Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:07 Hey, welcome back to the Grace House podcast. Brian Phillips with you here today. Remember our motto, I put it out there. A lot of the fronts of our, all of our episodes. We are a band of brothers being trained by grace to conquer darkness and empower the world to live upright, to empower men to live upright. So I'm excited about the mission, the passion, the model, the culture, everything that we've been working on. And God really is opening some really cool doors for us and things continue to develop and get deeper and wider. It seems like everything's just seems to be coming along well. So thanks for praying for us. Thanks for being engaged with us. Thanks for being an early adopter and getting in on this thing called grace SOPs. We want to actually take this to the nation. We want to help inspire men and connect them to a culture that's filled with comradery, the whole mindset of like a band of brothers doing life together so that we can actually be righteous men and help men overcome and do awesome things with their lives to really set them on the path that God called them to I'm in the studio today with a low culture and Lola and I have actually known each other for 17 years so long time.
Speaker 0 00:01:17 Welcome to the episode today. And, uh, we want to talk about being trained by the grace of God today and taking the training of Greece actually seriously. So we're going to look into a, what we call the T2 12 culture here in a little bit, but, uh, I want to LOL to just take a moment and say hi, and, um, I've known you 17 years. We're kind of cut from the same cloth. We've done a lot of the same stuff. And we kind of had our, like a 6, 7, 8 year period where we kind of were in touch a few times, but we kind of lost that dark years of our friendship, but now we're th th the enlightenment has happened. Doors open. Yeah. Lowe's actually here in my town. You just spoke at our church this morning and I'm excited about everything you're doing, and I know Grace House is going to partner in a strong way. So, yeah. So yeah, just take a moment, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and your passions and what you're doing.
Speaker 1 00:02:11 And like you said, Brian, we've, uh, you know, we've known each other for a long time, I guess I'd never realized it had been 17 years, but, you know, we met on the journey, uh, working with high school and middle school students. Really, when you look back at it, you know, taking students through this gray SOPs process, it really started with you back then that whole desire to, to raise a culture. Um, then it was students now men, but, uh, my path along with my wife, Tammy, we've we've ventured off, um, you know, we started hearing so many different things in the schools. And you, you remember how kids were, you know, they'd line up by the hundreds, after a school assembly to talk to this man who they just met an hour ago. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:03:00 Pour their heart out, like the most intimate things about them like that. Exactly.
Speaker 1 00:03:04 And it always perplexed me. And, but yet felt, I felt honored, but we started hearing so many different things. It went from, yeah, my mom and dad are broke up or, um, I did drugs or, you know, a kid bringing their pot pipe. And now, now the story started to get, Hey, um, my dad's selling me or my uncle selling me. And, um, this is what's happening. And my boyfriend, you know, I've been raped several times to where it really caused us to sit back and go, what, like, what is happening and how do we respond? And we answered that question with action and said, you know, we, you can't, you can't throw it out there. Like, how am I going to respond? And then when the, when the job looks tough, go, Ooh, not for me.
Speaker 0 00:03:57 Sorry. Somebody else will do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:04:00 Right. And we've done that, like with human trafficking, we've done that just like we've done with all the other issues. We, we compartmentalize it, we call it an issue. We call it a problem or a situation. And we do that as human beings so that we can compartmentalize it and survive yeah.
Speaker 0 00:04:18 Deal with the pain of it. Right. Or the mass, like the epidemic. Exactly.
Speaker 1 00:04:22 And so we box it up. Right. And we've even put the pretty label on it. And then we're what that allows us to do is put it up on the shelf with all the other issues. And I'm throwing up air quotes, um, and problems. I see
Speaker 0 00:04:36 Your air quotes that's right. Match them. And
Speaker 1 00:04:40 Then once it's on that shelf, it allows us to point at and go, who's going to take care of that. Somebody needs to deal with that. Right. Whereas when we looked, we opened that box, we realized that it's the girl across the street. It's the girl in the neighborhood. It's the women at the strip clubs that are in my town. And once you see the faces, like you've got to respond. If you, you have no choice. Right. And the only way to respond is actively. And so that's where we've been for the last, uh, 10 years. And, um, it's been quite a journey. And now I see where, where there's a natural overlap with what gray SOPs is doing and has done and how that's going to help us. Yes.
