David's Story

David W Ebel: This is I'm David Ebel with the God Says Yes podcast. And ⁓ I've had people be asking me for some time to tell my my testimony, my story, because it's not like everybody else's. It's mine. So ⁓ to honor the requests of many, let me share my story with you. My mom was an orphan during the coal camp area during the depression. Six brothers and sisters abandoned in one night. Mom had died in childbirth and dad died in a coal mining accident. And it was during the depression and there wasn't enough food to go around, so the kids were broken up and sent in whatever direction had food. And my mom, th the young one of the youngest, was also the one picked on the most and and and so she became really tough, tiny and tough. The and ⁓ finally she was shipped to Michigan to a great aunt who didn't have any kids but had money. 'Cause Aunt Aunt B could take care of her. And Aunt B took care of her and treated her well and she grew. And one day she ran into a guy that was working at the ⁓ the d at the grocery store. And ⁓ they fell in love. And they and eventually that guy, his name was Charles. Charles and in Anna Lou, my w ⁓ met, fell in love. And Charles signed up for the Army Air Corps. which was what is now the the United States Air Force. And because he was gifted, they tested him and found out that he had tremendous potential as a pilot. And it this was the beginning of World War II, and they needed pilots desperately. So they fast tracked him and trained him until he could fly those great big huge planes full of supplies for war. And ⁓ he was he he learned fast and has a he had a natural ⁓ ability to read maps and to know where he was and he never got lost and very mechanical and very very together and he was an unflappable man. And ⁓ so they they they moved him forward and once he was settled, h he called for my mom and my grandmother, my dad's mom, put her on a train and grandma and and and and my mom went to where my dad was and they immediately got married. And grandma went back on the train home and they began their life. Well, in in time they ended up with ⁓ with a with a couple of kids out of the Air Force and into into the world work world. And the first one was a little guy named Chuck, and then a couple years l years later they had a little sister named Anita. Well Anita was a beautiful little girl. Chuck was smart and cute and adorable and But Anita was stunning. She was one of those kids when you look at her, your heart goes, ooh. Beautiful hair, like ringlets, like and people would say she looked like an angel with a halo. Everybody I've ever talked to who ever met her before she died would would tell you how she was the most warm and cuddly child they'd ever met. That she never found a stranger. Well, one day they were ⁓ they noticed that Anita had the sniffles. So they rushed her to the hospital, and they come come to find it out, she developed what's called bull bar polio. That's polio of the brain. Two weeks after the first sniffle, Anita was dead from polio. At the funeral, the pastor that had been the family pastor for years, his sermon was that the sins of the parents fall on the children, indicating that the reason why God took that child away from my parents was because my parents weren't godly enough. Well, biblically that's inexcusable. That's twisting scripture. That would make him a Pharisee at least. The denomination was so appalled they terminated him and removed his ordination, but they did nothing to help my parents restore. So when I was born, we had the family had already signed off on God. There was no church, there was no Bibles, there wasn't they were going to live just a good, clean life. But when I was born, I was choking to death. A gland in my throat that should have gone down only went down about a third, and I could breathe, but I couldn't swallow. So the doctor gently came in and explained to my mom, all four foot eleven of her, that they're going to have to give me morphine. And it'll let me slowly die painlessly. My mom was not having it. All that honri angry stuff from being abused in Kentucky came out at once and she grabbed the doctor by the shirt and says, If he dies You die. Not a joke. He came back about thirty minutes later and says, Well, we got an experiment. Is he gonna die without it? Yes. Then do it, stupid. So they did it. And four months later it became illegal to do that to any human being. It's still illegal today. The problem is the side effects were that bad. Yeah, birth defects, dwarfism, sterility, and a hundred percent mortality by twenty. So here I I lived, but in my parents' minds there couldn't be anything they had done it all right, so there couldn't be anything wrong with me, so there couldn't I couldn't have a medical problem. Because if there was something wrong with me, then according to that preacher, then they were bad parents, which wasn't true ever, but it left its scar on them. Well I ended up being the smallest child