 Hey guys, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and today I want to talk about raising the next generation of protectors, right? So I'm a parent, I have a couple kids, my oldest right now is my five-year-old son, and I've recently started doing this thing where when I leave the house, I will take off my neck knife. I've started carrying a neck knife for a little bit. I'm going to make a video about that eventually, but I'll take off my neck knife and I will bestow it upon him, and I will tell him, look, if someone comes in here into the house, you have this tool, and your job is to protect your mom and your sister and our house while I'm gone, okay? And I think there's something really powerful in that. Do I, okay, so just to be clear, do I honestly, am I honestly expecting my five-year-old to handle business? No, okay, I'm not. But if he stabbed a bad guy, I'd be very proud of him, right? That's not the point. The point isn't that I'm actually placing that responsibility on him, he's not an adult or anything like that. The point is I'm investing him with trust and with a responsibility to say, hey, this is serious, this is a big deal, here's a physical token that I am bestowing upon you to handle that, right? This is a tool on your quest. I know that sounds silly, but that's a big deal. And to tell your five-year-old son as a dad, hey, I'm trusting you to take care of business. You're responsible now. Here's the thing where we're calling them up to a certain level of responsibility that you just can't do otherwise. And honestly, so far, that's been the best use of the neck knife that I've found. Is to be able to bestow it on my son and tell him that he is now responsible in my absence to handle things. And I'm equipping him with the right tools to do that, right? To some degree. You don't want to, he's five, okay, stick with me here. So I think that that's really important and helpful. And I would invite you to do that. If you're a parent, I want you to help, you know, we all need to raise our kids in the mindset of having a protecting mindset. We are going to be good, strong men who are going to love our wives and care for our families and we're going to protect that which is important, right? And I want to raise my son to think in the same way. And so that's, that's one small way that I've found that I can invest that responsibility in him and call him up to that level of responsibility. You know, you could say, oh, he's five, he doesn't get it, we'll do it later. We'll do it when he's older. But if you think about it, I mean, you really only have what, 15, 18 years with your kids, you know, give or take, right? And then they're adults, then they're on their own for the most part. I'm raising my kids to send them out into the world. I'm not raising my kids to keep them by me my whole life. You raise kids up and you send them out. There's a great proverb in Psalms where it talks about kids or arrows in the quiver. And I've always really liked that because that means I'm raising, well, first of all, making arrows is very difficult, okay? It's called a Fletcher. It was a full-time job who makes arrows. That's their job. They have to balance, right? And they have to be sharp and they have to be weighted and they have feathers have to be glued correctly. I mean, all this stuff, I don't know a lot about arrow making, but I know it's not easy, okay? Two, that's a weapon, right? That's a weapon. And three, it goes out and it doesn't come back. That's what arrows do. They go out and they don't come back, right? So I really like thinking about raising my kids that way. I'm raising my kids, all of them, boys and girls, to be weapons out in the world for Jesus, but that's a different talk. And they're going out and they're not coming back. And so in this context, I think one small way I can help raise my son appropriately is to, again, equip him and call him up to that responsibility of being a protector, saying, this is what it means to be a man. This is what I expect from you long term. And in 20, 30 years, whatever, I hope he does the same thing with his son. I hope that he carries on that and he hands his neck knife to his son and tells him, hey, while I'm gone, you're responsible. So again, I always want to be thinking about ways that we can love our kids better and that we can raise them up to be protectors and call them into the world that we live in and we inhabit. So if you have any more clever ways to do that, please let me know because I'm always looking for ways to do that. Do brave deeds and endure.