Pastor's absolutely right. The testimony on the victories that people have had this week. We're going to be showing a video, with pastor's permission, before the Sunday morning service. And you're going to see about four testimonies of people who dealt with PTSD and how God did some work in their lives. But I want to start this morning by telling you what PTSD is and maybe get into one or two of the little things. It's going to be an introduction today. There's more stuff available. Actually, with this book, if you go to the beginning of each chapter, and you go into YouTube, every chapter of this book in YouTube, it's under Wounded Spirit, it's a biblical approach to dealing with the effects of PTSD. Every single chapter has an introduction. Some people do it as a Bible study. So you can go out there and watch the introduction, read the chapter, answer it, work on it for a week or so, and then watch the next introduction. So everything you need to see is out there. Additionally, as we were talking to Pastor about, we do have a complete college course right now out of a college in Florida that's letting everybody take this college course for $39. And you just can't get a graduate-level college course for $39 everywhere. Plus, they give it as an undergraduate. There's less work to do in the study. That's a pretty great deal. Most of their courses, as you can imagine, are about $175 a credit. This is a two-credit course. And they'll send you all the DVDs you need, everything you need, for $39. You can talk to us about that later. The workshop we just did at the camp, we did tape in South Carolina, and we're literally weeks away from having a package together, and you'll see that on Amazon or online. We found that we're trying to print the books, we're trying to do the DVDs, we're trying to do the CDs, and it's just too expensive and we're losing a bunch of money, so it's better for us. to have a middle person in the middle somewhere who prints a bunch of them and then sells them. So that's how we're doing them. We're not trying to do anything weird here. But let me tell you about PTSD. First of all, as Pastor said, my name is Doug Carriger. I'm the General Director of Armed Forces Baptist Missions. We work with about 50, 52 missionaries. And we just brought on five new guys, and Pastor was a big approach to that. Big part of that now what we want to do here is this is a biblical approach to dealing with the effects of PTSD This came about through several means first of all years ago when I was a young soldier I was following a guy down the road and while I followed him down the road He was in a big piece of equipment and that equipment flipped over in a tactical situation and it buried him under that piece of equipment in a river and And he was jammed under that piece of equipment held by his legs underwater. And I gave the guy mouth to mouth underwater until eventually he was breathing through his nose as well. And I was sucking water in as I was trying to put water in his mouth. And he died. And that kind of hung around with me on and off some time. A couple of years later, the Army gave me a duty where I had to scrape people who had flown a jet into the Adams Mark Motel in Indianapolis, Indiana. Some of you may remember that. The Army at that time was at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. And they made us do a quick reaction force and scrape people up off the floor and put bodies in body bags and get rid of the sensitive material, load them onto trucks. And those kind of things stick, you just don't forget those things, they kind of stick around with you. And then the third thing that was weird for me, or that was a little bit different, was I had a guy who, and those of you who've been going to church here remember the story, my dear friend died in my arms. And he died, his left ventricular artery blew off the side of his heart, and as I gave him mouth to mouth and stuff like that, those kind of things hung with me. So I was always looking for answers, and God provided those answers. Well then years went by and I came across a guy who was really suffering and struggling. So I put together a study for him. So that was the beginning of this. And then we found as we gave him that study, one of our missionaries, more and more people were calling and saying, what's going on with this guy? His life's getting better. He's getting his head together. He's acting right. He's doing right. Everything seems right. What did you do for him and can you do it for us? So we said, we didn't do anything for him. We just showed him God's word. It's all about God. It's nothing about what we're doing. It's sitting back, all the glory goes to God. It's God's word. It's putting it together in an order where God can use our book and make sense to these guys. And so that's what we're trying to do, just to give you a little bit of an idea of what's going on here. We use the verse kind of to start everything off with and I want to start everything off with it this morning in Proverbs 18 14 I love Hebrew poetry. I remember being in a seminary Debbie and I had Hebrew together years ago Debbie that the seminary I went to let the ladies come to classes for free Obviously, she didn't stick around and get a preaching degree or anything like that But she did take language classes in consulate classes with me. I think she took language classes with me just to keep me on track, man, because she's good at languages. Every lady who went in a language class or anything with their husband, they got it just like that. It was crazy. Then there's guys like me who really struggled with the Greek in the Hebrew Well, not really but Debbie did so much better But the spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity but a wounded spirit who can bear we believe with people with PTSD have a wounded spirit and only Christ and his love only God can heal that and Well, let's pray this morning that God would do a work here through this class and through this day here at First Baptist Church and I Heavenly Father, we love you. We're so thankful to be here with Pastor Brown and his church