Engage Your Destiny

By Ben Peterson

From Ben Peterson, the combat veteran and founder of the non-profit Engage Your Destiny comes a bold debut forged from Peterson's own story of spiritual resilience and hard-earned wisdom. Engage Your Destiny invites readers to walk with God and uncover practical

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dexterity
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781947297975

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604 Magnolia Lane

Nashville, TN 37211

Copyright © 2024 by Ben Peterson. Published in association with the literary agency: The Blythe Daniel Agency, Inc.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted by the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without prior written permission from the publisher. For information, please contact [e-mail].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.® Scripture quotations marked AMP are taken from the Amplified® Bible (AMP). Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org. Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked EXB are taken from the Expanded Bible. Copyright © 2011 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked LSB are taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc.: LSBible.org and 316publishing.com. Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked TPT are taken from The Passion Translation®. Copyright © 2017, 2018 by Passion & Fire Ministries, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ThePassionTranslation.com.

Printed in the United States of America.

First edition: 2024

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ISBN: 978-1-947297-96-8 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-947297-97-5 (E-book)

ISBN: 978-1-947297-98-2 (Audiobook)

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Peterson, Benjamin J., author.

Title: Engage your destiny : practical ways to run after your God-given purpose / Ben Peterson.

Description: Includes bibliographical references. | Nashville, TN: Dexterity, 2024. Identifiers: 978-1-947297-96-8 (hardcover) | 978-1-947297-97-5 (e-book) | 978-1-947297-98-2 (audiobook)

Subjects: LCSH Self-actualization (Psychology)--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Christian life. | Self-help. | BISAC RELIGION / Christian Living / Personal Growth | RELIGION / Christian Living / Personal Growth | SELF-HELP / Motivational & Inspirational

Classification: LCC BV4598.2 .P48 2024 | DDC 248.4--dc23

Cover design by David Carlson

Interior design by PerfecType, Nashville, TN

To my dad, who taught me the power of relentless pursuit.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: Engage Hope

CHAPTER 2: Engage the Father

CHAPTER 3: Engage Prayer

CHAPTER 4: Engage the Path

CHAPTER 5: Engage Truth

CHAPTER 6: Engage Purpose

CHAPTER 7: Engage Sacrifice

CHAPTER 8: Engage Life

CHAPTER 9: Engage Redemption

CHAPTER 10: Engage Faith

CHAPTER 11: Engage Freedom

CHAPTER 12: Engage Your Warrior

CHAPTER 13: Engage Healing

CHAPTER 14: Engage Your Fear

CHAPTER 15: Engage Vision

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever lost hope? Have you ever been kicked in the gut so hard, you weren’t sure if you had enough faith in your heart to ever get back up? It’s pretty easy to swing from confident courage to damaging discouragement on the daily with the current state of our world and constant feed of information from the media. But I’m seriously asking, have you ever lost hope to the point of disaster, where you were completely done, with nothing left to live for?

The process of engaging your destiny—the focus of this entire book—is one of brutal honesty. If I’m not honest with you or you aren’t honest with yourself, we will never lay the foundation for the skyscraper of destiny God has for your life. So, that’s where I’ll begin with you right now: being brutally honest about my own journey.

There have been two times I have completely lost hope in my life. The second time was twelve months ago.

On Memorial Day 2022, my organization, Engage Your Destiny, held the largest Jesus-centered outreach to veterans in American history—with more than 35,000 in attendance. My team and I had envisioned honoring Vietnam veterans after a fifty-year absence of a proper welcome home. We named it the Heroes Honor Festival, and we promoted it as the biggest, baddest, most patriotic welcome-home celebration ever offered for these vets.

The setup for the festival involved a nearly impossible course of events. In 2016, the year I founded Engage Your Destiny, I was walking through my living room one day when a vision popped into my head. I saw a massive stadium filled with tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans and their families. I saw it! Tears streamed down veterans’ faces as they were healing . . . ; we were welcoming them home.

I have heard their horrific stories from the ’60s and ’70s. Soldiers were called up and drafted to fight in a war that no one understood and that divided our country. They fought in the most extreme jungle conditions, enduring the constant threat of booby traps—bombs that, when triggered, bounced waist-high, blowing a soldier in half—in addition to ambushes, snipers, prison camps, and an enemy they rarely saw but constantly felt surrounding them. More than fifty-eight thousand died in that jungle. Those who survived returned to protestors, many of whom spit at them, slapped them in the face, called them baby killers, and threw trash at them. Worst of all, they returned to a nation that shamed them by ignoring them. People wanted to forget they even existed.

