Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.
Stories of hopelessness turned into hope. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Starts here, now. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We're in the middle of a discussion about a great topic, Harold, and it is your topic.
Do you want to tell us a little bit more about it? It's dealing with the movies and the makeup of teams. Jesus had his team. Paul described that the church is being made up of different team members. Successful teams have people with different skill sets.
Not everyone is the same. And I was thinking about the recruiting of football teams and so forth. One of the major points being that it doesn't matter how good your quarterback is, if he doesn't have a line in front of him, he's not going to do any good. And the same is true for the receivers, the running backs, etc. It's the big old grunts in the line that determine the outcome of the game. And so that was the idea was to look at how teams are made up of different individuals in order to be successful.
It's true. And if you go in the opposite direction, maybe not the biggest guy, sometimes the smallest guy makes an impact. When you look at basketball, you may have a great center, a big seven-foot center, but if it doesn't have a point guard that can get him the ball, he's not going to be able to do anything except get rebounds.
He'll get a few put backs, that's about it, but he's not going to be much on the offensive board. Well, I enjoy the fact that Zakiya's got to be part of the team. That tells me that I can be short and still be on the team. That's true.
Baseball has a short stop. Well, I remember when I was first in a position to do hiring at work, one of my bosses had told me at the time, my boss at the time said, look, you're going to want to hire somebody that thinks exactly like you do, sees everything the way you do. And if you do that, one of you is not needed. And his point was you need diversity and thought really to make a team strong. Now you're going to have a lot of storming, norming, you know, before you ever get to performing, right? You got to go through that whole cycle to get to that point. But when you do, you're going to be so much stronger than you are if you just try to fill a team of everybody thinks exactly like you.
You know, go ahead. One of the things that I also think about the team aspect is that outsiders can look and see that and realize that they can fit and be part of a team as well. So I think it is another positive impact of a successful team.
Yep. Danny, in the first show you were talking about, in the makeup of this team, you know, one of the things about this team that always has amazed me, you know, God had to be the one to put it together, right, is up until about a couple years ago, none of us went to church together. You know, none of us had the same church background. You know, we all come from different, different denominations, different those types of things. And, and typically, that's enough to keep Christians apart. I mean, if you really want to be honest, that, you know, that often is what keeps them apart, instead of their love of God, they see the differences in how they see the doctrine, right, and let that, you know, keep them away. But, you know, God put this team together with a very diverse background from the standpoint of, you know, where we came from, from our beliefs. And it's made us all stronger, because different churches teach on different things. They all may teach from the Bible, but they tend to fall in this little vein of where they like to their sweet spot. You know, there may be a grace oriented church or this oriented church. And when you get a group of people from a lot different backgrounds, you get more holistic look at the Bible.
Right? Because this church that you went to Harold taught in this vein, or Andy, the one you went to taught in this vein, you know, and so we get a more complete look at God, the more that we can walk and trust with each other and listen to one another. Yeah, my buddy Ron Harris always says, he says that when he meets somebody new, he gets to see Jesus through their eyes. Yeah. And which is, which is a cool thing, because you had the diversity of it all, because they, you know, not everybody sees things the same way.
Otherwise, there'll be one building that will be really crowded. Yeah. So that's fair. So Andy, you have the first clip in the after hours?
Yep. So when I first got the topic, I wanted to go really wanted to go with something from Band of Brothers. And I think that's a great example of a team and it follows, you know, the team from D-Day all the way to they, to I guess, the Eagles lair at where Hitler was. But hard to find clips, they're really hard to find a clip that I wanted to express that expressed, you know, a whole team and looking at the different components and even the one I found, I'm really not happy with. But anyway, there's so many.
I'm glad to hear that. And in retrospect, there's a lot of stuff out there that I could have pulled from. I mean, there's Remember the Titans, there's Braveheart. But I picked something from the A team, the 70 show, I mean, you got to, you got to bring in the A team. And if you've if you've seen that 70s 80 show, it's about a bunch of mercenaries going there every week, they got a new challenge to help somebody out. And they all bring their skill set. So you've got Hannibal, the leader, he's a strategist kind of guy, big picture guy, you got face, he's kind of this con artist that always acquire stuff that they need. You got BA, the tough guy and the driver. And then you've got Murdoch, the crazy one, but then he's the pilot. And in this clip, you won't get all of that, you'll see though, that they get their assignments in this particular clip there.
This guy's being run off his logging business by some bullies. And basically, you see that interaction, then you see Hannibal kind of give assign the jobs to the guys to do what they need to do. And then at the end, you'll see the chainsaw come in, they proactively went after this bully group and started fighting back. Again, it's just a brief thing just to show how the team worked together.