family. We're thankful for each person who's come out this morning. Dear God, we beg you, if someone here is suffering from something, and perhaps your verses, perhaps your word can make a difference in their life. Oh, dear God, we just want to serve you in a wonderful way. And God, we ask that you do a work in our lives and our hearts, in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. So a wounded spirit, who can bear? I want to share some definitions and thoughts with you. First of all, the American Psychiatric Association. PTSD is not new. PTSD in America goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War. They called it all kinds of things. There's actually a whole study out there on what they called PTSD over the years. In the Revolutionary War, it said they got the downers. At one time, they called it shell shock. Another time, they called it the war depression. All the way up through World War II and stuff, they had different names and different things. Now, Pastor hit it exactly right. This is what we've found. People with PTSD fall into different categories. We find every time we work with folks with PTSD or a group gets started or somebody does something, we find that about 30% of the group are police officers. Highway patrolmen, regular police officers, these are folks that are dealing with PTSD. We find about 20% of the group are folks who had problems as a child. Maybe there was something, molestation, maybe there was some type of abuse there. And then we find the rest to be military people who went PTSD in later wars. The Vietnam War is a really tough time. We find that, and you'll see more in the video this morning, but about much more than half the people from Vietnam right now suffering from PTSD as they leave their jobs as they retire and stay home they're really dealing with some issues right now the VA is just overwhelmed and in a way that's good news for us because as you know the the president doesn't want us working on any military basis and he's basically shut the gates to any type of Christian ministry or outreach they're closed It's almost impossible to get on. They don't want us handing out Bibles. They don't want us having Bible studies. They don't want us doing those types of things. But on the VA, they got people killing themselves. And they don't want to play. So they're like, we have a Christian alternative for you. And if you guys are interested, you can go to this church down the road. And they pass out flyers for that. And nobody's bothering them because these guys are killing themselves. And their lives are upside down. And they're on a handful of pills every day. They're on pills to stop them from being depressed. They're on pills to counteract the pills for being depressed. They're on pills to go to sleep. They're on pills to wake up. They're on pills to do everything you could ever imagine. And the VA's saying, hey, if God can help this, let him. We'll just keep it our little secret and we'll pass out. So the VA is wide open right now to our military. But they count it as an anxiety disorder, a mental disorder that is from some stress that was evoked, something that's outside the ordinary, something that's a pretty big deal. And so they count it from that particular aspect there. We find it, as we talked about, in survivors of combat, we find it in survivors of accidents, in survivors of abuse, in molestation, in all those types of things. We see it in automobile accidents. This week in camp, we had the full gamut covered. We had the full gamut covered. We had people from accidents. We had people that were molested. We had people there that literally watched people get raped and burned in front of them. We had people there that were in a terrible car accident. We had people there who had combat exposure. Right across the board, everything you could ever imagine. They had seen and went through and they were searching for answers Let me give you just one neat story and we'll do that as we go through the training today We we put together this quick fun run and we realized that there was a lot of pressure between the military We're learning. This was our very first camp and and pastor and mrs. Brown will tell you we were kind of learning as we went along We've done the workshops in churches, but we never had a camp where everybody was together and we had the closeness that we had this particular camp there was a real closeness there and whenever you're close and you're around military people and police people and all that there's a great uh camaraderie but at the same time you know people pick on if you're a marine in your army you know you pick on each other i mean And, you know, the Marines are better, the Army's better, the Air Force is better. So by the end of the week, they wanted to race each other or hang off the ropes longer. So I put together a six-tenth of a mile fun run to let the Marines and the Army guys get their manhood out. The Navy guys sat there and drank coffee and laughed at them, but what we did... We set up this six-tenth of a mile fun run where you ran up from Camp Joy and then you ran up a mountain trail and you got a little card from a guy at the top of the zip line. And then you ran to Debbie, who was at the end of Camp Joy, and she gave you a little card for getting to the end of Camp Joy. And then you ran up to Brother O'Malley, who was at the—he was at the Frisbee golf thing, drinking a big old cup of coffee. That was his duty. But anyway, he gave you a card. And then everybody ran in, and the first finisher was a United States Marine. We knew it was going to be—the guy weighed 70 pounds. All we know is he took off the run carrying his kid. But anyway, to make a long story short, out of the first, the first finisher was a Marine, and then it was his son. His daughter came in second? All right, it was his little daughter who came in second. Then it was his son. Then it was two more Marines. And then it was like three women. And you should have, the competition, before you knew it, at the end of the run, what happened was exactly what we were looking for. Everybody was hugging and