TLP 83: Should You Consider Sending Your Son to Victory Academy for Boys this Fall? | Mark Massey Interview

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Far greater than where you choose for schooling is what you do to look at and engage the heart of your kid, and then speak into your child's heart's needs in a bigger way.

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Welcome to Truth. Love. Parent. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents.

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Here's your host, A .M. Brewster. Today's the fifth installment of our education series.

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So far we've discussed the parent's role in education, and whether or not you should consider sending your children to the public school,

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Christian school, or homeschool. And for most people, those seem to be the only options. However, I want to introduce you to a fourth option.

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It's not for everybody, but it's definitely for somebody. And your son might be that somebody. I also want to point out that today's show is the longest one we've ever done, and that's for two reasons.

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The first is that making the decision to send your child to Victory Academy is not an easy one. But second, my special guest and I want to equip you to never have to send your child to a program like this ever.

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And to that end, this episode will be well worth everyone's careful attention. As most of you know, I'm the lead counselor at Victory Academy for Boys in Amberg, Wisconsin.

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The ministry was started over 30 years ago by Steve Schroeder, who is a pastor of Grace for Life Bible Church in Illinois.

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Now, for the past 20 years, it's been directed by Mark Massey. And Mark is my special guest today to help us answer the question, should you consider sending your son to Victory Academy for Boys this fall?

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But before we start, there are three important things to understand. The first is that I believe today's discussion will be beneficial to all parents with all kids at all levels.

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Yes, it's true. We are talking about a school specifically for teen boys, but the principles we're going to cover today apply to everyone.

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Secondly, due to the nature of our program, it's good to know that every year we have students from all over the

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U .S. Unlike your local Christian or public school, Victory Academy is a boarding school program, and we serve families from all over the

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U .S., so this opportunity is not geographically bound. And lastly, I just want to give

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Mark fair warning, all right? My audience is no stranger to you. I find myself alluding to you quite frequently and quoting you and so on and so forth.

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So, you know, just be afraid. That's all. All right, Mark. So the question is, should our listeners consider

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Victory as an option for their son? What would you say is the major criteria they should be thinking about as they consider this question?

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I think the bottom line is whether the parent feels like they are not having the influence that they want to have on their kid and that they're not able to, if I could say, draw them away from the unrighteous things and continue to present truth and continue to draw the kid's thinking into what is a biblical worldview, biblical frame of mind.

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Now, what type of an effect does this have depending upon your relationship with your kids?

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I say this because, you know, I want to have influence in my kids' lives, regardless of how old they are.

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I want to have influence in the boys who come here to Victory. Specifically, though, the person who might be thinking about sending their kid to Victory Academy, many of them have come to a certain place in their ability to influence.

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And what do you see with the parents who send their kids here? Where are they in regard to that level of influence they're having?

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Well, we certainly get different kinds, if I could say it that way, of parents or parents at a different place.

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Some of our parents are what I would call really biblical parents. They both are Christians, and they are attempting to train their kids in a good worldview that's biblical, that draws their kid toward Christ.

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And then we have other parents that maybe they're nominally Christian. They like the idea of Christian things, and maybe they attend church every month or so, or not.

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So they're coming from a little different practical worldview, even though on paper their worldviews might be similar in some ways.

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So what I see is I see that either parent, whether it's the parent that is maybe more living out a biblical worldview, or the parent that's not,

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I see them understanding that their kid is kind of headed on his own path that is not necessarily a good path, and the parents aren't able to – they feel like they can't speak into their kid's life a whole lot, because the kid won't listen.

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He's in bondage to his own sin. He wants his own worldview because it feels good at the moment, and the parent's not able to really even take the time to speak into his life or draw him in and engage him in some way.

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That seems to be very limited, and the parents are scared. They're scared.

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They're not seeing any, if I could say, any turning back or even looking back at the parents.

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The kid's on his own path, and it's not a good one. As I've gone around telling churches and individuals about what we do at Victory Academy, I've oftentimes said that we're the place for parents who have lost the influence with their kids.

