Episode S6E05: "Bury Me in a Dirty Suit" | Discovering Man’s Valiant Purpose in the Aftermath of 9/11: Kinder, Darin

“On September 11, we remembered the 24th anniversary of 9/11, an unforgettable day. Darin Kinder, a personal friend of FWM, was there that day and experienced 9/11 as a responder. It was a gut-wrenching day that would change the course of his life.

In this podcast, listen to his story as he shares it with Hal and all of us. Buy his book, Bury Me in a Dirty Suit, and read it for yourself. Pray for Darin and the opportunities ahead for him. If you would like to contact Darin for a speaking engagement, you can contact him through the following links.”  

FEIRCE FAITH - Home

DARIN KINDER - Home

Transcript

Unknown: 0:02

ANNOUNCER today on the finishing well podcast, discerning and getting after the will of God. For me, I've come to learn at age 51 is it's less about knowledge and it's more about the obedient daily walk, that long, steady march in the right direction. Welcome to the finishing well podcast where we encourage believers of every age to find meaningful ways to impact their world for the kingdom of God. Our mission is to prepare and encourage every person to live well and to finish well. We pray this podcast will be a source of strength and encouragement as we seek to glorify Christ as we engage him in our aging years. Now, here's your host for finishing well, Hal habecker, you're listening to the finishing well ministry podcast where we meet people and talk about life and how God has changed us and what we're doing in this season of life. People often ask me or comment on this, and they say how you need to talk to people younger than us older folks. So I'm interviewing one of these younger guys today who has really impacted my life. Darren kinder, welcome to our podcast. Darren, it's great to be here. Hal 51 so I'm not a spring chicken, but you are to be I guess I'll do Yeah. Darren is a unique person, as we all are, but I'll just get into it quickly. 24 years ago yesterday, Darren was at 911 in New York City. We honored it yesterday, Vicki and I watched a video last night summarizing everything, but you were there, Darren, and this is uncanny for me. I mean, God led you to our church, and you come with all this experience and and tell us about that experience. Just launch us right in what happened on 911, 2001 Why were you there? Just tell us the main parts of your story. I know we could sit here for hours, and by the way, you have to buy his book, bury me in a dirty suit by Darren kinder, go to Amazon or whatever, and we'll talk about that later, but tell us what happened that day. So 24 years ago, I was a as I write in the book, a young and dumb Secret Service agent. I was a secret service agent for 25 years and four months. So I always, I always add the four months because I earned it. So 25 years and four months, I recently retired about three months ago and leaving one mission and starting a new one. But back then, 24 years ago, I was a young agent in the New York Field Office. Our field office in New York was in the Seven World Trade Center, which was the third largest building in the complex. And the day started like any other day. Got into the office early, beat the traffic through the tunnel. I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, and was in the gym, finished working out in the gym, putting in the locker room, putting on a clean suit for another day of of work. That day had meetings planned, so we were all in suits. And yeah, that's when we felt a rumble, felt a shake. Didn't know what it was, but within moments, we were told to to evacuate. And at that point, me and all my colleagues, a lot of my colleagues went outside, and as we dumped out onto the street, we were on the north side of the North Tower. And if you remember, the first plane had struck the north side of the North Tower, and it's literally 20 yards from me, just across the street, and I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know the totality of the circumstances, but I looked up and I know what I saw in my guts and in my training, I knew that was not an accident. Terrifying. I bet in some ways it was. It was like, okay, game on what I don't know all the facts right now, but I know we're we're in trouble in this is not an accident. I'm a student in the history being a former history teacher, I know that. You know, radical Islamic terrorists tried to knock down the towers in 1993 with a truck bomb. And I know that in court documents, they promised that they were going to try to do it again and and they did. So what we did as a unit, as a group, maybe 30, 3040, agents. We had our first aid kits that we have from work, and we just went into first responder mode, not our mission set. This is, this is really doesn't involve our direct mission, but we just started, you know, doing that, responding like first responders, and that's what I was doing. I was bandaging, irrigating and bandaging this woman's arm. When a massive explosion came right over the top of my head. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck and pieces of engine and debris and raining jet fuel on fire was everywhere, all around us. And that was the collapse. That was, well, that was the second impact of the Yeah. The next, the next second impact, right? I was south tower on the South Tower, I was, I don't know, about 80 yards less than a football field. From the base of that tower. When? When that when that plane came right over my head? And so at that point, yeah, things got a bad day, went went to a went to a worse day. And myself, as I write in the book, myself and two other agents, one of whom was a Marine, and I write in the book, when you follow a jarhead into a into a war zone, you're gonna, you're gonna find trouble. And that's what we did. And we went into the North Tower, went in, went in Tower One, the three of us to just to look for for people to help evacuate. So it never occurred to you what was about to happen minutes later with the collapse of the buildings. You go in, you went up. How far we went up, about 30 Flights. And in that process, we encountered two different people, two women that were physically unable to evacuate themselves, and we helped carry them down. But shamefully, I admit this in the book, as I was walking up, going up the stairs, and there's a steady flow of people going down, I said this out loud several times. Don't worry, folks, nothing can bring these towers down. Well, yeah. I mean, I didn't know that two, 767, had been used as missiles, but that's how naive I was. I was cop, well, I don't think anybody realized what hit it. I mean, right? Unless you watch the video and you see these planes fly in the building, if you're in the building, you don't know what's happened. Right? At that point, I had become separated from those two agents, and I was looking for them. And so on the 30th floor at the north tower, tower one, I encountered a large group of New York City firefighters. And I never want to tell this story without sharing this I had a brief conversation with them. I was looking for the agents. They were kind of refitting and regrouping. And I, as I'm leaving, I decided to leave to go back down, down to the to the lobby level. Go outside and look for look for my colleagues. Look for my people. I heard their fire commander say this something to the effect of, get your gear together, boys, we're going