Calvin Bagley

David W Ebel: Welcome to the God Says Yes podcast. You are welcome. Welcome to God Says Yes. This is the podcast that loves people where they're at, who accepts you as just as you are. No judgment, no opinions, just you and God and His love. We're glad you're here and we hope that somehow, in something that's said or done while we're taking this time together, that we can help you find hope beyond your difficulties, whether you've been betrayed, abused, you know, whatever it's been. However your story got you to this point, that you can find hope in your journey and a better future as a result. That's why we're here. My name is David Ebel and I've been in ministry over 50 years and it's always been about loving people because I can't imagine doing this without it. The love of God is what changes everything. I've known people in multiple denominations. I can't even count how many I've served as an evangelist. A bunch. And I can tell you two things. A house of God with love is a wonderful place to be. A place that calls itself a house of God with no love is a quick place to get rid of. You want to run from those places. So I'm glad you're here and that you can be drawn to the love of God in the building that God sends you to. Well today I have, I've got a wonderful opportunity here. I've met a good friend named Calvin Begley and Calvin is ⁓ an interesting guy with a story and the way we normally do this is very conversational Calvin. We are going to invite you to tell your story first. Introduce yourself and then I'll invite you to tell your story. Great David, it's really great to be here and just in our conversation before this I can feel the love that you're talking about. grateful for the opportunity to share my story and hope that it can touch someone in some way. My name is Calvin Bagley. ⁓ I just celebrated my 50th birthday. So I know I have a young voice and maybe a young face, but I've been around for a little while. And my story is in a book called Hiding from the School Bus, where it kind of is my memoir that talking about my life. And I know we're to talk a little bit about that today as well as just. ⁓ our impressions and the things that come to us. So thank you for having me. Well, we're grateful to have you. And at the end of our story, the last 10, 15 minutes, we're going to give you a chance to explain your book and also any links that you would like to have shared with you, with our listeners. So we're with that and said, start our story, help our listeners and viewers understand where you're coming from and where you're going. Yeah, I appreciate that. My book is hiding from the school bus, and it comes out of this word. It has a very powerful word in it that's hiding. And I was hiding for a long time. I hiding my past, hiding my feelings of insecurity, my feelings of inadequacy, and other feelings. And I've kind of realized that we hide the things that we fear. So my question to those listening is, what are you hiding from? And not only what are you hiding from, but what are you hiding from the world? And why are you hiding? And I was hiding because I felt like I was ⁓ inferior to others. I felt like I didn't have the things that others had. And it started with education. As a very young child, my parents decided that they didn't trust a lot of the, they didn't trust education, they didn't trust media, they didn't trust. ⁓ any institution of any kind essentially, other than the church that they belong to, but their trust in this faith ⁓ led them to, ⁓ well I say it's beyond trust, to kind of creating their own version of their faith that was more extreme. And they isolated themselves from the world, and with that, all of the children. So I was number seven of nine children. We were... prohibited from having any education. didn't go to school. And I didn't even know how to read except that my sister taught me. In fact, I was learning to read, ⁓ our living room, my parents had put the alphabet across the top of the room, but we didn't ever talk about it. And so I wanted to read so bad, I started to memorize the alphabet. And I started backwards. And I didn't know the difference. And so I would go around the room, and I would recite the alphabet. And when my sister went to teach me, I recited it as Z-Y-X-W-V-U-T-S-R-Q-P-O-N-M-L-K-J-I-H-G-F-E-D-C-B-A. Wow. Because that's how backwards ⁓ my education was. And so, you know, we can go through some of my story, but it is overcoming this major deficit. But, you know, I was always intelligent. I just didn't know it. And I didn't have an opportunity to learn. And so the one place that I would associate with with my peers or kids my age was at church. And we would go to church every week, but even at church, my parents, their faith was based in fear, not in love. And so we would go to church and we would come home and they would talk about what everyone was doing wrong. Everyone at church was doing this wrong and doing that wrong, doing this wrong. you know, these people are doing, and you know, I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some people call the Mormon or the LDS Church. And it has, and a lot of people know we have like a health law. We don't drink alcohol and coffee and some other things. But for my parents, that wasn't enough. They had to take it further and further and further and more and more extreme and prove that they were loved by going down these extreme paths of, know, we didn't eat chocolate, we didn't eat meat, we didn't have ⁓ any of these things in our home, and we just kept getting further and further isolated from the world. And so the moral... of my story if you get all the way to the end of it is that I rebuilt my faith in God around love instead of fear. And I also realized that the things I feared, the things that thought I was inferior or that I wasn't as good as other people or that I wasn't smart or wasn't intelligent or couldn't relate to them because I hadn't... When I grew up in the 70s and 80s, things like Star Wars were the biggest thing ever. But we were prohibited from participating in any sort of of culture, pop culture, anything like that. you know, those things were evil. Star Wars was evil. And all these things were labeled with ⁓ these harsh things. so I just was different. And I feared that. And so I have come a long way to get an education, to overcome this trauma of ⁓ fear around belief, but to cling to the things that helped me through my childhood. and through the different types of abuse and neglect and fear and things, which was a faith that was with me from a very young age in God, a belief in Jesus Christ, and a feeling that that was a place I could turn and I could trust and feel love and connection. And that has guided me through my life to the point that I am today. So what do you do for a career now? I'm an entrepreneur. I have founded several companies that