Pat Welsh is a retired Superintendent of the Dayton, Ohio Police Department, with over 25 years of service on the front lines in one of America’s most challenging and high-crime environments. His career was built in high-stakes leadership situations where decisions carried real weight, and resilience was not optional.

Through years of navigating chaos, crisis, and human suffering, Pat developed a deep understanding of what it means to lead with courage, integrity, and compassion under pressure. These experiences shaped both his leadership philosophy and his personal faith journey.

Today, he shares from those lived experiences through his Warrior Servant Leader mindset blending real-world leadership lessons with faith-driven principles. His focus is on helping others find strength in adversity, lead with conviction, and grow through life’s most difficult seasons.

Pat brings a grounded, honest perspective shaped by service, struggle, and faith, offering insights on leadership, resilience, and personal transformation rooted in real-life experience.

Link to my website: https://www.thewarriorservantleaderpodcast.com

Welcome to 12 Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, his creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, Pat.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

I live in Colorado.

Beautiful Colorado.

I see the mountains immediately, my friend.

I see them.

It's beautiful.

Did you always live in Colorado?

No, lived about, oh man, 40, close to 40 years, maybe even longer than that, in Dayton, Ohio.

And I grew up in, I lived in Kansas City, Missouri.

And I actually was not born in the United States.

I'm a naturalized citizen.

I was born in Dublin, Ireland.

Oh, that's the beard.

That's the mustache right there.

That's genetics.

In Ireland, this is everybody.

All the guys have nice mustaches.

But yeah, I was born in Ireland too.

My mother was a 39-year-old widow when I was born in the 50s, and she just couldn't keep me.

So when I was about three days old, she put me in an orphanage.

And a year and a half later, I was adopted by a family in the United States.

And that's how I ended up in Kansas City.

How was that being adopted?

Oh, great.

God is good.

I'm telling you, I genuinely believe because of where she lived in Ireland, she did not live in Dublin.

She went to Dublin because there were orphanages down there.

She lived in a very rural country area of Ireland, close to Northern Ireland.

And when I say close, 10 miles.

And I firmly believe that if she had kept me and growing up, I would have grown up in the 60s and 70s.

I probably would have ended up taking a very different path in life because of all the troubles and issues going on during that time in Ireland.

But somehow you still connected to the natural beauties of a country.

Oh, absolutely.

And actually, and the natural beauties of Ireland.

I've been back four times.

I've actually met my mother, my birth mother and sister.

And Ireland is every bit as beautiful as the United States.

Yeah.

So I've been very blessed in many ways.

When did you meet Jesus?

17 years old, senior in high school.

Wow.

What was it an event?

Someone telling you about Jesus?

It was obviously if you're most likely if you're Irish from the Republic, you're Catholic.

And I was raised, adopted by a Catholic family through Catholic charities, actually.

And I'm still a very devout, active Roman Catholic.

And it my conversion encounter was at a charismatic Catholic mass in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Speaking that first time I ever heard people speak in tongues and praying.

And the girl I was dating at the time invited me to to join her at mass there.

It was a Wednesday evening.

And that was my conversion experience was right then and there.

Did you marry her or did you marry someone else?

I was headed to the priesthood.

Actually, I was a senior in high school and then I went to college.

And my senior year of college, I had every intent.

I thought my calling was to be a priest.

And I went to a Catholic university in Dayton, Ohio.

And at a Saturday evening fellowship, which was about a two hour evening fellowship, I met the young lady who is now my wife and we're celebrating coming in September, 46 years of marriage.

Wow, congrats.

Wow.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

Tell us a secret before you tell us how you move from being the one who's pursuing becoming a priest to becoming a police officer.

A secret?

Well, it's a tough one.

I guess it's not a secret.

It's actually, it goes back to Jeremiah.

Here's the secret, if you want to call it that, is read Jeremiah and discover and understand that God knew you before you were formed in your mother's womb and consecrated you for a purpose before you were even born.

And once I discovered that secret of Scripture, that completely opened up my perspective of my vocation and calling in life.

So there it is.

The thing I wanted to bring to this conversation was an acronym.

And you just said the first word, which represents the P that I thought of in preparing, which is perspective for Pat, right?

If you say the other two, wow, that'd be amazing.

But I will tell you anyway, right?

But let's start with perspective.

So from moving from becoming a priest to being a police officer.