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But really, to be completely fair, that's not totally the case, because families who've completely, totally, 100 % lost all influence in the life of their child, oftentimes the child has gone out of the house.

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Whether it's a runaway situation, or the parents have just said, you know, this is just not working.

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Yeah, go live with your grandparents. I mean, there are many situations where I think the child has no care, no regard at all, zero respect whatsoever for his family, even as people.

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I think, you know, obviously we don't get this here at Victory, but I think kids who have gone to that degree are the kids who are physically abusing and hurting their parents.

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Those people who, you know, we hear about in the news, and we say, wow, how could that even happen? Often the civil authorities have already been in play for some time by the time a family gets to that situation, too.

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Exactly. Totally. So with that said, I think, like you mentioned, it's kind of a lot of different degrees of influence.

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There are some families who they don't have as much influence as they want, but they're able to make some helpful changes in their child's lives and thinking.

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And then there are other people who have less influence in their child's lives who are able to kind of do the same thing, but then there are people who further down the list, and so it ends up being a degree thing.

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But if you feel overall, for you and your children, if you feel overall that when, for the most part, as you instruct them and guide them, try to draw them back to truth, all the things that we talk about on the show, as you're trying to do them and parent them to the glory of God, it's not resonating.

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And not only are they not taking it due to their immaturity, but they're also rejecting it.

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They're pushing back against it. That's the point where you're saying, okay, I don't think

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I'm able to influence this child the way I want to in a profitable way because what I'm doing isn't working.

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And that normally brings us to this idea of crisis. I've heard

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Mark say on many occasions, you know, that we are dealing with teens in crisis and families in crisis.

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I wondered if you'd talk to us a little bit about that. Well, whenever I think of crisis, I think of something that's out of control.

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We're not able to get it under control. And in a sense, I'm not talking about just having a big thumb over your children.

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I'm talking about, we feel like we're losing control of what is influencing our kids. And we get, if I could say, scared because we can't get it to pull back.

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Be it, they're on the phone. For us, we work with teenage guys a lot of times.

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It's a girl that comes into the picture. All of a sudden, the whole world changes and the whole attitude of the kid changes.

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He's not interested in church anymore. He's not interested in dinner with you. He's not interested in being in your home. You just happen to provide good meals and lodging.

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That's a crisis. That's a crisis because it's like whenever we have an emergency scenario, an auto accident or something like that, all of a sudden, we were driving down the road and everything was good, but there's a wreck.

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There's a crash. Immediately, we want 911 call. We want to bring in all the resources we can because we've got to correct this situation because life is on the line.

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I think sometimes, too, and to use the metaphor of the auto accident, sometimes things just come out of nowhere and they blindside you.

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I think that oftentimes, that does happen in families. However, I think what happens more often is we're driving down the road in the car that's always been reliable.

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In fact, it's been reliable so often that we rarely take it in to have the tires rotated and we don't get it in when it's supposed to be gotten in to take care of all the fluids and whatnot.

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We really haven't poured into the car the way we're supposed to because it's a reliable car.

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Then, we're driving down the road and a tire goes out or something else drops from the vehicle.

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It seems in the moment to have come out of nowhere, but the reality is it was building up and building up and building up over time.

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I think likely, I think especially with the families we work with in our ministry, we see that very frequently.

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Yes, we get the phone call. Yes, the parent sits down to Google us at that moment of highest intensity, but the crisis moment that they see oftentimes was, had many other crisis moments before that.

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A moment when a child was responsible to make a decision to glorify God or to glorify self and they chose the wrong one, which made it easier to do it the next time and the next time.

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We didn't see it because overall, the child was pretty reliable and we weren't pouring in and influencing the way we were supposed to be up until that point.

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Right. We see, okay, we have a bald tire on the car that blows out and then that causes an accident.

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Now, we're in a major crisis, whereas before we looked at the tire and went, yeah, it's looking a little thin.

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I probably ought to put that in the budget pretty soon. As parents, we all struggle with having the time that we want with our kids.