back up. Whereas I was ignorant and blind at the time still. I mean, they had, they had communications. They they know that 767 Since slammed into these buildings. They knew the cost, they knew the threat, and they were going back up anyways. Well, and I have no way of knowing for sure, but I assume they're part of the 343 New York City firefighters who died that day. So I always want to share that. That's why I talk about it today. That's why I wrote the book. One of the one of the motivations and objectives in writing the book was to honor those people who answered the call, answer the bell, fight the good fight, time and time again, knowing the cost the book is dedicated to the 422 first responders who died that day in New York. Just thinking through very few of us have what I would call life and death experiences where we literally are on the verge of death, and literally 3000 people died that day when those buildings collapsed and you were there in the middle of it. You know, it has to leave a deep impression on you. I mean, when you're faced with life and death, and you make a decision, you're going up and you'll probably die, you go down, you might get, I don't know, right, the impact of that in your life. And this is 24 years later, and I want to explore that more in this podcast. But just sitting here, what did that do to you? You say life and death, encounter or situation, and I feel like I honestly can say I had three of them in one day, that second plane strike, and then the two collapses, which we'll get to. So yes, what it did for me. The scriptures say that we are but a mist, right? We are we are here for a short time. And when you have an encounter like that, you realize it okay, that's real. So on September 12, as I'm trying to process this with my wife, I'm sitting on my couch in Hoboken, New Jersey, things like that, scriptures like that, promises like that, were on the forefront of my mind. We can be taken, Lord, I can be taken from this world at any time. You are the creator. I am the created. And so what it did for me is it crystallized a sense of mission. Okay, I'm only here for a short time. I was spared yesterday. This is on September 12. I was spared for reasons I do not yet know or understand why. So you must have a purpose. You must have a mission for me. And so it has crystallized and focused a mission centered life for me for the rest of my days. I think that's the way God wants us to live, but you have an extra reason to live that way, and none of us are without excuse. I mean, we all see life happening around us, and tragedy strikes, and it could be us today. Could be us tomorrow. Yeah. I mean, we could any of us. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, right? We had a tragedy in my family five years ago, and when my mother in law, my wife's mother, just the healthiest person, and we're all like, you know she, she's that, that type who's going to live to 95 and and she was taken tragically in her car. I. Extent. But I know when she entered into the presence of God, she heard well done, good and faithful servant, because that's how she lived her life. Let's go back to your journey that day. You say there are three events you had three experiences, right? Describe them to us. So we just discussed the first, the second impact on the plane. And then at that point I had I left. I went back down to the lobby the World Trade Center. I called my wife from a pay phone, which I wanted you to include that part of your story. She hadn't heard from you all day, right? But this is still, you know, this is still

prior to to 9: 10:35

59am, when the first tower collapsed. So I talked to her briefly. I called her collect, which boggles the mind of young people today, when I tell the story, they don't even know what that means. Your kids don't know what it they don't know what it means. They had to google it. But we had a brief conversation. I love you. I'm in the lobby of the World Trade Center helping people get out. I will see you soon. That was essentially it. And I hung up the phone. And unfortunately, what she didn't know is, the second I hung up the phone, I'd left. I walked out of the building. I was going out to the perimeter, because I was by myself for the first time that day, I was not with my brothers and sisters from the Secret Service. I was alone. I was unsettled. It was didn't feel right, didn't feel good, and so I just went outside to look for my guys, look for my people. But 13 minutes later, the south tower collapsed. Of course, your wife didn't know if you were in the she assumed you were still there, right, right? So take a little sidebar in our story. Finish that out, because she went through the day assuming you were dead until you could get back to her. And I hate that. I just hate that she everyone in that 13 minutes. And I know, because I had the phone, the phone record, that it was 13 minutes later. In that 13 minutes, she called our friends, our family, all of them watched 13 minutes later me, you know, die in their eyes before them. And so that was that first collapse. Was oh, 959, in the morning, I was not able to call her until about, I think it's about three o'clock in the afternoon. So that is six hours of or five hours of total anguish, and she just went through the ringer. She when I was able to finally call her, I found this person had a cell phone that was actually working. I called and she didn't answer. And I was like, wow, how can you not answer, right? Well, we didn't at the time, we didn't have cell phones, her and I, and I left a message on the answering machine, you know, the old school answering machines with the video, the tape, cassette on it. But what had happened? She had left. She could not stay in our apartment any longer. She was a registered nurse. She worked at Cornell Medical Center, Upper East Side of Manhattan, but that was her day off, which was too bad, because she would have been better off had she been around people, and she had to leave. And so we lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the directly across the river from Manhattan, and she walked out of our apartment. She walked 14 blocks south, one block east, and she stood on the pier, the pier watch the pier that sits directly across from the World Trade Center. And she looked at the rubble, she looked at the smoke she could smell it, and she she prayed. She lamented and she cried and she wept and she she asked the Lord, this is, this was her question, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Just total heartbreak. That Chapter is the the one chapter that still gets me when I write that in the book. Yeah, it's so it hits hard. Obviously it ended well. And I want to encourage you as you listen to this podcast, go buy the book. It is riveting. I mean, personally, for me, as I read it page by page, it just interrupts into your life, and you're caught with your journey, Darren's journey. So I plead with you, go buy the book and buy many, give them to your church. Have Darren covet speak, whatever. Anyways, go back to your story. Okay, so when that tower collapsed, I wasn't inside. I was outside, and I was talking to a NYPD officer when I heard a weird, high pitched metal on metal screeching sound. And I said, what is that? And as I said that, I looked up in curiosity, and I saw the top of tower two buckle and began to fall. And my first thought was, I'm dead like lights out game over, because