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this resource for free. That's undaunted.combe, life slash 31 days. your reset today this is on This is Undaunted Life a Man's podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. Mark Hitchcock, weren't you just here?

Seems like that, yes. I mean, come on. We were trying to give you a little bit of a runway before you came back on and here you are. You circled right back around.

Here I am. Well, here's the thing. So peek behind the curtain for everybody watching and listen to this. So I don't know if you know this. Well, you should know this because I actually just told you off air. The interview you did, I guess it would be a couple of months ago now, a few weeks ago, has been the most talked about interview so far this year of all of our guests. We've had some amazing, awesome guests, but a lot of faith Biblesers have actually, I don't know if that's what we call people at our church, but we just coined the term. Faith Biblers, they have stopped me in service to say how thankful they were for the interview, because these are people that have watched your sermons for years. You know, you've been their shepherd as a, you know, pastor for years. You know, they may watch some of your stuff on YouTube, but they had never seen you before kind of in that long form, like, almost just kind of hanging out, going into a bunch of subject things. And so I was like, well, we eventually got to get them back on here. But somehow, you sat at this table for three hours and didn't even mention you had a new book coming out. And so I don't know what the deal is. I don't know why you try to keep secrets from everybody. But what was the big idea trying to keep the Persian storm from everyone? Well, just, you know, I didn't think we were talking about other stuff, you know, kind of talking about ministry and everything's like that. So I just, you know, I don't like to self-promote that much either.

So just didn't think about mentioning that. Well, that's actually very true because I don't know how many years I had been attending Faith Bible and someone mentioned one of your books. And I was like, Mark wrote a book and then they just kind of looked at me like I was a simpleton. and they're like, Mark's written a lot of books.

I'm like, my bad, I didn't really know this, but yeah, we don't exactly have a bookstore in the church. But it was interesting because I have a great relationship with a lot of publishers that, you know, God has kind of hooked me up with these great publishing houses. And Harper Collins is one of those. And so they sent me their catalog for the rest of the year. And they said, here's who's coming out for the rest of the year. Who are the people that you would like to target for interviews, blah, blah, blah. And wouldn't you know it, there was a book coming out in April by the very own Mark Hitchcock. And the thing that was interesting about it is this book, which is the Persian Storm, which guys, if you are looking at this, you can pre-order this book. It's coming out, I think,

officially April 21st. So April 21st. This was originally supposed to release in June, I believe,

because you finished, as long as I have my fax rate, you finished the manuscript before the

war in Iran broke out. Yes. And so let's just start there because obviously they, you know, Harper Collins, Thomas Nelson saw it fit to, hey, let's push this up a couple of months, you know, write maybe a new preface so that people can kind of like contextualize some of things in the book. But let's just talk through the entire writing process. Why did you even want to write this? How long did it take? And then, you know, the decision making around releasing it when we are. Well, yeah, I've written several books about Ezekiel 38 and 39. That's the biblical passage that mentions Iran, I believe in the end times, mentions Persia. And so I've written a couple books on that, but Harper Collins approached me about updating all of this and bringing it all up to date. And so just everything that's been going on over there, obviously, you know, Iran for 40, almost 50 years has been, you know, number one sponsor of terror over there. I mean, they got all these proxies. And so, you know, we had no idea what was getting ready to happen. So I worked on the book, finished the book, in light of October 7th, and a lot of things

are taking place, the nuclear crisis over there, what happened last year in June, you know, that 12-day war. Yeah. So we kind of, we did all of that. But then all these events started taking place here recently. So what we did is we went back and rewrote a preface to the book. And one of the important things about it is what I say in there is, you know, look, the current events are going to change over time, but what the Bible says isn't going to change. So we want to look at current events through the Bible, not the other way around. We want to look at what the Bible says first, and then, you know, if things in our world mirror that,

we want to point those things out. So that's kind of how the process came about,

and they moved the date up to release the book, obviously, because of what's going on right now.

Well, I thought it was a very easy read. We were talking about that off air because some of

these books, they don't have to be long to have depth. And it's almost like some authors,

they write to try to be intentionally obtuse, right, to almost seem deeper or whatever. It's like,

but you have to have nuggets, some core nuggets that people can walk away with because I don't know

if you've had this experience, but I have. I'll read a 400, 500 page book that's real deep, and, you know, it really gets into a lot of subject matters.

And someone asks me, well, what were some of the main points of the book?

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