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Peter Ostapko talks about The Kinsmen Journal, a publication guiding men on an internal journey and the impact of their lives to the people around them.
Join Peter Ostapko, founder and publisher of The Kinsmen Journal, and I as we go over the values and purpose behind this modern artifact that isn't a book but also isn't a magazine. It is a journal/publication aimed at Faith, Fatherhood, and Work. This journal is laden with amazing stories and images for men to relate to and have conversation about. Join us as we explore how to become a better father, worker, and man in this amazing podcast.
Peter is the Founder and Publisher of Kinsmen Journal. Publishing has long been a dream of his, though only in recent years did the dream become more clear. This platform and voice has been birthed out of his belief that God is good, and that each of us have a story to tell, because of a Savior that redeems.
PETER'S SOCIALS
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterostapko/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/kinsmenjournal/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100069848644963
KINSMEN JOURNAL WEBSITE
https://www.kinsmenjournal.com/
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Faith, Fatherhood, and Work. Some of the most important things and areas of a man's life. Publisher of the Kinsmen Journal, Peter Ostapko, joins us on the podcast this week to go over the values and purpose behind his modern artifact that isn't a book but also isn't a magazine. This journal is laden with amazing stories and images for men to relate to and have conversation about. Join us as we explore how to become a better father, worker, and man in this amazing podcast.
I have Peter Ostapko on this episode with me. Peter is the Founder and Publisher of the Kinsmen Journal. I’m going to tell you I have bought and read a lot of books. I don’t even know what to call this, but it’s 240-page. Peter calls it an artifact with essays and beautiful pictures as the masterpiece for men of faith, fatherhood, and work. Those three sections are what they talk about faith, fatherhood, and work. It’s a masterpiece that I use as a resource and a tool literally every single day of my life. These are real stories from real men, beautiful pictures, and I can walk through the stories with him.
He is the Founder and Publisher of this book I bought 50 copies to give away as gifts because it has meant that much to me, and I don’t say that lightly. He’s also bi-vocational. He’s a commercial lender at a community bank, and he does this as a side project. He is calling on men to become more focused and intentional about what matters in their life, especially in those three areas, faith, fatherhood, and work. I’m going to welcome you guys to the show with Peter Ostapko.
I also want to mention, before I welcome Peter, to go over to our website at IronDeep.com. We posted three events for 2023. The first one is the Men’s Awakening. We’re going to be heading out to Zion National Park. It is beautiful. God’s glory and creation are everywhere. We’re going to be taking about 30 to 35 guys to visit Zion National Park. We’ve rented out a couple of houses on 25 acres in Zion National Park right at the foot of a mountain. You can check that retreat out. It’s March 13th through the 16th, 2023. The cost and all the details are on our website, IronDeep.com.
We also have a soulmate retreat because these are for businessmen that want to deepen their faith and relationship with God and their spouse. That’s going to be in Palm Springs. That’s May 8th through the 11th of 2023. Check out that event on IronDeep.com too. We got some awesome things, guys. Our community is growing. A lot of people are talking about what we’re doing. I’m excited because God is faithful. This is a passion of mine. I see myself doing this Iron Deep and building out this community for the next couple of years of my life and then passing it on. It’s not about Brett Snodgrass but about the Lord, what he’s doing, how he’s restoring men’s hearts and lives, and the marketplace, their families, and organizations. I’m excited about what we’re doing here.
If you guys are interested, check out IronDeep.com. You can also check out our YouTube channel. We had a new video that came out about the Loneliness of Men. I had a conversation with a guy and he said, “I’m alone. I’m a business owner, and I feel alone.” I said, “A lot of people can relate to that.” We came out of that video. Check it out on our YouTube channel about the Loneliness of Men. I can’t wait to introduce you guys to Peter Ostapko.
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I have a guest on this episode, Peter Ostapko. What’s going on, Peter?
How’s it going, bud? Good to see you.
You too. I’m looking forward to this interview.
Me too.