I was 8090, yards from the base of the tower. And the second thought in my mind, which I now know, was the Holy Spirit, was run and I just took off. I started running north. And the other part that's hard. When I watch the footage on TV, I hear it in my head. It echoes in my mind. Each floor was a thunderclap landing on top of each other in quick succession, and each one was louder and closer. And man, I just one of the beautiful parts of my story, which will touch I'll circle back. To later was as I started to sprint, there was a fire truck in the intersection, and I thought about sliding under the fire truck for cover, for safety, and I literally took a step in that direction, and then kept going. And then a few strides later, I'm passing a pickup truck, and I thought about sliding under the pickup truck for cover, and I just kept going forward, and at that moment, large chunks of debris started falling all around me, and then the lights went out. That storm cloud of debris and pulverized concrete and other materials just took me darkness, utter blackness. And that's the contrast, right that you've all seen it even translate on TV. It's that bright, beautiful blue day became, for me, a dark night of horrors. But for the first few seconds of being enveloped in that, I was still sprinting, because there were still large chunks of debris falling all around me. I was still what we call in the Secret Service, in the kill zone, in the Kill Box, kept running. You could have been killed by any one of those. Yes, easily. I think most people around me probably were honestly but I wasn't. And it's at that point that I started walking, because the stuff, the large debris, stopped falling around me. And it's at that point that I said, and I write this in the book, I remember audibly saying out loud, Jesus, help me. And moments later, I saw light. What was that like? Get out of the darkness, get into the light. And then you talk about ducking into a little hallway, and you led people to the Light Through the Darkness. Yeah, that's one things I remember about your story when I first heard it years ago. Yeah, it's beautiful. It now it's a beautiful I use it when I speak to large groups. It's a beautiful, spiritual metaphor. At the time, this was not what I was thinking, but I realized I walked over to the sunlight, and I was looking up an alley at the far end. North end of that Alley was sunlight. And so I was like, sweet, let's get out of here. And I started to walk. And then something stopped me in my tracks, and that was cries and screams in the darkness behind me was utter blackness. The other direction, there was light, but in the blackness was screams of people that were injured and hurt and lost. And so I stopped. I don't remember making any of these decisions, but this is what happened. I stopped, and I turned, and I started screaming at the top of my lungs, follow the sound of my voice. There's light this way. Come to the light. Follow, follow the light. Come to me. Come to me. There's light this way, you know, just for minutes and minutes and minutes just repeating. And in that time, about 10 to 15 people made their way to me, and I would just shoot them up the alley and go towards the light, towards the light. And so when I speak, this is in, you know, chapter six and seven in the book, of course, but when I speak in front of groups today, that is like the first challenge I'm laying down to them is, are you being the man or the woman standing in the alley, pointing people to Jesus, pointing people to the light of life? Right? He who follow me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. And to your primary audience, I don't think you ever hit timeout and you ever stop being that man, being that woman standing in the alley, pointing people to Jesus at any age, whether it's the person you meet at the convenience store down the street or it's the the young man you've been mentoring for years or or the friend of your grandkids as they're running around your backyard, right? That's part of our mission. That is part of the universal will of God for all believers, aging believers as well. There's your 70s, 80s, 90s. Our mission doesn't change. Doesn't change. It never ends. And that's something we all share, that is, I think God has a unique will and desire and purpose for all of us, and that's and that's what this book is about, but that's one of the universal things that we all share as believers, to be witnesses, to be ambassadors for Christ, pointing people to the light. It's amazing. So finish out your day, then things were just insane. I never remember making this decision, as I mentioned earlier, but within that 29 minutes between the two collapses, which was chaotic, for the sake of time, though, I returned back to the World Trade Center site. I don't know why, but I think the Lord was, I know what the Lord was establishing my steps, and there I am standing there, I found another secret service agent, so that was great. And we're talking and I hear that same sound, that metal on metal, screeching. And it's something you never expected it just now, it just has to jar you, right? It's a sound I've only heard twice in my life. I've never heard anything like it since what would I would later come out to find it is the sound that that steel makes when it's about to lose its battle with with fire and gravity. And I was like, Okay, I don't need to stick around and watch this one. I I'm gone. So I started, I started running again. I got about a maybe a eight to 10 second head start this time. But then, as I'm running, I hear those thunder claps again, and then I hear the roar of the the storm. And I wasn't dodging chunks of debris that time because I had a head start, but I managed to plow myself through a revolving door of a bank and and just as I got into into the bank lobby, the that big storm cloud went by me. So I was, I was spared of that. But the great part there was I met, I met up with two other secret service agents that were also seeking shelter in the lobby. And that was awesome. You talk about those guys in the story, yeah, what I call my guys, a guy named John Beck and Rob Donovan in the acknowledgments of the book I write that they were the best of the best of the Secret Service on 911 they were and they were my age. Actually, they were younger than me. I mean, we were all very junior. And so that's a point I make to younger audiences, is it's not when you're when you're called, when, when? When the Lord puts an obstacle in front of you, or puts pain and suffering in front of you and is calling you and pushing you to enter in. He's equipped you. His Word has equipped you. His Spirit equips you. Doesn't matter if you're 81 or 21 you are equipped. And he just wants you to obey and go and then he's going to start knocking down walls and busting up strongholds. And it's a powerful message, Darren, 100% when we went back out, we met up with another agent. So now there was four of us and and that was wind in my sails. It was great. And at that point, how we walk on this side street about 20 feet and we get to Church Street, and we have a choice. We turn right and go north to safety and comfort, or we turn left and go south, back to the site. And that's what we did. I don't remember making that decision, but we did. And when we enter that intersection, as I say on the book, the only thing alive was fire. Everything was just on fire. Police