Being a police officer is a high risk occupation, especially for marriages. Adam Davis was headed toward divorce with his wife until she lovingly confronted him about his neglect, about the isolation she was feeling. I realized in that moment that the woman that I had hurt, whether intentionally or because I was so hurt, still loved me. And we talk a lot about the love of God, and we talk a lot about how He loves us. We sing about it. It's beautiful songs.
But until another human being has demonstrated that love and mirrored His love for us like she did for me, that's the love that changes you. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. How can those who have pledged to protect and serve their communities also protect and serve their marriages?
We'll talk with Adam Davis about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. You think about high-risk professions. I'm not thinking about your life being on the line, although that can be the case. I'm thinking about your marriage and family being on the line. The more stress, the more pressure you're under, the more your marriage is going to feel that and have to be a shock absorber for them. And that would be marriage as a pastor. Well, that's true. I mean, you know the statistics, and it is challenging. Very high. Or, honestly, marriage in the NFL.
80% divorce rate. Wow. But it's not dangerous like you're talking about. I mean, it's dangerous in a different way.
But you put your life on the line, that's a whole other type of danger. And we want our listeners today to recognize there are people around us, serving us, who are in those high-risk situations and have chosen to be in those high-risk situations for our good. And we've got a friend who's joining us. Adam Davis is here on Family Life Today. Adam, welcome.
Thank you all so much for having me. Adam is an author. He is a conference speaker. And the reason he is both an author and a conference speaker is because of what he did before he was an author and a conference speaker. How many years were you in law enforcement?
Six years. And what led you in to being a police officer? You know, you ask a lot of people, they're going to say, I wanted to help people.
And that's great. But really, I wanted to be like those good men that I saw. A man named TJ.
He's a retired sergeant. I wanted to be a man of character. That was who I wanted to be.
And I wanted my kids to look up to me. Adam has written a number of devotionals, one called on spiritual combat for men and women in law enforcement and in military, frontline military. Behind the badge for police officers. And then bulletproof marriage is the one that caught our attention because of what it is that we do. You know guys whose marriages have suffered because of their career in law enforcement.
I is one. Talk a little about that. I mean, what was the stress on your marriage? And I wanted to find out, too, Adam, when you went into law enforcement, were you married and how did your wife feel about it? She supported me 110 percent.
Really? And yes, we were married. We had been married, at the time, my goodness, nine years, about nine years. You waited a long time to get married, right? You came out of high school.
We'd go to college, have a good set career. No, I got married at 18 years old. My wife had been 18 a month. And we had a lot of people in our family that were very close to us that said, I give it six months and they'll be divorced.
They wasn't bad wrong. I packed my bags about every week our first year. We were still growing up together. Getting into law enforcement around nine years later, she supported me, but I changed. She didn't, you know, and she didn't ask for that. She didn't sign up for who I became.
What do you mean you changed? Yeah, you become a little hard around the edges, hard-hearted. For example, you go to work and maybe your job is to write tickets all day. Maybe your job is to work motor vehicle crashes. Maybe your job is to run patrol.
Or you're an investigator. With all of those things, there are inherent stresses that are going to occur. And there's going to be some things on days that you don't want to relive.
You go work at the bank, insurance office, hospital, go home. How was your day? I had this guy come in and you want to talk about it most of the time. I got to the point I didn't want to relive what I went through. It took everything I had to make it home. And I didn't want to talk to her about it for a couple of reasons. One, I didn't want to relive it.
Number two, I was exhausted. Number three, I didn't want her to know about it because I wanted to protect her. I didn't want her to see the world as I saw it. Very evil, very violent, a fallen world and a lot of threats.
And when you're in law enforcement, you know things that are going on that are not made known to the general public all the time. And I wanted to protect my family. I didn't want them to have that stress and that worry on them.
So at the end of the day, I'd come home, take off my gear, sit down, stare at a blank TV, stare at a blank wall. How was your day, honey? Fine. I wouldn't say anything else. Did she push you a little bit? Did she feel that divide between you?
Yeah, I think so. Did you see what my wife's doing? She's doing it right now. She's pushing you. She's getting more. This is my life. And you love it. She saw me fading.
And I forget at what point in my career it was, maybe five years in, four years in, whatever. But towards the end, it was a Friday, I come home. She said, hey, mom's keeping the kids. I've got your bags packed.