And you'd see it in every episode, though, where these guys excelled in their roles. Well, this is the new crew you hired, John. That's right, McEwen. We're gonna be hauling logs. That's good to hear. We figured we'd just come up here and check on union cards. How about you? You got a union card? No. Hey, face, you got a union card? No, I must have left it back in my tuxedo. How about you, B.A.?
This is my union card. Hey, now easy, fellas. You came up here nice and friendly-like. Just more than I can say it the way you handled yourself at the gas stop yesterday.
We handled ourselves beautifully at the truck stop. McEwen, it's more than just taking the money from these loggers. You've taken their dreams and you've twisted them till there's nothing left.
It's very poetic. The lady is right. You're taking these people money and got them believing you can get more for their lumber. And you can't.
And you knew it. You're not a union. You're just a bunch of goons extorting money from good, hardworking people.
Easy, easy. You know, Lawrence, seems to me there's an overdue mortgage on this place. And if you don't get your logs to the mill, you're gonna lose your house. Now, that's a real nasty bit of trouble. But I got this feeling that you're in for a whole run of nasty trouble. Well, now that you've said what you came to say, get off our property. Come on. Yeah, what you said, you know, not trouble.
Yeah, I expect that. V.A. Stand guard up by the rope of those trees. Murdock, make a half circle about a quarter mile. See what you can find. Face, we still gotta get that truck.
Gotcha. And after what happened to Lawrence and his pals today, I don't think we're gonna have to worry about them anymore. They're probably in the next county by now. Why don't you tell the boys it's payday. I love it when a plan comes together. So you got classic A team where they come to the rescue, and that's when you heard the chainsaw.
They came in and these guys were sitting around in the office and they were taking care of business. And it was a mercenary team going after protecting people. And if you think about what we're about in the spirit is working on behalf of God and taking back men's hearts, or we're after men's hearts, God's after hearts through our ministry. But what's really cool is Hannibal always ended every show with, I love it when a plan comes together because it got very chaotic during this. And I feel like that should be our motto when we finish up a boot camp.
I love it when a plan comes together because it's chaos a lot of times and a lot of stuff going on, but God always puts us together and the plan comes together. It may not look like it's gonna, we see those attacks at the beginning of boot camp and what's coming against us, what's coming against the team, but God puts us together to come through and for a plan to come together. So if we let him. Yeah, that's true.
That's true. If we let him indeed. Terry, did you have something you want to add? You want to grab the microphone?
No, no. I like to look back to something you said about football. It's always been something that I've thought about the game of football. And let's say we meet another football fan, you know, and we can talk football. We'll talk forever. So the next time I see him, we'll talk. But if we start talking favorite teams, our conversation tends to shorten and we stopped to talk to one another. We start talking about each other. So, you know, it's great when a team can come together and we talk just the plan, not so much, you know, not so much what we can do, but what we can do if we stick to God's plan, you know, don't get our favorite teams and huddle up behind our favorite mascot, you know, cause it don't work.
It doesn't work. Rodney, you actually are up next and have the next clip. If you want to tell us a little bit about it. Oh, that means you're, you're going last. Yeah. If I decide to play mine now, I'll play it. You can kind of try to play that, but we know better.
I'll play it. Yeah. Well, Robby stole the one that I was going to go with because I was one of the last ones. I was the last one to put a clip in. So Robby stole it when he did it on time. Exactly. Remember it's perspective. He was nine minutes before me when I looked it up.
He was nine minutes more than time. That's all I know. Cause I looked it up and I was like, man, the dirty dozen. That's the first thing I thought of when Harold's sent it out. It had magnificent seven. I'm like, no, not magnificent seven. It's the other one.
What is it? Oh yeah. Dirty dozen.
If that bartender would have cast that check at that moment, it wouldn't have bounced. Sure. Is that your story?
You're sticking to it? That's the story. Yeah.
Yeah. And I was like, Oh, I saw, I wouldn't listen to his clip. I'm like, Oh, that's a great clip. I was like, yeah, he's going to go first.
And he did. And then I went back to one of the other ones that I had that I was like, I really thought this was a better clip to explain what I probably wanted to explain. But I thought, you know, like Robby said in the first show, why dirty dozen was so perfect. Cause it is a dozen and they are a band of misfits.
I went with hacksaw Ridge. Again, my thought was military because when you look at military teams, they're always just ordinary people. I mean, that's what the military is made up of is just ordinary people that sign up, you know, eventually there's drafts at times, but there's normally, okay, I'll sign up.
I'll go in, I'll do this. And people go on to do extraordinary things through usually a team. Sometimes like we've said, there's an individual effort, but most times it's very coordinated through all kinds of different people. And then like we talked about with our team, what you coordinated, what you thought was going to happen, something else happens.
And you have to call an audible and you go in a different direction. You're getting flanked or you got to go flank them. And all these other things happen in war.