cars and ambulances were on fire. Both towers are now down, and all that office space that collapsed had paper, right? And so there's 200 floors of of office paper. Every cut paper seemed to be covering every square inch of the whole area, and all of that was on fire. So it is my vision of what hell must look like. I feel like I got a glimpse of it. It was very powerful. And it's at that point that the Lord put me on my knees, literally in the intersection, because I looked across the street at the fire truck that I was going to slide under for safety, and it was completely obliterated. It was flattened to the ground and and then I went up a few more feet and looked for that pickup truck I was going to going to hide under, and I couldn't even find it. It was there was someone. It was the first time I now, I know he was with me every step, but it was the first time that I literally felt the presence of God with me. And it's as if I heard a whisper. I didn't hear an audible whisper, but it's as if he whispered to me and gave me a slight squeeze on the shoulder, and he said, I am with you. Wow. It just I get emotional still today when I when I think about it. And so when I talk about life lessons that I have taken from that experience and apply it to my life, I remember and I study and I commit them to memory. God's word is full. I mean, the scriptures are full of that promise. I am with you. Fear not. I'll never leave you. I will never I will never leave. I will never forsake you. Forget about you. I am with you, and I know, as believers, the spirit resides in us, but even to a greater extent. And so when I'm reading the scriptures, I'm just on repeat. He's saying, Don't worry. I'm with you. Don't worry, I'm with you as I'm entering this so I see him talking to Moses and saying that, and to Gideon and on and on and on. And so as I'm now entering this new phase of life, some days I wake up and I'm apprehensive, and I'm like, Can I do this? What am I doing? I feel it again. I am with you. It must be amazing to have a sense of God's touch in your life. Everybody would say, people would say, in general, if God would just manifest Himself to me in some specific way, I might be more obedient. I might be more enthusiastic, but there is a sense of having gone through that. I mean, you go back to that experience. You can't refill the touch. I mean, God will not physically remind you of you know how he did that day, but you go back to that. But you have to learn to live by faith and keep going on, knowing the same thing is true every day, just just like Peter said, though you do not see him, you don't live in His presence. You believe in Him. He is literally there with you, even though you don't feel that that day again like you felt it 911, 24 years ago, right? And that, that experience, that personal experience, that moment, cannot be taken away. I mean, it's with you. It just gives me tremendous courage and. And my wife, sometimes she'll just throw her hands in the air and she'll be like, how are you're just one of the most confident people I've ever met. And that drives me crazy sometimes, that this is her words, because it's not always for good, and that's part of the secret sauce for me, is I feel His presence. I know His presence, His Word is full of promises, and all his promises are true. It's amazing. So I want to get back and finish your day out. I don't know what remind us of what else happened that one of the highlights for for me, kind of a strange word to use, I guess, is a low light. But in that intersection was a fire truck that was not damaged, and so one of the guys I was with, Rob, he said, We should hook up a hose to that fire truck and start putting these fires on. So Rob sees the problem. He says, Hey, we can. We can do something about this problem. Let's do something. My initial reaction to myself was that is stupid. We don't know what we're doing. But before I could chime in with a negative thought, the other guy, John says, Yeah, I was a volunteer firefighter in high school. I think I could figure it out. And I was like, Okay, so these two guys, we pull out the hose on this truck, and they start throwing levers and turning knobs, and within a minute or so, here comes water pouring out of this, pouring out of this. It was just hilarious. And sadly, it occurred to me in that moment, why are we doing this, like, why do we have to do this? Where are the firefighters? Wow, and they were gone. There's 343 of them erased. It would take time for other units from other parts of the city to make their way into the cut. And so at least in that little intersection, at that moment, we were it. And sometimes in the Christian life, in the Christian world, sometimes you're it. I heard somebody say recently, every now and then, on occasion, God will do a miracle, but usually God just makes people for the problems, for the issues. That's why he made us to be the hands and feet of Christ, and that's what I was thinking at the time. But that is essentially what we were doing. Metaphorically, we were just entering in, choosing to do the next thing. And saw in our mission was simple. We're going to dominate this intersection. We're going to put out these fires and make this area safe for the for the professionals that are on their way in, and that's what we did. We weren't very good at it, but we did it. And we just started putting out car fires one at a time and knocking them down. And it was tiring work, grueling work. And here's the best part. I have no idea how long we were doing that. I feel like it was an hour and a half. It was probably 45 minutes or an hour, but the real firefighters, the professionals, started showing up, and they're hooking up all these huge, elaborate hoses and four times wider than ours, and they're operating the hydrants and so forth. But at no point did they ask us to leave or get out of the way, or, Hey, you're in the way with your little dinky hose from this one truck. At least temporarily. We were part of, you know, part of that team. And just to fast forward a little bit, eventually, we literally ran out of hose, and we did a few other things the four of us. But eventually we found out where all of our colleagues in the Secret Service had rendezvous, had relocated. It got moved three times. Anyways, after running out of things to do immediately there on the scene, we the four of us walked a few blocks north to to a car that one of them had, and we drove out of the gloom, out of the cloud, back into that blue, beautiful day. Not a word was said. We drove about 30 blocks north, and we rendezvoused on the West Side Highway at the in this huge building with the rest of our colleagues, wow. And at that point, received some basic medical care, nothing major, cuts and scrapes and oxygen, and they had this irrigation station we cleaned, are able to clean up a little bit. And then, while all that was happening, someone was pulling off a logistical miracle, because about an hour later, I was hopping on a boat. I was part of the great boat lift of 911 it's fascinating to read that in your book. Yes, it just blows your original clothes, although you had washed out a little bit. Yeah, because I want to get to that part, you need to share when you get home how you met Heather, and what you did with your suit and where the title of this book and your life originated, right? So we get on this police boat, we go across, literally across the