That’s how I knew in my blood and guts that this was a God vision. Because God hadn’t forgotten them! It would be a national event to heal our forgotten heroes.

My small team and I kicked off the vision for the festival in 2020. This was an enormous leap of faith for us, not just in terms of the vision but because we lacked the finances and personnel to execute an event of this magnitude. Our organization was bringing in less than $600,000 in annual revenue, and we had only two full-time employees. I had no idea how to pull this off. But I have always believed big—I don’t have to know how to execute a vision; I just hire those who do, inspire them, and build a team to get it done.

When we shared the mission with a very experienced professional in the big-event space, it brought him to tears. We asked him to create a plan, a budget, and a personnel growth chart for executing this God-sized event; I wanted to weigh the options for this massive decision. To pull it off, Engage Your Destiny would need to grow from $600,000 in annual revenue to $6 million in two years’ time, and acquire about thirty people to work on it full-time. Wow. To say I was intimidated is the understatement of the century.

I found myself in a moment of decision: Had I heard God, or not, and did I trust Him? After a week of thinking through it all, I decided to go all in, to not look back. BAM! We were off and running.

We hired the event professional to build out the master plan, but one major problem remained: the world was shut down. Covid had nixed the possibility of offering an event of this scale anywhere in the country. Still, God continued to nudge me along and whisper, Keep going. So, we went.

As we started researching, we found the second-highest concentration of Vietnam vets in Florida. (The highest reside in California. No way would California let us put on a massive event there during Covid!) Plus, Florida is home to the Daytona International Speedway, the site of the Daytona 500, or the Great American Race. I cold-called the Daytona Speedway and managed a brief Zoom meeting with a young salesperson, Reagan. I pitched my idea, nervous as all get out that she’d laugh me off, but instead, she looked at me intently.

Ben, my daddy is a Vietnam vet. How can I help you make this happen?

In disbelief, I asked (or perhaps shouted), Can you get me on a call with your boss?

One week later, I connected with Nancy, the head of events for Daytona. I pitched my idea again, assuming it wouldn’t go beyond her.

Choking back tears, she replied, Ben, my brother is a Vietnam veteran. He was never the same after he came home. How can I help you make this happen?

Get me in a room with all the NASCAR people and Daytona leadership. Boom! Two weeks later, we were at the Speedway pitching to NASCAR about our event. Now we’re cooking with gas! I thought.

It was happening, and it was so . . . God. Halfway through our meeting, I realized NASCAR was trying to convince us to put on our event at the Speedway. There I was, trying to pitch to them, and they were pitching to me! No one was booking events at speedways then, because typically their events calendar is booked so far in advance, especially during a major US holiday weekend. If we had tried going after the event on a non-Covid year, we never would have gotten the meeting. Only God. As Mark Batterson says, "A God-sized dream is beyond our ability and beyond our resources. You can’t do it, but God can!"¹

We received one moment of favor after another. Our first fundraiser brought in over $700,000, which truly set the foundation for much-needed capital. It enabled us to begin putting down payments on the Speedway, book country artist Toby Keith, purchase staging services (along with lighting and sound gear), advertise, and continue expanding our team. God even brought in a Vietnam vet as a major donor: he gave $1 million to see our goal accomplished. Time after time, we experienced God’s provision and faithfulness. Though we never got ahead financially, we always had what we needed, like the Israelites and the daily manna in the desert.

For the festival’s show, we booked country music artists Toby Keith, Justin Moore, and Craig Morgan, along with special guests such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Actor Mel Gibson even jumped in on the promo video for us. We had planned jet flyovers, aerial displays, and Huey helicopter rides for the attendees. The Navy SEALS would parachute in for the event, and FOX Nation would live-stream it to the entire country. We partnered with NASCAR, Toyota, Humana, Harley-Davidson, and the US Air Force. Who wouldn’t want to be part of something so special, see an incredible show, participate in healing an entire generation of veterans, and buy a ticket to do it? Plus, the Speedway could hold 100,000 people. There was no downside! (This is where the eternal optimist in me emerged.) I just knew we could rally people around such a noble event and create a show everyone would want to attend. And I believed it would bring in enough profit to host more of these events around the country.