They happen even in, we just do war games. When you're just doing military planning and strategy, all kinds of things happen and you have to have core principles. You have to have core beliefs in your other men that you're battling with. You have to consider them brothers. And if you're not considered them brothers and you're just like, well, they're expendable.
That makes you expendable and that it just doesn't work in a team environment. So that's where I went. And then in this scene, what you have is Desmond Doss is saying a prayer before they go back in. And right before they go back up on the Ridge, they've just went in a big battle on top of Hacksaw Ridge where everything looks really good. They're fighting the enemy. And then all of a sudden the enemy really comes out from the bunkers, from all the tunnels and everything else and just swarms them, overwhelms them.
They're getting massacred. They go back down over the cliff. Well, there's a bunch of men still up on that cliff. Desmond Doss saves, I think the number 75, if I remember right, men up on there all by himself, bringing people down, except he's not by himself because we love the cliff.
Just one more, God, just one more. And Lord leads him to go find all these people and he brings them down. And what ends up happening is all these other ordinary men will not go back up on that Ridge until Desmond is done praying for them, is going back up with them. And this is on his Sabbath and that's where you hear them this right before they go back to that scene where they're about to go up. And you don't get to hear the prayer because it's a silent prayer, but that's all what's kind of going on and leading up to this moment where these men don't necessarily believe in God, but they believe in the man who believes in God. And he, as the leader at this point, just through faith is the one that's kind of bringing the team together. Even though he's not the leader, nobody considered him a leader through bootcamp, they discarded him. And now they completely see a different man than what he is through Christ.
These men don't believe the same way you do, but they believe so much and how much you believe and what you did on that really just nothing short of a miracle and they want a piece of it. And then I'm going to go up there without you. What's your delay, captain? You're supposed to begin that assault 10 minutes ago. We're waiting, sir.
Waiting for what? Private Doss to finish praying for us, sir. Private Doss is praying for you.
Who is Private Doss? Let's go to work. And they're going to work is going right back up on that cliff where they just got massacred, you know, a couple of days ago. So, you know, the teamwork in the eternal infinite Lord and you got the Trinity forever and then let us make man in our image is kind of to me the genesis of everything, right? That's where we come in. And Paul talks about the hand or the body, whatever part of the body of Christ you are, be that part because every piece of the team in Christ is essential.
You know, nobody, we talk about that quite often where if you don't reflect that part of God's glory, which you're meant to reflect, nobody's going to see it. And you have to do that. And you have to step up sometimes in very uncomfortable situations. And there with always have to have some kind of leader and leadership. Again, even in the Trinity, you see that where they're equal in essence, but they have different roles. The Father is the one who leads and the Son comes to do the Father's will.
And then the Holy Spirit points us into Christ and Christ points us into the Father. They have their roles and that's what we have to maintain and understand and live up to our roles. One situation happened to work a long time ago.
I worked at McDonnell Douglas at the beginning of my career and was able to work on the new ENF model when it came out and I designed the process for putting together the inner wing. And there was a big process change they wanted me to go work on. And in the middle of it, we were making some progress, but it was like, we're going to take kind of a major step. And I wanted to go one way, the team on the floor wanted to go the other. And at this point in time, they kind of did things because they were just kind of expected to.
They weren't bought in. And I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen if we did it their way. And I tried to talk to them out of it, tried to explain and all this kind of stuff in one ear out the other. And they were convinced their way was better.
Fine, let's go your way. We went their way and they had a huge amount of rework. It didn't go the way they planned. They realized their error. All this rework, I remember the supervisor coming up and saying, what did you do?
We got all this rework. And I said, have you talked to your people yet? And she's like, no.
Well, go talk to them. Well, she apologized there. She said, yep, they took full blame. That was their decision. They want to go that way. But the next time I go down to talk to them, ask them about what they want to do. Oh, they were all in.
They were bought in. They were like, now we're a team. And sometimes you have to go through things like that, a failure, just to realize it because I'm not out to do anything wrong with you guys.
I really want to work with you. But again, sometimes I think the attitude beforehand was, it's all just work until you make it to where I can relax and do nothing. They don't see the bigger picture in what we're trying to do with things.
They saw something that was a little more, let's say myopic. And then it's like, okay, we want to go do that. And I'm like, you have to have give and take. Again, we failed one time and we moved on and it was like, fail fast, go on, move on, learn from it and apply.
They were so great to work with because then we really started moving things and had things working so much better within a matter of a few weeks. And it's like, okay, those are the things and the teamwork that you try to build that where you can trust each other. It's like, I'm not out to get you.
You're not out to get me. And some environments, that's really sad because that's what you're in. Everybody's out to make themselves look good by making others look bad. And I've had to check myself on that a lot of times because you get in that mode where you lose the higher order of what you're going for and you just become about me.