river. There was a bunch of agents from the Newark New Jersey office waiting for us there, and they just gave us rides to whatever town we needed to go to in New Jersey. And at that point, US got dropped off in town, and I walked three flights of stairs to my apartment, the final flights of my day, and yeah, and the door opened, and it was, as I write in the book. It was not a Hollywood scene where, you know, we embrace and have a passionate kiss and say we'll never, we'll never be a part. It was. It was primal. It was just we fell down, joy, agony, pain, all wrapped into one. It was, it was, yeah, it was the most powerful thing I've ever experienced. And when I tell this story in front of groups, I make the point of this for the for the non believers that are in the room, consider the condition that I was in when that door opened. I was beaten and bloodied, and my suit was in tatters. I was just gross, and my wife didn't like put her hand in my chest and say, Wow, you're gross. Go clean yourself up first, right? And that's the condition in which, in which we all come to Christ for the first time. Right? We're filthy in our own sin. Even our good deeds are rags, as the Scriptures say. And he doesn't tell us to go clean up first. He doesn't tell us to go fix ourselves first. He doesn't tell us to go master this one sin that's kept you know that you've wrestled with. No, he takes us as we are, embraces us, and then we get the new heart, the new flesh. And then he starts knocking down walls and making changes within our heart, within our life. And so I call that, that embrace that she gave me, that that's similar to the embrace of grace Christ, that Christ offers all of us. And I got a just a shadow, just a glimpse of what that was like in that in that illustration. And of course, you're telling this story 24 years and one day later, yesterday was 911 and all of it floods back. I mean, these are part of your the fabric of your life. My wife and I just last night, before we went to bed, we talked about it, and we don't often talk about it together to each other, but out of obligation, she read my book, so she's been talking about it more lately, and we talked about what it was like that night and the next morning, especially in prayer and in lament, and what that did for our relationship. We grew up fast. So finish out, what do you do with your suit that you were wore that day? Yeah, you tell this in the book. So I take the the longest, best shower of my life, because I was just in there forever trying to get all this junk off of me. But Heather had brought a, she brought a trash bag to the to the bathroom, and said, you know, dump your stuff in here. And I my, I took my shoes and and my suit and just dumped it in there and tied it off and and I think she was like, we need to throw this away or something. And I was like, no, let's just put that, put that in the closet. And it sat there for years and years and years. At some point, I did throw it away. Brought it with you to Dallas. When you moved to Dallas or had been gone by then, that's probably when it got when it got thrown out. I would just look at it every now and then. But So the title of the book you mentioned? Yeah, it's intriguing to me. I Yeah, I don't know if it just out of the blue. It hits you in the face. Bury me in a I would think, don't bury me in a dirty suit. You know, people are all cleaned up when they're buried. You know, I was, I was wrestling with three titles for the book, and that was one of them. And of course, that's the one that I did not come up with. That's the one that my editor came up with, because it's in the book that that line is in the book. And here's why, when we had originally rendezvoused with our colleagues, we entered that that large space, and there's a bunch of my colleagues there, and most of us look like we did, like we were walking in the four of us together, and there's a huge group of agents. They look just like and we would all been in the fight. And for example, my pants were like three inches shorter because they kept catching fire all day. My shoes were melted and malformed the soles and ripped off my dress shirt and put on some t shirt that some person randomly threw at me just because we were just so, so gross. But as I looked on the other side of the room, I saw a group of colleagues, and they were different. And they were different because they were they were clean. They had clean suits on. And I don't say that today to disparage anyone. I simply use it as an illustration. I mean, I don't know their circumstances and their choices they had to make, but these people I know went on to serve their nation for years and years and years in a high risk environment. So I honor that. But just as an illustration, I could not get the dichotomy out of my mind. There were clean suits and there were dirty suits, and the next morning, September 12, I'm sitting on my sofa in Hoboken, Heather and I are crying and praying and trying to figure out what we're going to do with our life, and what does all this mean. And as we were praying together, I just made, I made a promise to God. I said, Lord, you should have taken me, or you could have taken me at least twice yesterday, but you didn't. You must have a mission for me. You must still have a purpose for me. What is it? What are my marching orders? I'm ready. I'm ready to be obedient to the call. And I said, Lord, I want to spend the rest of my days getting my suit dirty to glorify you. Wow. And as that prayer ended, it just rolled off my tongue. I said, Lord, when, when you call me home, and I punch out of this world, and then to the next bury me in a dirty suit? I. And 24 years later, that's the title of my book. You're all cleaned up sitting here. For me, you dress up pretty well, but that's really it. I mean, we want to spend our lives and expend them for Jesus, yes, yes. And so doesn't matter where we are, what we're doing, what age we are, what our circumstances are. We want to get dirty and finish well and finish well. Start Well, finish well, as Paul says three times in Scripture, fight the good fight of faith. So the book is so much what we just discussed in so much more detail. It's that firsthand account, right? What it was like to be on the street and be in the towers and all that kind of stuff. But the heart and soul of the book, as you know, is the message. The greater message of the book is it's a call to action for the people of God to get their suits dirty that we all have emblazoned upon us a unique purpose. I've heard it said we're made on purpose, for purpose. And Ephesians 210 is clear that we are masterpieces created by the creator for those good works, if we should just walk in them, right? And, and that's what I want to encourage and equip people to do, is to walk in those good works, to live out their God given purpose, which he ordained beforehand, before he should live in them. So God ordained 911, 2001 for Darren kinder, right, right? And for almost 3000 people, that was their last day. And I can't explain that. I don't understand that. All I can know is okay. I was spared for a purpose, for a reason, so it would be a shame to waste the rest of my life. And so I encourage people to seek and pursue and discern what the will of God is, what the purpose of God is, on their on their heart, discern that, and then spend the rest of their days getting after it. And one of the points I make in