in the school. I also ended up the most sickly child in the school. And the most bullied child in the school all the way until twelfth grade. On top of it, at six I pick up picked up juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. One of the side effects of the of the of the experiment was that your body had the propensity, the ⁓ the you you were like a target for things and and rheumatoid arthritis was one of the things that attacked me. So I lived in chronic pain from six on. And I so wanted to be like everybody else. I was already little, so I tried extra hard to be popular. So I would hide I would hid my I would take that pain and hide it so the kids wouldn't see that I was suffering because I wanted to be cool. Well, I got good at hiding it, and it got to the point where I had a r really strong pain tolerance, and I still do. And ⁓ I'd jump off the swing when everybody else did. They'd land and get up and roll again, and I'd land and feel electricity shoot through my whole body, from from my toes all the way up to my neck. It burned like fire, and I would get up, shake myself, and go do it again. 'Cause I wanted to be like them. Well that you know, off over time the pain got worse and I I kept hiding it all the way through high school. I had had the offer to go to college at a university on a full ride scholarship for disabled people. So I'm I I graduated at sixteen. The next week I started college at ⁓ my first week of being seventeen, no more prepared for college than I was to do brain surgery. But I went because I made my parents proud. I was the first child in our our whole family to to get a college degree and I was gonna have it. And I was trying to please my parents and please everybody else. I wanted to desperately be loved. So I was I was trying to please everybody else and I didn't even know who I was anymore. Well, I had to work. The college was free, but gasoline and food and survival wasn't. So I had to work, and I worked thirty to forty hours a week ⁓ at a department store. And I was carrying 19 credits and 110 lab hours. So I was full time student, hundred and you know, all these extra hours outside of college and working full time. After a year and a half, the pain had gotten so bad that my leg I would stopped I was driving a car with a clutch and I'd be sitting at a light and the leg would start shaking and then it would drop and I would hit the car in front of me without even without I couldn't stop my leg from doing it. And ⁓ the combination of all those things and the pain. I eventually had a nervous breakdown sitting in the student lobby. They brought me in and the counselors dealt with me and said, look, we've arranged for you to have your scholarship frozen for up to ten years. Go home, get well, come back. We want you here. But in my depressed state as as a failing, failing, feeling thing, in my mind I failed again. I I heard, you're not welcome here. You can never do this. You're not good enough. Now that's not what they said but But that's when I felt. Well, I left school and I worked a job selling clothes. And the guys I w was with were saying you're too soup you're too way too you're too straight, you're too serious. We gotta take you out and teach you how to have fun. So kind of I was dragged into going dancing. Now I don't know how to I still don't know how to dance. But while we were there hanging out, girls were flirting with me, and I w that I was not used to that at all. I was the littlest, so there wasn't a lot of flirting in my life. And these girls were flirting and everything was fine. And finally somebody said to her, drink this. And I I thought it was just a bet you know, a drink. And unfortunately, my mom died an alcoholic. The damage that had been done through the through her life, she started medicating with al with alcohol and fulfilled the family curse. Seven generations. I'm the seventh generation alcoholic in my family. But once I realized that I now was an alcoholic like my mom, like my uncle, like My grandpa, like all the way back. That was a terrible failure to me. And I began to use illegal drugs trying to hide the guilt. If I was numb, I couldn't feel. I still worked jobs and tried to do everything. But eventually even that got to be too much. And ⁓ then somehow along the wave the voices started. I now know that they call it demon possession, but at that point all I knew is The voice kept saying, You're no good at anything. You're a loser. Nobody wants to be around you. You're a failure. Nobody wants to hire you. Nobody wants to keep you. You don't have any friends. You don't have a girlfriend. You can't keep a job. You're good for nothing. Why don't you just kill yourself? Well, by the third year of those voices, I took ⁓ up on that and I tried to kill myself four times. The fourth time, the day before Christmas in Michigan, where everything's frozen. I drove a car off a bridge into a river at a hundred miles an hour in my old car. Problem was I didn't