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We may even budget it. We may even say, okay, this Saturday we're going to go and do whatever.

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Then you find out that, well, your kid's got to work that day or he's got to practice that day or a game or something else comes up and draws his attention away.

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You're sitting around the house having a bowl of ice cream by yourself because the kid's out doing something else and that was an opportunity lost.

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It's really, and that causes that blindsidedness. That's where you're driving down the road and the tire blows, it veers into the other direction.

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A girl comes into the picture or a buddy that smokes pot comes into the picture or the guys down at the skate area, he starts getting into skateboarding because it's fun to go down there.

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It is fun to play on skateboards and stuff, but it also opens him up to a lot of free thinking time with people that are not necessarily going to influence the way you want them to.

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That even happens even in the school system. We've talked about sending your kid to a public school or a

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Christian school or even homeschooling, but even within the realm of the Christian and the public school system, yeah, they're there and they're learning math and they're learning

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English and science and whatnot, but they're learning it from people who have a certain worldview.

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They're sitting under that person's authority for a number of hours, sometimes a day, and that influence is going to be there.

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Those are the things I think that really catch us off guard. I think most parents, your son or whoever brings a friend home and your friend's really into skateboarding and the friend's like, hey, can

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I take your son over to the skate park? You're kind of thinking in your mind, what are the influences that might come into his life there, right?

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But when we think about sending our kid off to school, man, we're rushing to get our kid off to school. We're trying to get him there.

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Sometimes we're tempted to see how late we can pick him up or her up and without even counting the cost, okay, so what are the influences that your child's going to have in that class, at that sports practice, in that band practice, even in that AV club while I'm waiting to get off of work?

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On the bus toward the ballgame or in the McDonald's whenever the team has stopped to get dinner, there's influences happening all the time, everywhere they go.

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If they're just sitting in their room perusing their phone, they've got an absolute open door of influence going right into their brains really all the time now.

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That's one of the, if I could say it, one of the crises in America is just that.

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Our kids are constantly being bombarded with thinking influences that really aren't biblical.

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They're training in unrighteousness. And the venues of that in our country right now are amazing and very, very captivating.

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The screens are just captivating and it's difficult.

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We're in a difficult place in that way. So there are a lot of things that can blindside us as parents and we want to really look at that.

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This is one of the things I hope this interview accomplishes is just to encourage parents to really think about what is influencing their kids.

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It doesn't really matter whether, well, I shouldn't say it doesn't matter. It matters what you choose for schooling, but far greater than where you choose for schooling is what you do to look at and engage the heart of your kid and then make your adjustments with your life however you need to so that you can speak into your child's heart's needs in a bigger way, in a more crisp way.

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That may be time, but you may already give a good chunk of time to your kids and that's great, but you may be doing things that aren't as important of an influence as some other things might be.

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But when you get to the teenage years, while with children you can speak and they hear because they have ears, the teenager not so much because the teenager is evaluating everything.

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He's starting to think like an adult. He's starting to process things. He's starting to get the connections between what you are saying and what you are doing.

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That's where that magical H word comes up, hypocrisy. And the kids, they'll throw that hypocrisy card because,

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I mean, frankly, we're all saying live like Jesus and none of us are living like Jesus. We're all failing at that.

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So we have to be very careful, but we have to continually be looking for the way to speak into their lives.

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I think two real quick points here, back to the idea of crisis. I hope what this does is it shows you that unless every single influence in your child's life is 100 %

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Christ honoring, your child is in crisis. And she's in crisis because she's being faced with worldviews that contradict

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God's word or that have a slice of God's word mixed with a slice of the worldly thinking, which basically contradicts

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God's word. And she's in crisis because in that moment she needs to make a decision. And this happens with children of every age.

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You have your mother of twins and they're young twins and they're three years old and they're sitting there and one of them has a toy and the one comes up and takes the first toy.

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Well, the one who had the toy taken away on a very low level, of course, is functioning through life.

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And you know what? That worked for that other kid. You know, I had the toy and that toy was taken and you know what?

