A Wanted Man Read online

  © 2016 by Jason Cruise

  Print ISBN 978-1-63409-850-2

  eBook Editions:

  Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-68322-044-2

  Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-68322-045-9

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  Churches and other noncommercial interests may reproduce portions of this book without the express written permission of Barbour Publishing, provided that the text does not exceed 500 words or 5 percent of the entire book, whichever is less, and that the text is not material quoted from another publisher. When reproducing text from this book, include the following credit line: “From A Wanted Man, published by Barbour Publishing, Inc. Used by permission.”

  Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

  Published by Shiloh Run Press, an imprint of Barbour Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.shilohrunpress.com

  Our mission is to publish and distribute inspirational products offering exceptional value and biblical encouragement to the masses.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: You Are Being Hunted

  1. Brutal Fact #1: Confront the Hunt

  2. Brutal Fact #2: You Live outside the Wire

  3. Brutal Fact #3: The Power of Obsession

  4. Brutal Fact #4: Every Good Thief Is Both Patient and Intent

  5. Brutal Fact #5: It’s Critical to Know Why You Are a Wanted Man

  6. Something Unexpected

  7. Brutal Fact #6: You Must Navigate Failure and Do It with Brutal Hope

  8. In the End

  Notes

  To my sons Cole and Tucker,

  I have no clue why God chose me to be the man given the sobering honor of having you as my sons. Your talent, honor, and heart often leave me speechless. Watching you grow up before me, it is beyond question that you are rare young men who are going to be valiant Kingdom leaders. May you be eternally brave, fear nothing, and yet never forget that you have an enemy eager for your demise.

  Stay forever sharp. I’ll be with you, at the ready, to the very end. I promise.

  —Dad

  INTRODUCTION:

  YOU ARE BEING HUNTED

  Hated. Despised. Pursued.

  That’s who you are.

  You have an enemy. He cannot kill you, for only God holds the keys to life and death.

  He can, however, most certainly bring about the death of your heart. His idea of a pleasant evening would be to rip out your lungs with a dull knife and watch you die a slow and painful death. In light of the fact that he cannot kill you, he will gladly settle for crippling you with job loss, divorce, shame, bankruptcy, or even jail time.

  This isn’t fiction.

  It’s a reality you live every day. This hostile environment surrounds you like the air you breathe.

  You don’t have to believe it. In fact, don’t believe it.

  Don’t believe it at all. Don’t believe that you have an enemy. Just smirk at it and keep moving through your day.

  He likes it that way.

  Just realize that it’s only a matter of time until you do actually believe it.

  In that moment—when you are standing mere inches from your wife as she stares at a blurry, distorted image of your face because she’s looking at you through tear-saturated eyes—remember that you didn’t believe it. In all of your talking, in all of your explaining, just remember that she cannot hear your words, for your voice is echoing off the walls of her mind as it spins with the shock and pain you just inflicted on her.

  That brutal fact is this: you are being hunted.

  In that cold, quiet moment when you are losing your job and packing your pens, that golf trophy from the charity classic your team won last year, and your phone charger into a white banker’s box—you know, the kind with handles cut into the sides—while the rest of your coworkers are watching but trying not to stare, remember that you didn’t believe it.

  When you literally cannot breathe because you can see in your son’s eyes that he has questions screaming in his young mind—What is going to happen to my family? Are we going to have to move? Is Daddy going to live here anymore?—in that moment, my brother, you are going to believe it.

  In that moment, when everything else about your life is foggy and dense and heavy, you will discover one truth so clear, so perfectly crisp, so clean—like a blue sky on a cloudless winter day—you will know that you have an enemy.

  And you’re going to wish you’d confronted the most vital brutal fact a long, long time ago.

  That brutal fact is this: you are being hunted.

  Before you read any further, go to JasonCruise.com/WantedMan and watch “The Story of Brian Hinkle.” Then come back and start reading from here.

  WHY THIS BOOK?

  I’ll never forget the day Brian called me. When I answered the phone, his trembling voice sounded weak.

  “Brian, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  All he could say was, “I messed up. Real bad. I don’t know what to do.”

  Later on, when I left Brian’s house that day, my soul felt tired. It was a feeling I hadn’t encountered in a long time. I just felt weary.

  I’ve been weary before, true. Yet I couldn’t remember a time when I experienced weariness from a battle I wasn’t fighting personally.

  Typically when your soul is tired, it’s from being in a fight that has an impact on you personally. Your mom has cancer, so you walk with her and your dad through the oncology gauntlet. Your teenage daughter is crying because boys are not paying attention to her. You pray with her and for her for months on end, about her identity in Christ, and your soul is fatigued because she has your DNA. Those types of battles make sense. You should be tired from that kind of fighting.