cheering and slapping each other five. And they were talking the junk of, look at the Marines. Yeah, look at it. And then the Army guy. I mean, the Army guy is 46 and has had seven surgeries. He's got blood clots in his leg. But he came in sixth out of 25 people. And then we had a 77-year-old Vietnam veteran who came in ninth. But anyway, to make a long story short, I mean, people were just hugging. We couldn't have had a better. This is exactly what we wanted. Well, about a half an hour later, I was walking outside, and someone said, Brother Carragher, you need to come over here. And there was a man curled up on the side of the building. He was just curled up. And I went over there, and he had tears coming down his face. And I helped to lift him up, and I said, Brother, what's wrong? Did you get hurt? And he showed me his camera, and he had went in the powder room, and he had taken a picture of himself smiling. And I said, just to give you an idea of what some of these people are going through, and I said, what is that? He said, my first smile since 2004. That'll mess you up, man. And we stood out there and cried and laughed and cheered. His first smile since 2004 came at the end of a six-tenth of a fun run, .6 of a fun run. He was smiling. He texted it to his mother. and said, look what I found. And so that's what that's what these people are going through. And that's what we're trying to help. And folks, if that won't change you, that changed me, man. And I wanted to tell everybody in the group, but everybody knew who he was. So I had to leave it alone, you know, and and kind of keep it quiet. But that was his first smile in all those years. Now, this is the weird thing about PTSD as well. Most people who go through traumas are OK. Most people who go through traumas, they come out of it and they're fine. You can't say, this guy's not going to go through it, this guy's going to go through it. We do know that people who are born-again Christians, reading the Bible every day, members of church do a lot better than the rest of the population. with PTSD. We do know that. We do know that people who are college graduates come in second to that. They do about half as good as born-again Christians who are members of fundamental churches who read the Bible every day. So we do know that, but we can't understand the rest of it. We know that most people do well, but some people, these stress reactions, and it drives... Like this guy had not smiled since 2004. This is a married man. This is a guy who came back from Iraq. Came back from Fallujah, all those different things that were going on over there. And he never smiled for 11 years. How in the world can you go through 11 years of life without smiling? And somewhere along that fun run, he found his smile again. He said he couldn't help it. He said he was coming back in and a kid went under his legs and people were cutting each other off. He said he found himself laughing. And he said he didn't know he could do that. And that was pretty cool. And so most survivors, we do know that. We do know that PTSD is a contemporary name. There were other names, we talked about them, shell shock, war depression. You know, at the end of World War II, the VA hospitals would come in and they recommended that you drink whiskey. They said whiskey will make you better. And so that was their recommendation for you. Well, fortunately, they didn't provide it for him. I don't know about you, but I used to drink whiskey back many years ago. I've been saved for 20 something years, but it never made me better. I promise you that. But again, we didn't know, people didn't know what they were dealing with. People never looked at this as a spiritual issue as well. The reality of it is, is God has an answer to every question. We just got to find the answer. And and and that's what we know about God. So he has an answer to every question and and it's certainly there We do know that that history records many and we can go all the way back to a guy named Hori H-o-r-i Hori some people call him but they they they had him in the dictionary of the Greek dictionary Hori 3,000 years ago This guy was in a battle and he talks about just before going into the battle He was a young man best. We could tell he was about 14 years old and he was trembling and shaking, and his hair was standing on end. And he was talking about crying just before they went into battle. And you know what got me about that? Then he went on, he was the first recorded person with PTSD. But as I looked at this guy, what got me is all that is what added up to his PTSD. And we use a term in the military called optempo. And up-tempo means when you're out there and you're going at it, you're in up-tempo. Everything's fast. Everything's quick. You don't have time to think. So when you go into a situation that's bad, you go to up-tempo. You don't stop. You don't think about it. Someone goes down, you give them a medic, and you keep on going. You're in up-tempo. Your objective is whatever the goal is, that's your objective. And you're going to get your objective. You're not going to talk about it. You're not going to stop. It doesn't matter whether it takes five minutes or five days. Go to your, stay at op tempo and capture your objective. Period. That's all there is to it. You have to capture your objective. And so when the op tempo slows is when people have their problems. So you're in the military all this time and you're sitting over there, it might have been something that happened in Iraq your first day there or your first week there and for a year you didn't have one problem. And then you come back home, you get out of the military, or you're in the Guard or Reserve, and you come back to your regular job, and boom, everything hits you because the op tempo has slowed. And all of a sudden, your mind has this time to work and think about it. So there's many instances of this. I like this guy's definition. There's a guy named Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl. Now this guy has the oddest story of any year. Everybody remembers the Jewish concentration camps during World War II. You