I love what you’re doing. I heard you on a podcast and I got the Kinsmen Journal, which is basically a masterpiece. We’re going to dive into that. If you’re a man out there, especially in the marketplace, where a lot of guys tuning in to this show, I want to get your hands on the Kinsmen Journal that Peter and his team have put together. We’re going to dive into that. Before I start bragging about the Kinsmen Journal that I use pretty much on a daily basis, let’s talk about you. Who is Peter Ostapko?
I’m a Midwest kid, born and raised in Southwest Missouri. I met my wife at Evangel University here in Springfield. I only went there for a year, but she came down from Wisconsin, so she was a Northern girl. We met and I knew from the get-go that she was the one that I wanted to marry someday. I waited a little bit of time before I told her that, and then she said yes.
You didn’t do that on the first date?
Not on the first date. I’m an old soul and she is a little bit too, so I think maybe she would’ve received it well, but I held off a little bit. We got married young. We’ve been married for many years, have an 8 and a 6-year-old, and then we have a 3.5-month-old. It’s been amazing. I have a great family, my wife and kids. It’s an everyday blessing. It’s a wonderfully exhausting stage but I don’t know if that changes much. It changes maybe from physical to mental. I love being a dad and having three kids.
I work in the corporate world. I’m in banking and finance. I have been in the industry for decades. I do commercial lending for investment properties, new developments, owner-operated property, CNI, small businesses, and a variety of different types of things here for a local community bank. I am bi-vocational. I’m from this area so that’s given me a lot of opportunities to get to know people in my community, the region, and the banking space. I’m a publisher of this journal and we’ll get into some of the details of how that all came to be. I’m a very busy guy. Not just for the sake of saying busy, but I’m very intentional about the time that I have and using it the way that I like to outside of work, the journal, and my family. Were very involved in our church, and that takes up about 98% of my life.
You’re very intentional. I got that out of the Kinsmen Journal. Number one, it is extremely intentional. I heard you on a podcast. I don’t get impress that easily, honestly. There’s a lot of stuff out there. I ordered a lot of books. A lot of my friends write books and figured you get this book. It’s good but this, I was impressed. I got this. This is basically 240 pages. It’s a masterpiece. I don’t even know how to describe it. That’s a book, magazine, or whatever. That’s not even able to describe exactly what it is. Maybe you can describe it. I’m using these words, but how would you describe this Kinsmen Journal masterpiece book/magazine? What is this?
It’s so funny you say that because people in the publishing world are like, “This isn’t a magazine.” It’s a magazine and it’s a periodical in the sense that there’ll be future volumes. Typically, it’s one book and it stands alone. This can do that but we have intentions and hopes to continue to pump out these volumes in the future. It was John Tyson whom we sent a copy. John is a tremendous voice in the Christian leadership space, specifically, with the formation of men and a variety of different things. He pastors a church out in New York City.
We sent him a copy of the journal early on to thank him for his insight and influence. We’ve learned a lot from him as well as quite a few other different people that we wanted to bless, honor, and thank even though they didn’t know who we were. We sent it to him and he did a story on his Instagram, which was neat. We had a lot of people that found out about us through that. There’s something that he said and I was like, “That’s a great description.” He goes, “It’s an artifact.” It is a timeless piece of stories and essays. It’s very visual.
We wanted to lean into the images because men are very image driven. All the photos in the journal were original shots. We didn’t use any stock photos with the exception of one. There’s one stock photo in the entire journal. There are over 150 pictures, so it’s just one. We wanted to capture. Personally, I wanted to provide and create something that I wanted to read that I was not seeing out there in the marketplace. I said, “Let’s create it. I want to do this. Let’s get up and do it.” It’s a very long process and it’s taken quite a few years. We were methodical and careful. We had been waiting on the Lord and allowing him to guide and direct each and every step.
When you’re launching something, whether it’s a business, an endeavor, or doing anything of this magnitude, it takes time. Sometimes, it’s a good thing. Personally, it allowed the Lord to purify some of the intentions behind why I was doing this. It also allowed us to clarify what exactly we wanted to do with it. Do we want to create something for the sake of creating it or do we want to be very intentional about the stories we were telling, the words we were saying, the language that we were using, and the voice that we were creating when speaking to men? Those things take time to develop.