think it through because I had already drank enough alcohol and took enough drugs that I wasn't thinking much. And I went in the air, when I went to land I landed in mud. The water had frozen before I before it got to me. I hit this big old tree and ripped it out with the front of my car. They towed the car out and I drove it home. All the way I'm saying stupid, stupid, stupid. What's wrong with you? W Don't you even can't even kill yourself? You're good for nothing. I made up my mind I was going to finish the job, and I started planning the rif the money for the rifle and pay payments on it until I could and then I could kill myself. Well, my main job in the daytime worked in a mailroom. I sorted papers and it was no big deal. But I still needed more money so I had alcohol. And I had I had to alcohol and drug money, and the first job wouldn't pay for it all. So I got this job carving candles at a at a a hippie commune giant they took a giant store and turned it into little booths. And one of those booths was a candle carving booth. And I'm a little bit artistic, so I took the cam I took it and they taught me how. And I made all the those granny candles, the ones that look like a star at the top all the way down. You take knives once you get them hot and you layer them with different colours, you take a knife and cut them down and roll them into to swirly, curly things. Some of you would know what that is, and others can see a picture someplace. They they were they were the fad at the time in the 70s. So I was doing that, but my depression was getting worse and worse and worse. So I one day when I w I had nothing to make, I decided to make a skull dripping blood. So that when you melted the skull, the black skull would start would start having red running off the sides and down through it. And the hippies went crazy. They just loved it to pieces. And I got even more depressed, so I made a brain. And the brain w was was blue black. But when you lit it, pus colored wax came out and ran all over it. They c I couldn't make them fast enough. They were fighting for who would buy them fastest. My boss loved me, but nobody realized I was crying out. I didn't want to die. I just couldn't live the way I was living. The pain was too bad. So finally, this girl comes in. She gave in her heart to Jesus about three months before, and she was determined to be I was going to be her first person to talk about Jesus with. Well, you have to picture me a little different than I am now. I was five foot four, eighty pounds, and I had the an eighteen inch afro that went hung to the middle of my back with no perm in it. I just had super curly hair. And I let it grow and it tr turned into a fro. So I was the first white guy in Detroit with a fro. And that was a good thing and a bad thing. I ha another story another day. But ⁓ she she saw me and thought, Man, he's in trouble. I'm this is perfect. So she began to tell me about Jesus and I kept trying to push her out and tell her to go away and I didn't want any and blah blah blah. Almost I gave it the office. Anything I could think of to talk her to leave talk her into leaving. She wouldn't leave. Finally she saw that I was drawing and she said, What are you drawing? I said, It's none your business. No, it is my business. You're gonna tell me what it is. No, you don't need to know. No. I'm not leaving till you show me. So I turned it around and showed it to her. It was a graveyard. And it ha it had my name on every stone. And it had Saturday's date on every stone, and this was Tuesday. And she said, Well, what does this mean? I said, Well, this okay, I'll tell you. I'm in severe pain. I can't hardly I can't hardly stand here. I have to move just to keep the pain calmed down. I can't I I can't I failed college, I can't keep friends, my life just sucks. I've tried to kill myself and failed. I've even tried overdose four times and drive a car drove a car off a bridge and I still am alive and I can't take it anymore. So Saturday I get the I pay off the payment on the rifle and I end my life and it finally the pain will end. She said, No, you won't, because I'm taking you to church tomorrow. No, you're not. Yeah, I am. You're going to church with me. Well, she was pretty. And after she had tried used all her three months of of church learning, she finally out of desperation flirted me into church. Now when you don't have a lot of girls talking to you, when somebody's really persuasive and pretty, you pretty much do whatever they want. So I went home and said, Mom I met this really cute girl and she's taken me to church and my mom went David, church is just gonna hurt you. Look how it's hurt me. Let me tell you what it was like when I was a kid and I went to church. People ran around the room like danced like chickens, swang from chandeliers, rolled on the floor. It was the scariest thing in my life. And you want to go back to that on purpose? I said, She's cute, mom. Maybe I'll get lucky. And my mom