  With Brian, it was different.

  I drove my truck out of his driveway, and I was over it. I mean, just fed up and over it. I felt so incredibly sick and tired and sick of being tired from watching brother after brother, men whom I truly loved, just getting their teeth knocked in from doing battle with the devil—or from not doing battle with the devil as they should.

  What is going on? I found myself asking my own soul.

  Yes, I knew it was Satan. Yes, I know we live in a spiritually hostile world. That wasn’t my concern.

  What I could not grasp is why. Why are so many men, later in life, like after forty, still falling to the very same enemies they fell to when they were young men in their twenties?

  If a twenty-three-year-old guy has sex with his girlfriend, we chalk it up to him being a walking hormone, and in our minds, his age alone is at the core of the reason he did it.

  At forty-two, I and my friends should know better, right? Yet all around me, I kept seeing man after man after man falling.

  Some were losing jobs from falling to toxic levels of arrogance and their unwillingness to be coachable or to grow professionally.

  Some were falling to addiction.

  Some were chained in depression and felt hopeless.

  Some were falling to porn.

  Some were falling to greed and the lust for a fat bank account.

  Some were destroying their lives with unyielding bouts of anger.

  About the time of the Brian Hinkle saga, men all around me were falling.

  This one thing I knew: I was next.

  THE SOBERING REALITY OF BEING ON THE HIT LIST

  I wasn’t next because I was wrapped up in living a double life. I wasn’t nex
t because I was pursuing ill-gotten financial gain. I was moving through manhood “okay,” I suppose.

  I knew I was most likely next, because on many fronts men I shared brotherhood with were taking sniper fire from the enemy, and I certainly wasn’t exempt. When you walk around in sniper territory, you’re going to be shot at; and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got hit.

  Brian Hinkle’s fall jolted me. Hard.

  I felt as if I’d been hit by a stun gun, for a brother close to me had fallen—had taken a round to his heart spiritually. That one shot from the enemy had been well planned and tactically orchestrated. And while it was Brian who had been shot at, that solitary projectile had ballistic casualties far beyond him. His wife was wounded, his parents absorbed some of the pain from the shock of it, and so did his two sons. His friends felt the blow. His church also took some impact from the blast.

  I knew I’d just been painfully reminded of this brutal truth: this land is not my homeland.

  I cannot tell you exactly why Brian’s fall hit me so hard, other than that we were close. His fall caused in me a chain reaction of thoughts and feelings that had perhaps been dormant for a while.

  When Brian went down, it became painfully evident to me that I was living, walking, networking, and operating as an alien in a foreign, hostile land.

  Upon pulling out of Brian’s driveway, with my heart on the floorboard of my truck, I knew I’d just been painfully reminded of this brutal truth: this land is not my homeland.

  THE BRUTAL FACTS

  The greatest, most effective leaders I know are readers. Leaders are readers; they learn early that they must never stop learning. My life has been changed by many books, mostly by faith-based leaders writing about what it means to live, walk, and survive in Christ as a man pursuing biblical manhood.

  Every book that God has used to change my life is one that I’ve read more than once. I keep returning to certain books like a person would return to a freshwater well.

  This trend holds true in my life with Jim Collins’s globally famous work Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t. While I’m not the world’s strongest businessman, I enjoy knowing about business, for all of us are in business on some level. Instead of writing his arbitrary thoughts on how to win in business, Collins decided to research great businesses throughout history.

  For example, Kroger and A&P sold groceries. Ask people born before 1970, and many of them will tell you, “Oh yeah, I remember A&P. My family shopped there all the time.”

  In Collins’s mind, both Kroger and A&P sold the same stuff—toilet paper, soap, hamburger, and fruit. Virtually no differences existed, from a product perspective, between the two companies. So why, then, did A&P, this giant in the land of grocery stores, go bankrupt while Kroger is still alive today? In a word: worldview.

  Good to Great isn’t a book on business models as much as it is about how great business leaders think. And that got my attention.

  Learning the fine points of interpreting profit-and-loss statements means nothing to me, but how great leaders think—well, that has massive value for me. So I found myself reading and rereading Collins’s book over the years.

  Perhaps the greatest truth I have taken away from Collins and his research on great corporate cultures is this axiom in the fourth chapter:

  Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith).1

  Why does this mean so much to me? Because I’m an optimist. I am that guy saying, “Yes, we can win, no matter what.”

  However, I also know that living in Utopia is often not as important as living in Realville.

