All right let's see we're all good. Okay so I want to start today with a quote talking about sailors. Your fleet and your trade have so near a relation and such a mutual influence upon each other they cannot be well separated.   This quote makes clear the the tie between the merchant service, the Royal Navy, and the semen that both services were dependent on. Now understanding British naval manpower during the 18th century is by no means simple. Naval recruitment particularly impressments has been a subject of scholarly fascination for more than a century now and from the start the fundamental importance of the subject has explained only a small part of its attraction. Just as it did in the 18th century today impressment matters more for its political and moral implications than for its administrative history as a mechanism for manning the Navy and unlike naval administration it is still capable of arousing emotion and passion. Historians have generally been more interested in the symbolic value of impressment rather than its practical machinery. Effectively impressment and the infamous press gang has become what most people and many historians think of as the standard of Royal Navy recruitment during the age of cell. Fiction and history alike have filled the popular mindset with images of press gangs dragging semen and landsmen alike off to serve in what amounted to a seaborn dungeon. Similar themes have also emerged in modern research such as the popular idea that press gangs were out to conscript anyone they could find and that deficiencies in skilled mariners were made up by pressing unskilled landsmen. The prevailing view of 18th century British naval manning is that the majority of men were forced into service and this fits very well with a traditional view of navies in the age of cell and that is of course the infamous image of rumsotomy in the lash. The problems that undermine our understanding of impressment are entirely based on or sorry are the problems that undermine our understanding of impressment are entirely based on historians having done a poor job of research. There is great value certainly in the cultural and political analysis of impressment but without understanding the mechanisms of British naval manning including the frequency of impressment along with volunteering and being men being turned over from ship to ship we cannot hope to come to grips with the topic. Historians engaging with naval manning have long called for data to better understand the subject and until recently we haven't had that data because the subject suffers from an evidence problem. Mainly there's too much of it. The primary evidence for understanding how the Royal Navy manned its ships are ships muster books. If only a dozen of these ships musters survived they would have no doubt exhaustively been analyzed. However more than a hundred thousand muster books exist in the British National Archives and working through them even only a few of them can prove exceptionally difficult. Trying to examine more than a handful quickly turns into a laborious task. Further organizing and investigating the enormous amount of enormous quantity of data that these books provide is virtually impossible without using computers and understanding how database programs work. Therefore with the difficulty involved in analyzing the primary source material and historians desire to use impressment for its political and moral implications until recently there hasn't been a detailed study of what British naval impressment was or how it worked. Now the press gang itself is one of the first images that come to mind when people think of the Royal Navy and the age of cell. It's often an image of landsmen being dragged off to sea and the Royal Navy as effectively a seaborne dungeon. Now here we have two of those images. These are from the 1780s and the 1790s. Effectively it's a group of the press gang consisted of a group of oversized brutal men directed by a sadistic lieutenant looking for anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path and we can see in most cases this one on the left is a little bit whoops. Oh what have I done? Oh there we go. That's what I want. Okay here we go. This is a little bit left on the little bit dark on the left here but this gentleman here is being pressed and he is obviously not a sailor. This is the Tower of London in the background and over here we can see this guy being dragged off by the press gang and you can see clearly there are scissors and a tape measure in his pocket. He is a tailor and either of these gentlemen in these images are sailors. The general view is that the Royal Navy was a place where the majority of the men were forced to serve and most historians have come down to say somewhere between 50 and 75% of the men in the Navy were pressed. American historians tend to use a higher number particularly when they're discussing the War of 1812. And the historical reception of Impressment actually supports that idea. So how do we get from those landsmen being dragged off to Naval Service to the sailor on the cover of my book? This image is a watercolor by Gabriel Bray. He was a young lieutenant in the Royal Navy at the time and it was painted aboard HMS Palace around 1775. So who are the skilled men that the Royal Navy wants or wanted I should say? Now this image itself comes from around 1930. It is from an Allen Villars film. It was a silent film that was then later dubbed over called The Last of the Cape Horners and it's a film really documenting the end of the age of sail for the merchant marine. And even up until really the eve of the Second World War, the very long distance of voyages that weren't time dependent were often carried by sailing ships. So in this case, it's the grain trade from Australia going to Britain. They were carried aboard sailing ships. But importantly, the reason I chose this image is for these gentlemen right here. Because effectively these are the same men that the Royal Navy was looking for in the 18th century. So if British Naval recruitment had been based on dragging unskilled the unskilled dregs of society off to sea, then where did the necessary number of these gentlemen here come from? Because the problem is, is that let's see if we go one more, we can compare the two images. These men here have to be able to go up in the rigging. It doesn't matter if it's 30 degrees and the wind's blowing at 60 knots. They have to be able to go up in the rigging, because the ship depends on it. Okay, that takes lots of skill, they're required to work of lofts. And generally, this took five or more years of skill to become an able seaman to be able to proficiently do this on a regular basis. But it also took the strength of a full grown man and the agility of youth. So it's actually a fairly narrow window that we're talking about. They needed to originally go to sea when they were sort of 14 to 15, to be able to gain those years of experience. And then by about the time they're sort of 20 or so they become able seaman. And then really by the time they're 28 or even 30, they've acquired enough injuries and they've lost a lot of that agility to go up in the rigging. So they're no longer really feasible to do that job. So it's a narrow window that these men need to come out of. And effectively, these this man here, this being pressed in front of Tower Hill, cannot be these men here. That this guy is not a sailor and has no sea skills. It's pretty obvious from the way he's dressed. So one of the issues here is really understanding the historiography of how Naval Impressment has been dealt with. And really, it boils down into two different groups of researchers with two different agendas. And this has produced the modern debate about Impressment. The first group, and this is a large, these are broad, general groups, there are large subdivisions within them. But the first group looks at Impressment for its political and social implications. Now, that does not mean that this is this is not something important. It certainly is. But it's a perception of the Royal Navy being heavily manned by press gangs, which calls social friction within 18th century society. Part of that social friction that was actually caused is because press gangs were very visible. They were often what landsmen saw of the Navy, because it actually happened on short, whereas most of what the Navy does happens out, happened out of sight. And certainly volunteering as well. Volunteering often happened without much notice. Men went and signed up for the Navy and were taken off to a ship. There was no scuffle or anything like that to go with it. The second group examines press Impressment as a naval function, or I should say more widely, naval manning as a naval function. It's not simply naval Impressment. How successful was the practice? Who was pressed? Who volunteered? And how did manning practices affect desertion, discipline, and the general effectiveness of the Navy? Now, I'm not discounting the first group by any means. However, one of their primary arguments is the Impressment was a function of a tyrannical government that forced men to fight wars that they did not benefit from nor support. On the way to making this argument, they have vastly overstated