The result is a 240-page publication. We printed it using the foremost printer in North America out of Vancouver. We printed 2,000 of these journals. They’re beautiful. They’re a tabletop piece. They weigh almost 2.5 to 3 pounds. You will keep this on your table. All the content is timeless. Our anchors of content are faith, fatherhood, and work. In each section, we have a couple of short essays, long writing features, a photography feature, and some wrap-up. The content is designed to open up and provoke thought and conversation, whether that’s internally between you and yourself, you and your wife, you and the Lord, or for a gathering or a group setting where you’re having conversations ongoing with other men and other discussions. It’s a resource. It’s a tool that we wanted to use.
That’s the quick elevator spiel. I said, “There’s nothing quite like what I want to create out there. Someone needs to do it, and I think guys are going to love it.” That’s what we did. Everybody we’ve talked to has loved it. I love how you said you don’t know how to describe it because I love books. I read books, but everybody gets books and they’re all printed in the same font. They all have the same paperweight and have snazzy covers. There’s great content, and if you want to dive into a book on a certain subject or topic, that’s why books exist. There’s so much rich content there on history, leadership, development, culture, or whatever.
What is so unique about this journal is it’s very rich in imagery. The paper is very thick. It’s glossy. There’s an art and beauty about it that is very tactilely luxurious. People love that. In a digital-first age, people are looking for places and sources where they can disconnect from technology. That’s why we’ve published it the way that we have. It’s not online. It’s not going to be online. We didn’t want to cheapen it down. Honestly, here’s the other side of it. We are telling first-person account stories of men and their walk with the Lord and life. I found that to be a very honoring sacred space. I did not want to print it on cheap disposable paper that people are going to throw away.
There’s nothing wrong with printing cheap magazines and all that. That’s fine. It’s just not the model that we wanted to do. We wanted to be very careful about every detail of what we were creating. Going back to John Tyson and what he said, “It’s a modern-day cultural artifact for men.” It’s testifying to the goodness and faithfulness of Jesus in our lives.
You’re exactly right. I’ve moved around, stepped it in my bags, and it’s still not crumpled. It’s still the exact same. I love that it sits on my coffee table. I read it in the mornings. It’s been a great resource in my life. A couple of things that I want to ask you about. Obviously, this is for men. A lot of stories of first account stories of men and you went with the topic of three sections. You talked about faith, fatherhood, and work. Let’s talk about the ideas behind that, first and foremost. Why those topics? You could have gone in an array of directions with things. Talk about those three things.
If you think about it, our faith, who we are as fathers or as dads, and our work, are three pillars that encompass most of our life. There is a lot of content out there about faith, work, and definitely about fatherhood. In the spiritual space, I feel like it’s somewhat dated, especially in fatherhood. We’ve seen quite a bit of a revival here in the last couple of years. I don’t think that’s by accident. It’s what we’re a part of and I believe the Holy Spirit is doing in the hearts of men. I wanted to bring all three together because they’re not compartmentalized. They work incongruent.
I think about who I am as a dad is not different than who I am as Peter, the commercial lender, or as Peter, a follower of Christ. I’m Peter but I’m all of those things at the same time. What I wanted to do is I wanted to intersect those three because they’re not separate. The way that we live our lives is incongruent. There’s a lot of great content out there on faith, but I didn’t want to get into theological debates about scripture and all that. There’s a place for that. We’re not going to do that.
With fatherhood, there are a lot of great practical applications, 10 ways to be a great dad, and 5 ways to engage with your kids. All are great but again, that’s not what we’re trying to do here. In the workspace, I almost landed on entrepreneurship. I was going to do faith, fatherhood, and entrepreneurship, but I switched it to work because the Holy Spirit was very clear. Not everybody has been an entrepreneur, nor does everybody need to be an entrepreneur. Honestly, if everybody was an entrepreneur, a lot of things wouldn’t get done. We’d be circling the clouds, vision-casting all the time, and dreaming. There’s a place for the worker.