Yeah, it, my perspective changed in that I, it was no longer about me.

I was so focused on what am I supposed to do?

Who am I supposed to be?

Everybody told me I was going to be a great lawyer and that's what I should do.

And in reality, I did end up going to law school and became a lawyer.

But my perspective went from being egocentric to the servant mindset and wanting truly to make a difference, serve people and make a difference in their lives, which I thought I knew I would do as a priest, but God had different plans for me is that's not your vocation.

That's not where I want you to be for him was eventually being a police.

I actually went to law school and became a lawyer first and was a prosecutor for four years.

And my wife talk about perspective.

She changed my perspective.

One evening I came home, we'd been married six years, two kids, and she goes, you're, you're never happy when you come home and from working.

And she goes, what do you really want to do?

And I said, since I was eight or nine years old, I always thought I was, I would be a police officer.

I always felt that what's what I was called to do, but I was living up to other people's expectations.

And she goes, then go do it.

So I did.

And I was in that career for nearly 30 years.

Wow.

The next word is accountability.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

That that's a good one that that's probably one of the hardest ones that were not we, me, I am quick and always have been to want to hold other people accountable to my expectations and what I expect and accept out of them.

We had five kids.

It's like, I, I just so focused on accountability for a long time without actually an accountability of others.

It took a lot for me to grasp accountability for myself.

And some of it is scripture based.

Some of it is experience based, but it came down to, we've had some Job moments in our life.

My wife and I, we've had some Judas moments in our life, not between each other, but with other people.

And it forced me to go, Hey, the passage, don't pick a log out of some or a speck out of somebody else's eye till you pull, get the log in your own eye that that required accountability in my part.

That's a daily struggle.

Even now I'm 68 years old.

It's a daily, every day I get up.

It's like, I literally have to say to God, when I put my feet on the floor, these are the words that come out of my mouth that I will be done.

That makes forces me to be accountable to God first and then to myself.

And then I can do what I'm called to do that day.

Next up, we have the T the final round.

Yeah.

So we're spelling path here, perseverance, accountability, and the T that represents the cross for one, right?

Cause the T makes the cross, but definitely truth.

What has truth meant to you in terms of integrity and functioning as a lawyer, functioning as a police officer, functioning as a father and now retired.

Yeah, semi-retired, but okay.

Why semi?

I still travel about 15, 20 weeks of the year.

I train cops all over the country.

It's giving back type deal.

It's, I love that you pick the word truth because I actually, I have an acronym for the word love.

Everybody loves the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength, love your neighbor as yourself.

And I always wanted somebody to give me a definition of love because it strikes me as being an emotion and decades ago.

And I'm going to get to your point here.

Decades ago, I came up with my own definition using love as an acronym.

And this is what love to me is live out Veritas every day.

In Veritas, the translation to English is truth.

Live out truth every day.

And then of course, then what is truth?

Jesus, I am the way, the truth, the life.

Yeah.

And the word became flesh.

That's a truth.

And so the transition of careers I've had, positions I've had, responsibilities I've had, it always comes back to live out Veritas every day.

And you can't do that.

You can't know the truth if you're not in the Bible.

If you don't read, I read scripture every morning.

I actually read, I started my day off.

I have an app that it's called Laudate and it has the saint of the day.

Every day there's saints and I read their stories and I read their lives and their struggles.

Like today is that we're recording.

It's the feast day of St. Bernardino and who's the patron saint of San Bernardino, California and the patron saint of speakers and coaches and mentors.

And I read about, and he was a very pious, very poor individual back in the 1200s.

And that's how you learn the truth.

And you keep studying that, you keep repeating that, and then it becomes second nature to you that you no longer struggle with what's the right thing to do.

What's the right time?

This is my motto.

Do the right thing at the right time, the right way and for the right reasons.

That's a fundamental truth.

If you do that, then you are going to discover and live out God's will for your life.

Amazing audience.

This is the first time that I'm speaking to Pat, but my introduction to him came through his podcast, Warrior Servant Leadership Podcast, logged on and locked in to that and really enjoyed the conversation there.

So I would suggest you check that out.

Pat, is there any question that I could have asked that I didn't ask that would have helped you serve us better?

No, man, you did a great job because that's it.

I like those deep thinking kind of questions.

So no, you did wonderful.

Thank you.

This is a great pleasure, one I treasure.

Thank you for being on What Is Inspired by 12 Minute Converse.