the number of men pressed. And generally, as I said, these estimates are north of 50% of the men, usually somewhere between 50 and 75. And I've even seen one reference to 80% of the men being pressed. But this argument suffers from a lack of data. And currently much of the received concept of Impressment is that, again, of brutality, where seamen are taken off against their will, much like this gentleman over here. Now, I want to talk a little bit about history of Impressment and then talk about what I've done and look at some of those statistics that I've created in my work. Now, Impressment, I work primarily on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but Impressment was not new to the end of the 18th century. Even in the 1660 Charles, in the 1660s, Charles II's Navy relied heavily on ship's officers to man the fleet and captains would send out lieutenants with a handful of men ashore to recruit men for the English Navy, whether through Impressment or accepting volunteers. There was little in the way of organization in this. There was a constant shortage of volunteer skilled manpower. So Impressment was a necessity to produce skilled seamen. And even at that point in time, it was considered a medieval prerogative of the crown. These efforts were often not enough and had to be supplemented by emplacing embargoes on outward bound shipping. So they literally close a port down until enough men could be raised for the English Navy. And this was, of course, to inspire merchants to provide sailors for naval service. Now, it's important to recognize that the Navy of the 17th century really only employed seasonally. They fought primarily in local waters in the North Sea. They would mobilize for war every year in the spring. They would campaign in the summer and then sometime around October and November, all the ships would be put into dock. All the sailors would be turned out of them and then they would repeat the practice the next year. So if you were pressed or you volunteered for service, most you're committing to six or eight months of service at a time. However, with we in the third and 1689 and the Glorious Revolution, this all changed. Suddenly when the primary enemy of the English and later Britain became frats and wars became more and more colonial in nature, the Navy's began mobilizing year round and wars became longer and longer. And this graph that we're looking at here is effectively the size and manpower numbers of the British Navy from 1688 all the way through till 1815. The peaks are the wars and of course the troughs in the middle are the pieces and then there's lots of little mobilizations when weird political things happen and the British think they're going to war and then it turns out not to. So you see all these tiny spikes in between the larger ones. But you can basically count the wars of the 18th century with these peaks. So as the 18th century progresses, wars are progressively fought on a longer basis. The Navy's are mobilized throughout the year. They're in distant waters and the fleets become much larger and are employed over much longer periods of time. And manning the Navy in a haphazard function, basically captains sending out lieutenants of their own ships became less and less feasible as the Navy got larger and larger. They just simply weren't able to recruit the manpower numbers that they needed in that manner. There was even the Admiralty was was really concerned with this throughout the 18th century. There was even an attempt to create a Siemens register, which was effectively having all sailors sign up in a major list. And then in the similar sense today as to sign up for the draft, the idea was when work came around, they would call it whoever needed it. But this was an offense to English liberties and sailors much more like the idea of the press game, which you could avoid if you or at least had a chance of avoiding if you wanted to. However, it wasn't until the Admiralty took the manning issue out of the hands of ships officers and organized a dedicated recruiting service that they really made major progress towards supplying their vastly expanding naval force with the necessary manpower. And this is where we get the beginning of the Impress Service. Impress Service was an administrative branch of the Royal Navy. It became as at the end of the 18th century, the primary means by which the Navy recruited manpower. It originated in the War of Austrian Secession, so the 1730s and 40s, with the introduction of two regulating captains in the City of London. These regulating captains inspected the men taken by the press gang, streamlined the process of Impressment and ensured the men being pressed were mariners, not criminals or vagrants, because the Navy wasn't interested in the unskilled drags of society. In the Seven Years' War, in the 1750s and 60s, this was vastly expanded. The Impress Service itself was actually established. And regulating captains were first posted in several coastal cities throughout Britain, including London, Bristol, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Newcastle, Yarmouth and Edinburgh. And it was expanded in 1756 and 1759 and again in 1762 because it was successful. And by the end of the war, regulating captains were posted in most of the major cities in the South and East Coast of Britain, which included Gloucester, Winchester, Redding, South Hampton, Aberdeen, Exeter and Cork. Regulating captains supervised press gangs. And press gangs themselves operated out of a rendezvous. And usually the rendezvous would be a local inn. It was, importantly, a point for volunteers to join the Navy. So the Impress Service is where men who voluntarily want to join the Navy would go as well. So this minute was always highly visible. It was marked with flags. It often had drummers and men marching up and down the streets, playing patriotic tunes and, of course, many recruiting posters. And it was important that a rendezvous was not an ominous place, as such places had little chance of attracting volunteers. And so here we have an example of a recruiting poster from 1797 in Shoram. And in the poster, I won't go through and read the entire thing, but the reposter has lots of patriotic language in it, references to good hearts, love of the king and the country and religion, and of course, people who hate the French and damn the Pope. Not a friendly Catholic environment in England of the 1790s. So the actual gang itself was made up of five to ten tough men and not sailors. They were usually made up of locals because sailors were much more valuable on a ship and it was much cheaper to hire locals who didn't have a job. So we'd hire five to ten locals. It would be commanded by a naval lieutenant who was issued with a press warrant, which gave him legal right to take men for naval service. And it also detailed the men who were eligible to be pressed, basically people who whose occupations involved the sea and some means or another. Similarly, there were impressed tenders controlled by the Impress Service and these operated in coastal waters and often pressed men off of incoming merchant ships. The Impress Service continued to grow after the Seven Years War and by January of 1793 on the eve of the French Revolutionary Wars, the Impress Service was already fully deployed in Britain. The Admiralty saw this, saw the war coming, so the Impress Service was fully deployed. It was armed with signed press warrants that lacked only a date to make them legal. So basically they've sent out all the warrants, the men are in place and literally they've just got to write the day on it and go once war was declared. The creation of an administrative branch of the Navy specifically dedicated to naval manning made the process of mobilization significantly more efficient. This was a clear Admiralty strategy. They understood that more efficient manning resulted in a more effective naval force, especially during the early stages of war. So how did the Royal Navy recruit this necessary manpower? During the French Revolutionary Wars, there were approximately 250,000 men that served in the Navy between 1793 and 1802 and if you take the entire span of the French Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars, so 1793 to 1815 into effect, as many as 650,000 men would have served in the Navy over that period of time. So was the press gang really the source of the Royal Navy's power as popular concept has us to believe? Were press gangs really setting out to grab anyone unlucky enough to cross their paths? Did anyone actually volunteer for what some historians have described as a floating dungeon? My book is the result of a research project that has attempted to answer those questions with new research. The heart of my book is the first substantial statistical study on recruitment. My primary aim was to examine the mechanism of British Naval Manning. I constructed a database that analyzed Royal Naval manpower, which includes impressment, but all forms of recruiting as well. The database was compiled from ship's muster books, 81 muster books in total between 1793 and 1801. It was a random sample from the French Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars, which covered 27,174 men. And each man in the