Speaker 0 00:05:28 And when I met you 17 years ago, in that timeframe, you, you remember back then, you were telling me about lifeguard group and the passion, the dream you had and just the passion you had for it. And now it's like the thing you run in full time now, you know, so, you know, three years now, you've been running full, full steam ahead in life guard group, which helps rescue girls from trafficking. Right. And rebuild hope and help inspire them to dream again. And
Speaker 1 00:05:54 Yeah. You know, we have four simple, I don't know whether call them pillars or constitutions, you know, it's to respond, rescue, restore, and to revive. And you know, the, the respond piece is, is that, that action point, like, right, you don't have to do it. Right. Just do something, right. Like, you know, people ask us all the time. Well, you know, if we see this, if we see somebody that's in human trafficking or somebody that's Melissa, like, what do we do? I don't know. I'd love to have all the answers and say that we've got a booklet, but do something right. Like respond. And I told our team, I told our board of directors. I said, we may not do everything. Right. But we are going to show up. Like, we will show up if a family calls their daughter's missing and they want our help.
Speaker 0 00:06:46 Yeah. But you know what? This reminds me a little, like I was in Israel in 2016. And one of the things I love about Israel is like every one of their citizens has to go through the military women. And there's one strategic reason. That's important to all of Israel. It's because every, now, every citizen knows how to be vigilant. Every citizen knows like how there've been trained to see things that don't fit in. So if you're out in the market square, you can pick up on the weird guy. You can pick up on this or that. So it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen in Israel. There's are there. That they're all like righteous and holy, but they're all trained. So like when I'm sitting out on the, uh, the king hotel, the king David hotel around the beautiful balcony out there, and I'm just enjoying Israel.
Speaker 0 00:07:32 And like, all of the Israel, Israeli troops are out there and they just got their guns or they're a whatever kind of, well, no, they're just, and they just sit them up next to tables where they're drinking their coffee. Like, I felt safe, you know, but it's like, I feel like that we were, we lack that in this country, we lacked the idea of like being vigilant. We, we, we are blind because we're staring at our devices and we're walking, we're walking around. Like, it's like, um, not too long ago, my wife came out of Walmart. She saw some woman, like pretty much abusing her child. Like it was really bad. So my wife actually parked in a way where that woman couldn't get out. Why my wife called the cops on this woman? Yeah. Like stuff like that. Right. Like, and maybe that's extreme, but we've got to have like eyes to see yours to hear like, we've, our society has to start learning how to be vigilant, you know, get involved.
Speaker 1 00:08:23 So that's the thing though, you know, with vigilance is vigilance without action is frustration. And so we've got all these, you know, frustrated, you know, why, why are we seeing all these school shootings and workplace shootings and domestic violence? Because we've got, I mean, we were, we were created as men to be vigilant. And when vigilant has no action, it causes frustration and frustration takes us to places that we're not supposed to go. Never we're intended to go, you know, like you, you have that vigilant piece, but now you're because you've refused to act. Well, now you're going to take that out on your wife or your children, or you're, you know, you're going to get so ramped up that you're going to lock and load and walk into a school. Um, it's that that's vigilance without action. And those are
Speaker 0 00:09:21 The rare extremer cases. Right. But then you think about the guys, you know, people who don't snap and go wild, crazy like that. Um, it's still affecting society overall.
Speaker 1 00:09:32 Yeah. Cause they're kicking doors there.
