Behind the Badge: A Chaplain's Call Ep 4, "Faith and the Law Enforcement Profession"

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Hello again.
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Welcome to Behind the Badge, a chaplain's call.
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We're going to talk about faith and the law enforcement profession today.
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And specifically, how can faith improve your law enforcement career?
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Now we see so many ugly, kata, tragic, and senseless situations and the aftermath of those situations that at some point in time most of us ask ourselves why does blank insert a name allow this to happen?
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So today we're going to talk about that faith.
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Faith is basically a core block of beliefs that guide your moral compass behavior and actions.
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To simplify, faith would be trust in a person, a thing, or a concept.
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And then we get to religious faith.
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Religious faith comes in many forms.
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There are twelve classical religions Baha'i, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism.
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And within those twelve classical religions, there are approximately four thousand different faiths.
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In the context of religion, one can define faith as the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a god or gods.
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Religious people often think of faith as confidence based on a perceived degree of warrant, while others who are more skeptical of organized religions, tend to think of faith simply as belief without evidence.
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In whatever way you wish to define or accept the concept of faith in a religious context, it is safe to say that most of us have at one time or do presently, have some level of faith.
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The million dollar question is how strong is your faith and do you truly realize how a strong faith can improve your law enforcement career?
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And that would include your law enforcement personal life.
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One thing that strong faith requires is discipline.
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Another would be humility, another would be positivity.
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Now if you take just those three elements, have you not described three needed traits in our career?
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We wouldn't survive without them.
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Our profession dictates that we deal with stress on a daily level.
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Stress from responding to calls, stress from leadership within the agency, with what the community expects of us, stress from spouses, significant others, family members, finances, etc.
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etc.
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Then that stress can be hugely amped up by a single dynamic event or a cumulative sum of the smaller events.
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So much of the time we end up taking that stress home with us, which can cause, yes, even more stress, which very often causes us to crash our personal lives because our professional lives have gotten way out of balance.
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To combat that, some head for the gym, which can relieve the stress.
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Yet while they're in the gym, others head for the bar or another relationship, an affair.
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Some shut down and become depressed.
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Some find buying an expensive toy, a truck or a boat, temporarily relieves that stress.
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Now while the gym is a positive example of fighting stress, the rest are obviously negative.
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The good news is that faith can help greatly to combat stress and the out of control balances in our lives.
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Law enforcement officers can lessen stress when they utilize a strong faith to get a crystal clear view of their purpose in life.
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Faith enhances your positivity, humility, and discipline, which in turn strengthens your personal and family relationships and your fiscal responsibilities.
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If you take an LEO with little or no spiritual foundation and they spend some time investigating faith, they will usually find much more balance in their daily professional and personal lives.
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Knowledge is king.
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Every working day we throw on our ballistic vest, duty belt, taser, ASP, our ASP, IFAC, extra mags for our pistol and patrol rifle, comms, etc.
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We carry all these weapons and tools on our person in order to be prepared to do our work and to survive our shift and go home.
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But do we also prioritize a place to keep our faith with us?
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Where do we carry that?
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We need to look at our faith as an indispensable survival tool.
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Having trouble getting started?
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Try these small steps at first.
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Each has served me well through the years.
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Find that spiritual motivator, a person, a picture, a scripture, a song, a memory.
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You need to know what inspires you.
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It will be unique to you and your individual makeup.
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While a faith or spiritual mentor can help you find those motivators, just be sure that the person you are using as a mentor motivator does not push or bully you to adopt their motivator.
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If they do, turn around, run away quickly.
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Create a transition ritual.
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This one is hugely assisted by a strong faith.
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My personal ritual during my years in law enforcement before the shift was this.
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As I was leaving, I would never say goodbye.
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It was and to this day is, I'll see you in a bit.
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I would then say to myself as I was getting in my car, no matter what comes at me today, I will be coming home after shift.
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It set me up to maintain enhanced awareness and set in my mind that nothing was going to prevent me from returning home.
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Unfortunately, what I did not do well was to transition out of that LEO role after work was done until I've realized, until I finally realized I also needed a transition to reset myself before I got home.
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I began stopping for a coffee, a soft drink, a taco, etc.
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after I was done with my shift.
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That gave me time to process, delete, or file away, and reset myself.
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Now I carried suspicion of people with me constantly, and to some degree I still do.
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I failed to realize that most people are good and decent.
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In our profession, that is probably the factor that affects us most.
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We have trouble thinking and letting go of thinking the worst of people.
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Some are evil, I know that.
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In this job, we've all dealt with those people.
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However, most people are respectable.
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Work on building, finding, or renewing a faith spiritual identity, and that doesn't mean you're going to start wearing flowers in your hair, change your camo to pink woodland, or start watching badminton matches all day.
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It simply means you're going to beef up a very important survival tool.
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It will help you see yourself not just as an LEO, but as a human, civilian who chooses to do right as a law enforcement professional.
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When we overemphasize the law enforcement dimension of ourselves and ignore all our other sides, we put ourselves at risk.
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We jeopardize our relationships, our health, our fiscal responsibilities.
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Things start going downhill in our personal lives.
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And because that crash causes more stress, we then endanger our ability to survive on the streets.
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Our reaction time can decrease, and even if that decreases only by 0.25 of a second, that is enough to put you behind the loop and trying to catch up.
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I've seen it, it happens.
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When you give up many of the dimensions in your personal private life and overemphasize the LEO dimension of your life, you become helpless to control either identity.
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I assure you that a strong faith and spiritual outlook can bring balance to all the dimensions of your life.
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You will notice I have not suggested what faith, deity, or spiritual slant you should believe in.
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That is strictly a personal choice.
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Be it God, Allah, Buddha, maybe the cowboys, Broncos, Raiders, maybe not.
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Look for and find or rejuvenate your faith now.
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Make it a priority in your life.
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At some point, someone usually brings up atheism.
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I have worked with those faith systems that were more esoteric, atheism, theism, Wicca, etc.
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When I was a LEO in Wesicho, there was an officer whose faith system was Santoria.
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I will state that I have personally witnessed the lack of strength that atheism, theism, Wicca, and other esoteric faith systems have given people when everything truly goes down into the toilet.
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You see, it is not within reason so much who or what your belief or deity is called, it's the fact that you have that strong faith and spiritual center in your life.
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The dividends it pays you, they're gonna be immeasurable.
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I pray that this might give you something to think about, perhaps cause you to reevaluate, or if you are not of faith, to search for a faith system.
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Maybe start exercising your faith in spirituality to a greater degree.
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Try it.
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Take it out for a walk, jog with it for a while.
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See for yourself if I am right or wrong.
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I love all my brothers and sisters.
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Stay safe, all of you.
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Stay strong mentally, physically, and spiritually.
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God's peace.