database has 26 data points. So that's a total of just over 700,000 individual data entries. And the sample cuts across nine years of war and is large enough to provide reliable statistics across its breadth. Following my book, I've continued that research and looked at the Napoleonic Wars where I looked at the muster books of 54 ships. I looked at the odd years, 1803 through 1813. So 1803, 05, 0709, 11, and 13. A random sample from the Napoleonic Wars, it covers 15,000 and 30 men and 390,000 data entries. So all told, I have information for 42,204 men and the entire database consists of about 1.1 million data entries, all done by hand. The data comes from ships muster books. And here's an example of what one of them looks like. This is the front page of a muster book. These are all housed in the British National Archives. And we can zoom into the top here and we can see this is from HMS Dreadnought. It was a 98-gun, second-rate ship, had a complement of 738 men, and it was commissioned in Portsmouth on the 29th of June, 1801. And we can go on and look at a page within the muster book. And this is what it actually looks like. And the muster books were used ultimately to pay the men. It showed when they joined the ship, what their rating was, if they were promoted at any time during that period. And at the end, when they left the ship, this is how they would be paid. So we can look at the individuals. There's a couple here. So we've got, what is this? I think this is Samuel Cooper. He was an ordinary seaman. On the 20th of August, he was promoted to a midshipman. He is from... Where's that? I made an odd angle here. Bedford, sorry. Yeah, he's from Bedford.  We can see he showed up on the 29th of July. When he began payment and he received two pounds, 10 shillings as a bounty for volunteering. He was also a volunteer. We can see right here from Portsmouth. Below him, you've got Jason Coates from Somerset, 23, an able seaman, five pound bounty and a volunteer as well. We can go on and there are many examples of this. Basically every page of a ship muster has 20 men on it. And it will cover everybody that's on the ship. It's also it's not only for pay, but it's also for victualing. So this is how the ship received the necessary number of supplies. It knew how many men were on board and how much food and whatnot it would need when it was going abroad. So this all this data basically flipping page by page and a number in a muster book and entering it by hand into a database is how I got to my research. And effectively from that, once it's all entered into a database, we can pull all kinds of information out of that. We can tell how men were recruited, how old they were, where they came from of all kinds of information. Their age, their skill levels, all types of stuff. So I want to go to this first. This is a this is a graph that looks at the number of men in the Royal Navy during from 1792 through 1815. And we can see that 1793 the Royal Navy mobilizes and really through 1798 it is growing the entire time and it plateaus in 1798. Effectively what's happened is all the ships that were in ordinary or mothballed in normal terms have been mobilized at this point. And they're working on new construction to grow the Navy. So you see sort of a spike here in 1800, 1801. And then the piece of Amiens, which is a 14 month piece in the Great Wars will France comes and then the Navy immediately remobilizes again and peaks out at its highest point in 1813 at 147,000 men. So it grows from about 17,000 1792 to 120,000 no sorry 120,000 in 1798 I think about 130 and 1801 and then ultimately 147 is the height of the size of the Royal Navy. It's the biggest point of the Royal Navy in the age of sale. So we can also compare that we can lay that on top of and this information comes from the Lloyd's Insurance Company and know how many sailors were effectively employed in the Merchant Service at the same time. So the big blue bar on the bottom is the is foreign and coastal shipping. The pink line in the middle are the watermen. So the the boatman and intercoastal waterways. There is a tiny green stripe in here that just is visible in a couple of points. That is privateers. There were very few of them and then the Royal Navy on top here. So you can get an idea of how large the the number of seamen in Britain are. And the important thing here is, is to remember and we'll talk a little bit about landsmen being recruited into the Navy is that landsmen recruited in the Navy, they weren't very useful to the Navy at times, but then they were gaining skill the entire time. So effectively the Navy is training sailors. So the total number of sailors in Britain grows over this period of time. We'll talk a little bit about the consequences of that here in a minute. But some of the major stuff has come out of my data. If we're looking, this is from 1793 to 1801. So the Napoleonic Wars. But importantly, with once we're able to factor out Turned Over Men, which I'll also talk about in a minute. This is the key number that comes out. It's 16% of the Royal Navy is actually pressed into service. Now this is of course a clear departure from the historiography. Some have arrived at more conservative numbers than the tradition, but very few arrive at a number less than 50% for impressment. However, what I found is 73% of the men were volunteers during the French Revolutionary Wars. And if we add the quota act volunteers into that, that brings us to 82% of the Royal Navy was actually there of their own free will. That's four out of five men aboard the ships were there on their own cognition. We can take this and look at a recruitment by year and see all that changed over time from 1793 to 1801. Over here is the factored data, which is just looking at new recruits. So it's not the men that are turned over turned over men would be men that when one ship comes in for major repairs or is decommissioned, then they would be taken and put into another ship. So if we look the graph on the right is actually everybody that's on the ship. So these are men that had served in previous ships. But if we just look at men who have not served in previous ships, we can see that this yellow line here are the numbers of volunteers by year. The blue line down here are your pressed men, the green are quote acts. And then there's some other really small categories in there as well. We can see that volunteers are the vast majority of the men you're on here. Now that goes down over time. And we can see as the war begins, there are very few turned over men because there are not ships to turn them over from. But we can see that the volunteer numbers decline and the number of men turned up, turned over, you're on your increase. But importantly, Impressment never comes close to reaching the number of volunteers. Now, we can also look at raw recruitment. So this is the this is the raw recruitment data. This is 1796 through 1800. And one of the key things here when we looked a minute ago, we saw that in 1798 is the point when the Navy really quits growing fast and it sort of plateaus off. Interestingly enough, that's the year that turned over men are half of the crews aboard warships. And every year after that, they grow more and more of the men aboard the ships are men who have come from previous ships rather than are being freshly recruited can go on. And this is a an area graph. This pink bar at the bottom is again the turned over men. And we can see this is the piece of Amiens right here when the Navy decommissions and recommissions. But we can see if we take the piece of Amiens out of the equation and look at it sort of is a continuous point of war. Effectively turned over men are pretty steady after 1798. They peak at 1798. They continue to rise slowly, but they're making up the majority of the men aboard ship. The yellow here is the volunteers. The green are the Quodak men. This blue stripe that's relatively the same size all the way through those are pressed men in naval service. So they make up a fairly steady amount. Now we can do a couple of things with this. We can compare years. So if we look at 1800 and 1809, which are effectively according to N. A. M. Rogers and Roger Knight, the worst years of both the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars, we can see that recruitment and those years looked very much the same. So basically in both cases this is seven years into the war, six to seven years into the war. We see that turned over men are making up 68% and 67% respectively. In both cases, pressed men are responsible for 8% of the men aboard these warships. Now we can also make other comparisons. We look up here at the top and this is one of the most interesting slides for me or most interesting comparisons is these top two graphs side by side because this is 1793 which is the very beginning of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. 