In the work section, I wanted to honor the dignity of all the work that men do, whether you’re a teacher, a professor, a doctor, a real estate professional, a janitor, a pastor, a banker, or whatever it may be. The work that you do is anointed. It’s holy and important. We wanted to speak to that. I say this now with such clarity but this took years for this to unfold. This is not something that happened overnight. I got some clarity on like, “I want to publish something.” In January 2017, I read a book that sparked my imagination.
For the next couple of years, I did a deep dive into the publishing industry. I learned a lot about independent printing, different magazine publishers, why certain ones were scrapped and done with, and why others were seeing emergence, growth, and success. What I found was people love print but they don’t want print that can be readily translated to digital. If they want to read the news, they’re going to go online or get an update about it. If you want to read a story, you’d rather do it in print form. Even a long essay, you don’t want to read it online because it’s exhausting to read it. A lot of times, people I talk to too are like, “I’ll print off a longer essay and I’ll read it. I print it off because there’s a different experience with that.”
We did a deep dive into the industry. I went to my local Barnes & Noble, and there’s a lot of variety of content there available but there’s so much for women. There were hundreds, if not maybe a thousand different titles available. Many of them for women are so great and they’re very enriching content, affirming, encouraging, and thought-provoking stuff. For guys, it was limited to fortune, fast companies, success, cars, perversion muscle, and other stuff that guys get wrapped up in with that. I said, “We have a lot more to offer. There’s a lot more buried deep in the heart and soul of men. I want to speak to those things.” From a business standpoint, there was a gap in the marketplace and I wanted to fill it. From a practical standpoint, the Lord said, “You need to do this. I’m going to provide the way.”
The other thing I love about looking through this spoke to me was all the variety. You use poems, essays, and stories. There are so much different varieties. Some of them are long and some of them are short. The photography was amazing in it. I love that you used a lot of different voices. It wasn’t just your voice constantly or a few people’s voices. I don’t know how many people contributed to this, but so many voices and faces.
It’s real people. Not famous people or authors. There were some people in there that owned businesses, pastors, and things like that but it wasn’t people that we heard of. It was regular everyday people or men. I love that about it. Where did you come to use that, the variety, the different voices, and the faces? That alone probably took a lot of work to gather those people. I don’t know how many people contributed to this.
It did take a lot. We had nearly 30 writers for Volume One and about another dozen creatives between graphics, illustrators, and photographers. There are nearly 40 to 45 people that we had on this project. It’s a lot of quarterbacking and directing. I’m a trained banker. I didn’t go to journalism school and I haven’t been doing this for years. I was around it when I was a kid. My father was publishing in some local magazines. I got to be around that a little bit when I was young. I’ve always been drawn to the printed word. This is how I see a manifestation of some of those desires of my heart that the Lord brought full circle in my own life.
For me, when I was looking to publish this, I didn’t want to create something that is already being done. I don’t want to make this sound the wrong way, but there are about 50 or 100 different voices in the Christian leadership theology space. They get all the way through the radio waves and they write tons of books, and that’s great. They’re wonderful and gifted, and God has anointed them. We all learn from them but that’s not what I was interested in. I was interested in getting stories from everyday people because I knew stories of people that I knew in my own life.
This would’ve been in the fall of 2019. I sat down with this couple and they ended up writing an essay in the fatherhood section on infertility. I sat down with them and I was asking them about photography because they owned a photography design studio. I said, “If I’m going to get this and many original shots, and then they need to be edited and I want ultimately probably about 12 or 15 for the spread, what’s that going to cost?” I was building the budget and what it was going to take to produce.
That’s my next question. Forty-five people have got to have a big budget.
They all were paid at or above market. Every single one of them with the exception of myself. That was the other thing about it that was different. When I was researching, going back to 2017 and 2018, they said that the things that have crippled the industry are everybody wants freebies now. People like, “Can you write an essay for us and we’ll tweet about it?” There’s no value in that anymore because social media has become a racket. We use it some for the journal because people are on it and you’re finding people here and there. We don’t have this overarching strategy to try to penetrate social media because we don’t control the algorithm. It’s a false reality of what real life is for most people.