Speaker 0 00:09:34 Oh yeah. Domestic violence. We're both police chaplains. And we, we know that we, we empathize with the police officer who has to deal with this type of person every day, you know, go back. And it is every day, multiple times a day, every day. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:09:51 You know, it's, it's, it's all around us. It's in it. I don't know. That's, that's why I'm excited about like the gray SOPs piece and where it fits in with what we do is because you know, people all the time, like just after this morning, you know, had a chance to speak here at the grill and people come up, like, how can I help? What can I do? Um, the cynical part of me, I've been doing this long enough to know that some people will throw that out there never intending to do anything. Right. But knowing, I know that because now they've, they've been enlightened to it. I opened the box. They were able to look in, they were able to see her face or the faces of the stories that I talked about. And when you don't act on that, now you now there's frustration.
Speaker 1 00:10:40 Right. And so, um, but with grace ops, now they have an avenue like through grace, like we're not, you know, this is like you said, it wasn't that the soldiers were out there like shooting, you know, have their ARS pointed at the sky, shooting off rounds, you know, pounding their chest, going don't come in here. Right. It was the presence of it. And so the presence of a powerful man brings peace. You know, it's not the absence of, of a conflict where you find peace, it's in the midst of it. Right. And so that's why I'm excited. And I think, I mean, it's an ordained thing, this great, the gray
Speaker 0 00:11:25 SOPs concept, we're going to help with raising up and training teams. There's going to be, um, and then just in the, just the culture of grace offices is to, it's built to inspire a man to be a holy man, like a righteous man, you know, and that can actually, it doesn't just save us. Right. We love that concept saved by grace, but we, we have to learn the fuller expression of being trained, uh, by God's grace, you know, to be like Christ. Yeah. And that's a journey. And so, you know, on the one hand, you know, so, but you're out there like rescuing. And so like you throw in some wild statistics out there today, um, in our, and just in our time where you've been here for a couple of days, so it's been, we've had a lot of hours of talk and conversation. So what is the, um, what's the success rate of rescuing girls? Or what are some of the numbers like, what's the global numbers and what's like those success rate, it's
Speaker 1 00:12:20 Where it gets dark. Right. And you'd like to put that box up way high on the shelf. Right. But yeah. You know, right now the kid that, you know, once a person enters a life of human trafficking, um, there's a 1% chance that there'll be found rescued. And, you know, even beyond that, the re the restoration rate goes, you know, plummets, just because of, you know, like we talked about, you know, several times over this weekend, and it's hard to talk about being fathers of daughters. Um, you know, we think about a woman that's been raped one time molested, right? The level of PTSD, the level of trauma. Well, now you take a girl that by the time she's 18 years old, or 21 years old, she's been raped by a stranger 36,000 times. Maybe can't even fathom that. Like, how do you, like, I mean,
Speaker 0 00:13:21 Like tens twenties, 30 times a doorbell, like it's just absolutely staggering. And then under nourished, zero love just chained to a wall or whatever, you know, just absolutely.
Speaker 1 00:13:36 And mentally incapable of seeing any hope like that's, you know, always said the back, even when we were, you know, hitting the road school, the school always said, you know, a kid could come up to me and say, I'm sad. I'm lonely, I'm depressed. My parents are broke, uh, broke up. My family is destroyed. And I always thought I can always, I can always help. Like, there's always something of resource, uh, uh, an avenue for that kid to find help. But if they ever said to me the words, I don't have any hope. That's where I like, that's where I hit the wall. Like that that's the base, right? It's the base of faith. It's the base of tomorrow, you know, like when you lay your head down and you have that bad day and you lay your head down at night, the healthy mind says, I hope tomorrow's better.
Speaker 1 00:14:35 Right. But when you've been, when you don't have that, like w like you like, even to take your own life, doesn't even seem to bring even the thought of that. It doesn't even seem to bring alarm you or nothing. Yeah. And so no hope, and the amount of hopelessness is, and that's why I always say, do something. Even if you go up and look her in the eye and hand her a piece of gum and say, I see you now, that kind of sucks too, because, you know, thanks for the gum. And you see me, but if you really see me, like, grab me, do do something, but, but do something, you know, right. Does it ha you're not going to do the right thing. Let me just take the pressure off you. Right. You're not going to do the right thing. Cause I, I can't even tell you what the right thing to do is I've been doing this for, for 10 years and I've done it wrong a lot of times.
