BATTLEGROUND // S03E07 (EPISODE 35)

Many of us grow up learning to fight with our hands, with our words, with weaponry made of our own brains and brawn. Yet, God calls us to fight in a different way, on a different level that often seems like the quickest way to lose, not win. Yet, God never fails. This week, Michelle interviews our very own Shea Watson about the parallels and paradoxes between being a veteran of the world’s army and an active duty soldier for Christ.

Questions we touch on in this episode:

What does it mean to be in the Lord’s Army?

How does God want us to fight?

What is supernatural warfare?

VERSES FROM BATTLEGROUND

Ephesians 6:12, Matthew 5:44, John 15:19, Galatians 2:20, Proverbs 22:3, Hebrews 13:14

QUOTES FROM BATTLEGROUND

Love the enemy. I mean, it is a script-flipper. Being attacked always brought a counter-attack. I’m supposed to love my enemy. I’m supposed to feed my enemy. You know, it makes me think of World War I, Christmas day. The enemy stopped, took that moment in time, ate together, played soccer together, football. It depends on where you’re from. That’s what we have to live in, all the time. See, they went back to war. They went back with their sergeants, their colonels, and their lieutenants, and whoever else was running their show and they started fighting again. They started physically fighting again, the war that I do now, the war that I’m training for now—And let me tell y’all, there’s a switch. I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a switch that I have to really work on—it’s recalibration.

Shea Watson, Battleground, The Panrty Podcast

And in Hebrews 13:14, it says, “For here, we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.” That city is run by someone who can do incredible things, simply in partnership with our obedience. It doesn’t have to be a striving. It doesn’t have to be us coming up with it and succumbing to doing the same thing that the world that lies in the power of the evil one does.

Michelle Watson, Battleground, The Pantry Podcast

ANNOTATED TRANSCRIPT

Michelle: I get to open the show this time.

Shea: We’re just going to say hello, and you get to do what you want to do. We’ve kind of done some flipping over the, over the season and interviewing one another. And so it was my turn to be interviewed. Uh, watch this, y’all: no notes.

Michelle: That’s very different for Shea.

Shea: I like, I like to be prepared, but you know what? What we’re going to talk about tonight, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. It’s gonna be cool.

Michelle: Shea interviewed me for Build This House and this week is Veteran’s Day. So we thought it was very fitting rather than find an equally fitting guest that could speak to this topic, why not just talk to our friendly neighborhood veteran, Shea? You know, I mean Veteran’s Day in the, in the world is to just honor and appreciate and reflect on those who have served and have paid a price, not the ultimate price, you know, that’s Memorial day, but a price nonetheless, and often quite a high one.

Now in our show, we always go to the eternal storehouse. So we’re going to talk, well, I’m going to pick Shea’s brain for this—for all of you. I’m going to pick his brain about the service, the battlefields that come with being a soldier for Christ. So to start us off, I’m very interested in this idea of coming home from battle as a veteran in the world sense and the new way in which you see things and how you can kind of translate that into coming to Christ, becoming a soldier for Christ. How do you see the world then? What are the parallels between those two experiences?

Shea: Ooh, that’s a good question. She came out guns loaded! Parallels—how the battle plan is drawn up before I really came back and, and really said, “You know what? I’m going to be a soldier for Christ.”

You know, knowing Christ is one thing, being a soldier for Christ and, and really trying to walk in His steps as imperfect as that can be, but really making an effort, um, to before that it’s like, you know, you have this battlefield. You go, I mean, you don’t have a choice. Um, I guess you could go AWOL or something, but most people don’t. We go because we raised our right hand. You know, I will stand and defend the constitution of the United States. You know, you kind of just stand there and you give your all, um, and a lot of us take that very seriously.

We will go when we’re told to go, we will do what we’re told to do. And we do it usually from a position of pride, man, I’m doing something good for my country. So, I mean, it’s puffed up. It’s I mean, let’s not lie about it. Let’s just be real to be motivated, to go fight and, and engage in combat against another human being. There has to be something that lifts you. And, and when I wasn’t in Christ, I mean, I still would tell people, “Hey, look, you got to believe in something.” Of course, that’s a horrible thing now, you know, when I look back at this, but how does that transfer out? Right? So you go, you stand in there strong, you stand in there tough, you stand in there like, ready to go and you fight and you come back and you’ve got a lot of garbage, unhealthy things in your pantry.