1803, 10 years later, is immediately after the peace of Amiens. So Britain has only been at peace for 14 months but we can see very quickly that volunteers flocked back to the Navy even after almost a decade of war, volunteers were willing to come back to the Navy in enormous numbers. In both cases, 77%. We can come back up here and look at this and there's an actual reason behind this. I'll go back to the idea that the Royal Navy was training landsmen and giving them skills so the overall number of seamen in Britain is increasing. But when the Navy decommissions in 1802, it dumps 100,000 men on the beach and these men need jobs and the merchant marine does peak a little bit but it cannot handle that many men because it's been operating at a relatively steady rate the entire time. So what it means is when they go back to war in 1803 there are lots of sailors without employment and they are more than willing to go back to naval service which does not suggest that this is a floating dungeon where men didn't want to be. They're willing to go there. This graph is also interesting because if you look at the end when the wars end you can see the merchant marine expanding into the vacuum of international deep sea trade that Britain to a large extent had created by blockading France. So a lot of the colonial mess that is sort of left in this open vacuum British sea trade is able to expand into it because there's an enormous number of sailors that are just dumped onto the beach at the end of the war. So the manpower is actually there and they're able to build the ships and expand into that vacuum. Now if we go back to this slide we can also compare 1805 1800 and 1805 and see again that just a couple of years after the Napoleonic Wars kick off it's right back to this this grind of turning men over whoops sorry of turning men over year after year again and again. Now we can look at these these are the new men brought into service 1803 through 1813 we can see that Impressment in its worst year in this case which is 1813 only accounted for 34% of the men. We can also see this is an interesting number these are the POWs in 18 well there's POWs in each year but 1807 to 1813 there's a large number of them and these are actually British citizens that are being brought back to Britain after they've been captured and there's a large number that come into the Royal Navy in these years. This is basically when Spain starts falling apart a little bit and ultimately later on sues for peace and I'm pretty sure this is coming from the American War but I've still got to do some research on these guys this summer when I make it back to Britain. Now we can also look at things like skill levels with this so we can see that year on year high numbers of skilled men were going to the Royal Navy this yellow line here are the Abel Seaman and we can see the Abel Seaman and petty officers make the vast majority of the men that are being recruited or make a large majority of the men that are being recruited in the Naval Service and if you add ordinary seaman in then literally 72% of the men being recruited by the Naval Service are men with sea experience. Okay so they're not unskilled landsmen even though landsmen were actually useful on board ships because lots of the ships rigging actually led to the deck where basically they needed several strong guys to heave on a rope and you need one experienced guy to direct them. So they did have value and they gained skill as they were there. Now we can look at the differences in skill level between pressed men and volunteers and see that volunteers almost 42% of volunteers were unskilled landsmen whereas smaller numbers were petty officers, able seaman and ordinary seaman. If we look at the pressed men we see that only 16% of pressed men were volunteers and there were some sorry only 16% of pressed men were landsmen. There were landsmen that had skills that the Navy wanted like carpenters and shipwrights but they didn't have sea skills so they wouldn't be considered a seaman at least not when they first joined. The vast majority of people being pressed are petty officers able seaman and ordinary seaman. So it's clear that the men the pressed gang salt were skilled men. So one of the problems with the historiography is the idea that impressment was scraping the dregs of society to drag men off the streets but this is clear that that is not the case. There are not that many unskilled men being brought in. We can also look at this in the Napoleonic Wars and we can see as the Napoleonic Wars go on this is impressive and these are landsmen at the top. So the pressed men become more skilled as the war goes on and volunteers become less skilled. So by the end of the war just over 60% of the volunteers are unskilled landsmen in the Napoleonic era. Now we can do other types of things too. I'm going to go quickly through these but we can see that that being a sailor aboard an able ship even if you were an able seaman was a young man's game. The numbers fall off really quickly by the time you get into your late 20s able seaman lasts a little bit longer but basically there's very few people over 35 years old on board these ships. It drops off really, really quickly even with the petty officers the petty officers are really going downhill by 40 and there are very few of them. So being on a ship was certainly a naval ship at least was certainly a young man's game. We can also see the Admiralty's concern with with the seaman so they change the pay scale in 1797 in 1807 before this time it hadn't been changed in almost 150 years and it doesn't go up a whole lot on the bottom. It goes up a little bit. So this is if you're not used to looking at Old British money this is Pound Schilling's Pets or the two sides here. So it doesn't go up a lot at the bottom but importantly it gets steeper. That's what they increase it to which means the Navy values experience they won't mend to stay around. So you've got landsmen down here at the bottom and up here we've got master's rates at both the ship of the line level and a sixth rate level. But that the idea of experience staying in for a longer period of time is going to pay more. Yes. How long was that for a year? Oh, sorry. This is by the 28 day lunar month. So there's 13 pay periods in a year. So four weeks on a pay period is what this was for. Also in 1808 the Navy changed the way prize money worked and petty officers basically doubled their share of prize money before 1808 a quarter one eighth of prize money would be shared amongst petty officers. After 1808 that became a quarter and that was actually taken out of the captain's prize money share from before. So they they're showing that they value these men they want to keep them around and they want them to stay and they of course will pay them more over time. Yes. What is it in two days dollars those pounds what does that translate into today's dollars. I don't know in today's dollars this was a little bit this this was this was a quits equivalent to what an agricultural labor would make at the time. Now also remember that sailors didn't have to pay for food or board. So there's there's that that adds to it. And they usually got this as a lump sum once the ship paid off at the end because there's no there's no way to spend it while your own ship. So they would be given most of that and one big chunk as they paid as they paid off. So if you're wise with it you could actually do something with that. If you weren't you might just be broken a couple of months. Yes. Most of the men in the Navy were single. The Navy allowed after the 17 after 1756 I think for men to assign part of their wage to a close family member.  And very few men took advantage of that which suggests that not many of them are married and also if they're if they've been sailors since they were 15 years old chances of them you know there's not a lot of opportunity for them to get married. So. Any rate. The function of impressment was to provide the Royal Navy with the necessary skilled and experienced men especially Topman. The shortage of seamen volunteers was constant and therefore pressing lasted throughout any given conflict. Impressment was always difficult and few of those involved in the practice actually enjoy the experience. However, no matter how disliked impressment was it proved to be a potent tool for adding skilled seamen to British warships and aided the Navy in achieving a high ratio of skilled to unskilled men. Though it's been claimed that landsmen were pressed in large numbers it was not legal and only only anecdotal evidence has been proved to suggest that as war went on landsmen were being pressed in greater quantity. Further statistics show that landsmen formed only 16% of pressed men. The reality was that the Royal Navy had no desire to recruit men without seafaring skills. The notorious press gang was indeed crucial to manning but this was because it concentrated on finding experienced seamen who made up an essential leavening for any crew. In the end, impressment may have been an evil but it was a lesser evil. Seaman accepted naval conscription is unavoidable. Evidence by the fact that in all of the grievances of the mutineers spithead and nor in 1797 impressment was not mentioned. In his own memoirs William Spavin showed no resentment to being pressed. British fleets of the French Revolutionary Wars were not manned by impressed men. Rather, pressed men formed a supplement to a mainly volunteer force and functioned to raise the overall skill level of the lower deck. In the end, seaman were conscripted into the Royal Navy by press gangs because their skills were one of Britain's most prized military assets. Thank you.


