Jamie’s story is a reminder of just how far following the Lord’s voice and His directives will take you in life. From what can be gathered about Jamie, he has lived a very colorful and blessed life, filled with many adventures, including but not limited to successfully raising a family, traveling the world as a missionary, and doing exciting police-related things, such as being brave and courageous. With his story, it is implied that there is adventure out there for you when you follow Christ! No matter where that journey takes you, YWHY will provide for you and light your path. Part of His provision is giving us adventure!
On his path, Jamie encountered some challenges along the way, but he persevered despite how hard it was at the time, and the Lord made things all work out for him and his family. The story about Jamie comes from the podcast called “The Heaven Meets Earth Podcast,” and the title of the podcast is, “He Learned How To Hear God’s Voice… And You Can Too | Jamie Winship.”
Life as a Police Officer
The podcast explores some of Jamie’s early experiences as a police officer. He answered the call to be a police officer in his early 20s and worked in law enforcement for many years. Jamie’s experience of being a police officer included many exciting details, like the time he had to de-arrest someone. As the story goes, he once encountered a large suspect who was clearly guilty of burglary, and he also struck a fellow cop, who was unconscious at the time of the arrest – so the guy was super guilty! If booked at the police station, the guilty guy would probably get in some significant trouble because he had not only harmed a police officer, but he also committed an additional serious crime. So, unfortunately, Jamie had to arrest this large man at gunpoint. Luckily, the man did not fight him either and listened to him. After he had placed cuffs on him and put him in his squad car, he heard the Lord speak to him while he was driving. The Lord clearly said he wanted Jamie to remove the cuffs and let him go. He wrestled with God and with his pride, and began talking out loud in the car about it. This is what he said,
Is your career more important than the guy in the back seat? Is your position, is your livelihood more important than the guy in the back seat because you’re white and you grew up in this neighborhood and you know Jesus and he didn’t and all that. Are you more valuable than him and he broke the law and you didn’t break the law and justice has to be served.
As stated above, there was a lot of back-and-forth with God about this decision. It was not a choice to take lightly. There was a very real concern that Jamie could be fired for this choice.
Following the still small voice of God
He then tried to remove the man from the car and the guy would not get out. Jamie and the guy sort of went back and forth physically and verbally about getting out of the car and being de-arrested and he said it was super interesting as a snapshot of our culture. He said, “This is our culture. I’m trying to set a guy free and he’s afraid of it. Wow.” Jamie said the young criminal was possibly scared that it was a set up. On this thought, Jamie said,
And then finally I knock him down on the ground and I de-handcuff him and I and I stand up and he jumps up and he grabs hold of me and he won’t move away from me. Do you know why? Do you know what he’s afraid of? He’s afraid I’m going to shoot him. He’s afraid I’m going to say he broke free and I’m going to shoot him. That’s our culture. That’s how at war we are.
After this man is long gone, and he finally gets back to the office, or as police officers call it, the station, his captain is waiting for him. For obvious reasons, his captain is very upset with Jamie’s decision to let this guy go. He then has to tell his captain that God told him to let him go. Unbelievably, the captain did not fire him on the spot. The captain simply said, “you have two weeks for this to become a really good idea, or you’re not only fired, you’re probably going to be arrested for what you did, but you I’ll give you two weeks.” So, he was temporarily demoted, and he had to work the front desk doing paperwork and answering phone calls.
Sometime later, Jamie received a phone call late at night and it was the very same guy he had de-arrested and he offered a “call-in tip.” The tip was very beneficial and produced a “massive narcotics bust.” The reason the informant provided this key information to the police department was because he no longer wanted to destroy his community but instead make it better. To make a long story short, they ended up working together for about a year and they “broke a gambling ring” and they “made arrests from Boston to Miami. Me and him together.” The informant’s identity was always kept a secret, and eventually it became too dangerous for him to continue. At that point, Jamie arranged for Crime Solvers to pay for the informant’s wife’s school tuition as a gift from the police department. It was a very big payment!
Life on the Mission Field
After his career with the police, the Lord moved Jamie and his wife to be missionaries in foreign countries with Sharia Law (where being a Christian is a punishable offense). To transition in their life in this new and again dangerous direction, he and his wife moved across the country to attend grad school. They moved in anticipation of working and studying under a famous linguist who would teach them both how to speak the language of the country they planned to one day move to. When they arrived and were just getting settled in, their stockbroker called with some terrible news. He said they had lost all of their savings in 1987. He had worked hard for years only to hear, “I don’t know how to tell you this, it’s all gone. Everything’s gone.” And that, “You’re not going to be able to wait this out. It’s gone. Gone.” Jamie went on to say, “So, years of saving and being smart and all that stuff. Gone. And uh we had I don’t know $135 left of years of work.” He said they decided to spend the last of their money on groceries. After that, God provided for the entire two years. Money would just be stuffed on their porch or clipped to their fridge it was a very supernatural provision. On the miraculous provision that the Lord provided Jamie said,
We were dirt poor. And so, we would get up some mornings and just say, Lord, we just need the food for today. And I mean it happened in so many weird ways. One time we were (he and his wife) just standing in the kitchen. I’m like you know I’m going to a class. (She’s also took classes.) I’m like you know we got to think about dinner at some point. And she goes over to look at the refrigerator and there’s a $20 bill just stuck on the refrigerator. And we just look at each other and just burst out laughing like I don’t even know how to ask where that came from.
Jamie said the constant financial miracles were not just for him and his wife. They were his whole family. He said, “And our kids got to watch it. That was the coolest thing. Our kids were little, and they got to see this happen. And then for them, it became kind of a normal!” God also used the incident to prepare Jamie and his wife for missionary work. He said that if they went to this foreign country with lots and lots of money in their bank account, the corrupt government would just steal it. So, God used the experience of losing all of their money to help prepare them for life overseas. Story after story is woven into this podcast about how God uses disappointments and hardships to show off, provide, and grow our faith and our experiences, readying us and making us into our full potential.
Jamie continued to say throughout the entire podcast that the Lord prefers obedience over anything else. The verse he continued to cite was “obedience is better than sacrifice,” which is attributed to 1 Samuel 15:22. Although Jamie did not describe the verse in this podcast interview, it suits his legacy well. In 1 Samuel 15:22, the prophet Samuel tells King Saul that God values listening and obeying His voice more than performing sacrifices. This emphasizes that sincere obedience, not religious ritual, matters most to the Lord. It is a recurring theme. For Jamie, following God no matter where that takes him in life is more important than doing his own thing.
Something else that really hit home for me was how Jamie described the cultural differences he learned while working as a missionary in another country. For obvious reasons, he and his family learned first-hand overseas that advertising is very different in a faraway land. The values that they knew were vastly different than the ones we hold here. On this topic, he said,
When you travel around, you come back with a sense of like, whoa, you know, there’s a consumer mammon (over America), which has a much stronger hold on us.
Jamie went on to say, “I don’t think this is (the consumer culture in America), you know, I think it’s just a fact of how we’re raised. There is so much emphasis on money. I mean, there’s so much emphasis on it and you don’t realize how much there is until you go into another country where they don’t have it, but they don’t miss it.”
I highly recommend that you take the time to listen to this podcast! But, if you are more of a reader, Jamie has also authored many books that are outstandingly good. I have provided a link here to Amazon.com where you can check out his other content which is off the wall amazing! (I have only read two of them so I cannot attest for all of them, but I am sure they are all very good!) I hope you enjoyed listening to this review of this outstanding podcast and I hope you have a blessed and wonderful day!