When it came to footing the final bill for this thing, I knew our organization didn’t have the donor base to make the numbers work. I had researched and learned from other ministries that had created ways to bring in money beyond their donors; I had networked like a madman, called in favors, asked donors to ask their friends . . . everything I could think of to raise the money. But this venture was something different. I was building a model where donations set the stage for a healing event, which in turn could sustain itself and grow to support more events with the ticket revenue. It all made sense in my head.

Going into the event, our expanded team had raised $4 million. We needed to sell $2 million in tickets. I believed nothing was impossible with God and that it would happen.

The event was one of the best days of my life apart from my wedding and my kids’ births, of course. I’ll never forget walking among thousands of veterans and their families, weeping, hugging, smiling, laughing—all of us filled with joy and celebration. The team came backstage after mingling with the crowd. We wiped the wonder dripping from our faces, as none of us had ever seen anything so beautiful, so healing. I shook so many hands that my arm ached for a few days after.

At the close of the festival, Toby Keith sang his last song. Then a lone trumpeter came out and, in a moment of silence throughout the stadium, played taps in a solemn remembrance of why we were all there. It was Memorial Day. And we were reminded that we must never forget those who gave their lives for this great nation.

Afterward, my wife, Rachel, and I sat on the stage for an hour watching the horde of veterans, families, and patriots make their way to their cars to head home. I didn’t want it to end. We waited for the arena to empty, then made one last drive-through in our truck to say goodbye. We noticed a couple still sitting in their chairs, so we decided to stop and say hi. Both the husband and wife were crying.

My husband has served for thirty years and retires next month, the woman related while staring at the stage. Vietnam veterans trained him. They showed him how to be a leader. This day meant everything to him. We can never thank you enough.

So many powerful emotions and memories coursed through my heart as Rachel and I drove back to the hotel, but a sinking pit began to form in my stomach. I was worried about our ticket sales. When our team gathered for a wrap-up meeting the next morning, I got the final report. We had sold $500,000 in tickets. The bill sat at $6 million, and we came up $1.5 million short. We simply didn’t sell enough tickets.

I felt like a fool.

One day I was witnessing the best-attended ministry outreach event for veterans ever conceived, and the next day I was looking at a mountain of debt with no cash in the bank. I had to let go twenty-five members of my team. Man, it hurt.

Devastated, burned out, angry at God . . . I was completely devoid of hope. He had opened every door, supplied every need, paved the way through the impossible, done more healing in those veterans than I could have ever dreamed. But at the end of it all, we were bankrupt. I would have to bring an organization back to life from a state of hopelessness, then raise money to pay for an event that had already occurred, with no vision for what we would do next. And to be honest, it had taken everything I had just to get to that event. Like getting to the top of Mount Everest and then realizing you still have to climb all the way down.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to raise money for a vision you don’t have, for an event that has financially failed and an organization that has shrunk from twenty-eight to three people?

Hopeless, man. Hopeless.

Losing something (like hope) means you have possessed it at some point in your life. Hope for a great future, or maybe even a destiny. Now, I’m not talking about fate. I’m not saying you can just live your life in any random way, and it’s all going to come together. I’m talking about destination-believing destiny. Meaning, there are precise moments on the journey of pursuing your dreams where you can reach your full, God-given potential.

It often catches us off guard, though, when we find destiny at our lowest and most broken point, when we must fully surrender to the plan God has for our lives and accept the bone-crushing pain we’ve had to endure.

I’m a man who walks with a limp. My spirit, hope, and faith have been broken many times in my short life. But through all the moments, in victory and defeat, I have found the path to a life of destiny. As a result, I’ve devoted my life to helping other broken people like me engage a hope-filled destiny. In this book, I will take you through the highest of highs in my life and the depths of my pain and hopelessness, and I’ll include some powerful stories from the lives of others. Through it all, God has shown me how to engage a life of destiny. It’s simple, but man, if it isn’t hard!

This is where I want you to be brutally honest. Where are you in your hope for a destiny, a brighter future, and a dream realized in your life? Which broken moments of hopelessness have torn you down and, for the time being, weakened your faith? Take some time to think: What has happened in my life that I am willing to get honest and uncomfortable about? How has a feeling of lost hope affected me? If you are willing to go there, to be honest with yourself about what has temporarily damaged your heart, then a warrior stands ready inside of your chest to be ignited by this book.

Engage Your Destiny is for the dreamers and the doers. The stay-at-home