We're going out of town for the weekend, just me and you. She said, I know you need a break. And she didn't have to do that. I mean, I'm the sole income for the house. She works harder than I do as a homeschool mom of three.
But I'm the sole income. And I knew that that took a lot for her to do that. So we went. We stayed in a hotel. We had a nice dinner.
We rode horses through the mountains in north Georgia. And I realized in that moment that the woman that I had hurt, whether intentionally or because I was so hurt, still loved me. And we talk a lot about the love of God and we talk a lot about how he loves us. We sing about it.
It's beautiful songs. But until another human being has demonstrated that love and mirrored his love for us, like she did for me, that's the love that changes you because it was unconditional unrelenting. Did not matter now. We still we still had rough spots and bumpy spells. But she essentially wrestled Hulk back to the ground, back to a normal guy. And she loved me through the storm. And sometimes that's what marriage is.
Instead of saying, hey, I've got a rescue boat over here, I'm out and you go in your own way, you ride the storm out together. And I owe everything to her for that, because when I look at the love that she's shown me, I see the love of Jesus. Did you grow up with a spiritual foundation in your life? I grew up in a charismatic home. I was in church nine days a week and my stepdad was a pastor. I had this different idea of who God was, more so that he was sitting there with a leather belt waiting on me to mess up.
He could tear my head up or he's waiting to mash a button that I had to do good for him to be good to me. I remember signing my first membership card that said you can never go dance. You can never go to a movie theater. Can't listen to whatever. I'm like, this is going to be really hard.
That's not who God is, man. And it took me becoming a law enforcement officer to discover that, yeah, I wasn't there an entire career. I started because I was going to retire. I wanted to climb the ranks. I wanted to do everything. I don't have a lot of years on me, but I had a lot of miles on me for six years.
I did a lot of stuff. But if all the only purpose he had for me was to show me his love in that. I'll never forget in my roughest moments feeling, you know, I never heard the audible voice of God, but I would feel the Holy Spirit bubbling inside of me saying there's nothing you can do to change your love for me.
Hugging a toilet, drunk as all get out. There's nothing you can do to change my love for you. Well, take us back to that, Adam. What happened? So you get into law enforcement where your walk with God was not that dynamic. Yeah, it wasn't dynamic at all. You know, for me, it was performance based, like I said, and I think when you fight for your life and you encounter evil on a very real level, people that want to kill you and to kill your friends and people that are hurting other people, when you see these things that are going on in the world, it becomes a moment that you have sort of a fork in the road. You can just pretend like you didn't see it and keep going or you can face it head on. And I faced it and there was something here that was like, this ain't right.
This ain't right at all. And so instead of just pretending like it didn't exist and saying a sweet prayer and carrying on, I went to battle with it and it was a battle inside of me. I never doubted that God existed. It was if you're good, then why? If you love me, then why? So he was taking me through a place to where eventually he had been showing me his love the whole time.
And I think that that's the miracle of life is if you just look, you'll see it. But for me, I was so hardheaded, so stubborn that I had to sit down and essentially interrogate him. So I started drinking and that was sort of self-medicating, like we say, for the things that I dealt with. They teach you how to survive a fight if somebody is trying to stab you or kill you.
Teach you all the tactics and skills. But when I went through, it's not so much about that as much as it is how you respond afterwards and how you handle the trauma, how you handle encountering these things, seeing death from different causes. And so I started self-medicating and I drank and I drank heavy. It was never abusive, but I'd be silent, completely withdrawn from my family. One of the things we talked about earlier, I became a cop because I wanted my kids to be proud of me. When somebody said, what does your daddy do for a living? I wanted them to be able to bow their chest out and say, my daddy's a police officer.
And I had been so withdrawn. I mean, you can't go to most of the ball games. Your birthday parties, you're probably going to get called out. Christmas Day, I'll never forget one Christmas Day, chasing cows through somebody's yard.
Not the most violent thing I've ever encountered. But the family that's sitting there eating Christmas dinner saw me, a uniformed police officer, chasing cows. But I'm still not with my family. So there's sacrifices that have to be made and I was no longer willing to sacrifice my family. I'm willing to lay my life down for you.
But I'm not willing to give my family's life for you. That's where it came. So I started drinking. And we lost some very good friends that I served with, had a wake-up call, and started writing instead of drinking.