just rolled her eyes. So went down in the basement where I had my bed and I I went up in the rafters and got my emergency fift scotch that I had hit I had hidden for the day when I didn't have enough money to be able to buy my booze when I really needed it. So I had this fift hidden away. And I had my my full pill bottle full of tranquilizers the doctor had given me for a month, and I just had it fulfilled. So I figured, well, I got I'm gonna need something to to live through this. So I j took the whole bottle of of pills and my empty stomach. And I dri I chugged down the whole fifth of Scotch, drove to the girls' house, picked her up, drove to this little one room schoolhouse, converted into a church, pulled in the parking lot, and then the alcohol and drugs hit. And I was obliterated. I didn't even I couldn't put the car in park. I couldn't even find the key to turn it off the car. So the girl reached over and put the car in park, turned turned the keys off, put those keys in her pocket, came around and scooped me up and put W just kind of wobbled me into church. Well, we walked in and these this is a very conservative church with people who dressed very, very conservatively. And here comes this drunk high hippie with the wrong hair and the wrong clothes and the wrong everything, skinny as a rail, looks like he's half dead. They're going, ⁓ my God, right in front of me. ⁓ my god, what is that doing in here? We have a witnessing team. We've got a coffee house for hippies, we've got all this stuff. That doesn't belong on a Wednesday night. Our children are here, don't get him near those children. It is a hymn, isn't it? And I mean they were just one after the other, insult after the other, and I was too obliterated to defend myself. So I turned to the girl and says, Look, I don't belong here, and she says, No, you belong here. This is a house of hope. They don't belong here. Obviously they don't have any hope. So she wobbled me up and sat me down, and I was too inebriated to be able to get up and move. So I sat there for the service. At the end, when the young preacher said, with every eye closed and no one looking around, if you need Jesus, just raise your hand, and my hand went up. She heard me say, I do I don't I don't know what I want, but my hand went up and I tried to bring it down because I was afraid those mean people in the back were going to jump me. I mean this was Detroit. Jumping was not a new thing, and I was just sure as much as I'd been bullied that that's my next problem. So finally he says, Thank you, brother, I see the hand, and I brought it down and held it. And he says, okay, with every eye closed, including my relatives, because it was a family church. All eyes closed. If you need Jesus, come come up here and let me pray for you. Well, I looked up and right where he was standing in the middle, to his immediate left was the emergency door, the fire door that they required to be that we installed. So I figured if I could get up to where he was and hang a quick turn, I could get to the emergency exit and not have to deal with all those mean people. Well, this guy was 6'4, 280, and I'm I'm 5'4 and 80 pounds. He hops over the the small tiny pulpit and he's in front of me. And he says, Can I show you something? I said, Sure, just don't hit me. And he opens up his Bible and shows me, For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. What is that? What is that to me? And he looks at me and says, David, God knows about your birth defects. He knows about How how you've got a bleeding ulcer hemorrhaging out of both ends. He knows about your suicide attempts. He knows how much pain you're in from your arthritis. He knows about all that's wrong with you, and he doesn't want you to die. He's got a plan for your life. These people didn't know my name was David. Even the girl didn't know my name was David. Everybody called me fro. So here I am, and he's calling me by name and he's describing my story and no one knows it. That was the scariest day of my life. That was scarier than when a guy put a gun to my hand. I didn't know what to do. And between the drugs and alcohol, I was swimming in in just disbelief. And I said, So what do I do with that? He says, Well, this is a small altar. These two guys are praying over here. Go over here and kneel and just cry out to God. Well, you know, I didn't have anything to lose on it. And they were all screaming, so I figured that's how you prayed. I looked around and they're all going, Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus. And I thought, well. Okay, I can't do any worse. So I put my hands up and said, Jesus, if you're real, I give you six months to prove yourself. If you're real, I will serve you with every day of my life, and if not I know where the gun is. And suddenly this sweet, warm feeling came over me like honey. And I was sober. For the first time in three years I was sober as the day I was born, which scared me worse than anything that had