and be the fire, and be my sword to your beautiful face. For this next session, we have Anna Asbury with us. I know she has already led us in worship, but for this afternoon session, it's going to be interview style. We're going to have conversation, and I'm going to ask some questions for Anna to answer. Anna has just on her heart a ministry time that we're going to lead into, where I'm going to just play piano, and my wife Rachel is going to come back up and sing, and Anna will facilitate that. So we're just really excited for what the Lord is going to do for that. Anna, this is fun. Welcome. It's fun. Super glad to be a part of this true North experience. Yeah. Anna, she has been in this community with a lot of us that moved about four years ago, but Calvary's and Asbury's, we've been friends for going on 15 years, and so it's one of the fun things about this event. It's all of our family, and so there's just such a rich history of just relationship, and Anna just within our community, obviously, a wife and a mom, but is a creative painter, worship leader, songwriter, prophetic singer, and so it's going to be really fun to kind of get an inside look into her life and just let her speak into a lot.   Yeah. I don't know what you're going to ask me. No, I do know. I actually do know a couple of things he's going to ask me. I'm not sure of all of them, but as we were talking and preparing for this moment, sometimes it's fun to just have a window into people's lives, and it's hard to express that in a teaching or in a preaching moment, and so Corey is my husband. Caleb and I were just asking and talking with each other on how we could do this the best way, and it's so fun to just be interviewed and ask questions, and I just want to give you guys a vulnerable and honest look into my life, into Corey and I's life, and with our kids and our ministry and how we've been doing this for the last 15 years. Yeah. That's awesome. Cool. We'll jump right in. So first question, because I feel like a lot of creatives, we have this stereotype of just kind of being all over the place and chasing a million different things, and there's kind of this, what am I called to? I'm supposed to do this, I'm supposed to do this, and so I just want to start just ask that question like, what is your calling and how did you discover that? Yeah, well, a lot of different places for where I fit, and some of you may actually identify with some of my story, but when I grew up a Christian, I grew up in a Christian family and it was great. My mom was a worship leader, and my dad was a teacher, and my grandmother was a preacher, there was just a lot of ministry, a lot of songs, a lot of singing around us, and I just remember singing lots of songs to Jesus. With my guitar, six years old, I remember playing songs and writing songs and just singing to Jesus, and people would ask me as I got older, what do you want to do, and what are you going to go to college, what are you going to do with your life, and I could not find a description for what I felt in my heart that I wanted to do. I just knew I really loved worship, and I loved the arts, and I loved, you know, I was in a ballet company for a while in my teen years, and traveling around and doing ballet, and I loved art, and I loved, I mean, there's just, they name it in the art world, and I just fell in love with it, but especially worship, and singing songs to Jesus, and I could not find a description for that, so I would just come up with something and I told people all the time, I'm going to be a teacher, and even though inside, I was like dying, sorry for all of you that are teachers, I just, it was just a way to get out from their question or their judgment, because I didn't know, and I was about 15, and I was invited to go with my youth group to what was called a one-thing conference, and I went, and it was out in Kansas City, and for those of you who don't know, it was the International House of Prayer out in Kansas City, and Mike Bickle was leading this charge, and there was all of these young adults that were there, and my heart just came alive with the worship, Misty Edwards, and you know, there's just a lot of awesome people that came to that conference, and I remember my heart just coming alive in that moment, and me going, I don't know what they do here, but whatever they do here, I feel like I'm called to do this, so I just needed to graduate high school, so I got through high school, and the first thing I did was I showed up at the one-thing conference, or not conference, one-thing internship, which actually Caleb happened to be at, and we showed up at the same thing, and it was there that I discovered for the first time that I could be a worshipper, that I could do the arts, that I could do all of these things that are so deeply in my heart, and they be just for the audience of God, and that there was a description for it, and now I have an actual scripture to go with what I felt called to be, but it's the Anna calling, and in Luke 2, it talks about Anna, who was in the temple day and night, she was a widow, and that's where she stayed, and she actually ended up meeting Jesus while they were on their way to the temple, and that's what she did day and night, she was in the temple worshiping Jesus, and I feel like that is my main calling. I have a lot, there's a lot of things that I do, but that's my main calling is to stand before the Lord and minister before Him, and it's Psalm 27 for one thing have I desired, and that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, and just to see the beauty of God, so I would say that that was my main calling, my second being I'm a mom, and I love being a mother. I didn't always love it, it was hard, it's been a progression of me falling in love with my calling and my authority as a mother, but I love my four kids, and I love the creativity that comes out with them, and I love being a mother in general in the ministry.  There is definitely a tension, especially in the beginning of having I had Gabriel when I was 23, Corey and I were both 23, and there was this tension of I still had all of these desires to be in a prayer room, to be leading worship, to be leading and teaching, and there's all these desires in my heart and dreams in my heart, and then I had this little infant baby that couldn't live if I didn't give him all of my attention, and I adored him, but the tension was how do I how do I do both, and it was there you know Gabriel our firstborn he was such a gift from the Lord because I don't think that I would have ever been able to meet God in the in-between and in the mundane had he not come, and it was the mercy really it was the mercy of God to bring me into motherhood so that I had to find him in the hidden place, and so I had to quickly discover how to meet God outside of a conference, outside of a worship session, outside of a prayer room, outside of church you know, I had to find him in the times when I was feeding my baby, the times I was doing laundry, laundry actually has been a great place of encounter with the Lord, you know, late at night early in the morning in the middle of the night when I'm waking up with a baby, now waking up with four different children, I had to discover how to have my activate my calling in my home and with my kids and with my husband, and so that that looked practically like me really having to dive in deep and how to become a friend to the Holy Spirit, and I would say more than anything else I had to discover who he was as a person because I was like okay Holy Spirit you have swallowed up loneliness I can't make it to the rooms all the time I can't make it to all the conferences I can't make it to every teaching but you're with me and I know you swallowed up all the loneliness you came to do that so I just started talking to him all the time and when I couldn't sit down and spend two hours in the Word I was you know just grabbing my Bible five minutes or even two minutes or just even 30 seconds before the baby's screaming and I was diving into those scriptures and then the rest of the day I'm either singing them or I'm talking to the Holy Spirit about them or I'm forgetting about them and then he's reminding me of them and while I'm brushing my teeth whatever and I had to activate the calling outside of the space that I thought in my head for so long was the only space it could be and I realized I could bring his presence into my home I could bring his presence into wherever I was at in the moments with my kids on in my car at work you know wherever and that's where the tension started just everything a piece came through me diving into to really have relationship with the Holy Spirit yeah yeah let me just ask kind of a you hit a little bit but let me even zoom in a little bit more on the practical so you you know hearing God's voice in the midst of the mundane but but maybe also amidst like the chaos like you wake up you know to a screaming child and maybe into children that there's just kind of non-stop noise and so you you you mentioned like stealing away for five minutes but yeah you said you're talking to him all the time I mean is that are you just