When we were getting these people together, I want people to tell real stories about who they are and what God is doing in their lives or the challenges and all those things. I sat down with this couple. I knew a little bit about their story, but I looked at him. They were telling me what the costs were going to be for the photography and all that and I said, “I have one last question for you. Would you be willing to write about your story and a little bit about your guys’ journey through infertility?” His wife started tearing up. I knew I was onto something. There’s a relatability factor about everyday people.
God has no respecter for persons. Sometimes, we can place a little bit too much emphasis on our celebrity culture. Even our local pastor. I love my pastor, but my faith should not be tied to his ability to preach on Sunday. It should be tied to my direct relationship with my Lord and Savior. My pastor helps usher that in, and he creates an environment with worship, teaching, love, and compassion. Ultimately, often in Christian and American culture, we place people on such pedestals that are unfair to them because if they fall, and oftentimes, they do or make mistakes, we’re so quick to judge. Yet that’s not the way it was intended.
When I was publishing this journal, I wanted to have a unifying approach to it. That’s why I don’t have pictures of those people in the journal. I wanted them to be represented but I did not want the journal to be about any individual people. It was about the collection of what we were all saying together. That was a part of the editing process as well. We did get a couple of fairly well-known writers that have a heart for this space. They were willing to jump on board. People are busy and the process it took to get these people to get them to commit, agree to the amount of words, get them to write it, edit it, go back to them, and edit it again. We did that 25 to 30 different times. It was a very long process but the Lord provided.
Again, I’m not a trained writer or publisher, but as we got into this and as we were starting to get some of these essays back and some of the images, I could tell immediately that the Lord was in it because there were words that these people were saying or these images that they were capturing was exactly what I wanted. It’s impossible to articulate that perfectly. You can say in a letter, “If you could elaborate on this or tell me some stories with this, we’ll tie it all together.” If you’re not a trained writer, you don’t know how to do that. It’s very hard.
Even trained writers.
Absolutely. There’s a thing called writer’s block for a reason.
For a visionary, even to articulate what you want, it’s hard.
That’s why I knew when we were getting these back, I was like, “Lord, you’re so good.” He was so intimately involved. Brett, this isn’t about Peter. This is about us creating this journal. It is a collection of the things of God and what he’s doing in the lives of people and we wanted to put that on display. This is a really good lesson for all of us to learn. If we’re willing to take ourselves out of the equation and truly be used and be conduits by which what God wants us to do in our lives, we’ll be pretty amazed at how God can use us. It’s when our pride, ego, and our belief that we have figured out gets in the way that things slow down or things get stalled because we’re striving, and striving is not of God.
We were intentional, not perfect of, “Lord, what do you want to do here? What does this essay need to say?” The Lord blessed that. It’s been remarkable. That’s been a very common response from people. I love that there are everyday people showcased in the journal. One of my favorite stories to tell on that is in the fatherhood section. We did this photography feature in baseball. I love baseball. It’s a sweet sport, and my own history, my own life. There’s a historical nature to it. People get very romantic about baseball.
One guy wrote a short little poem about his dad. It was really neat. It was called My Mighty Dad. The guy is in his mid-30s. He works for a local and he’s an inventory specialist for a local manufacturing company. He works hard, provides, and does his job. His bio in the wrap-up section was next to Dr. Tim Elmore, who is the foremost thought leader in Generation Z and Generation Y in development, interaction, and communication. He speaks all over the world. I was like, “This is exactly what I was going for. There’s a commonality there.” We didn’t bold and highlight Dr. Elmore and he wouldn’t have wanted us to. That’s the beauty of this journal. This is about all of us. We’re all doing this together, and we wanted to showcase it.
You’ve already mentioned that photography was a huge piece in this and that shines through. Sometimes, from page to page, it’s one amazing, magnificent picture. Every day people, you captured the faces so beautifully. That took a lot of intentionality too. A lot of times, when you’re thinking about writing and writing essays, you don’t think about the images of their photography as much or you put in a stock photo, which you guys used. I’m interested in which one that was but you don’t have to talk about that.