remember studying them. I know most of us aren't old enough to have been alive and remember them from back then, but certainly we heard about them in school. We heard about them In college in different places like that, but Viktor Frankl was a guy who that was a an immigrant in Poland. He was a Jewish Well, I'm sorry. He was a Jewish. He was taken as a Jewish immigrant Remember they pulled them all out named him immigrants put him in concentration camps to work. He was a young teenager And he went to seven concentration camps in six years. And on a regular basis, they would call people up and kill them. They would kill one person a day that was a regular MO. Even if you were a worker, from the workers, they'd pull a name out of a hat and kill somebody. Can you imagine living like that? It's a lottery every single day. Am I going to die? Is it my turn? And so they bring Viktor Frankl up there. Viktor Frankl told his buddies, if I ever get out of here, I'm going to go to college, I'm going to go to medical school, and I'm going to help people with whatever they're going through here, because we're going to need help. We're going to need help. But anyway, he came up with this definition. He calls it an abnormal response. He's talking about PTSD. An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. And what helped me as I went through and did a study, I ran into this five or six years ago, but what really helped me with that is we're wired a certain way, aren't we? You know, God makes us to handle just about anything, but we're born and raised by our parents. And we're not, in the United States, we're not born and raised for war. We're not born and raised for, you know, the things we go through. So, you know, we used to call that in the army, you're wired a certain way. You're trained to live through certain things a certain way. And so when that situation is completely abnormal, I was telling you, Pastor, last night we got a call from our boys. Someone — we have a retaining wall in our yard. Someone came down our road, and he turned into our neighborhood, and our house is right on the corner. This 16-year-old girl with a drunk lady in the car with her went over our retaining wall. She couldn't make the corner, flipped the car over and went into our house upside down, punched a hole through the outside of the wall. That's a weird situation right there, isn't it? So they send us pictures of a hole in the wall. Police, it didn't wake them up. This happened the night before last. Finally, one of the boys got home last night. One of the neighbors said, hey, you see those painted spots all over your yard and the hole in your house? Haha, there's some police reports in your mail, but how did a kid sleep through that? You know, the neighbors are out there getting the police reports and undoubtedly taking pictures and stuff and our kids are upstairs crashed Get out there. They must have been ringing about me. There's police there. There's a crane pulling the car out But anyway, those guys are wired to sleep. So you want to talk about being wired differently, but and All we know is they get up for college or work on a regular basis. But anyway, an abnormal response to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. But you know what I like about Viktor Frankl is he spent about 30 or 40 years as the number one psychiatrist in the world. Now, all medical people aren't bad. I subscribed to medical treatment. I took my blood pressure medicine, that kind of stuff, this morning. And not all of them are evil, and many of them have your best intentions. But the great thing that happened about Viktor Frankl So he added to that definition somewhere in the 70s, and he said, with Christ, everything can be normal. Because he got saved in the 70s while on a trip to Indiana University. Someone was able to share the gospel with him. But anyway, so in a way, this PTSD and stuff we go through, these things we go through that are terrible, they're part of who we are, aren't they? They become who we are. Now, someone said, I remember I went to, they sent me to a counselor years ago over at the Navy base to learn how to get rid of headaches. And I said, you know, I'll give it a try. And she told me, she gave me a list of these five things and she gave me a book, I have it somewhere at home. But one of the first things that she wanted me to subscribe to or that she prescribed to me, and it wasn't medicine, was I want you to forgive yourself. And I said, ma'am, I don't need to forgive myself. I said the forgiving was done at Calvary. I said, you know, it's not about what I think I'm worth. It's not about, you know, I need to forgive others. You know, if we have any problem at all with anger and those types of things, it's a forgiveness issue, but it's us not forgiving other people. We can't forgive her. Christ did that. Why do we need to forgive ourselves? We need to get right with God and seek forgiveness from him. And that's the word. But that's how a lot of people are. They're trying to forgive themselves. Well, we're not wired for that either, are we? God made us to be forgiven by Him. And it's so much better to be forgiven than Him while we try to forgive ourselves. And we hear it all the time. When we're out there talking to people, I had a guy tell me one time, he said, I had a major victory. I was talking to a young guy, and I said, well, what was your major victory? He said, I learned to forgive myself. I said, well, I know even a more major, you know, I'm not going to tell him, you're all messed up, dude. I said, I know even a more major victory. And the more major victory is I know a savior who died for your sins. who can forgive you, and you're not going to have to worry about forgiving yourself. Because he's all about the good stuff, the good forgiveness. And so anyway, those are some of the things that we're trying to look at and go through as we speak of them. And so I think Frankel's right, but I know the Lord, as I said, can get through those things. And you know, all these things are replaced with God's grace. I met a guy, I was, I think I might have said something