happened so far. And then I felt forgiven. I felt loved. I felt like I belonged for the first time in my life. My pain reduced. And I I knew that I had a that God loved me as I was and I didn't have to do anything to impress anybody. So I I I knew I I I was doing something was right. I didn't know in all the details yet, but I knew something good was happening. And then I felt this need to apologize. The Bible calls it repent, but at that point I didn't know what it meant. But I felt this need to say I'm sorry. So I'm I get back on my knees and I raise up my hands and say, Jesus, forgive me for and I start expliciting times, dates, and places of all the wretched, nasty, and horrible things I'd done. Man, they cleared out that chapel like I was saying, free cholera, come get a kiss. There was no one in that chapel in about two seconds. They all went in the back room and get got away from me. So when I finally had apologized until there was nothing left, I felt like a balloon as you let go and it flies around the room and finally goes and it's flat because it's empty. I was empty. There was nothing left to say. I ran out of words for the first time in my life. And I did I just kind of melted onto the floor behind me. I raised my hands, Jesus, I love you, Jesus, I love you, Jesus, I love you. And this voice said, My son David, and I I leaned up and looked around. There was nobody near me. There was no one behind me or on either side. I was by myself, and the voice said, My son David, I've called you with an everlasting love. And I've called you to preach my word. If you will love my people and preach my word, I will change lives. If you will love my people and preach my word, I will change hundreds of thousands of lives. Will you love? Yes. Will you preach if you teach me how? That was the end of the conversation. And the two guys on the other side had been were converted hippies, but still had the long hair and the scraggly beard and the bib overalls. They came over and said, I'm Tony, I'm Gary. You belong to us. We're going to teach you how to live for God. And they just hooked onto my arms and became my own private team challenge, my own discipleship team, who worked with me daily, hourly if I needed it, to help me live for God and learn how to who God was and learn how how much he loved me. They taught me all about the things I that I'd never exposed to. I was twenty and I didn't know that God's last name wasn't Dam. And all of a sudden these two guys are showing this all to me, teaching me how to love and how to serve and how to share God's love and to witness to tell other people about the good news of the love of God. And as I grew in that, I knew that what God had said to me was true. My pastor invited me to preach on a Wednesday night. I was no more prepared than I was for ⁓ to become a you know a a rocket scientist. But I went up and said, okay, I'll try. And whatever I shared, people liked it. And it and and somebody came forward and prayed. And I was just in such joy that God would want me. I didn't think I had anything worth giving to anybody. I didn't think I had a value one in this world. And God wanted me. I even said in my prayer time when I started, you know, you're getting you're getting cheated here. Certainly you can find better than me if Yet here I was learning how to do all these th beautiful things. I learned kids' ministry. And from the kids' ministry, I learned how to I I found people to mentor me. I went to Sunday school and they and the at the church we were at, it was terrible. I'm my my training in high school and college had been theater and performance. And you know, the kids look at TV and they look at movies and it's professional. They came to our Sunday school and Jesus was on a flannel graph falling on the floor all the time. You know, they were sitting on a couch with springs biting It was it was why would you come to a church where where the last thing on their list is kids if you're a kid? And it just it just troubled me that I didn't I was twenty before I found out that I could have learned about Jesus as a kid, and who knows how much better my life would have been had someone taken the time to tell me, Jesus loves me, this I know. Because the Bible tells me so. But no one did. So I made it my personal mission to figure out how to do that. So no other kids had to turn to be twenty and still not know who Jesus was. So I had a guy mentor me on storytelling and another one on what we call gospel magic, which is you buy the gadgets and you turn them into modern day parables. Then storytelling and pu puppetry and ventriloquism and all these things wove together, and finally someone just taught me how to do clowning. And ⁓ We mixed it together and I did a youth camp in a vacation Bible school or two, then five or six. And along the way I met my wife and ⁓ we married and she would she knew that in her heart she had been called to be in the ministry when she was she was six fourteen. And