looking for windows where you can get away or is there conversation happening even while the noise is happening what does that look like for you um both I would say in the middle of the noise sometimes I'm talking out loud and my kids are like what are you saying mom I'm like I'm talking to the Holy Spirit you can either join in or you can ignore me um and other times it's just the inner prayer my inner prayer life that is in my head and I'm just inside I'm just saying God Holy Spirit give me strength right now give me might right now I feel weak this morning I don't feel like I I feel overwhelmed whatever and I'm just asking I'm praying scripture honestly in my head over and over and over again um you know like Ephesians 3 I'm praying give me might in my spirit give me might in my spirit give me strength empower me let me know the length of width the depth and the height of your love and I'm I'm literally throughout the day I'm I'm I'm asking the Holy Spirit for help and I think that that's become one of my greatest strengths honestly is that I know how weak I am and that I cannot get through the day without him and um it's just it's become it's become the only way to get through every day and I also find myself um more than ever now looking for ways to say thank you and when I wake up in the morning like this morning I looked out the window and I was like I don't think I've said thank you for that tree and so I mean I'm just finding how can I just conquer this day with thankfulness and when I find myself just starting even if I don't feel it you know the feeling I think so many times we're led by our feelings but I'll wake up first in the morning I may feel like crap and not not good at all and especially in the days right now that we're living in that just there's just a ton of noise everywhere and you can wake up feeling that especially if you go to bed and you're feeling yourself with that and so I wake up and I try to just conquer them learning with thankfulness and it is crazy how the Holy Spirit will just start welling up inside of me and thankfulness then begins to overflow and then what I see with my eyes it begins I start to see everywhere that God's moving in my life and I see his hand prints on everything and it changes the direction of my day. Yeah let me let me ask what's what is the enemy of that like if if the goal is just this constant communion you know abiding in him being grafted into the vine and what is the enemy of that like what pulls you out of that place whining um focusing on the negative and that's hard to do hard not to do especially if you have a sick baby especially if you've lost your job you know what the list goes on and on the big things but I would say that the thing that steals it more than ever is the complaining and the and and focusing on those things um and when I find myself you know Cori and I we are we sharpen each other in that and we can call each other out you know in the beginning of our marriage when we did that it didn't go over so well but at all but we're really good at like you know telling the other spouse to be thankful not so good at uh remembering to be thankful to receiving it exactly but now we can lead it one of us will just start let's let's be thankful one of the things we've started doing with our kids is when we're having a moment and everyone's just losing losing it uh one of the things we'll do is we'll stand up we're like okay everybody get on the chair if we're in the house or in the car we're like okay we're gonna do we're gonna do five minutes of thankfulness and we'll get the kids up you know one of their favorite things everybody stand on the chair and at first they're like I don't want to do it and they're whining and they hate it and we'll get everybody on it and then we just started screaming out everybody's like thank you god we just start yelling it and then we'll go through and you know and then they're laughing because it's ridiculous and they you know it's just funny and then we start saying what are the things we're thankful for and they each naming their things and it will boom it will shift everything so I forget what you asked me and that's right yeah it was what's the enemy and you just you know hitting that that negativity and just staying in that place it's it's crazy how much that does pull us out of just that communion with the lord and thankfulness really is the door that we walk through into the court of praise and into the place of faith and gratitude and hope and yes I do I love that you know that promise of sama 100 it's it's that the gate is always there like thankfulness is always a bit like I like I don't have great faith all the time I don't walk around being like let's pray for the dead to raise right now because I have great faith but I always have access to to thankfulness and I love that that you know learning the discipline when everything's going crazy and there's chaos I always can stop and practice gratitude and I just I love that example too you know the the kids and getting up and having a goofiness playfulness uh let me kind of ask you on that like when you're talking about discipling your kids in that family environment you know I know we all want to be careful of just not becoming that you know uber religious family where like our kids just kind of hate god and and hate church and all of it is kind of sterile to them and like all right you know we don't want to force it on them but you know that's not an excuse to not disciple our kids and so what what what role does playfulness have in discipling our kids so much um I grew up in a wonderful family but it was very very religious and so I feel like it's taken years to peel back the spirit of religion over my life where I can I see god that he's smiling and I see my I see my father that's happy and delighted in me and so I remind my kids of that a lot like I feel like in my language with them and my prayers over them that's one of the things that I bring into the language and of my prayers and the way that we talk about god I'm so careful to remind them that he's happy and that he's smiling at them the second thing that we would do is I mean we do a lot of dancing in our house and a lot of dance parties um and goofiness if I feel myself getting because I can get really serious quick actually both Cory and I can we're both really passionate but really intense sometimes we get too intense and we need to loosen it up and um Cory does tickle fights I know it seems so simple but it really does it brings in a playfulness and they're always going to remember daddy as the one that chased him around the house and played hide and seek and tickled you know tickle them um I like to do art with the kids like my hands right now are covered in spray paint because Rachel and I just did uh we just did a time of art with the kids and we invited the Holy Spirit to come in and they get to play while the Holy Spirit's there we remind them that the Holy Spirit's there and then he's speaking to them by the same time they're going to use their hands and play and go outside and find elements to bring into art and so we do a lot of art when the when the kids are younger that's a little harder and it can become chaotic and stressful and actually not be helpful in the end but as they get older that's a really fun way to do it and then the other thing that um I love to read to them um as many books I mean as many books as I can get a hold of that will will spark creativity and imagination and then we talk about it and and those conversations from these these books that whether they're they're written by god you know people that love god or not they can be inspired into learning more and about him through our conversations afterwards so those are a few things that we do yeah that's awesome I can't tell you how many times he's got too serious and Cory just started tickling me oh gosh gross I'm totally kidding just just to be clear those haven't happened so Rachel over there googling in the corner my wife I can feel her rolling her eyes over there uh as I told her a joke so recently I did a funeral and my fifth line in was a joke and uh it didn't land super well but I have to be me and just throw a minute you gotta tell everybody the joke now no I'm good but I will say the family loved it they told me after they're like everyone needed that joke so uh I you kind of hit a little bit of of you know bringing the kids in on the art side yeah but uh and you talked a lot about being in this constant conversation with the lord but you know for yourself and your own creative flow yeah of painting of writing of singing like um what does how does it uh how do I want to ask this like how do you stay in the rhythm of constantly creating when you have these other things that are really important and really time consuming but you feel that if I'm not creating then some some part of me is dying and so how are you able to you know carve out time or what is it what does that look like to stay in a constant rhythm of creating that is a really great question and honestly I'm really bad at it I would say that Cory is really great at doing that and I am really bad at it but then he helps me but the thing that I'm learning I will just bring you into