And that's when you're going to lose everybody else in your team. Thank you. I don't actually think I'm going to play my clip. We'll see. I want to ask you guys a question first. Well, here's the point. You guys made the points I was going to make with my clip, a lot of it. And so just to say the same thing and play it again, I don't know that I want to do that.
I'd rather ask you guys a question and that makes it easier on me. What's it meant to you to be a part of a team? Where has that made an impact in your life?
For me, it's been a game changer, right? Because I realized that if it's just me alone, I can't do it. One, I'm easy for the enemy to take me out. Two, but you guys support me and bring me along. And you also hold me accountable, right?
If it's just me, I only have to look in the mirror and hold myself accountable. And I'm not the best at doing that. And being a part of a team helps me a lot because I know you guys are relying on me to do certain things. And that causes me to go do what I know I want to do. But in the middle of something, I may have something I think I'd rather do at that time, but it's never more important to me, right? And it grounds me and it puts me in a place that is really good for my heart. And there's so much more to it. I'll let you guys kind of answer that and we can come back to it, but what's it meant for you to be a part of a team and how's that made a difference in your life?
Well, since I'm the only one sitting here with a microphone, I guess I'll go. Like I just said a minute ago on that tale there where we weren't acting as a team then became a team. I think one of the worst things is when I've been thinking I'm on a team and find out, no, we got a bunch of individuals. That is one of those things where it's kind of a lesson learned. You're like, oh my gosh, I need to learn to read the room, read the people, test those things. In my career, I've just been fortunate that over time I've had good mentors and we learned a process to where you build up other people by mentoring and doing those things.
And I never planned on being a mentor in my life, but having someone mentor me to be a mentor, to be a teacher was wonderful because then I could go out and actually work very specifically through a series of questions. And it was just so key to be able to probe in and get people to think and act differently so that they could actually build each other up rather than just blame and point fingers. And that's what I like about being on a team because we've achieved things that I remember sitting in meetings where everybody's like, well, are we really, the numbers really that good?
Is that really the right reason? And over months, eventually going out and looking at stuff and going, yeah, everything seems to be right with the numbers are that good. And nobody stands up and says anything from the upper management. I was like, well, this is what this team over here went and did.
They don't recognize those things sometimes. And it's like, but the team did. They made a big stride and that's great to be able to share that. What's really great about being on a successful team is that you're pulling together. I didn't play football in high school until I was a senior. Being a little guy, my mother was afraid I was going to get hurt and no, she didn't want me to play. Well, I finally, as a senior, went out and actually ended up being the first string running back. But the rest of the team didn't want to win like I did.
I mean, I would go through a brick wall in order to win. They couldn't care less. They talked about shooting pool, drinking beer, whatever. I hated the team that I was on. I loved playing the football, but I hated the team I was on because we won three games out of nine.
Well, here's an example. I was a backup quarterback and at practice session, if the coach had to be in a teacher's meeting in the evening and would be lined up throwing passes, they'd be throwing rocks off my helmet, the ones back in the line behind. And so if the guy coming up to catch the pass was a little guy, he's going to go short and I would drill him as hard as I could. If he's one of the big grunts, go long.
And I'd throw it way past his head. So, I mean, there was this constant conflict between me and a lot of the other guys on the team because of the difference in what we wanted out of that team. I wanted to win. I wanted to be as good as we could be. And that's why I love being a part of this team.
We're pulling together, trying to do something good. One of the defining moments being a part of this team was a few boot camps ago. My wife called me in the middle of boot camp and she was in distress.
She thought there were people around the house, flashlights and stuff like that. And, you know, we had a boot camp going on and, you know, going the whole journey with my wife. But at that moment, I knew I had to go. And not only did part of the team, you know, it wasn't, oh, I can't believe you're going to leave. It was, what do you need?
How do you need? You know, David offered me firearms and he offered to go with me. Several of you, do you need somebody to go with you? And I think, and, you know, it was such a defining moment in my life as part of the team because I knew then we were part of the team. And most importantly was my wife knew we were part of the team.
And that was such a cool moment. Yeah, I think joining in again, being alone and then coming to a team and immediately given responsibility to do something like boot camps and stuff, which called you into doing something. You wanted to stay on the periphery, but you're called in to do something and that escalated and you do more and more become more comfortable.
But that's really helping people mentoring you into growth. And that's what you guys did. And hopefully I'm doing with the other guys that joined. So thank you guys. I wish we had more time to talk about it, but as you hear the music playing, it's time for us to get going, but you have time to register for the boot camp. That's coming up November 21st through 24th, masculine journey.org. If you want to be a part of a team, lean into God, say, God, I want to be a part of the team and be a part of his team first, and then he'll lead you to the rest of your team. We'll talk with you next week. Love somebody well this week. This is the truth network.