here I was twenty and I'm just f I just found out who he was. So she was much more prepared for God's future for us than I was. So God gave me the a woman who was even more secure in her faith than I was. So that I could grow into it. And together we did kids ministry and we did street wind ministry and we went to nursing homes and whatever wherever we could just share God's love, we went and we got went gladly. But along the way people started finding out about the kids stuff we did, and they booked us to do youth camps. And to be a speaker at a youth camp is a really important and big thing, 'cause you have got three hundred kids who who really came to find out who Jesus is, and somebody's gotta tell ⁓ and I felt so unworthy. But I've I I figured they must not understand what I'm doing, so I'll go and try. And it went beautifully. It went better than I could have ever dreamed. And one turned into twelve and then to twenty. We've done over forty six youth camps across in the nation. We've ministered in forty-nine states and twenty countries, doing what we call the kids' celebration circus, heavenly good, clean, fun. What that was is that you took all that training and eventually I became a clown. A real clown, not just somebody who puts on the stuff on once in a while, but I learned how to do it prof performance wide grade. And I got good enough at it. I was invited to go to a convention where all the clones get together. They have conventions for stamps for everything. So I wasn't shocked about that. But while I was there I ran into three of the main clowns from Barnum and Bailey Circus, the ones who are considered master clowns as far as you can get. Smart as you are, talented as you are. They were the lead of the lead for the whole world. And they pulled me aside and said, David, you know how good you are. I said, No, I'm just doing stuff for church for church. No, no, no, you're way beyond that. But I'm just doing this for church. But no, no, but you're that good. I'm that good. Why? And they explained. And they said, just so you know, obviously you don't, so let me explain to you. When you start out, you're you're like a hobbyist. Then you can do a little bit, then you become a birthday clown. And slowly but surely you improve. But the f way up here at the very top, that's a master clown. And you can't say you're that. You can't earn to be that. You can't talk it into that. You can't even buy that. You have to live it until someone else like us recognizes it and tells you you are. And David today you are. You're the very and I said, but it's all church. So you're the first ministry clown. In the world that's certified by Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. So I took that seriously and I improved what I did. And that's when we took it on the road for 12 years. This is a guy that's supposed to be dead at 20. But at 20, I gave my life to Jesus and extended my life. This is a guy who was told he'd never have children. I have three kids and nine grandkids, which is pretty good stuff for a 74 year old man who's supposed to be dead at 20. But you see, this is what God does. He don't tell him what he can't do. God will do what's best to reach the most people with his love. And because I was young and gullible and willing to trust him, he gave me opportunities that probably other people would have laughed at and rolled their eyes and walked away. But I remember that I've discovered in the Bible Philippians 4 13, which says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And I became strong in God and I I learned my Bible and memorized it because I loved him more than I loved my wife or anybody else. And if I was willing to please my wife and make her happy, how much more should I be willing to please my God who had done so much for me already? And so we've ministered for over fifty years full time. I've been a hospital chaplain, a police chaplain, a fire chaplain, a sheriff's chaplain, a hospital, and a jail chaplain. These are all things that you do. on top of your regular ministry career because if there's a need, I'm willing to fill it. I also at one of my appointments, I'm a Salvation Army officer. At one of my appointments they they had a disaster feeding vehicle called the canteen in the backyard and it wasn't being used. So I found out where to get the training and I got trained and then eventually the tr I realized that I needed more training and I went and got all the training I could and became a critical incident stress management. interventionist, which means when there's a disaster, we're the guys that you you bring in right after right after the ambulance, so that we can help the people who've been impacted by the disaster, the emergency, whatever, so that they don't end up with PTSD. It's not a guaranteed science, but we have gr you know ⁓ much better rate of success with it. And I got good enough at it that they made me a an extr an international instructor. I even went to Haiti