It’s true. You have to think visually about what is going to correspond with this. For some of them, it’s a lot easier than others depending on the shoot.
You had a story in there. For example, there was one in the middle talking about living an adventure. He had a gentleman and he was going on this amazing adventure in the mountains trekking through the snow.
This is an amazing story. I got to tell the story. Every single one of these has a story. The writer of that, Dr. Bryan Jarrett, is a pastor down in Texas. What’s neat is the reader may not know this, but he was writing about this trip that he was going to take, but he wasn’t going to take the trip for another six months. He was writing about adventure and risk-taking with God. I said, “How do we mirror images to go with this?” He hasn’t gone on the trip yet. Our photographer climbs mountains, takes pictures, and does stuff all over the world. It’s an amazing story of how I met him, but I’ll tell that story at a different time.
He’s like, “I am getting sponsored to go climb Mount Alpamayo, which is in Peru.” He’s going down there. He is like, “I’m going to take probably 10,000 photos. I have to take some shots of product placement and stuff like that for these companies, but they’re paying for the trip.” I was like, “Are you serious?” He’s like, “Yeah.” He got these shots. They’re spectacular images. The stories of that of how it all came together.
For me, I want to show these images because this is God’s creation. This is beauty. I wanted to honor this man and his talents of him taking those photos and being able to compensate him to do that. How that came together is one of my favorites, but the images are spectacular. They jump off the page. That’s why we went with the glossy page rather than a muted matte because the images, I wanted the colors to be bold, vibrant, and pop. Guys are very image driven. Culturally, we are now.
When I was reading the essay about the adventure, I was like right there with him. I was walking right there with him. I was cold. It’s freezing. One thing is in your video on your website and this might be in the Kinsmen Journal as well. You talked about one of the big reasons for putting this together was calling men to live with a sense of urgency instead of passivity. I want to talk about that a little bit, but I also want to talk about your own life because you did take your time on this. That’s one of the pieces of advice that I got when I started our organization, Iron Deep. It is to take it slow and take your time. You did that but with a sense of urgency. Can you unwind that for us a little bit?
I would translate urgency to focus. We’re distracted by everything right now. There are so many things clamoring for our attention and time. Social media, sports, kids’ sports, television, relationships, work, and working out. Name it. There are so many things and there’s so much time that you have. What I would say is urgency is having the awareness, knowing, and understanding that my time is finite and limited. You’re not guaranteed for the next day. The time that you have with the people that you care about or that God has entrusted you to lead into steward well, whether that’s your family, your kids, your spouse, your coworkers, your employees, a company, or whatever it may be are not an indefinite thing.
There are going to be endless amounts of distractions or things that will take away from what matters most. Urgency is the awareness that there are a plethora of things out there that I could give my time and attention to, but I’m choosing to be focused and intentional about the things that are most important. Most important because it’s what God’s word says. I’m to be the caretaker and the steward and the leader of my children and my family. I remember my pastor used to say this years ago. He goes, “For the first 10 to 15 years of my kids’ life, people would ask what my hobbies are. I have children. I don’t have the luxury of hobbies.” He’s right about that. Don’t get me wrong, you got to have time where you go do something that you enjoy.
There’s a difference between working out for 30 to 45 minutes a day, maybe going on a specialty walk for an hour a couple of times a week, or taking six hours to go play golf with your buddies on Saturday. There’s a difference there. Do it every now and then or bring your kids or whatever, but those times that you have with your children are extremely limited and important. I have even seen it in my own kids. My son is eight and I’ve seen how I have shifted with him from being everything is fun, laughing, goofy, and wrestling into having to parent and inject areas of discipline and instruction now because he’s pushing the limits of his independence. He wants to know what are my boundaries, what can I do, what’s okay, and what’s not okay.
If I’m distracted or numbing myself with my phone or saying, “Go play video games,” what I’m doing is I’m being completely passive and lazy because I’m not taking the time to do what’s necessary. That’s love for my son as his father being intentional about his development, his well-being, and who he is. I’m learning this. This isn’t like, “Peter has got a PhD in Dad.” I recognize that there are so many things clamoring for our attention and time.
