In 2006–2007, I served in Iraq in the Sunni Triangle—a region that saw some of the war’s fiercest fighting. Day after day, I was confronted with the reality of evil, the fragility of life, and the weight of knowing that every decision could mean life or death for someone I loved.
You do not leave the battlefield the same way you arrived. No one told me that. No one had to.
I started in uniform. Boots on the ground and friends beside me. The military taught me discipline, sacrifice, and what it means to serve something bigger than yourself. It also taught me things I did not know how to put down when I came home.
When I came home, the war didn’t stay overseas. I was trying to raise a family, finish college, and move forward, but I brought Iraq back with me. Not just in memory, but in how I led my family, how present I was in a room, and how much of myself I had left to give at the end of the day. Like many veterans, I didn’t fully understand how trauma was shaping my reactions. I just knew I felt on edge, numb, and easily triggered while trying to make a "normal" life.
That pressure didn’t just live in my head. It landed in my home. The same armor that helped me survive in a war zone made it hard to be present and connected as a husband. I was not the same man Amy married. There were seasons I was physically home and still fighting somewhere else, still scanning for threats that weren’t there, still locking down emotionally when what my family needed most was for me to open. Our marriage carried that weight. So did our children.
Amy had lived her own version of the battle while I was gone—carrying responsibilities and fears I hadn’t seen up close, holding our family together while I was holding a rifle. Now we were both trying to rebuild something we loved while standing on two different sides of the same pain. Misunderstandings grew. Communication broke down. The home I wanted to protect started to feel like another kind of war zone.
Amy did not sign up for the man who came back. She stayed anyway. Through the distance, the hard conversations, and the slow, unglamorous work of learning each other again, she fought for our family the way I once fought for my country. Not with fanfare. Not with guarantees. Just with faithfulness day after day, when it would have been easier to walk away. I am not the man I am today without her.
It was in that broken place, where my efforts to hold it all together were failing and my pride had finally run out of places to hide, that the Lord met me. Not when I had fixed myself. Not when I had earned it. But when I had no more strength, no more excuses, and no more illusions that I could heal my own heart or save my own marriage.
What put our home back together was not willpower. It was prayer and God’s patient, undeserved work in our marriage that I nearly let slip through my hands.
In the middle of trying to juggle classes, provide for my family, and make sense of my anger and numbness, God broke through my pride and called me to do something that made no sense on paper.
He called me to preach.
"And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten." — Joel 2:25
Along the way, I realized I wasn’t alone. Countless other veterans, entrepreneurs, and leaders were carrying their own invisible battles- raising families, going to school, trying to build a business or career while wrestling with things they couldn’t name and didn’t know how to fix. They loved God. They loved this country. But they were tired, conflicted, and unsure how to bring their faith, their work, and their wounds under Christ’s Lordship.
I brought those same questions home. How do you think biblically when the world rewards compromise? How do you lead wisely when you’re still healing from things no one around you can see? How do you build faithfully when everything you’re standing on feels like it could give way?
Those questions don’t go away just because you put on a suit or start a business. They follow you into the boardroom, the budget meeting, and the home. And they deserve more than theory. They deserve a community forged by people who have lived them.
That is why For Lord & Liberty exists.
Not because I had figured it out. Because I didn’t, and because I know what it costs to come home broken and build something whole again. As an ordained minister, veteran, and entrepreneur, I’ve been in enough battles to know that neutral ground doesn’t stay neutral for long. I saw too many believers shrinking back in a culture that needed them to stand up, and I knew that someone had to build a place where the men and women who had fought for this country could be equipped to fight for their families, their businesses, and their faith with the same conviction.
For Lord & Liberty is the outflow of that journey where my combat experience, my trauma, my marital struggles, my healing, my calling to preach, and my love for entrepreneurship converge into one mission: helping Christian veteran entrepreneurs think biblically, lead wisely, and build faithfully. Everything we do- the apparel, the education, the community- exists to forge believers who know what it is to be broken and who have learned to build anyway, under the grace and authority of Jesus.
Amy and I are still building it. Together. The way we’ve built everything that matters.
Every shirt, every lesson, and every connection in this community is aimed at helping you live out your calling with the same honesty and hope—not as a polished hero, but as someone who has met the Lord in the middle of the fight and said:
"Then said I, Here am I; send me." — Isaiah 6:8