right after their their earthquake. and and train trained the missionaries on how to handle the survivors so that they wouldn't be just there destroyed, but they could they could be comforted, they c they c they could learn how to cope with what's going on. So I did all those things for a guy that was told he'd never that he'd be in an a wheelchair at eighteen and dead by twenty, I'm I've I've done all these things that it are impossible. But God's t not impossible. After the twelve years on the road, my body The birth defects and all and the arthritis began to win, and I couldn't keep up the driving all over the country. So they sent me to a small town in California called Turlock. They had volunteers who were do doing some feeding some people for the Salvation Army, but they didn't have a full program. And since I had been trained in my early days in how to plant churches while I was learning how to do ministry, they sent us there and we started a brand new Salvation Army church. And ⁓ to our to our our shock, the community rallied around it, and in six years we went from no address to twenty-eight thousand square feet of debt-free space. Beautiful. Beautiful brick building, gymnasium that's got an Olympic floor, Olympic sized gym, computer lab, everything. All this from in and the guy leading is the guy who can't can't even do can't build anything bigger than Lincoln logs when he was a child. But God decided it was going to happen and it happened. So I'm of the opinion that if God can take me through all of the things he's brought me through. In all of the pain that I still live, I've been in chronic pain right now, but I decided twenty when I was twenty that pain is just how it is. But I can give my life to God. And I've lived my life respi and a without paying attention to the pain all these years. But the key is I can do all things. Because God gives me the strength in spite of the pain. You can do all things in spite of whether you've been betrayed or belittled or cheated. Whether you've been someone's lied to you, somebody in your family's hurt you, or even went to church and somebody at church was horrible. Man goofs up, man fails. But God, who he's supposed to represent, never fails. We were created before we were a twinkle in someone's eye, God created us. And he placed in us hope and faith before we were even conceived. He gave us the capacity. To one day receive his love and be forgiven and start our new life. And it'll happen for each person individually because God is does a personal relationship with us. But in that personal relationship, He gives us what we need to keep us alive till we give our hearts to Jesus. And then He to rebuild us and renew us and restore us so that we can be re inspired and move forward with the love of God. I'm telling you this for a reason. I'm telling it because if God can do this for me, what will He do with you? What are you willing to risk? Are you going to blame your whole miserable past as a reason to not trust God who's never failed you? Are you going to look at the men and women who've who have done all the terrible things and have caused you to pull back and sit on the curb and watch life go by? Are we willing to trust God who's never failed? Say, well, I tried it once, it didn't work. Well, try harder. Try again. Try doing it with not by yourself, but try to give your heart to Jesus, then attach yourself to some more believers like I did. Somebody strong enough in their faith that they can help you figure out how to how to get how to move forward. God has got a tremendous plan for your life. And I can't wait to see what God's going to do for you. Now I captured all this in a book and the Which is called When the Doctors Say No, God says yes. But I'm not here selling books. If you want it, you can go on Amazon and find it. But out of that, as I'm at 74 and I can't drive all over and do all this, I opened up my podcast, God Says Yes. Where we meet people like you, people who suffer, who struggle, who have difficult days, everybody's got their own battle. But we meet them where they are, and we bring people on and interview them. who were like you are now, who found a better way, who gave their lives to God, who God has given them hope and joy and peace and love and encouragement and provision. And now they're back sharing with us that if you are willing to trust, God is willing to do these great things. He's done it for fifty, sixty people in my interviews, what is he going to do with yours? What will he do with your heart when you put your trust in him? What's it take? That's always the hardest question people ask me. Well, how do I do this? What's what's it take? I mean is it I I'm sure it's hard because living for is hard. That's the funny part. God made it simple because he knew that mankind was all kinds of people, including people who were simple. So he didn't speak over our heads, he spoke to our hearts. You see, if you know what right is, and you've done the