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I want it back. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to take it back. I'm going to do what he did to me. And even in that environment, that child came to a moment of crisis.

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Are they going to take the toy back? Are they going to take it back and then smack the other kid over the head? Now, the three -year -old doesn't think through it the same way that a teenager does, which is why oftentimes we see it more in the teenagers.

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But the reality is our children are in crisis because they have influences coming into their lives that are not 100 %

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Christ -honoring. And my second thing was, Mark, I'm curious. Your kids actually,

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I think in a way, kind of go to all of the different school educational opportunities that we're talking about in this series.

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You've got some kids in the public school. You've got some kids who are homeschooled. You have kids who are taking advantage of Christian school opportunities.

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And you also have kids going to a Christian college. So, you know, your children are spread out.

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You know their influences coming into their lives from all over the place. You have a pretty good idea about the amount of influence you have in their lives.

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So how do you know, how do you handle and facilitate all that in a

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Christ -honoring way? Well, we know that Proverbs teaches us that even a child is known by the things that he does.

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Read that yesterday. I think it was Proverbs 20. I think it was Proverbs 20. The reality is

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I have five children from 11 to 20. And they each require a different type or a different dynamic of engagement at times.

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They all require time. They all require good thinking, insightful conversations.

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Even the 11 -year -old requires insightful conversations. We, my wife and I, have to work at where is my kid at?

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And I can see that by what he does. So I may not know the full struggle that's going on in his heart, which is important for me to acknowledge, because I may have a kid that the acts on the outside, he's being a selfish pig, you know, in some way.

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He's not really not caring for the people around him, a brother or sister, or it may be someone else, one of our students.

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There may be an interaction with one of our students. They're not being kind and patient with or whatever. I have to think through what his actions are and then challenge his actions.

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Then, if I've got a good relationship with the kid, if I am relationally engaging all the time, if I challenge what he's doing, he's going to do his best to reveal his heart to me, because he wants me to understand why he made the decision he made or why she made the decision she made.

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That's fantastic because it gives me an opportunity to speak into his heart, not just his actions.

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The actions reveal the heart, but it doesn't reveal the whole heart. It may reveal that genuine struggle like Romans chapter 7 talks about.

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I've got the nature inside of me that is old and corrupt, and I've got this new nature because I'm born again.

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Those two natures are at war with one another. I see that whenever my teenage son doesn't respond well to my teenage daughter.

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They get frustrated with each other on a personal level for little intricate details like doing the dishes.

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Your kids struggle with that too? Oh, man, yeah, or taking out the trash, or cleaning the rooms, or taking care of the last responsibility they were given.

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Those responsibilities often overlap whenever there are no dishes to eat dinner on because the dishes haven't been done, or because there's junk laying around on the counter in the bathroom, so the next person can't get in there and do what they need to do.

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They just want to get a trash can, clean the counter off, and move on. Getting not just to what they're doing, the actions, but understanding that the actions reveal heart struggle.

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Now I want to learn the heart so that I'm not harshly speaking into or putting in demands that they change behavior.

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Yes, I want to change behavior, but behavior is one of the keys that reveals heart, and heart is what

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I'm after. The dishes will get done. They may not get done on my time schedule, but they'll get done.

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The room will be clean, or it won't, and we'll all survive, but what we won't survive is a heart that's corrupted and continues to be trained to be selfish because I'm not engaged as a parent and challenging that thinking.

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They'll go on on their own, and as we know in Proverbs, you can't leave a child to his own.

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His own way is a deadly way. It's a terrible way, and we've been given the glorious opportunity to step in and challenge in a kind way, in a gracious way, but to challenge their thinking and encourage them to really see what's behind it.

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So then they begin to loathe, Wow, I was really unkind. That's a pretty lousy heart.

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I want to be a kind person. I know that pleases God, and because I'm born again, that's what

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I want. So I want to be kind, but I didn't see that as unkind, but you're right,

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Dad, that's unkind. This is such a huge topic, knowing your children, being able to tell,

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Okay, so my kid's away at school eight, nine hours a day. When they come home, how do I know if my influence for Christ is really working in their lives to fight against the negative influences they have at school?