in a prayer letter a couple years ago, so you probably heard this. from the pastor, but I was up in Seattle. And whenever we go somewhere, if there's downtime, we're on a base. And as we're on the base, we were trying to plant a church there and get a missionary. And while we were on the base, I said to the guy, isn't there a major veterans hospital? Because I saw a movie or a TV special or something on PBS years ago about VA hospitals. And I said, isn't there a major one here in Seattle? And what I find is usually if there's a major VA hospital somewhere, that in the midst of that, there's people willing to be preached to and taught and cared for. So I showed up, and I told them. And I carry an ID card saying I'm the general director of Armed Forces Baptist Missions. And I have a prayer card and a business card. And I said, I'd like to talk to those people. And they said, what you need to do is you need to talk to the Protestants. I said, OK. You know what I mean? You let me in to talk to anybody. I'll talk to them. They could have said, you need to talk to the devil worshipers. And I would have said, praise God. I'm there. They said, you need to talk to the Protestants, because they really need someone to talk to. Because the Protestant chaplain, he broke his leg in a skiing accident. And when that healed, he shut his door on his left ear and ripped it off. And I'm like, I did what your pastor just said. I had to stop. I said, what kind of door? I started asking all kinds of questions about the door. Then I realized it didn't matter, but I wanted to know more. How do you rip your ear off your head? Is it a steel door? Is there someone pushing the door? Is your wife mad at you? I mean, there were many questions I had at that particular point. But anyway, I end up with this guy, and this guy's 90 years old, and it was one of those divine appointments. I talked to about 10 or 15 people with this pastor, and they were saved. These folks that they had categorized as Protestants, the first 10 or 15 people we spoke to had a good testimony. And I mean, it was solid. So we gave them Bibles, prayed with them, and tried to be a blessing to them for the first four hours of the day. So we went down to the cafeteria, and we ran into this guy. His name was John. And I didn't know what he was, a Protestant or whatever. He was 90 years old. He said, hey, aren't you talking to people about God? I said, yes, sir, I am. He said, would you talk to me about God? I said, sure. And you know how when you buy a big sub and they cut it in half? and you offer someone half, you really don't want them to take it. So I'm sitting at the table, so he sits down, and he says, my name's John. I said, John, would you like half? And he just grabbed it. And I said, man, he really took it. I didn't like that, you know? But anyway, I was thinking about not offering anymore. But anyway, we started talking, and he started telling me that he was a Marine during World War II. And he looked at me, and he said, real seriousness, he said, do you know what a flamethrower is? And I said, yes, sir. I said, I've actually seen some in museums. And, you know, our nation outlawed them toward the beginning of the Vietnam War as part of the Geneva Convention and stuff. Everybody outlawed flamethrowers. He said, well, I was a flamethrower during World War II. Excuse me. So he went on. And he told me that when I got to Iwo Jima, what they would do is there were so many flamethrowers per company. Basically, every platoon had a guy with a flamethrower. And there are these two tanks. I looked it up. There are these two tanks that hold eight gallons worth of stuff. Now, one tank holds about seven gallons of diesel and about one gallon of gasoline. And they put some phosphorus, some like laundry detergent in it. And they shake it all up. And that makes it stick to people. And the other thing is compressed air and nitrogen. And it goes through this hose. It could be up to 12 feet long, but most of them are about 4 feet long. And they can pull the trigger 3 times, that's it. It shoots 3 times. And when they pull the trigger, it sends flames 75 feet straight in the direction you pull it. So what happened is, every platoon would have a flamethrower. Their lifespan, their average lifespan on a battlefield was 4 minutes. So when the first bullet got fired, the Japanese there in Iwo Jima, Tarawa, wherever they happened to be, Guadalcanal, wherever they happened to be, aimed at them. They wanted to shoot at them. And they wanted to kill the flamethrower. It was extra points. It's the guy you want to take out. And so he told me he was number six. And so the guy put on the flamethrower, dead. Next guy put on the flamethrower, never got to pull the trigger, dead. Make a long story short, number six got called on, the trigger had been pulled once, and five guys were dead. And they were coming up onto this cave. And there was a Japanese machine gunner in there, the enemy. And he was really wiping some people out. And he had some reinforcements. They were shooting some mortars out of this cave. They were on the side of the mountain. And this guy, John, as he's eating my sub, is telling us the story in bits and pieces. And he gets to the point that he says, and we got up there, and they said, flamethrower. And he said, I wish they would have said something like, go use the latrine or something, so they wouldn't have known I was coming. And he said, about six guys and a Navy corpsman took off up this hill around the corner. And these guys started providing cover for him. And he said he was a little nervous. And the Navy corpsman grabbed him, because he wanted the machine gun to stop, because he had to keep on taking care of these people who were getting shot. And the Navy corpsman propelled him over by the cave. And so they ended up over by the cave. And these Marines are shooting at him. keeping their company, and they were waiting for him to stop and have to hook up another line of bullets for their machine gun. And when he stopped, the guy got in front of the thing and pulled the trigger. And sure enough, that nitrogen and that forced