Kind of one of the reasons this show even exists is—I know this is like different, but I found peace—the best that I could find—in the kitchen. So my coping mechanism—and honestly all it failed by the way, but let me throw it out there now—I thought it was what would get me through. So you sit there and you dice and you slice and you really refine your skills. You refine the herbs, you refine the spices because you don’t like what’s in your heart or your pantry or your soul. You don’t like what you’ve experienced. It’s hard. It’s something that we deal with. It’s something that, you know, like Michelle said, yeah, it’s not Memorial day, it’s Veteran’s Day. But every day to us is Memorial day and Veterans Day, everyday we live this. Every day.

This is something that we’ve gone through, right? So here I am in the kitchen falling apart, thinking that like, “Oh my knife and my green onions chopped up touch-up are going to get me through.” And it did.

So onto the transfer, across into the Kingdom. Man, I go to battle every day. I see more clearly what’s going on in the world. I see more clearly what battles are really being waged. I see the supernatural, the spiritual aspect of this instead of the flesh and blood aspect of this, the wars we went and fought. Watch this y’all: if you’re a believer in Christ, we’re not flesh and blood, you see it that way. You see it played out on TV. That way you see soldiers dying, or you see soldiers fighting, but anger, hate, and all of these things. And all these things that we go after, right? It’s spiritual warfare.

Michelle: I often have heard soldiers that are coming home say they don’t—they can’t see this life, this way of life, the same ever again. It’s like a veil has been lifted, but in the world it often manifests as PTSD where they see the enemy around every corner. A car backfiring is a gunshot, that kind of thing, and then in the eternal, a veil is lifted and you can see the enemy everywhere, but it’s a different type of enemy and you’re fighting in a different way. Right? And on a whole different battlefield. How do you, as a believer in Christ, reel in the desire to be a soldier in the worldly military, when you encounter a supernatural threat?

Shea: Ooh, go on, man. Man! My wife interviews people! Yeah. No. Hey—so let me, let me just digest that for a second because I think what you’re saying—and let me just make sure this is clear, right?—You’re asking me how you’ve got this switch that says there’s war and then you’ve got another switch that says it’s a supernatural war. And how do you work—help me?

Michelle: Like, you’re trained.

Shea: Yeah.

Michelle: You’re trained in the military to fight with, you know, like you said, bring out the guns, bring out the cannons and shoot the enemy down. And that’s in my head, y’all. But, there it’s like, “okay, there’s an enemy. I’m going to physically encounter the enemy.” And the enemy is often a person or a place, like a very physical thing. And then the Bible says we do not battle against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and the powers of darkness. But yet you’ve been trained as a literal soldier to go in, guns blazing or psyops or with hand to hand, whatever it is. But it’s very physical. But our God is saying that is not what I’m calling you to do. Like every time you encounter sin, I’m not saying to bring out these literal things that you’ve been trained to use in the world. I’m calling you to pull out spiritual weaponry,

Shea: Love the enemy. I mean, it is a script-flipper. Being attacked always brought a counter-attack. I’m supposed to love my enemy. I’m supposed to feed my enemy. You know, it makes me think of World War I, Christmas day. The enemy stopped, took that moment in time, ate together, played soccer together, football. It depends on where you’re from. That’s what we have to live in, all the time. See, they went back to war. They went back with their sergeants, their colonels, and their lieutenants, and whoever else was running their show and they started fighting again. They started physically fighting again, the war that I do now, the war that I’m training for now—And let me tell y’all, there’s a switch. I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a switch that I have to really work on—it’s recalibration.

It’s a definite recalibration because I’m used to reactive and there’s still a reaction, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a different form. It’s a physical versus a supernatural or spiritual. Now I fight on my knees. My prayer is my battlefield because I know who is on my side. I know who is leading me. And plus, I’ve been called to do a certain thing: to love. To love even an enemy. That wasn’t in my head before now. Granted, there are people that you encounter along the way, but generally, it’s not the dude who was shooting at you that you captured. I mean, I’m not trying to brutalize this. I’m not trying to make it funny. I laugh probably out of nervousness, more habit than everything else, but it wasn’t that when we would catch an enemy or when we encountered the enemy or enemies were in our hands, I didn’t feel for them. Today when I see war, when I see enemies of whatever caliber that is, um, across the nation, the globe, you know, all right, whatever it is now, my heart breaks because I’m seeing a battlefield that’s waged differently. I’m seeing a battlefield that’s about souls. Um, and when you start seeing battles that are waged against people who believe may be a different way, their finale is horrible.

Michelle: It makes me think of the ceasefire. You mentioned in World War I, I think it was called the Christmas Truce or something like that. How, to battle worldly enemies, you’re often stripping the humanity away and seeing them just as the enemy, you don’t think about the kids they have at home. You don’t think about the wife they might be leaving behind. You don’t think about the valuable role in the community they might play but then the script flip where God’s calling us to see them as human, to see them as a potential brother or sister in Christ or remind ourselves they are one.