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I encourage you. I mean, this is so huge. We started talking about this back in episode five. I encourage you to go back and listen to it if you haven't.

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It's called Removing the Mask, Four Ways to Better Understand Your Child. When you're asking yourself,

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Okay, well, how much influence am I really having in my kid's life? Hopefully these will help you along with the things that we're talking about today to figure that out.

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Also, episode four is called Don't Lose Your Influence. I wrote that information down specifically because we work with so many families who have lost influence.

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I just kind of work through. For those of us who haven't yet, or for those of us who really want to gain it back, what do we need to be doing?

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That's, again, episode four. I encourage you to look at Don't Lose Your Influence. Again, this is important regardless of the age of your children.

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What influences are in their lives? Understanding that they are in crisis moments and that a three -year -old is not going to respond in a

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Christ -honoring way. In fact, if my child is unsaved, if they're rocky or if they're thorny or if they're hard -hearted, they can't respond in a

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Christ -honoring way, which is why God put us into their lives. God gave us parents to them so that we can help work them through these situations and help them to see how

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God wants them to respond, to influence them. And so that influence arises out of the fact that we need to realize our five -year -old, our seven -year -old, our 13 -year -old, our 22 -year -old, they are all in crisis moments and that we need to parent them through that.

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But the last thing is specifically, I think for you parents out there who you say, my kid's a terrorist and he just so happens to be 13 years old or he's in senior high and he's definitely a terrorist and I'm listening to what you're saying and it's all resonating with me.

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My kid is obviously in crisis. I think he has more crisis situations in his life than most kids do and he's responding worse to them than most kids do.

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I try to influence, but I realize that it's not really working. What do

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I need to do? And this episode is not here to convince you to send your kid to Victory Academy for Boys.

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Actually, what we really wanna do is we wanna just give you more information so that you can make the best decision for your family and that may involve

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Victory Academy, but Victory Academy is not big enough for everybody whose teen is in crisis. So we understand the fact that this is not

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God's will for everybody. So for those of you who we can help and serve here at Victory Academy, we would love to do that.

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We're gonna have all the appropriate links and phone numbers for you listed in the description or links to the places where we can get the phone numbers.

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We definitely want you to get in touch with us if you think that this ministry can help your family and to help you in particular get back to a place of influence in the life of your child.

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But there are some steps I think before that that maybe you shouldn't consider. We've talked about them being in crisis.

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We've talked about them needing that influence, but beyond influence is this idea of engagement.

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Mark, why don't you talk to us a little bit about how a family who's realized that they're in this, and honestly, really it's for all of us.

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We all need to be engaging, but specifically how parents who are working with a terrorist child in this difficult situation where they're losing their influence, how can they take this idea of engagement perhaps to help fix things before a step like sending your son to Victory Academy?

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Well, there are two. Well, for one thing, I think going to the four kinds of soil that you mentioned a few minutes ago and looking at, okay,

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I've got a kid who's hard or he's stony or he's thorny. We just cleared some land out here at the academy.

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Boy, did we ever. If rocks were gold or if they were even copper, we would be millionaires here.

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We have rocks everywhere. But it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time.

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It takes sometimes specialized equipment to get stuff moved out of the soil so that we can actually grow something.

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If your kid has his heart packed full of rocks and thorns and hammered down solid soil, somewhere you've got to start taking those rocks out.

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Somewhere you've got to start pulling weeds. And that's hard work. A lot of times weeds don't want to come out.

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A lot of times the rocks, they're packed in. That hard soil that's packed in with rocks, we get heavy equipment and break it up.

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Sometimes we get the pry bars out and little shovels to dig little pieces of dirt out so we can get the rocks out.

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It is a lot of work to cultivate the soil into what is good soil.

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So to look at how we're going to do that, it's really forcing the influence for good back into his life.

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And you've only got a few options because if it is truly hard, rocky, thorny soil, there's not much room in there to plant the good things.