What do you mean you had a wake-up call? You can read about certain things, and that's sad. We don't flip the page. That's what we do as a society.
We read a headline, flip the page, or scroll. But when it's somebody that you know and that you've had a relationship with, it's different. We buried brothers that I served with for various causes, some inflicted, some not. But for me, my wake-up call was in a patrol car. And you're not supposed to talk about these sort of things.
Because if you talk about it, it shows a sign of weakness. I got to a point to where I was really, really tired in all facets. I was tired emotionally. I was tired mentally. I was tired physically. I saw no hope for my future.
My marriage was on the rocks, mainly because of me. And I had just pushed everybody in my life away. And it was a Sunday, working. I was working overtime.
Marked car, uniform, sitting in an old, used to be a gas station parking lot. And that was the day I was going to take my life. I've tried to do it all. I can't be good enough.
I can't answer these things. I can't put two and two together and make sense anymore. I don't understand it. I don't have to understand it.
But I believe in you for no other reason than I choose to believe, not because somebody else has persuaded me to. And there was a change. Now, it wasn't an instant. Everything changed overnight.
But the alcohol was gone. I didn't desire it anymore. I wanted to do things different and I wanted to pursue Him. So, writing and listening to where He was leading me and following that still small voice and wanting other people to experience the same love that I felt in that car that day.
You just don't really feel that love as a cop anymore. And I know for a fact where that love came from. Jesus was in that car with me. And it's because of Him that I'm here today. I don't owe my life to anybody but Jesus. And I've become a bond server of love and I want other people to know that there's hope. Did you go home that Sunday and tell your wife what had happened?
Oh, yeah. So, what happened was I no longer saw it as I have to do A, B, and C for Him to love me or to be a Christian. It became, oh my goodness, this love. I want to live in a way that shows Him how much I appreciate it and I want to give that love back to Him.
And I want to live in a way that when my life is done that He says, Well done, thou good and faithful servant. And that I was a good steward of it because we've all been given a measure of it. Do you remember what Amber said?
I really don't. I think I was in a fog. She was grateful. She's been supportive ever since. She saw a change and she'll tell you she saw a change.
What did she see? I became softer. I became her husband again, not just Officer Davis. I became a father to my children again and it gradually over time. That was probably a year after I left law enforcement that it really fell off.
And she was like, It's so good to have you back. What did your fellow officers see? I've had so many tell me how proud they were. I'll never forget one officer, I'm not going to say what his relationship was, but told me I'd be better off to go kill myself.
Explain that. Well, when you're no longer part of what's going on. And I wasn't partying anymore, I wasn't drinking anymore, I wasn't part of the clique anymore. I wanted to go to work to my job and go home. And that hurts because he had no idea what I had been dealing with.
He had no idea how close I was. And having those conversations, I think just drove me harder to go after God in that moment. And to see my family and say, I can fight for this job that in 20 years, 25 years, whatever, I'll be forgotten when I walk out the door, I'll be another number. Or I can fight for my family. And so I just shifted the priorities to where they should have been the whole time. It's okay to be a great cop, love your job.
But don't forsake your wife, your husband, your kids, your family, the people that are going to be there for you when you hang up the badge. Explain for listeners how consuming the law enforcement culture is for those who are in it. It's like life is here and everything else outside of that is not secondary.
It's third, fourth, it's way down the line, right? I can't tell you how long of a time in there. I had zero friends that were outside of law enforcement. And that's okay for a period, but you need to have those friends that are outside. When I talk to men today, I tell them, you need friends that are not in law enforcement.
And that's part of my assignment. You need to find you need to develop friends outside of law enforcement. Well, they don't understand what I got. That's okay, don't talk about it with them.
Talk about gardening or golf or the weather or something. But it's consuming because most of the time you're working 12-hour shifts, all right? So if you're going to work 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., you need to get up about 4.30 so you can be at briefing about 5.20. So you're 4.30, now you're going to get home at 6 if you're lucky, if you're lucky.
Most of the time you're going to catch a call right at 6 o'clock and you're going to have to work late. Your spouse is preparing and you're going to go home, you're going to go eat, you're going to meet them somewhere, go out to eat. You go and you are still not present.
Your body may be there but you're not there because you're still thinking about if you've got to do reports or you're thinking about stuff from today. And so you work that and then you've got court. And you may have court on your off days when you'd rather be with your family.
