so I started to drive forward — let's just go to the pool. And I started driving and my oldest son 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, 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 — I was just with our kids that live in Dubai, they were here for Christmas, and we were 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 times where the Lord — I think as dads, we have to always remember that the situations that we find ourselves in — and I know this is what you guys do so well, Jeff, what you do so well — 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, are Muslims bad people that we got to run away from in life? That kind of thing.
So we've actually used that. We've actually prayed that tactically in other places. 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: With your kids on the way to the community pool. And I love that at the 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 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 owned the school said to do — get out of the 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 "We got this one on our own strength. We got this one, God. We don't need to ask Your wisdom." How did you learn that? And how would you coach me to listen to God's voice on decisions?
Jamie: Well, I mean, I learned it — I think the only way any of us learn anything is from a model, really. We can read books about it, but it's different in a discipleship, father-son, mentor-mentee relationship where you watch another person actually live it out. Because Jesus never says anything that He doesn't do at a deeper level. And so I learned it from — I can name three different guys. That's the number of people I've seen in my life that actually do what they say. I'm sure there's lots more, but in my journey, there were three of them.
And I watched them, especially in Indonesia, where the guy that trained me — I watched him do this all the time. We would be threatened in a situation and he would say, "God, either transform the person who's threatening us or just walk us out of the situation." His first reaction was never, "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 to read it in the scripture is one thing, and then to watch someone live it out in front of you is another thing. And so 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. 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. If you're afraid to fail, you won't be a model that can do it in front of other people because you'll be concerned about, "What if it doesn't work?" Already you've lost. Already it's over.
[AD BREAK]
Jeff: He 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. This is — let's get 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, 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 for guidance?
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. 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 right relationship with ourselves and in right relationship with others — the great commandment. And so, Lord, 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 what beautiful discipleship is about. Obedience in Hebrew is to hear and respond. That's what it is — to hear and respond. And so let me just pray through this together — this relationship between Jeff and me 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, always.
And so, Lord, we ask that we submit ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in this, as the 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: Amen. Jamie, any whisper, any nudges, any direction on what you need to know right now in this conversation and what to say?
Jamie: Yeah, I think you led into it by asking about that story about invisibility. Immediately it comes to my mind — I think the thing is fear for most of us. The biggest issue that we deal with is fear. And so if I was listening to someone talk about being a dad, that would be it, because my dad was a very fearful man. He was very fearful. And the way he compensated for his fear was through violence, by trying to prove that he wasn't afraid.
And so anyway, I've always wanted to understand — how do we deal with fear? And then as a parent with my own kids, fear is such a large thing. And fear is learned, right? Only the fear of falling and loud noises is innate in us, but all other fear is learned.
And so I would 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 a daily question. It's even incident to 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?"
So in Indonesia, the prayer is, "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. Him first. "What do You want me to — why would you not stay?" That's His question. "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 — "I got to protect myself, that's why." It's not even worth praying about.
And so God wants me to know, "I can protect you in any situation." "Though a thousand fall on my right and ten thousand fall on my left, yet will I stand." Okay, so God, "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 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 let's teach them other than that worldview, right?
Jeff: And then tactically from that, you moved into — as a way to demonstrate to your three boys that we're not afraid — you actually did some preparedness through gamification. If I got that right, you gamified the preparedness. Is that correct?
Jamie: 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 the whole thing becomes this act of love and joy. We love our neighbors, 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 anything. 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 a game." 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, "Wow, this could go south on us." It's not true, but it's what we're taught. And so as soon as you think, "Wow, there's a possibility of losing in this," then you have to self-protect and self-promote. But if you realize, "Well, we can't lose," so if we couldn't lose, what would we do? We might find joy in this thing, right? And so then, what would joy look like? Well, let's make it into a game.
Later, when our kids were in eleventh grade and eighth grade and one was in college — when we were in Baghdad, the height of the fighting and the war — we lived in a regular neighborhood, 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 are you doing?" And they would take off in different directions. And so I would just constantly — and then at night in their room, I would just burst open the door 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.
And a lot of our team was killed in Baghdad. They knew that. They lived in that reality, because they knew men and women they knew were killed. And so it's 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. If you died, you lost. 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. "Wow, if You die, we lose." And He's like, "No, if I don't die, we lose." Dying is winning. So all those lessons in there. But yeah, to gamify it — to make it joyful. Love, joy, peace, patience — the fruit of the Spirit.
Jeff: 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 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 — someone wrote this of you actually, Jamie — they said, "You're about bringing peaceful solutions to some of the world's highest conflict areas." That's interesting, because some of us today, when we think of the world's highest conflict areas, 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.
So could you explain your heart, what you get to do with identity exchange, your writing, teaching the courses — pan out for a moment on the elevator pitch. This is what you get to be a part of with your wife. Both globally and how that even could impact the household.
Jamie: Right. So, you know, I went from a police officer, then was interviewed by some State Department people about what I was doing in the police department. And their question to me was, "Can you do that in another country? Can you do what you're doing in the police department overseas?"
And what I was doing in the police department was asking God these questions. I'd be in a situation. I'm trained. I've been through the academy. I've got experience on the street. I had a training officer for twelve months. I have all that. But then I get in scenarios where none of that applies. So my question was, "Okay, when none of that works — God, can You talk to me about what to do right now in this situation?" That was my big question.
And I just started to experiment with that on the smallest level — at home and at work. Little small things. It's not 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 then when we 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 the cause of conflict is different in every region of the world and every ethnic group and every generation, then we'll never find the solution. We'll never figure it out because we'll have to adjust to everything.
And of course, James says it — James chapter four — the cause of conflict in the world, the reason you have wars in the world is because you have wars in your heart. That's the answer. So conflict inside produces conflict outside. So when we go to China or wherever we're working, the goal is the heart of the person that we're dealing with.
What's the cause of internal conflict? Fear. 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 wrong identity about who your neighbor is.
And so that was — we called it the conflict narrative. External conflict produced by internal conflict, produced by fear, produced by false identity. What's the shift? The shift is not "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 — 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 — 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 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 be transformed by the renewing of your mind. They said that was not that you did wrong stuff — that you knew how to change. They thought that was the greatest thing.
Jeff: How old were they in that chapter that they watched and observed some transformation? When was a lot of that happening?
Jamie: Yeah, in middle school. When they were in middle school. Indonesia was a big one. And before that, you know, they saw brokenness. They saw brokenness. I've seen brokenness, the whole thing. But they would say — here's the three things they say all the time when I ask them about it — because I don't often talk about parenting, because parenting is very much about the identity of the dad. That's why — the greatest gift you can give to your kids is the truth of who you are. 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 gift to the world.
[OUTRO]
Jeff: Thank you so much for joining us for this first half of my conversation with Jamie Winship from the vault. So this was recorded two years ago, but man — the heart, the wisdom, the testimony, the encouragement, the strong emphasis on who are we as dads — our identity. And it's going to get much more practical — like, we can take this away, we can bring this into our families with what you're going to hear next week. So get back over here for the second half, episode 422, next week. Come on back for the second half.
Thank you for being DadAwesome. Praying for you guys, cheering for you. Have a great week.
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"Kids learn to be afraid of things from their parents' fear." — Jamie Winship
"The greatest gift you can give your kids is the truth of who you are." — Jamie Winship
"Fear is an invitation to transformation. It's an invitation to a conversation." — Jamie Winship
"In the walk with Jesus, there is no win-lose scenario." — Jamie Winship
"God, what do You want me to know? And what do You want me to do?" — Jamie Winship
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