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So it's really forcing your way in. It may be ripping a weed out. It may mean, you know what, son, you can't have the internet access at our home anymore.

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It's just, you're not going to have it. You're not going to have your phone. It may be pulling out, snatching out some of those weeds or some of those rocks and giving opportunity.

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Okay, now he's bored. All right, he doesn't have the ability to surf

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Facebook for four and a half hours in the evening. Well, yeah, he may not be super stoked about you filling that four and a half hours.

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However, it is four and a half hours. And if you have the ability at this point in his life to control that that well, which a lot don't, but if you do, that's an opportunity

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God has provided. Seize it. Be intentional. Be intentional with what you can do.

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How can you influence? Maybe you need to bring others into your lives. That are good influences.

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That may mean more church attendance. It may mean being engaged. If there's a

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Christian guy that's running the scouting program or a martial arts program or a soccer program, you know a good

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Christian coach that's going to be a good influence. Encourage. Do all you can to encourage his involvement in those kinds of things.

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Don't just sign him up for it either. I mean, we need to be there. Be there. Transparent. Yep. We need to be engaging as well.

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We also need to be transparent. Sit down with that coach and be honest. Hey, I'm losing my son's heart.

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Yeah, I want him to learn how to play soccer, but will you please view him as a discipleship opportunity?

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Maybe even evangelistic opportunity. I think that that humility that we need as parents to be transparent like that is super important so that as we onboard other people, we're not just kind of doing it on the sly.

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We're intentionally, they're intentionally, stepping into my child's life to have that influence.

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Yeah, that will create an accountability with your coach or teacher or whatever, whoever it is, that okay, we've got a program going here and it really doesn't have that much to do with soccer.

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I mean, I love to watch my kids play sports, but boy, is that ever secondary to their character.

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And if I see poor character on that field, I'm going to confront it as a parent. I'm going to confront it if it's my child.

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I'm going to confront it and work on it. So I do want to be very clear that our goal is to get the influence back ourselves as parents because we're given the primary responsibility.

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However, there are times that the relationship is very poor between parent and child and the first step is going to be just getting some good influence into their lives.

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I've used the term a council of influence before and what

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I mean by that is as a parent, I look at every resource I have, every resource in my community, every resource in my family, every remote resource that might be in another part of the world, any resource of influence that can be engaged in my kid's heart.

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That might be a friend that you know that's a missionary in China. It may be an uncle that's an aerospace engineer in California.

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It really doesn't matter who it is. But looking for who can influence his life and connecting with them, and as Aaron said moments ago, transparent,

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I need your help. I am losing this kid. I don't feel like we have any influence in his life.

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Could you please step in? And not asking them to step in and build you up as a parent.

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Ask them to step in and build up Christ because Christ is the answer. You're not the answer. You are a tool that God is using to rescue this kid from the pit of hell.

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And as that, you really don't, if I could say, you really don't care who the influence is.

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Whatever influence God can use to draw his heart toward Christ is what you want.

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But you have, you've been put into that key position as a parent to engage and see the need that the kid has and look at how we can influence him.

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And that may be through a whole bunch of different people that aren't you.

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And that I think is, while we don't want to just say, okay,

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I've got him in Sunday school. I've got him in youth group. I've got him in Christian school. Okay, everything should be good.

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That ain't going to work. That does not work. If that works, it's by God's grace. It's not by your work.

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And you're the one given the responsibility as a parent. So the deal is, like Aaron was saying, to engage and be transparent with your coaches and your teachers and that kind of thing.

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I'm going to say another step that you can take in that is to be actually engaged in the activities with your kid, not just dropping them off, but staying and watching practice.

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As boring as that may be, in some ways, it does give you something to communicate and connect with him about.

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Hey, I watched you do that. That was an amazing goal you had right there. Or, wow, you kind of got run over by number 74, right?

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Whatever, it's learning. You've got more to talk about and more to engage in. And there is nothing that says care as much as really engaged, focused time.

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It just takes it. It's like I've heard someone say before that quality time is only found in quantity time.