the book is that you as a creative being, you do not determine your purpose. I do not determine my purpose. Purpose is assigned by the Creator. Yes, he's the one that crafted the implement that you and I are. Therefore he assigns purpose to his creation. And so that's the Christian life is discerning that and studying the Word of God and listening to the Holy Spirit and bringing like minded people into your life that speak into that can affirm those aspects of your life. And it's not just one thing. It's a discerning and getting after the will of God. For me, I've come to learn at age 51 is it's less about knowledge and it's more about the obedient daily walk, that long, steady march in the right direction. And he starts to unfold His will and His plan for your life, if we just do the next thing in front of us and keep taking these the and that's the Christian walk of sanctification, and in doing that, he is doing his will through you. Hebrews 12 to let us run with endurance. The race set before us, the race set before us. And you and I don't know the course. No, you're running and biking. You typically know where you're going. You know the course. We don't know the course. You crash, like I did a year ago. You crash as I write in the book about some of my adventures on white water rafting on rivers. You get awesome. You get you get tossed upside down really quickly, and you don't know what the next bend is going to be. This one set of rapids that was one way the next year, the rocks have changed, and it's a different rapid and but we're called to, we're called to be running the race. We're called to be in the river, riding the rapids, not on the not on the edges, just kind of looking at life go by looking at people racing. You know, I once heard Tony Evans say that that watching a football game, he equated it to very similar to that a whole stadium of 60,000 people watching 22 men, given that they're all we should be on the field. The Christian experience, the Christian walk, is not about watching other people's other people in spectator sport, not a spectator sport. So, so I say in the book, there's an arena, there's a problem, there's an issue. You know, there's this world is full of problems. You and I were, were designed and created to to be part of the solution for at least one, like the issue that the Lord has put on your heart is, is people, quote, unquote, retiring from a profession and then retiring in life, punching out and just, you know, Pina Coladas and sunsets on the beach, which, there's nothing wrong with that, but if that's all we're doing, right? And so your your whole mission, your purpose right now for this stage of your life is to, is to equip those, to inspire those, and to equip those to have purpose driven lives in their later years. That's what He created you for, for this stage, that's your arena, and you're in it, and you're the, you're the gladiator in that arena, and you are fighting the good fight, and you've had victories, you've had failures, you've been humbled at times, you've been frustrated at times, you've you've experienced pure joy at times. And I just think that especially with Christian men, there are arenas out there just waiting for the gladiator to show up. I want to come back to this in a little bit, but there's one more experience you write in your book that I really didn't know about. And of course, you have this event in 911, 2001 and then the rest of your life unfolds. But a day or two later, you share an experience where the president, President George W Bush, comes and you, you know, that's what the Secret Service does. You had no idea that that would happen on 911 that day, right? But a couple days later, you're in a whole new arena, and you have a picture in your book that you're right there next to the president, watching all of this happen. Describe that to us. And it's, you know, for us in Dallas, Texas President George W Bush lives here, and he's from Texas, so tell us that experience. Yeah, not many people know that part of my story. Sometimes, when I think back on my 25 years, I feel like the Forrest Gump of the Secret Service, like there I was, because I seem to be at a crossroads of a lot of really interesting times and places. Yes, September 14, three days after 911 911 was on a Tuesday, so on Friday, we got the word. On Wednesday evening, late afternoon, President Bush is coming to view the world. So let me interrupt you. Yeah, so the next day, September 12, you're back on the job the next day. Set a day off the next day, September 12, we didn't know what we were going to do. Our office was gone seven. World Trade Center collapsed at 530 on the 11th, all of our equipment, cars, weapons, gear, everything is destroyed, and we don't know what to do. And so the first two thirds of September 12 is frustrating, because honestly, I've got righteous anger. I'm I want to enter into the fight in some way. We've just been Sucker Punched as a nation. The news report came out. I was as I write in the book. I was with several other agents, and news report came out. President Bush is coming to New York City in two days. And we were like, it's your job. Is Secret Service to get ready. We're like, All right, boys, that's it. That's the new mission. That's exactly what we needed. We needed a mission. So that Thursday was a Day of Gathering together, doing a really brief operational plan, getting some logistical miracle happen from DC. They got all kinds of cars and gear and weapons back up to us, and September 14, early in the morning, before the sun came up, I was back at ground 03. Days later, back at my personal Battlefield, but this time, preparing to bring in the president United States, as I write in the book, this smell of death was still in the air, and I gave myself about 30 seconds of emotions, and then I gulped it down and said, All right, focus on the mission. And what happened was the President came in. You know, that's usually a seven to 10 day advance. Well, this was a one day advance, and the site was an active recovery and rescue operation. And so how do you secure a president in that way, the way we normally do it? And the answer is, you can't. It's impossible. And so in that process, as he came and Mayor Giuliani and all his hangers on were with him and Governor Pataki and all his it just became this mob of very important people, and it just got messy. The site got messy. Not not how we usually do things. And yeah, sure enough, I was as a young and dumb agent, very junior, and my role was very minor that day. I'm just mere feet from the president. That usually doesn't happen for a junior agent like that. And when he made that famous speech, remember watching it with the bullhorn. I know it to this day. I mean, I hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knock down these buildings will hear from all of us soon, and the place just went nuts. And chants of USA, I still get goose bumps just thinking about it. It was such a powerful scene, and definitely one of the high water marks of my professional career, September 14. Wow. So I want to shift now we've hinted at what God was doing in your life. So these experiences start, I want to say rumbling. They're there. It's an undercurrent in your life. God is doing something with them. It took a while. I mean, the years went by. I mean, you're thinking about this process that you and Heather are talking about. You're starting your