And then if you're going to go on vacation, you've got to report that to a supervisor so they know you're out of town. And so it's completely consuming. It's the lifestyle, it's the way of life.
Not apologetic, not sorry for it. That's the way it is, the law enforcement lifestyle. But there's got to be an injection of gospel, of the Holy Spirit, of the Word of God in there. The love of Jesus that changes that up so it's a healthy lifestyle.
We need men and women on the line. But there's got to be a presence of God in there because if not, the burden is we try to carry it on our own like I did. And it will crush you, it will destroy everything about you if you try to carry it on your own.
We were never created to do that. Take it and put it at his feet and he'll give you strength. Adam, how did you bring Jesus into your family?
He's in you, you're taking him with you in the workplace. How did the look of your family change? You know, it started just by, as silly as it sounds, sitting at church with my wife. Or, this is unique, but grabbing her hand at night before bed in front of the kids and saying a prayer.
And it doesn't have to be complicated or complex. When we become the authority in our home, under the authority of the Great Shepherd, that's the way it's supposed to be. Pray for her daily. It's amazing how the environment changes in your home. It's hard to remain mad at your spouse if you're holding hands praying together. So, it was really simple steps and I hate that I didn't document everything, but I really wasn't thinking about that at the point, but it's a good idea. And so, that's what Bulletproof Marriage did, was introduce praying with your spouse every day for 90 days.
And it's opened up a lot of communication efforts between spouses that have been shut down for a while. I was thinking about your book and I was thinking, in the city where I live, there are a little more than 700 employees of the police department. Wow. I thought, what if a local church, a couple local churches, pitched in and said, let's buy 700 copies of this book. That would be awesome. And just make it as a gift to everybody who works for the police department.
What if in every police force in America, people would buy the book and give it to police officers, people on the police force, with a note inside. Even have everybody, somebody in the church just write a note saying, praying for you. Appreciate what you do. And thank you. Thank you for what you do. If I can ever help, here's my number.
Love it, Bob. Give them a copy of that book. We've had a lot of churches do that and a lot of businesses do that with Behind the Badge.
Yes. Obviously, about half are married, but it's written from a cop who has a testimony for cops. And if you talk to cops who've read it, the ones who were contemplating suicide, who God did something in their life, or the ones who were getting ready to, they'd already called the divorce lawyer and set the appointment and bulletproof marriage. They went through it in 90 days and God changed their lives. It's laid out.
He used what I went through, the mess, and turned it into a beautiful gift, literally. And we've had a lot of churches across the country do that in all 50 states. Yeah.
And so thankful for that. I mean, what a great idea. You know anywhere they could get that book, Bob? Well, as a matter of fact, you can go to our website, familylifetoday.com, and Adam's Book Bulletproof Marriage, which is a 90-day devotional, is available. There's another devotional called On Spiritual Combat, 30 Missions for Victorious Warfare, and then a 365-day devotional for police officers called Behind the Badge.
All of these resources are resources for you to look at, pray about. Do you know somebody who's in law enforcement? Maybe you want to buy a copy and give it as a gift to them. Or again, maybe you or your church want to do something for the police officers in your community. Go to familylifetoday.com and look at the resources Adam has available.
You can order them from us online, or you can call to order. 1-800-FL-TODAY is the number. That's 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY.
Check out Adam Davis' books and devotionals for people who are in law enforcement and figure out what you'd like to give to somebody as a gift. And let me just say thank you to those of you who have made today's program a gift for all of us. Those of you who are regular donors to Family Life Today as legacy partners, those of you who donate from time to time, you are the ones who have covered the cost of producing and syndicating this program so that listeners in your community, listeners all around the world, can benefit from these kinds of conversations. Family Life Today's goal is to provide practical, biblical help and hope for marriages and families, and we're grateful for those of you who partner with us and make that possible. If you're a long-time listener and you've never made a donation, or if you're a regular listener and it's been a while since you've donated, go to familylifetoday.com and make a donation today, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY.
When you do, you're investing in the lives and the marriages and the families of people all around the world, and we are grateful for that partnership. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow as we continue our conversation about the unique challenges facing people who are in law enforcement, facing their marriages and their families. Adam Davis will be with us again tomorrow. Hope you can be here as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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