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You don't just show up and have quality time. It takes that quantity of time within which that's found.

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So being engaged in every way that you can, most little kid soccer teams are going to love to have a parent that's willing to tote the stuff out there, that's willing to take the little midgets downfield and run them and help them figure out how to kick the ball without doing the

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Charlie Brown thing. I mean, there are certainly things that you as a parent have to add into a situation like that and be engaged with that coach and teacher or organization leader or whatever.

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I mean, think outside the box in some senses, too. You may see an influence like a neighbor two roads over or whatever that your kid mows the grass for and your kid respects him.

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Engage with that guy or family and build everywhere you can see an influence for positive work to build that influence and keep the kid engaged in that.

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And like I said earlier, this is not just for the families who found their child with pornography or found their child with marijuana.

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This is for everybody. If you take everything that we've talked about today and you're doing that preemptively, you're doing that before the tire blows out and the car flips.

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The problem started a long time before it showed up at pot. Exactly. Getting to your child, engaging in them when there doesn't seem to be an issue.

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And I think this just kind of falls into parental laziness. I'm listening to what Mark is saying and I'm realizing that, you know what?

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Heath Lambert said it. Tim Challey said it. We're all saying it. We've got to be intentionally engaging regardless of whether there's a presenting problem in their life or not because guess what?

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They're human. They're human, which means they have a sin nature, which means they're making choices that don't glorify God. And listen, we here at Victory Academy are in a very interesting position because there's not a single person on this campus who wants your kid to have to come here.

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We would love it if a family camp or a weekend of counseling or any of the advice that we've given you today were able to get you back into a place where you're able to influence your children and there were not a single child in the entire world who had to come to Victory Academy.

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You know what? We would find something else better to do. Now we're here because there are people who do need to come here.

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And if you or your children did participate in a ministry like what we have, amen, we'd love to serve you in that way.

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But I hope you understand our heartbeat today really is, yes, should you consider sending your kid to Victory Academy?

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And some of you may have to answer yes to that question. For those of you who say, I don't know yet, great.

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Hopefully the things that we've given you, the importance of the fact that they are in crisis, that they need your influence, and you've got to be premeditatedly, intentionally, disciple -makingly engaging in their lives now before there's a problem will, praise

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God, keep your children from needing a place like Victory Academy or needing a place beyond Victory Academy, a place like a lockdown facility or the state penitentiary.

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So that I think is our greatest heartbeat. And like I said before, I'm going to provide all the necessary links in the description so any of you who are interested will be able to learn more about Victory Academy for Boys.

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I also encourage you to give them a call. Mark's wife Lynn handles many of those calls and she and Mark will be able to answer all of your specific family questions in order to provide you some more guidance about whether or not this is a decision that you need to be making and potentially maybe some decisions you should think about making before taking this step.

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And Mark, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. I'm so glad I finally was able to drag you in here.

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It's good to be here. Awesome. Before Mark takes off, I want to encourage you to listen to episode 20. It's entitled 10

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Things Parents Miss. I basically worked through an article that Mark wrote and I believe it's vital for all of us to hear so that we don't miss these things.

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Please join us next time as we wrap up our discussion on education for now. Our next episode is entitled

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The Future of Christian Families and Higher Education. The thought of your little ones heading off to college may seem very distant to you, but that makes this discussion that much more important.

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The landscape of Christian higher education has changed so greatly in the past 10 years. In fact, much of today's research is showing that higher education in general may not be the answer of the future.

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But is that research accurate? Are their conclusions sound? And what does the future really hold for Christians in education?

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Please join me next time as I interview the president of Bob Jones University, Dr. Steve Pettit. And don't forget to like Victory Academy for Boys on Facebook.

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And while you're there, swing on over to like TruthLoveParent as well. You can also follow us on Twitter and you can find me on Twitter as well at AM Brewster.

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Whether your child is an ambassador or a terrorist, God will help you decide what educational options are best, but you need to submit to Him and utilize

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His wisdom. And don't forget, we're here to help. Have a great day. Truth, Love, Parent is part of the

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Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.