oxygen lit this thing and sent it 75 yards into this cave. And he said you could hear screaming and things blowing up. Actually, they must have blown up some rounds or some mortar rounds or something, grenades. And he said, out of nowhere came this Japanese man and he was burning from his head to his toe. And he came outside and he said he was screaming so loud it was hurting his ears. And he said then finally one of the Marines realized he wanted to be killed. And so one of the Marines aimed his M1 and shot the guy in the head and he died. Well, he said, years later, he's telling me the story of what he went through, but he said, years later, sir, he said, I read a book that was translated from Japanese by a Japanese soldier who was a mile and a half away that day, and he said his second chapter was talking about how he met Christ because he never wanted to burn like that guy who came out of a cave. He could hear a guy yelling a mile and a half away, kill me, kill me, kill me. That just, it changed me that day. Well, we got, so John told me, he says, I never want to live that life. I don't want to go to hell. And that day in that little chapel downstairs after we finished lunch, he didn't have to. He met his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But that's some of the things. This guy's life was a picture of trying to self-medicate, of trying to drink himself to sleep, of trying to get through bad times. But when he met Christ that day in Seattle, Everything changed when he met Christ that day in Seattle in that old Buddhist Chapel down at the end of the hall down there with old Buddha sitting up there I had I let Buddha hold my cup of decaf until they so so someone told me we're not supposed to do that but he had his perfect hands right there as I jammed it in there and So I could have some time to pray with him So some of the symptoms from PTA, yeah, I guess you're not supposed to mess with Buddha I don't know, you know in Korea when you travel over to Asia and stuff They bury the rich people sitting up in case Buddha goes by, they can get a ride. There's some people who have some of the strangest beliefs you've ever heard in your life. And folks, it's like, how can people believe that? I was born and raised a Roman Catholic, and I believe the Pope knew what was going on. Well, I really never did. I was always one of those rebel people. I stayed there, I mean, I guess because my parents had went there and stuff, but suicidal tendencies are a really big problem of people with PTSD. People with PTSD want to kill themselves. The number one problem that we have at the VA centers, the number one problem that the mental hospitals have, the number one problem that emergency rooms have, is people with PTSD and those things going on with their lives want to kill themselves. And we're going to talk a little bit about suicide probably tonight, but let me tell you this, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It's not worth it. There's no need for it. There's no need for suicide. Suicide's a mistake. You know, I mean, I have met people who tried to commit suicide in the Army. I've stood there and talked to these young privates. I said, why do you commit suicide? Well, my girlfriend cheated with me or broke up with me or whatever. I said, you know, what, is there 150 million girls in the United States? I mean, I know it's tough. Suck it up, private, you know? Go meet one somewhere else. I mean, what is this? I read the other day, 1,680 dating websites. You know what the best place to date is? Your court, church. Praise God. People go to church, yoga, marriage. I know a couple churches that you can't even make it a week there as a soldier, and you're hooked up with somebody, praise God. And the pastor types out a plan for you on a big piece of paper. It's like a map, you know? Your first month, you can talk on the phone once a week. Your second month, three times a week. That's just ugly. But anyway, these poor guys. Suicidal tendencies. And that's God's plan, by the way, is to meet somebody. and love like faith and do it the right way. And boy, I'll tell you, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and anxiety. Man, fear is a big thing. Fear is a really big thing. So big, we're gonna spend the whole morning message talking about it. Most people commit suicide. They commit suicide because they're afraid. How in the world are you not afraid to commit suicide, but you're afraid of living? To me, that just doesn't add up. You know, that really, it doesn't add up. So you've got depression, you've got sleeplessness, you've got anxiety, and some of us may suffer from some of these things. You know, it's hard on this side. You know, we go to funerals, and you preach funerals. I put a thing on my Facebook status. Yesterday was, as Pastor Ed mentioned earlier, was the anniversary of June 6th. And the D-Day invasion in Normandy, and we were honored to go to Normandy on the 60th anniversary. I don't remember. I think the 60th anniversary we were living in Germany. No, it was the, I don't remember. We got to go there, praise God, all right? And all these American soldiers were wandering around that day. And they let us preach back then in a corner. And so we set up, and we started singing hymns in the corner of this Normandy, Cemetery and and you know the know the American Cemetery in Normandy had the cliffs where the Army Rangers climbed up the front of the hill and So you can walk right up to the cliffs and you know what happened is this one Army Ranger captain this colonel put him in charge of getting up the hill with his Rangers and This guy's one of the Medal of Honor winners from World War two. So he met this young lady he liked in church in England and Her dad ran a fire station a firehouse and this colonel told him you better figure out how you get up these cliffs So they stole all the ladders out of the firehouse at her dad's fire station. And they laid them. It's funny how we look back at those things now. But can you imagine getting shot at and laying ladders from ledge to ledge? And they're climbing a ledge that's almost 90 degrees. And