For our family, there are certain things that we have held sacred. Saturdays are very sacred for us. We don’t do the whole traveling team or all the sports stuff. We do sports, but they don’t monopolize our family’s life. We’re very intentional about that time on Saturdays, especially. Partially is because we could do that now. That could change. It’s important for men especially to say, “What areas of my life where I’m being maybe lazy with my family or with my kids that I can take it up a notch or where maybe has my wife been taking on extra slack that I could potentially step in and say, ‘I need to take ownership of this a little bit more.’”
That’s not a place of shame or anything like that. You have a tremendous opportunity to speak life over your children. As a father and as a man, you carry God-ordained, anointed presence, and purpose behind you because you’re a man. You’re a father. If you love the Lord, you have a tremendous opportunity to impart wisdom, truth, love, and compassion that will shape your children. It’s not going to happen overnight. I try not to measure things in days and weeks or even months. I measure them in years. Some weeks are awful. There are times when this was a bad day or you said some things and you’re like, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Don’t measure it in those days and weeks. Measure it in months or years because you’re going to look back and be like, “I’m so glad my son, every single Saturday morning, went out for an hour and talked. Once a week, I would rotate the kids, take them to school, and we’d go get breakfast before.” Create those things and moments. You have to be intentional about that because life will suck it out. Life will find a way to fill it with something else. That’s a little bit of that.
I love what you said. Sometimes we get overwhelmed even thinking about all the things that we’re saying. Maybe take one thing and one thing is sacred. I found it myself. The dinner table is something that we can sit down. I don’t even know what’s going to happen. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes it’s awesome to have that space of that sacred like the table. If you’re tuning in, what is one thing that you can keep sacred in your life that’s awesome?
Peter, I want to ask you this one last question. I feel a lot of this from you. You took the initiative and the risk. A lot of what’s written here is about men becoming focused on what matters and taking risks. You’ve obviously done that with the Kinsmen Journal, but that came with a lot of wrestling throughout your life. I even listened to one of your stories about having severe anxiety and wrestling with God with that. What would you speak to the men out there that are in that wrestling mode because we all go through these seasons of wrestling with God, a call to our life, or what’s he guiding me to? We have this comfort zone. Talk to the men out there about that with our own life.
A quote that I came across was on a video years ago that I’ve leaned into quite a bit. I’ve remembered it and used it a lot. It’s, “God doesn’t waste anything. He’s always taking what you’re doing and weaving it into where you’re going.” I love that because so often, we get tripped up in the moment. We’re like, “God, why am I going through this? Why don’t my kids listen to me? Why my company was down 50% in sales and expenses is are skyrocketing.” For me, I would say this is the moment where I started to go through extreme anxiety. There’s a lot of story there, and I’d love to do a follow-up conversation just on that because there’s a lot to unpack there.
Every single one of us has unique stories and experiences, whether it be through childhood, our spouse, relationship, or work. Those experiences shape who we become. They shape our thoughts and perspective. They physically affect who we are. When I started to go through this severe anxiety, it was only for about an 8 to 10-week period. There are people who deal with it for very long periods of time. This was January of 2021. We’re 75% of the way through creating this journal and we’re starting to hit some momentum.
On a Sunday night, January 2nd or 3rd, I literally am sitting on my couch watching the Cowboys and the Giants football game. My wife is in the other room. The kids are in bed. I’m shaking and I can’t sit still. I’m like, “What in the world is going on?” I thought it was an attack. We immediately labeled things as spiritual attacks. As time went on over the next few days, I would go through highs and lows. There’d be times over the next 8 to 10 weeks when I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to have a heart attack from stress. I’m like, “What is going on?”
Like David in the Psalms, I was pouring it out to the Lord. I’m like, “Lord, why? What is going on?” What he needed to do was peel back layers of my heart, things that I buried deep that he was like, “I’m ready to peel these out. I’m ready to heal these areas or these wounds that you’ve buried deep in your life.” How it manifested was I had a fear of abandonment because of some things that I experienced as a kid, especially with my father. I should say my dad and I still talk to this day. He lives in Pennsylvania. He and I connect, but when he left, it left some very broken things in my life that I’ve buried very deep.