Speaker 0 00:15:42 Right. But you still got to do something,
Speaker 1 00:15:46 Just do something. And, you know, uh, just the whole, there's a lot of, there's a lot of men out there that are, they want to pound their chest. Look at me, look at me, look at this, you know, look what I represent, but the lack of action. And that's why I, it says I can, I don't have any like, study, you know, I'm not a psychologist, but the lack of action in a vigilant man brings this depth of frustration that, that destroys a man, you know? And so it always makes me afraid to get men fired up because you build that vigilance and then there's no action. You, that's a destroyed man, and he's going to die. He's going to destroy things around.
Speaker 0 00:16:41 Yeah. And I think, uh, so some, so when I look at this epidemic and you know, we have, obviously a lot of the things that pour into this is the fatherlessness global epidemic. And then you've got human trafficking, which you, you said the numbers were 45 million globally. And so 1% of that is 40,000 or so that are getting out of 40 million. I mean, that almost feels like, well, you know, why try? Right. Like why, why, you know, why be vigilant white? W you know, so we're not going to like, um, solve it overnight. We might need, we might not even solve it in a generation, but we have to create awareness. We have to get, yeah, we have to get people activated and you actually have some on-ramps for that. But, you know, one of the things that I want to throw out there, cause I think this ties into the, how grease can Trina man, um, like you throw a staggering fact.
Speaker 0 00:17:42 Cause I, cause you were, we were talking and you were like, well, wherever pornography goes, so goes human trafficking. The trends in pornography, um, are found in the trends of human trafficking. So it's not always girls, you know, when the trend of pornography goes like more homosexual or fat and the boy or fetish, like you said, you start seeing those same trends happening in. Absolutely. So it's like a parallel world. Um, and so in some regard it's, it's, it, it should be alarming or kind of alerting to us that pornography could lead a man to that place where maybe he never thought he would ever be exactly. You know, actually having sex with a traffic girl or yeah. Or chasing down some, some girl, you know, some, so, you know, we were talking and you actually threw a stat out that blew my mind. Like, so talk about that from one of the, the, um, where you see the spikes, like you said, the Superbowl was the first one where like, where are the spikes at? Like walked through some of those, cause that's kind of a, uh, it's, it hurts my heart man.
Speaker 1 00:18:51 No human trafficking is, is in its basis. Right. As a supply and demand. And so where, where the buyers are, the pimps or the traffickers, the exploiters there, that's where they're going to bring their, their, their victims. Um, and we know that the Superbowl, because it really truly is a perfect storm. It's a, it's probably the most testosterone-driven gathering, um, in our borders, not, you know, uh, people will say, well, UFC, you know, that's, that's, you know, Spartan like that's, you know, but that has nothing to do with it, you know? And, but you, you have majority of men, you have large amounts of money and you have, um, you've set this, this timeframe of almost that what happens at Superbowl stays at super bowl, or it doesn't really count because it's a once in a lifetime bucket list or whatever, whatever pretty glitter you want to put on it.
Speaker 1 00:19:56 But, um, so the super bowl, and then, you know, you've always got a really right after that, the political conventions, you know, the Republican national convention, democratic national convention, the numbers spike unbelievably. So, and it's an it, but it's an entitlement or, or a perceived entitlement. Like I've got money, I've got power, I've got position and I'm going to take, I'm going to use that fake what I want, take what I want and I should. And because I have this power place, a position I should have, um, immunity. Right. Even, and I, the only way I can describe it is that you've, you've got, you've got a numb yourself so much that you can't take responsibility for that, but then begin to move down at the other large, like sporting events, you know, NCAA championship, national football championship, college football championship, but then you start getting it down into that number four and five. And this is the disturbing, uh, piece is because we see a huge spike in cities that host, um, denominational church, religious denomination, <inaudible>.