this captain was the first one over the ledge. And he lived. And then they got them all down. And they put all these ladders all broken up and bombed and stuff. He wrapped them all up and sent them to his future father-in-law and said, sorry. You can send a bill to Dwight Eisenhower. And they did. And they bought him a new ladder. But we got to preach in the corner of the American cemetery there. And you can ask Debbie, we were singing hymns and stuff. And all these World War II veterans wearing their VFW hats and stuff, we had five or six of them got saved. Foreigners good say people were on the knees begging God to save them. I preached the message on true freedom on the freedom and peace that only Christ can give and And that people were getting saved people were weeping In those gravestones. It's just it's real. It's reality. It's reality. It's right there on top of you another big thing guilt and survivors guilt will be hitting on that tonight in the night session as well and so many people We see survivor's guilt and guilt. Car accident, someone else dies. Could I have done more? One guy, sitting next to another guy in Fallujah, one of the men we're working with right now. It's a Marine, he's standing next to another Marine, the Marine next to him, he ducks down to, the other Marine says, will you just go get us some water? And so he reaches for the water and turns around, the other guy gets shot right in the head by an RPG. Rips his head right off his shoulder. He said, if I were to let him get the water, survivor's guilt stuff. Young lady, she was molested and she didn't tell anybody. Then her little sister got molested and turned around and killed herself. This is a tough thing. Guilt stinks. Only God can take guilt away. Only God can take that away. And we're going to just share a ton of verses with you guys. So I hope you have a lot of a lot of paper tonight to write some of those things down. We're going to give you some verses. And this, by the way, this book has all them in there. So if you turn around and get a book, you have all the verses. You'll be able to fly through those this afternoon. Anger and irritability. Boy, people with PTSD have anger issues. And one of the things we worked on this week, and I know your pastor and I had talked about this earlier, too, and how it's not a good idea to give guns to these guys with PTSD. There's triggers. It doesn't matter how you have PTSD or what you have it from, you don't want to go to those triggers and start it all over again. A trigger could be firing a gun. A trigger could be hearing the loud noises. A trigger could be all those types of things. We found out a good trigger this past week is a little half-mile race at Camp Joy at 6.15 in the morning. Brought everybody back to that basic training time where everybody's hugging each other. And it took little kids and made them feel like they were Marines and stuff. Those little kids can run, man. They're flexible. I mean, they're passing old people. Excuse me, sir. People are out there running like crazy. A little kid goes, zoom. And then little kids do weird things like, is that a butterfly? They stop for a few minutes. Then they run by you again. Then they come in second. But there's a lot of anger and irritability that comes with PTSD, a lot of anger. The guy who hadn't smiled since 2004 said, I've been so angry. He says, I've been living life mad. And you know what he said to me as he left? He left Friday night, but he said to me as he left after church Friday night, he said, you know what I realized, Sergeant Major? And I said, what's that? He was a Marine. He said, I realized that everybody I'm hanging around with is mad too. I realized that my whole crowd is mad. And I said, where do you go to church? He said, tell me where to go to church. He wasn't going to church. He was one of the guys that got saved during the week. He thought he was saved when he was a kid. Folks, you need to be in church. You know, there's a reason the Bible talks about the local church. You know, the church is the bride of Christ. I mean, church is a pretty important thing. It really is. I mean, it's the most important thing in my life, besides Christ. Nightmares and flashbacks we took you know these things follow the weirdest pattern of anything you've ever seen a Nightmare can be people with PTSD can have a constant nightmare Returning back to the scene of what caused the PTSD or they just could have nightmares about anything We found out that about 7% of the population has nightmares People with PTSD a little more than 60 or 70 percent of them depending on what study you believe Have nightmares going back to the time of the incident Some people have nightmares about the stupidest things. Now, I really have nightmares. I had a nightmare the other night. They have this. How many people have been to Camp Joy? How many people? So a lot of you, because you're close by. Well, Camp Joy has this 234-foot slide. All right, so all week we were pumping each other up. Someone was going to go down this 234-foot slide. So we have this Army guy. He's 46 years old. Brother, Harold Pierce, who you met. This guy puts a plastic bag on and has Mike Marshall spray him with vegetable oil. So he'll get on the slide path. I mean, everybody's pumping each other up. Well, what do I dream about the night before he goes down the slide? That Harold goes out in the water and gets lost. And nobody will go out there, and that my buddy John O'Malley standing there saying, the water's real cold. He'll be all right for hours, the fire going in. But flashbacks and nightmares are real to people. If you have flashbacks, you shouldn't even drive. Flashbacks should come at any time you could be driving down the road and somebody has a Backfire on a car you can be driving down the road and somebody hits a trash can especially around here in the wintertime when the roads get narrow because of all the Snow and stuff and these people put these steel. I don't know why people still have steel cans today Yeah, I guess they just been around forever. You know and you'll hear that big bang, or you'll hit something. People go flashback, they won't even know where they are. Some of it, it takes the flashback to a new level called disassociation, which takes you completely out of the circumstance. You don't even know where you are, so you shouldn't be driving. We do know one thing that God has an answer for them. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. We are gonna do the New England Fast Talk on these things, tonight's service, so you wanna hear them. We're gonna go through all seven of these categories. Avoidance of conflict. We do know people with PTSD want to avoid any conflict. They don't want to deal with it. We found a whole group of people that just want to play video games. They want to stay home. If they do work, they go to work, come home, go to work, come home, and they don't do anything. So they want to avoid conflict. Well, God expects us to do something with our lives. He doesn't want us to just lay around on the couch. Now, it's OK to lay around and watch a prerecorded Packers game Especially when the Giants have beaten them, praise God. But I mean, you know, those last two NFC Championship games, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for those. As a Giants fan, those must have been tough games for you guys, huh? Especially that last one. All we did, all week, us Giants fans kept on getting all this. People were taunting, Packers fans are tough, man. I'm sitting out there laying low, you know, and there's like two weeks between those games, and Packers fans are sending things, they're like, Aaron Rodgers could throw a football through the needle, through the eye of a needle. You know, he can do this, he can do that. And I'm like, holy cow, we're going to get beat really bad. Well, I thank God he can't throw it to receivers when Giants are on top of him. Praise God. All right. Apathy. I won't pick on the Packers anymore. I think you guys are going to have a good year this year. All right. Boy, apathy is a tough thing, folks. All joking aside, apathy is not in God's plan for our lives. It really isn't. And you know, to me, apathy means there's nothing else good left. In our eyes, God can't do anything else good with us and our family and our church. When we get to the place where we're apathetic, we need to have a tune-up. You know, go to your churches where a Bible, get on your knees, study your Bible. When we get to that place when we're saying there's nothing else good that can happen, we're in a bad place. But a lot of people with PTSD get exactly to that place. A lot of people get caught in that. They get caught up in exactly that place. So apathy is a really tough thing. Precepts. And these are the last things we're going to do before we go on break here in just five minutes or so. But we know that PTSD is real. We know it's real. We've seen it. You know, it's nothing fake. Are there people out there trying to get money from the VA? I'm sure. But I believe the lion's share of these people, the greatest percentage of these people, are really suffering from PTSD. I believe that many people suffer from PTSD. The more I study, I meet people. Debbie and I met a guy. We were in the VA clinic. And I'm waiting for an appointment. I wear Army surplus glasses. And I pick on these glasses. And I'm going to stop picking on them. I'll tell you why. I picked on them always because the lady told me, I have Army surplus glasses I can give you for free. I'm like, praise God, you know, the plastic lenses. While I'm standing, where were we the other day? We were preaching at a church. We were at a church getting ready to preach last Sunday. This is no kidding. And I'm standing, and I'm brushing my teeth or something, and my lens falls out of my glasses into the sink. So Debbie had to run to a wall. No, I was at church. Yeah. I said, baby, you got to find some MacGyver-type tools quick, because I'm not going to see anybody. So I start church like this. But then Debbie comes up, and she goes, So except for a couple of thumb smudges, it worked out all right. So anyway, many people suffer from PTSD. PTSD can show up at any time. Folks, like I tell you, as you're winding down. You know, folks, by the way, as you take these classes, if you decide to take this college class, and I have nothing to do with any of them, honestly, folks, I'm not in business to make money off of people with PTSD. We don't make any money at all off them. We're not in that business. So I'm not trying to sell you anything that makes any money. We, but the schools take care of that. They don't give us a dime. We don't make any money off our books. We just want to help people get saved. We want to help people have a good life. God takes care of us through our mission work. And that's what we do. And God provided for us being at this church right here and the church on the way here to come to camp and leave camp. We told them make us camp as cheap as possible because they usually charge 25 or 30 bucks a camper to give the speaker money. I said, no. Minimize that God will take care of us through preaching because we have the blessing of coming to great churches like yours on the way up and the way back So we're not in the business of making money at that kind of stuff at all PTSD affects people in every class and status of life PTSD is a disorder that is treatable and with the Lord's help curable. We have seen people We have seen people completely cured from PTSD. I will tell you this is two things I know and we'll end with this with prayer and I had a guy tell me who suffered from some of the worst PTSD I've ever met in my life. Tell me if I opened my Bible in the morning, you'd read it. And I opened my Bible at night. I don't have any problem all day long. We had a wife call us. I won't tell you who it is. It's one of our dear close friends. We had a wife call us and say, I don't know who my husband is, but please don't take him away. I've never lived a life like this before. And folks, that guy curled up on the ground, haven't smiled since 2004. We can make a difference and help people. We can make a difference and help people. Thanks, Pastor Heavenly. Father, we love you.