my current because even this week I'm going gosh I've got to do this better is I look at the week and if you if you let the week just take over you will never find time all all the emergencies will always take over your week and um and you'll never get to the things that you actually want to prioritize in your life so what for me I'm learning I'm not great at it but I'm learning to take a day to plan out my week and plan the intentional times with my kids plan the meals with my husband and plan the day nights plan the times to connect with friends but also plan the times where I can sit down and write or I can sit down and paint or um and need it when I need to get a babysitter for three hours so maybe I can just go to Starbucks and just have some time and get inspired again for some you know for me sometimes that's just grabbing a magazine and going through and just looking at art and pictures and and then other times it's going out and walking and I can do that with the kids and I love to do that is just take them out and get out in nature and that will bring new life into me whether it's cold or hot we can just get out into nature and that is life um but I would say you've got to plan it out um I know that seems so ironic to creativity because you feel like oh gosh doesn't it just need to happen and that could rub a few people wrong but for me currently in the place of life that I'm at and I would say most people um it is really important to prioritize your time and looking at your week and if you want to get things done um you won't if you are letting life just come and hit you and because you'll always end up being moved by whatever is happening around you you won't ever be able to just move on what's actually in your heart that you want to do yeah yeah that's good yeah I want to stay on the theme of uh art because you know you are an artist and I want to kind of ask a question that ties a bit into uh your heart and uh because I know for a lot of artists one of the most difficult part of being an artist is sharing you know a vulnerable part of you and if it's like something that you feel like God is saying and it's your heart and it's your calling it's like it's every part of you and I just I'm laughing I don't know if you remember you you uh Anna did this custom uh piece for Lee our pastor uh his birthday and he posted that on Instagram it was a beautiful piece it had deep meaning it was awesome and one of the first comments was like that's art it looks like you know it was like some despairing comment we all saw that just looks like so I mean it was so funny like Cory and Lee and me all of you were like let's find this person and just you know destroy them uh you know but as an artist like how do you deal with that like when you put your art out there you put your heart out there and it's what the Lord is saying and then people don't understand it people belittle it people make fun of it like yeah what do you do in that moment gosh there's been there's been several of those moments I remember the first time that I I did this um this show where I was downtown Kalamazoo and I displayed all of my artwork and I had prints for people to come and receive and or come in by and this artist came up and he looked at my artwork and he goes gosh it's good but I can tell you just started oh I was like I was like okay I won't run away I won't then I thought who are you you don't know where's your artwork I don't see you displaying your artwork I just stood in my ground and I was like yeah and I and I took it as a moment to go you know what yes I was filling all of this commotion inside but I just responded like yeah I haven't been doing it very long but I'm not going to let that stop me um so there's that but that one sticks in my head because I sometimes see that person and I'm like bless you bless you bless you bless you um but I would say that one of the things that I have uh so um learned to make a habit in my life is when I finish a painting or a song whatever it may be I ask the father what he thinks about it and I don't ask anybody else I don't look around me first to say like what what are you what do you guys think what are you what how is that because I've learned that will only lead to me finding the most negative thing that was said and then just crashing and burning so I I stop and I say father what did you think about this what did you think about that moment what did you think what do you think about this painting and when I hear what he has to say about it it does not matter what anybody else thinks and I can weather a lot when I know what he thinks and um that has kept me going honestly I know a lot of artists that have stopped because of so much negative there's just everybody has an opinion and they just stopped and instead they should have just kept going but they needed to hear the father's opinion he they needed to hear how he was rejoicing over what they created because he's a creator and uh that it's not too much or it's not too little or I think that that's the the two biggest lies in my head usually are you that was way too much you know you just you laid it out there too much you were too much in worship or that painting is too much or on the flip side is you didn't give enough you know that like the painting for pastor Lee was um I was like is it enough is it enough is it enough and I the father was like this is exactly what I want him to hear and to see right now this is enough you are enough and once I hear that I'm good to go I mean I'll have to you know it doesn't mean that I won't battle some of the negativity but I have that as an anchor you know as a foundation that I can just rest on yeah that was that was so powerful and I was just even feeling the Holy Spirit as you're talking we're not we're not done with the interview yet but I just I felt like you're supposed to just pray I just kind of got this picture as you were sharing of artists that have had people come and say things and that has shut them down and they know that they are trapped right now and they're not releasing the art that's in them because of that that that wounding and the fear of man so would you just would you just pray for those people right now father I just ask right now that your presence would be so thick in every single room every single bedroom or church room or wherever people are watching and right now I just ask that the shame from people's words would be broken off those words were never meant to do what they have done and I just right now I just I rebuke every lie of the enemy over you in Jesus name I release the light of Jesus into every room into every ear into every eye and I release you to create again you were made to create and what you've created is beautiful and what you have to create is beautiful and I just right now I see a massive massive room in heaven with masterpieces in it and God is just waiting to give you these ideas he's just waiting to release through your hands these these beautiful masterpieces that will even bring people to believing in Jesus forever and so right now I just I do I rebuke every single lie every single negative comment that has come against you every single word curse against you we break it off right now in the name of Jesus and I release you to be everything you were made to be from your mother's womb you were called to be something great and and it is okay to be something great some of you have have backed down because you you felt judged by others because they were jealous of your gift and and the most humble thing you could do right now is to admit that you're great and to admit that the gift you have is great and the most humble and beautiful thing to do now would be to activate that and to use it you don't have to apologize for your greatness anymore he's called you from your mother's womb to be great and Jesus amen amen that's awesome that's another question that kind of leads me into last question because I know that this really aligns with just your heart for journaling and I know so much of your passion for journaling is not because you're like oh journaling is it like that's the thing it's it's really a tool for pouring our heart out to the Lord and having him speak over us and so you know you have taught this journaling as a spiritual discipline for years like what does journaling look like for you and what does it mean to to pour out your heart and have the Lord speak over you like how does that look practically and and how does that you know look in your life yeah well I'm done journaling for a really long time probably since I was 14 I um I acquired this gift or this tool I should say um when I went to um what was called a creative worship camp and some of you know the Hellzers they sing the song um I'm no longer a slave and but their dad Jonathan Hellzers dad was the one who taught me how to journal and he had done it for years and he had been an alcoholic and in a in a rock band and done drugs and all this stuff but the thing that pulled him out was when he began journaling the voice of God back to him and that was what created a discipline in his life to remain in in a place of purity and holiness and righteousness and just communion with God so I learned it back when I was 14 and