If our enemy happens to be a misguided believer, but you know, in the world, the people that oppose us often, you know, in John, it says it.

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. But because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world.

Therefore the world hates you, but we’re called to love them. Despite the fact they’re constantly going to be kind of treating us like the soldiers that are stripping away humanity to make it easier to hate and battle us. Right? What are your methods like? What’s your experience? How has it been to retrain yourself to see the humanity in the people that, and you kinda touched on it already, but just like, has it been easy or harder?

Shea: I don’t know that I personally have ever not thought about a repercussion of a trigger pull, but, and I know this so it’s raw. This is raw. This is raw. When they shot at me, you don’t think about it. When you’re back in your kitchen, cutting green onions, you think about it. You don’t necessarily think about the one it happened to as much as you do actually think about a downline of an action. Yeah. So the things that I struggled with, as you mentioned earlier, as the PTSD and the things, cause y’all that’s was my world for a long time. It was more along the collateral damage that created a lot of the issues in myself. So the humanity aspect for me, and I’m just speaking, look, this is one man. Always kind of played a role cause I’ve always been kind of, I have a heart for people and those kinds of people.

I mean, there’s a lot of us. I mean, let’s not shrug the military whatsoever. Y’all um, a lot of the people who join, join because they have to, um, there’s not a whole lot of options for them. Uh, small town, no jobs need to get away from a situation. And so we do. And so there’s a lot of us out there that I would say, think of the humanity of it. Cause otherwise you, you put, you kind of paint us as these super soldiers that, you know, just like trying to fight, fight to kill let’s it. And it’s, and I mean, that’s, that’s all a lot of it.

But uh, but we have a downside too. We have a side where we come back or even when you’re in theater or in-country, or however, you wanna label that with whatever service that you’re in. There’s a pause and that pause always created a void. So now humanity. So humanity is still there. So we carry it over into our spiritual, right into our beliefs. How the, you know, I have now been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I but Christ who lives inside of me, it’s sealed up my void. Now when I see battles, it’s been a spiritual battleground. It’s not flesh and blood. Everybody’s pointing to flesh and blood. Everybody wants it, but there’s a lot of is out there. A lot of us believers they’re sitting there going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We see this for what it is.

It’s principalities. It’s, it’s the ruler of this world now, you know, back then it was, I come back to void because I didn’t have Jesus man, praise God from my brothers that had Jesus. Like they really had Jesus, you know, like this, I’d be like, come on, Shea, clean up your language, man. You know that language I’m like, ah, whatever, you know, but now I have it. And now my kitchen is not my meditation. I guess it’s just a place I cook and have fun. And uh, and I fill my pantry with good things. When things go wrong, when things got hectic, when things crash, man, I go, “Satan, stop. Lord Jesus—” And I pray, you know, you get on your knees and you pray and you fill that void. You get away from the nonsense. And I know Michelle, I’m going to hear it. I’m coming back on this one with Michelle a little bit. But she sees it. And her being a little younger, me being a little older with a lot, a lot under my belt. As far as these battlegrounds, I’m usually like pretty like, eh, it’s just relaxed. It’s fine. We’re going to be okay. Yeah. And it’s because I’ve seen it being in a void and you can’t really throw nothing at me right now that’s going to create a void.

Michelle: Amen. When we’re talking about battlegrounds, it makes me think of the Vietnam War. The people who told me that, one of the reasons they struggled so hard there is because of the terrain and how well the soldiers there were familiar with it. And they use kind of the terrain against the, against our soldiers. That’s right, right? To a degree?

Shea: There’s a lot, there’s a lot. But I do know that, um, it was rough terrain. Yeah. But I also know that there was politics behind it. I’m not getting, I don’t want to get it all down, but I’m saying that there was a lot of, “Take that Hill.” I mean, it was already tough. They’re dug in, they got tunnels. I mean, we had our own group of tunnel rats. Right? But they’d have to go down in these tunnels. It was like an intricate battlefield that was just set up with booby traps and tunnels and all of these things that, that made it just horrible for someone who isn’t used to that. I mean, until years into the war, you know what I’m saying? If they spent tour after tour. Um, but for just to get in there and just peep them, bomb it from all different directions and to take a Hill and then be told, okay, come back and then be told, take the hill again. Okay. Come back. Okay. Take that same hill again. And if there’s a vet out there listening right now and they know exactly which, which warrants or which portion I’m talking about. Yeah. It was horrible. Yeah. It was tough. So yeah.