family. At what point did you feel the urge, the direction, the leadership of the Holy Spirit, to say, Darren, you got to do something with this. It's a great question. And that prayer, September 12, was the first of many, like, what do you want me to do? What are my marching orders? And for about five years, there was just little to no response. You're just going on with the Secret Service. I'm in the Secret Service. I am a frustrated young believer in Christ, because I feel like I've been spared for a purpose, and I just don't know what it is trying to discern that i feel like i. The Spirit is not leading me, although I now I know he was just preparing me and just continuing to build me up. Probably wasn't the easiest person to live with. I was frustrated at times, and I thought about quitting the Secret Service every day for many years, feeling just listless and purposeless. And then about the five year mark, I was on a mission trip, he spoke to me and said, just let me use you. As I was saying that prayer, he just said, I write in the book. He was as if he smacked me on the back of the head and just said, Relax, let me use you, meaning, Trust me. Trust trust me with your life. You don't know the whole plan. You don't know the course that we just talked about, but just follow me step by step, and I'm going to start. And what he started to do. And he started to in my obedience, in the word and in prayer and following him, like that picture we were talking about following Jesus. He started to drag the desires of my heart to be directly in line with the desires of his heart, with his will. And he put in me a fire for Men's Ministry. I don't know where it came from. Well, I say that it came from the Lord, yeah. But it just, it just, it just appeared. And I was like, oh, and then, and then we got pregnant with our first son, and I was like, wow. Manhood takes a different meaning to me now, a fatherhood, being a servant leader to my wife, all that started taking more meaning, right? And then we had another son. I'm like, Oh, wow, this is really getting serious. And now I'm leading volunteer. I'm leading men's groups in my small church in Hoboken and taking on leadership positions. And this just started happening. And then, you know, we moved to Dallas, and we have two more sons, and now I've got four sons. This is no accident. I'm like, Lord, I get it. You don't need to give me to give me any more sons. And so now I have a heart for men and Men's Ministry and that kind of thing. And I'm jumping in at Dallas Bible Church, and we land in this amazing place with this amazing pastor who's just a great shepherd. And I'm like, wow, this is, this is nothing like the church we had in New Jersey, but this is exactly what we need now. And Men's Ministry was strong there, and I jumped right in and and then you take me under your wing, and you took an interest in me, and you started being one of my spiritual mentors. And I mentioned this in the book, that you are one of a short list of spiritual titans in my life, just I'm not gonna look at you right now because, because I'll lose it, but you are one of the first people who said to me, you because not many people knew my story. I don't know how it came up between you and I, but I didn't tell anybody about 911 that was maybe a dozen people in the world, and somehow it just came up in conversation between you and I, and I gave you a glimpse of it, and you're one of the first that said you need to share this. You do. I remember that event. Yeah, tears in my eyes, yeah. And I thought you were crazy, because, no, no, that's place of darkness. That's a place of hurt. Why would I go back there intentionally? What could God possibly do with that? And I had no idea. And people like you faithful servants. Joe Fournier, Terry Fournier, sitting on my couch telling me quote, you would be a fool not to share this to bring glory to God, and it's just man, just those nudgings of the spirit, moving you, moving in me culminated in, okay, Hal, I'll finally give in. I'll speak to the men at Dallas Bible on a barbecue event, and then I did it again not long after, and then you asked me to share it in front of the whole congregation. And what I didn't see coming, and this is that, this is the obedient part, not knowing the route, not knowing the course, not knowing the next turn in the river, what I didn't see coming. Two things, number one was the healing and restoration that would begin in me, and that's just bringing light into the dark places, bringing the light of Christ. I had no idea. I thought, Okay, I'll do this out of obligation. Okay? God wants me to do this. Okay? This is like the Christian in being obedient, we experience joy, the joy and the contempt, the fulfillment. And so I was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Myself, selfishly healing and restoration. And the bigger thing I didn't see coming was just what he was going to start doing, the people he was going to stop dropping into my lap, the crowds and the opportunities he was going to give me, whereas on the 10 year anniversary, maybe a dozen people knew my story today sitting before you, I've literally spoken in front of 1000s, and that's just in person. And now it's and then through medium such as this. And it's all about taking making Beauty from Ashes, taking this he does redeem all things. Romans 828, is true for the in the heart of it, we turn all things for good. For those who are called according to His purpose, I am called according to His purpose, and he's going to take even the junk and make it powerful things that bring Him glory. And that's what we're here to do. Bring him glory. So part of your journey, then you developed a an organization of such, or at least a speaking agenda called the valiant right. Yeah, and that was you speaking talk about this. You start thinking about the end of your retiring from the Secret Service, and all of this is, what do I do next? So God's culminating your career as a secret service agent, but at the same time, he's been developing a whole new venture for you, which, earlier this year, you left the Secret Service, and you're now on a new venture to tell us about fierce faith, right? So it started 12 or so, 13 years ago, branching out and doing this speaking ministry called the valiant ministries, right? And I just did it on the side. Whenever I could, all the free time I had full time Secret Service, the father of four, husband, everything. I felt called to do that, but also felt that I was not done with my mission with the Secret Service, and that I had still had a mission to complete, and so I was faithful to that as well, and kept doing that. What I didn't know at the time, and what I look back and now know, is that he was just cultivating me, developing me, giving me contacts and networks and experiences, and building me up and speaking in front of groups and so forth. And then he started working on this book. People are like, Oh, you need to write a book. And about 5000 people said that. And then I started making jokes about it in the family, oh, that's a good one. I'm gonna remember that. I'm gonna put that in the book, and everyone would laugh. Well, they didn't know that I was now serious, right? I was writing this book in my head, and so the last 18 months in the Secret Service, every free moment that I had, if I was traveling on the road, I started to write this book, and it was just all coming