honestly it's been this tool that I've I've used all these years so I wanted to um both share on that but I wanted to teach it to just just a just a really simple way there's there's lots of ways to journal um you know some people do it as the diary type and some people you know just write out their deepest thoughts all of all of that is good but this this way that I have learned to do it has become this compass of turning my heart back to the Lord over and over and over again um so if it's okay I was gonna show some of my journaling and um and then show you I'm gonna use a sharpie because I don't know if that's how else to do it without it being bright enough but what I'll do okay so what I'll do I'm gonna hold it up this is one of my journal entries from this year actually and so for those of you who are really nosy you'll stop and you'll pause and then you'll zoom on my journal and I'm sticking right here okay but I always start I everyone can put their own thing I would start with my date and on some of my other ones I I'll if you're really artistic and you like to do things I usually will will do a picture I didn't on this one um but of where I'm at like what am I doing um am I in a house or am I somewhere else sometimes if I'm at the beach I'll do waves just whatever and I'll put that at the top so when I go back to look and read my journals there's like this feeling and this remembrance of where I was at I didn't on this particular one but whatever you get it then I I don't know if you can see but I put a little coffee cup with steam rising and it's just like my cozy like I'm gonna share my heart to God now some people may want to do something else but that's how I always recognize throughout my journal oh this is my voice and so on this particular day I said Abba how do you feel about me today and that was just I just woke up and that's what I wanted to ask the father and a lot of times I call him Abba and then right here you can see I put a cross and on the cross the cross to me always represents his voice and then I will just take time and I will write out everything that I'm feeling him say um and then again I then I'll have my response and in my response so I'll read a little bit just so you can get a um feel for what the father sounds like to me um he'll sound different to everyone I'm sure Caleb's journals sound very different than mine but I'm gonna say this if it's negative if you hear the father speaking to you negative then you probably just need to take a second and and that's not the father's voice the father's voice always comes in this tender and kind way sometimes he he does yell at me but it's always still kind um so you are my deepest intricate possession I formed everything about you you've gone through a lot in the last year and that I and I knew that you would need lots of help as I healed you I need I knew you would need Corey at home and your mom near and your sister near don't be afraid of me I care for you don't try and produce or work to transition or to put your heart through needed procedures I care deeply for you you need to receive all of my healing do not compare commit your family and your ways to the Lord and he will establish them all I will build your family remember that and so then I I said back to the Lord let your whisper be like a roar in my ear and then I then the Lord spoke again to me I'm going to establish your ways your need for me is your greatest gift please do not be afraid of me my kindness will make you great you are my queen and you are royalty the pearl of great price I'm directing I'm directing your lives and your steps and see how it comes out of rest help me oh this is so god I didn't remember this part here I am help me with the painting for pastor Lee I'm nervous I want it to be so perfect direct me and give me grace and strength to be guided by you that was the Lord I didn't know that was in there so that's how I map it out and I I want us to do it I want us to take a second but I want to first I'm going to just do it in this some of you got this book it's a or this journal it's a little bit small but I just want to I just want to show you with it because my writing is a little bit hard to so usually so oops so I'll put the date what's the date of today it's something nine let's just say 930 20 okay and you can see I put that and then I'll say where I'm at I didn't on that journal entry but right now we're in a loft so I'll put the loft and then I'll write you guys whatever you like this is my little coffee cup whatever makes you happy and then this is your voice okay so whatever is your deepest most honest prayer before the Lord maybe it's a question like I had said I just needed to really reminded how he felt about me I just wanted to hear him say I like you again and that you're my favorite and I just needed to hear him say he was proud so I just wrote Abba how do you feel about me today and that's where I started so you write it might be a ton or it might just be a little bit and that's all you have or sometimes when I'm going through a lot it just might be me saying help honestly and then I write the cross so I can always go back in my journal and sometimes you guys I'll go back and I'll just read I'll find the little crosses and I'll just read what he said over and over and it will bring me back to this place of being grounded and remembering oh my gosh he loves me he likes me no matter what the storm I'm going through this is he's still speaking to me he's still you know he's alive he's present so his voice okay so we do that and you can do that over and over as many times now there's one little thing I sometimes do I do this little cloud and that's when I have a random thought and it could be a good thought or it could be random like order pizza for the kids but that's just a way for me to keep I get it out I get it done and then I go back into whatever I'm doing because that sometimes can happen it could be a good one though and sometimes if it's a good one I'll circle it or you know whatever and it could be a good thought like like I liked what I said in this one spot here um see how it all comes out of rest and remembering for you know this was something that he said to me and I could make that a thought that I go back and I could highlight it like everything good comes out of rest everything from him comes out of a place of rest it can't come out of a place of being going you know nuts so okay so that that is kind of sloppy but it gives you it gives you an idea so I'd like you guys to grab a journal and um go ahead and I want you to write thank you I want you to write your deepest just your deepest prayer before the lord and Caleb and and Rachel are gonna uh just kind of put us in a devotional type setting where you can receive um yeah so don't be afraid to hear his voice it's a little scary at first for those of you who this is the first time and for those of you who this isn't the first time that you've been doing this a lot I just and you think oh I've done this before I've heard his voice a million times that's awesome and but I want you to come to it today like it's the very first time you've ever heard from him yeah so I'm gonna give you just a little bit and Rachel is gonna just sing some songs prophetically over you or the father's voice whatever she's feeling and just take time to receive and just sit in his presence and um after they sing a bit then then we'll come back and we'll bring it to a close this questions of your heart things asking god how he feels about you things that no one knows maybe that you walked through or I just feel like he's gonna come and he's gonna speak to you and you're gonna begin to see him in those places of your life that you never could see him before and it's gonna be like you know all of a sudden in the morning when you hear the birds singing for the first time and place from you hearing your father's voice so don't hold back don't hold back this is gonna be a moment where it's like peeling back layers and layers and I just see more and more joy and more and more laughter and more and more peace and rest is happening as you take time to write down these conversations that you're having with God comfortable if it's a safe place to share some of the things that the Lord spoke to you and to even make this a time of ministry within your group and pray over each other bless each other and the things that the God that God has been speaking take those moments and speak them over each other pray over one another even if there's healing I just it's endless the opportunities the Holy Spirit's just like hanging on the edge going will you give me a chance to show up I want to show up in your in in your room in your homes or if you're at home alone call a friend and tell them what the Father has spoken to you speak it out even if you have no one around you speak it out what God has spoken over you what he's speaking to you and declare it over your life don't don't hide it the more that you get it out the more you believe it that if you want to if you sing if you dance dance to those thoughts create a a painting out of what the Father has spoken over you we love you guys so much and we are we are so happy that you have spent this time with us bless you