  In looking at why so many companies fail, Collins found that many leaders had charisma but their charisma was sometimes misleading. Not misleading so much in terms of being deceptive with employees, but in terms of having a “pie in the sky” mentality of leadership based not on numbers and trends but on blind hope.

  Here’s the truth: hope is not a strategy.

  As Christian men, we can’t just hope our way through living out godly manhood. It won’t work. We need to have a biblical plan for winning.

  We need to have a biblical plan for winning.

  Collins and his researchers found, in his own words:

  “All good-to-great companies began the process of finding a path to greatness by confronting the brutal facts of their current reality. When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts.”2

  1 : BRUTAL FACT #1

  CONFRONT THE HUNT

  Before you read any further, watch “Brutal Fact #1: Confront the Hunt” at JasonCruise.com/WantedMan.

  The brutal facts start with accepting the simple reality that you are being hunted. Operatives are out to get you, and they come in all forms.

  The form they take is custom-designed to fit your personality, for deceivers are craftsmen. Never forget that.

  ARX AXIOM

  Arx axiom is a Latin concept meaning “the fortress of first principles.”

  Before you find victory—a true, sustainable victory in this journey of manhood—you must come to grips with one single principle: you must confront the fact that you are being hunted.

  My grandfather, Joshua Lowrey Cruise, was five feet ten inches tall, yet he was larger than life in my eyes. I called him “Dat-Dat.” I think “Dat-Dat” came from me not being able to say “Granddad” as a toddler, and as I grew older, it got shortened to “Dat.”

  Dat fought in World War II. Raised in the hills of Tennessee during the Great Depression, he grew up poor, never leaving his county until the day he received his draft card in the mail to go defend his country against the Nazis.

  During his tour of duty, Dat’s boots ran across Normandy Beach and all throughout Europe.

  I didn’t need movies like Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, for Dat would dispense real-life stories in small doses over the years as time allowed him to talk about the things he’d witnessed.

  Because of Dat’s fighting in World War II, the European theater of war has forever been of interest to me. Often when a college professor assigned a paper, I’d write on something about that war, that era, or the political situations surrounding it.

  One of the great truths I learned about the D-Day epic saga was that the war was actually won on that day. Any historian will tell you that one day changed world history forever.

  Yet the reality was this: the war was won at Normandy, but the battle remained. The battle had to go all the way to Berlin before the war actually ended.

  YOUR VERY OWN ARX AXIOM

  The first principles of the war you’re in now are no different. If you are a believer in Christ, the war you face was won the day Jesus came out of the grave. The battle, however, is recurring for the rest of your life until you meet Him face-to-face.

  The context of the battle may change, but the fight remains to the very end.

  If you are a believer in Christ, the war you face was won the day Jesus came out of the grave.

  THE FOUNDATION FROM HERE FORWARD

  This book, A Wanted Man, came out of my investigation of a solitary verse—John 10:10.

  Get this verse down. Know it in your mind, word by word, phrase by phrase. Seriously. Know it beginning to end. This verse is vital for living life smack in the middle of a manhunt.

  “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

  JOHN 10:10

  If you isolate this verse and let it sink into your bones, you can feel the weight of it almost immediately. It took hold in my life through something quite unexpected.

  I began to study the Gospel of John, and as I was reading it, this verse resonated through the annals of time and came at me almost from the scriptures themselves. With weight.

  I
turned this verse over and over in my head for weeks, even months.

  It soon became apparent to me that a thief stalked me. Look, I knew that already. That was no new news.

  However, I found his intent sobering. The discipline, the passion, the nonstop push the enemy had for me. And that’s why I’m telling you we must break this verse down together for it to grab hold of our spirits.

  IMAGINE THIS

  Imagine you get a text message today that simply reads:

  I’m coming to kill you. Not today—but soon.

  That single text message would alter the course of your life, right? You’d be calling the police, and if they labeled it a serious threat, they’d probably bring in the FBI or at least state-level authorities to investigate.

  You’d tell all of your closest friends. You’d let your employer know about it.

  If you got that text and you didn’t own a gun, you’d buy one before supper.

  For reasons beyond me, John 10:10 confronted me. It wouldn’t leave my mind. I’d read it a hundred times, but this time it took root.

  I realized I would be in a battle for the rest of my life.

  Daily you and I are being hunted. And if you expect to come out on the other side of this battle as a victor who is, as Paul said, more than a conqueror through Christ who loves us (see Romans 8:37), then you have to take Jesus’ words in John 10:10 seriously.

  KNOWING YOUR ENEMY

  For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

  EPHESIANS 6:12