GAME WARDEN CHAPLAIN CHAT

Retired Game Warden Raymond Custer was in the hospital recently (he’s out now and doing well).  I ran up to San Angelo to see him and he started telling me about some of his stories from his old Game Warden days.  What a hoot he is!  Remember to tell your stories because they mean so much to those who will come after you.  You are the past of their present and they will be the past to someone else’s future.  Hope you enjoy him as I did!

This month, I have a great interview with a very charismatic man named TJ Greany!  TJ is a friend of Carter Smith who introduces us to TJ before I interview him.  If you are looking for a good program to get boys out into the outdoors while learning skills that, unfortunately, are being lost due to technology and staying indoors, then KOZ may be just the program for you.  There are opportunities for girls out there, as well, but KOZ is specifically for getting boys, many of whom have no father or man in their life to teach them outdoor life skills, outside and learning how to do outdoor things while learning about God.  If you’re looking for a outreach program for boys, you can’t do any better than this.  Hope you enjoy!

In this final installment of “The Power of Story,” the final two lessons I learned while living in the back of my 1969 Ford Fairlane 500 is presented.  1) Without an Advocate, there is ultimately no one to stand up for us, and 2) God always presents a way for us to see us as we are.  What is YOUR story?  Who can benefit from hearing what you’ve been through and how they, too, can move forward in life by hearing your story?  Don’t be silent!  Tell your story and watch to see how far your influence can go!

Last month I talked about three life lessons God taught me in one of the worst times of my life. So, this month, I begin with the first lesson. Why? Well, we as humans learn from the lessons of others. Its one of the ways God has given us to not only teach us, but for us to use to teach and help others going through difficult times of life. So, I hope you get something from this because “as iron sharpens iron, so we sharpen each other!”

We, each of us, have a story to tell.  That means that it is important and worth sharing.  Beginning this month and for the next three months, we will share in the telling of a story and how God has taken a stupid, unruly, egotistical young man to a new place and how important it was for his life.

I hope you will enjoy the journey.  Each story is a journey!  Your story is a journey and one worth telling for . . . you never know who!

We talk a lot about heroes on this site because we honor our Game Wardens for the things they do – especially when they had no idea they were going to be put into certain situations.

This month, we interview GW Rob Frets just over a year after the horrific shooting in Sutherland Springs. Rob was one of the first on the scene after the massacre of so many people and we talk to him about how he is doing, how he’s coping and what strategies he used to get through this past year.

Listen in to his own words. We will all go through horrific incidents in our lives, but Rob gives us good advice about how those incidents do not need to defeat us in our minds and hearts.

October reflects the interview with one of our own Game Wardens.  Aiden Deitz is a Game Warden for Starr County.  He just returned, recently, from a 9 month stint as a First Lieutenant with the Texas Army National Guard as a Platoon Leader.  He had 40 plus men and women under his command on the front lines and down-range.  In this interview you will hear the difficulties of life deployed away from his loved ones, how he and his family coped with the deployment and ways to make it through crises, stress and the difficulties away from family, friends and a job he loves.  After listening, please send him a “Thank you” for his service to our country and a “Welcome Home” email so he can know his time away is appreciated by all of us.  A hearty “Well Done” to him and his family!!

Last month I indicated that the August Podcast would be nothing but jokes from the field and that there would be a competition for the best joke.  Well, that joke was won by the seven-year-old girl, Hailey, the daughter of one of our own TPWD folks.  I have included her joke, in her own words, which is “cute as the dickens!”  I’ll be sending her an age-appropriate prize!  Hope you enjoy the jokes and can use them the next time you’re out with friends.  I’ve already used some of them, myself!

This month, I’m asking everyone to send me their favorite jokes and we’ll play them in August.  Send them to me in an audio file (in your voice) or in text form (I’ll do my best to tell it for you) to [email protected].  Let’s see who has the best jokes.  A reward will be coming to the one our panel has set up to judge.  Remember to keep it clean!  No person(s) attacked; no dirty jokes; no ethnic jokes; no culture jokes, race jokes, sexual orientation jokes, etc.  Let the one in this podcast be an example of a clean joke.

We live in a world of social media.  This causes us to feel like we’re connected to so many more people, including people we haven’t seen in a long time.  The trouble is, perhaps we really aren’t connected as well as we think we are.  The younger folks in our world have actually been recording that they are actually more lonely because their connections are mostly electronic.  But we can’t lay that only at their feet.  All of us have substituted true connections for short spurts of “connection.”  The result is that we are feeling, as a society and as individuals, more loneliness, depression and anxiety as we search for true, meaningful relationships.  This podcast aims simply to help us ask the right questions about ourselves, our families and our work-mates.