Michelle: No, I mean your briefing right there. No, that briefing—actually you made the analogy without me having to like walk us through it and it is just so perfect because I think you can, you can listen to what she just said and apply it, like translated over to see the benefit of building yourself up in the truth before you go out there trying to fight because the enemy and people of this world, they know the world really well. You know, and we have to be prepped for the battlefield, even though we’re this world before we’re saved that doesn’t, that doesn’t really help us anymore because the not to say, we’re not to get legalistic, but the rules have changed for us. You know, if you want to obey Christ, there are things that the world can do that you are no longer permitted to do. If you want to actually listen to what the Word’s telling you.

Shea: Yeah. I like this track. I actually like this track because I really see us in it. I really do see us in it. I see me kind of like, I see things, I understand things. I roll with things and I’m like, I’m going to rest in things. And my wife got five vinegar or bigger vinegar, bigger. I don’t know. But either way she is like ready to like jump was she hit and I’m like, it’s okay. Let’s relax. It’s good. But you know, and, and biblically speaking, um, in Proverbs 22:3, it says a prudent man for sees evil and hides himself. But the simple pass on and are punished and that kind of goes along with this rest. I know we want to chomp at the bit that things that we see that are wrong. Um, think about this. We go to war, right?

We’re not chomping at the bits to go to war when I was military. It wasn’t like the call came out and I’m like, go as go fight. Somebody know you might be saying that, look here, it goes, puffed up. And you guys, you know, if you’re out there and military and only admit this that’s up to y’all, but you’re like, Ooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But inside you’re like, Oh man, here we go. Right. Because you know, death, you know, mayhem, you know, you know, all of the chaos that’s involved in this. And yet here we go, the natural man wants to jump in. It’s like, man, I got this, I got this. A lot of people. I mean, they they’re like, I got this, but he’s saying a Putin man, foresees evil and hides himself. But the simple, and you know, that translates in, in, in Hebrew, like foolish and all of that, those other things, right?

I mean, it’s, it’s an amazing word study. The Greek y’all study the Hebrew. I mean honestly, but, uh, pass on and are punished. That’s that’s an interesting thought. It’s an interesting thought of our position. Now. It’s an interesting thought to where we need to be. I don’t want to be a puffed up Christian. I want to speak truth. I want to love, I want to give people grace, mercy. I don’t want to side for slander, but I want to be in the war the way that I need to be in the war. And I want it to be with the full armor of God. I don’t want it to be me. I don’t want it to be my actions or reactions. I want to be guided into action quick to hear, slow, to speak, slow to wrath. Because wrath that progression is is, is amazing.

Notice how here right hearing. Right. Right. It’s like, it’s like, you know, in ax at Pentecost, everybody goes, Oh yeah, everybody spoke in language and they’re like about the speak. But really the miracle was in the hearing here. There is a deeper rhythm that flows in everyone. How it manifests on the outside is not necessarily what’s on the inside. We love to be defensive. We love to be reactive. We love to just go and Jesus even would stop and pray. Pull the disciples aside and pray. A lot of the people we see in the Bible prayed their council was God, their counsel was Christ. Their counsel was the Holy spirit. That’s where we need to be.

Michelle: I think that’s a wonderful place to settle and leave people to kind of marinate because throughout both Old and New Testament, the peculiar things that God calls us to do—when done—lead to results beyond what human warfare could have accomplished without God.

And in Hebrews 13:14, it says,

“For here, we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”

That city is run by someone who can do incredible things, simply in partnership with our obedience. It doesn’t have to be a striving. It doesn’t have to be us coming up with it and succumbing to doing the same thing that the world that lies in the power of the evil one does.

Shea: And I just want to shout out to all the veterans, if you believe in Christ, man, praise God, trust in Him, give Him everything, surrender it all. Carry your cross, you know, die daily and follow Jesus. If you’re a veteran hearing this and you don’t believe—look, hit me up. Michelle’s gonna put out all of the ways at the end of this podcast that you can hit me up. Hit me up. Let’s talk. Even if you’ve got questions, even if you disagree, I don’t care. Let’s do it. Let’s just let’s have a conversation. Um, I love everyone. I’ll hold nothing against nobody. I think that’s the final thought because that’s where we need to be. Amen?

Michelle: Amen. It’s been awesome to interview the hubs. We would love to have some awesome, cool conversations that are just full of love and patience, and listening. We’re very quick to listen. At least we try. I mean, we submit it to the Lord daily, you know, um, but you can do all that through ThePantryPodcast.com, as well as on Instagram, Facebook and Gab— we have, you know, gone into new territory for us. If you think anyone can benefit, you know, rate, comment, subscribe, hand it to a friend, whatever the case may be. You can also reach out to Shea directly @theycallmeshea. Shea is “S-H-E-A” on Instagram. So until next time y’all. Bye. Bye.