together. And it was beautiful, because I didn't have anything to do with it. And, yeah, I decided I was going to do one more presidential campaign, the 2024 campaign, which was completely normal campaign, nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, right? I did that, and I just knew, I just had this feeling the spirit was telling me, yeah, this mission is complete. You are not running away from something. I'm calling you to something else. You are running towards something else. Running that race, and I retired in June of this year, and kind of took that experience from the valiant ministries and rebranded it. And now this is my full time endeavor. I have greater ideas for it to expand, but right now it's a speaking ministry slash business called fierce faith, and it's all about the heart and soul of this book. This book is kind of the driver of this new thing. I'm booking corporate in secular settings, corporate engagements, because there's lessons here from my 911 story and others that apply in a corporate setting. I like to say that's what feeds my family, the spiritual side of it, the spiritual engagements that I have, the talks and presentations and keynote addresses in the faith based setting. That's what feeds my soul. And so it's a two headed monster, fierce faith. I'm engaging corporate audiences for leadership and resilience and grit and all the experiences I learned, but also my heart is really into the spiritual application aspect of it. Men's groups, men's retreats, men's conferences, the sermons, and, you know, in front of Nick's congregation, all of it for His glory. And that's what we're doing at fierce faith. We've been gone a long time. I need to wrap this up a little bit. I want you to address the needs of our world today. I mean, the theme that comes out of your book is the courage to step up and be what God has called you to be I mean, address that. I mean, we live in a culture of fear. Today. There's a lot of conflict all over the place, and I think this is God's time for men at any age, men and women, older people, your peers, my peers, people ahead of us in the last years of their life. I mean, talk about the importance of courage and stepping up to the plate. This is our time. This is our season, and Jesus is enough to lead us through victoriously. Absolutely, things seem terrible now, and they are, but there's nothing new under the sun. I mean, there's so much divisiveness and anger and resentment. And, you know, the political polarization is crazy, and we're talking here today, just two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, for example, tragic, and it's just so much divisiveness. This is a time for courage, for biblical courage. And I like to say, and I write in the book, that courage is a choice, and it's not just one choice, you know, a heroic action on a terrible day. No, that life of courage is like a muscle that needs to be built and used every day, because following God's will, submitting ourselves under the mighty hand of God, so he may exalt us at the proper time. First. Peter, five, six, I believe that rent is due every day, and that's a muscle that has to be built every day. And submitting yourself under the mighty hand of God and following His will and His purpose for your life takes guts. It's just hard, because we want to have control. We want to know all the answers. So that's an aspect of following God's will just take. Takes, takes courage, takes real biblical courage. And I find encouragement and for courage in all of those promises that I mentioned early, that he is a with you, God, that He is with us. He never leaves us or forsakes us. I constantly focus on that. It says 366 times in the Bible to not be afraid. And so many times it's coupled with for I am with you, right? That gives me tremendous amounts of courage, and that you mentioned it fear just rules and reigns today. It rules and reigns in culture and society, as I write in the book, the opposite of fear is love, the perfect love of Christ, and that perfect love casts out all fear in the heart of a believer. We do not need to be operating out of fear. We operate from a heart of love. And if we just had a greater glimpse of the magnitude, the majesty, the awe of how much God loves us, how much he has done for us, and how much he loves the world and wants to see the world redeemed, and he wants all it says in the scripture, he wants all to come to the knowledge of God, right? We would not be driven by fear. We wouldn't. We'd be driven by by the love of Christ. And for me, that is the secret sauce. It starts with humility, humbling ourselves to His plan. See what he does with it. It takes, it takes courage to do that. And that's what's going to turn the tide. That's how we turn the tide as implements of his good and faithful light in the world. So let me conclude, if you're in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, if you're breathing, God has a purpose for you, and He wants you to step up this day. This is the day the Lord has made in your life. Embrace it, because he will use it for his purposes more than you could ever imagine. I mean, that's what you experienced on 911, 2001 you had no idea what God was going to do in your life. And here we are, 24 years later, and you see the hand of God and how things work, and who knows what's going to happen the next 30 years? Who knows what's going to happen? And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, was it would be a historical marker, but it also be a legacy, legacy for my own boys, that one day they're going to open up and read it to their grandkids, or tell the stories from their grandkids and generation to generation. That's what we need to do. And to your audience, pass along these, these stories of faithfulness, of courage, of unknown, but moving forward into the unknown. Pass those along and those successes that that you've had, the failures that you've had, but how God was with you. That is a generational thing that has to continue. It has to continue, because that's hope. I want to encourage you to buy his book. Bury me in a dirty suit. Buy it anywhere you can read it. Give it to your family. Give it to your friends. And I want to do something that I don't particularly do, but I want to pray for you as we finish up our podcast. I would love that, Darren, it's a joy to be with you and Lord Jesus, I thank you for how you've worked in Darren's life, Heather, his four boys, how you wove our lives together, how you're working out His purpose and His and their life. I pray that you'll continue to lead them in powerful ways, open doors that he cannot imagine or even dream of at this point, I pray your hand would be on him like it was just a 911, 2001 and you would continue to work out your purposes in his life, for his greatest joy with Heather and for your purposes in our life. We praise you this day for how you use us, and we worship you in Jesus name, amen. Amen. You've been listening to the finishing well podcast, let's keep pursuing Jesus together and encourage each other to follow him in our aging years. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or you can find us at finishing well ministries.org/podcast, our vision is to change the way we think about our aging Season of Life, equipping you to actively pursue God's calling in your life. May the Lord bless and encourage you and we'll see you next time on the finishing well podcast. You.