wrong thing, that's called ri that's rebellion. Okay, if you know better and you do it anyhow, the Bible calls that sin. Sin is what separates us from God. God's over here pure and holy and never goofed up. Man's over here who can't seem to get it straight. And Jesus was sent, became a man, lived a life without any sin, then allowed himself to be crucified, which was the electric chair of that day. He allowed himself to be crucified so that By the shedding of his blood, he can wash away our sins. The Bible tells us in the Old Testament that without the shedding of innocent blood, there is no forgiveness for sin. So Jesus shed his innocent blood so you and I can be forgiven. So I don't care what you've done. I prayed with people on death row. I've prayed with people while they're awaiting being arrested for murder. And you know what? God forgives those he forgives the sin. Now, if you broke the law, you gotta answer for the law, but the who you really are inside, that part is forgiven. And God wants to work in your life and in mine. So if you are if you're interested in a life that's better, know that you know what sin is. And you're sorry for that sin. You regret that you've done it. If you ask Jesus to forgive you, he says if you'll confess your sin to him, he'll be faithful and just to forgive you of your sin. And of all unrighteousness of all the unright things you've done. When Jesus died on the cross, he said, It is finished, which means payment in full was made. If I go to the grocery store and I pay for my food, and a man says, No, no, no, I'll pay for it, the lady says, No, no, you can't. He's already paid for it. You don't have to pay for your sins. Jesus paid for you. By the shedding of his blood, when God sees you, he sees no sin. He sees only mercy because Jesus was willing to die. Go to the electric chair of of that day. When we should have died for our sins, he died. So that we can ask for forgiveness and he will forgive us. It's that simple. The second part of it is after you you ask for forgiveness, you make him a promise to live for him, with his help, and you promise to start to seek after him, which means find a Bible and start reading it. Don't know how, find somebody who knows and have them teach you so you can do it for yourself. Find a church that teaches the Bible clearly and apply it to your life. God set the disciples up two by two because if I if there's just one of you and you trip, you're down. If there's two of you if you trip, the other one can support. So that's why we need each other at church so the strong ones can help the weaker ones. And together we can grow together to be something amazing. If God can reach me and God can heal me. He can deliver me. He can extend my life that many years, and give me children and give me a job and give me a minute ministry that's reached hundreds of thousands of people already. What can he do for you? What will he what will you let him do through you? The only limitation is you. Are you willing to give him a chance to prove himself? I'm gonna I'm gonna re say a prayer and you can repeat it with me now. You can play the tape back later and watch it then and pray it, or you can it's I even have it on my webs on the website, GodsaysYespodcast.com. It's on there too, so if you if you need to look it up, you can. But the prayer goes like this Jesus, I'm a sinner, and I know I deserve to die for my sin. You died on the cross, Jesus, when I should have died. You paid the punishment for my sin when you died on the cross and shed your blood. Please take that blood and wash me clean from sin on from the inside out, so that when God sees me, he doesn't see my failures, he sees your love through his Son Jesus. Change me from the inside out. Through your Holy Spirit, come and live in my heart. Lead me and guide me and give me truth. And I promise with your help to live for you. I may fail, but I'll get up and keep trying. I will live for you. I will find a Bible and learn how to read it. I will find a church that teaches that Bible and I'll learn how to apply it. And I will get out of my past and watch you build me a whole new future. Help me, Jesus, to be that new person as you work in me. If as you have forgiven me. I'll forgive myself, and together you can help me live the rest of my life. I give my heart to you and I accept your forgiveness, and I'm saved from my past. I give my heart to Jesus and I'm saved. I'm a saved born again, born by the Spirit of God, brand new person, because of the love you've shared for me. I love you, Jesus. Amen. That seems a little simple, but I guarantee you it's not. I've shared that all over the world, and it it the same truth is still the same truth. Lives get changed when you we put our trust in Jesus. So put your trust in Jesus today. Let him impact your life for eternity, starting right now. I'll be praying for you. Look me up online. My podcast even has a place for voicemails so you can reach me. I'd love to hear from you.