For that period of time, the Lord said, “I need to heal this from you so that you’re not carrying this burden anymore.” That’s what he did. It was a very difficult time. I wrestled with God because it was very hard. Out of it, it was trusting and a belief. It was this intimacy with my heavenly Father that I didn’t go there before and I needed to because of where he was taking me with the journal, my family, relationships, and all of those things. God will do this through and with anybody. You have to have an open heart. You have to posture yourself to say, “Lord, how do you want to use me as a man, a father, a husband, and a business leader?” Wait on the Lord. Something that we so easily do is we rush into things.
There are times for quick decisions and moving fast, but there’s a time to wait on the Lord patiently. He purifies your intentions and the heart. He purifies to find out and says, “Is this of me or is this of you? Who are you building? Your kingdom or mine?” He would ask me these questions and I would say, “This is what we want to do.” Through that process, my relationship with the Lord grew so much. I know we say that in the Christian world, but my faith matured in areas that never had before.
It came to a point when we were starting to do some things with the journal. There was no doubt. I’m like, “God is in this. I know he’s doing this. He’s spoken to me.” There was an authority that came not because of anything I did but because of what he did through me. If there are areas of your life that are burdensome that bring stress and anxiety, you need to lay those before the throne. You need to wait on the Lord in that space. You need to prayerfully open your hands and say, “God, help me.” He will absolutely do that. He will do it in the time that it takes that he sees fit, not that you, so it could be a day or an hour. Not all of us have these Paul Barnabas transfiguration moments like that. Sometimes it takes weeks, months, or years.
That’s also a reason why we need to have grace and patience with other people because everybody is on a different track. What their faith looks like and they’re learning it in different ways. That was such an important part of this journey. I speak to say this too. God doesn’t need Kinsmen Journal. God is God. He said, “Peter, I got something for you. It’s going to bring fulfillment in your life like never before. It’s going to be the journey of a lifetime. There’s going to be some things that are going to be very difficult but there’s also going to be some incredible victories and moments of glory and beauty but I want you to come on board. Are you willing to take this journey with me?” I said yes.
The other thing I wanted to do is I wanted to tell my kids that I took the risk and the chance. It’s easy not to. We live in a very safe world. Safe in the sense that we have insurance policies for everything. We have safety measures for everything and there’s a place for those things to an extent. I so often would fall to paralysis by analysis. I would shy away from taking big risks because I’m like, “I’m afraid this is going to happen.”
God brought me through that place to say, “You’re going to have to trust me with this anxiety. This place of abandonment, I will not abandon you. You’re a good father to your kids. It’s not going to happen. They’re going to be fine. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to have to trust me.” That trust turned into areas with the journal in my life where if the Lord is in it, then he’s going to make it happen because it’s his. It’s not mine.
That’s awesome. Thank you, Peter. Thank you for sharing the story. I love the Kinsmen Journal. The best place for someone to get the Kinsmen Journal is where?
KinsmenJournal.com. We have some videos on there. It shares a little bit of background on the origin story, behind-the-scenes, and some of that. We’re most active on Instagram. I personally have started to do some more stuff through LinkedIn. We ship it out. This has been one of the neatest parts of this journal. People will get it, and then within a week or two, they’ll order 3, 5, 10, 15, or 20 more because there’s nothing like it. I say that with confidence because I’m so proud of what God has done through these people. The men that we’ve heard from across the country and the world have been extremely affirming. We’re very grateful for what we’ve been able to do.
If you’re tuning in, I would highly encourage you to get the Kinsmen Journal. I know I talked to Peter before the show. I said, “How can I put an order of 50?” I don’t say that ever. It’s definitely something that’s a great tool and a resource for my life that helped me grow in my faith and mature in my faith. Thank you so much, Peter. That’s a wrap for this episode.
You bet. Thank you. I appreciate it.