and most of them are in health care and financial services. My most most known company is ⁓ called Nouveau Health and we help people with their Medicare and health insurance. We've helped over 70,000 people to choose a Medicare plan. And so, you know, from you know, I've reached a level of success financially and in business and in life that just seemed completely out of reach. from this little homeschooled Mormon kid growing up in isolation ⁓ in a tiny, well, it wasn't even a town, we lived in the countryside in Utah away from everything. In the sticks, thank you. It's fitting you say the sticks because sticks, they can be used for a lot of things and one of the things that sticks were used for on me was for punishment. Correction. were in the sticks. Yep, correction. Sticks and willows, right? I know it well. Yeah. So you had this beginning. What's the middle? How did you get past the feeling of not being whole? Yeah, that's a great question because it was a very gradual process. Several winds that I had along the way. as is traditional in the Mormon church, when I was 19 years old, which now it's 18, but when I was 19, I submitted paperwork to serve a mission for the church and to go abroad. And I was called to serve in Brazil. And at the time that I opened that letter and it said, you you're going to go to Brazil and teach in Portuguese, I didn't even know where Brazil was. I thought, you know, Brazil could be... Africa for all I knew. I really thought I was going to Africa. And ⁓ so I went to learn Portuguese and that's how I learned English, honestly. I didn't know what a verb was, what a noun was, any of these things until I began to learn Portuguese. And so by learning to learn Portuguese, I kind of had to learn English. And that was a major accomplishment for me. And I really, and I became very good at speaking Portuguese. I spent two years in the South of Brazil. And I write about some of the stories and experiences I had there. And one of the most incredible experiences that I write about as a missionary in Brazil was this moment when this woman came running out to me. You if you've seen Mormon missionaries, there's always two of them together. We call them a companion. Me and my companion were walking down the street. This woman came running out to us and said, you're a priest, right? Will you please come bless my child? He's going to die. we went into this home and it was in the middle of a favela which in Brazil is you know the slums where they're the open sewers and tiny shacks and things like that it's like a little one room place and this boy is lying there and you could just feel like the thickness of death in the air and he was barely breathing very very light breasts and you could see that his he was white and just looked terrible and we laid our hands on him and we prayed and blessed him and I My companion was like brand new from America. He didn't even he didn't hardly speak Portuguese so you know he didn't he didn't know what to do and so So I had to do that night. I just prayed for this boy and the woman thanked us and we left the next day we decided to come back to see how this boy was doing and We walked up to the house and the the mother greeted us and she said I'm so glad that you're here ⁓ And we said, well, how is your boy? And she said, well, look for yourself. And she pointed out the street and he was playing soccer in the street with his friends the next day. And I said to her, wow, that's amazing. ⁓ Would you like to learn about church and come to church with us? And she said, ⁓ no, no, no, I have my church. And that moment for me was it kind of, it's a really critical moment for me to separate my parents' way of thinking. this very linear concept of God and Jesus that is fear-based and so much more to that than what I can share here. to say, you know what? God loves everyone and he cares for everyone. Whether it's that boy, whether it's me, whether it's this denomination, that denomination, whatever, God's love is for all and that he is ⁓ he's watching over all, you know, like it says, you know, he, the, the, the flowers of the field and the birds, they, you know, God watches over them. He watches over all of us. He loves and cares for all of us. And it kind of fractured or separated me from some of this very linear concept of what my parents believe God to be. ⁓ so, you know, to answer your question, how, what's the middle, the middle was this messy time of me trying to overcome fear. overcome the things I was hiding from. I got back from my mission and at 22 years old, I studied and got my GED. My dad saw me studying for that and said, what do need that for? You need them to tell you that you're smart. You need that piece of paper to tell you that you're smart. And I said, well, I want to go to college. And he did not agree with that. My father has since passed. But he was like, you know, he just didn't agree with any of those things. So without his approval, I got a GED. And I went to take the ACT exam to go to college because I figured that I don't have a high school transcript. All I've got is a piece of paper that says I have a general education equivalent. So I've got to study for that. So I studied for six months. I went in to take the ACT exam. I still was woefully unprepared, if you can imagine, trying to cram 12 grades of information into six months of study. And I bombed it. I did so terrible. My score was so low that no college would take me. I applied to several. to several colleges, was denied, denied, denied. And then my brother and sister-in-law who had moved to Las Vegas, and they knew that I wanted to attend college, I would have been the first person. There's nine kids, I'm number seven. I have my grandparents and all of my aunts and uncles. I didn't have anyone who had attended college in my family. And so I moved to Las Vegas, and my sister-in-law who was a registered nurse and college-educated herself, she helped me. We went to this store called Learning is Fun. We bought every grade book of math, because math was where I was so weak, from grades three through 12. And she coached me, and I self-studied. And then I went to UNLV and met with an admissions counselor and explained my whole story. Look, I grew up in like it was the 1910s, not the 1980s. ⁓ I've been fighting and fighting to try to get an education on my own. I have done everything I could, but I can't get into college. Is there anything you can do? And she kind of took pity on me and she said, you know what? We will accept you as a non-admitted student. And you can audit classes for two semesters. And if you successfully pass those classes over those two semesters, then we will accept you into UNLV. And that's how I got into college. I did very well my first two semesters. I had to start with like, I couldn't do Math 101. I had to do math 97 and then 98 and then I could do 101. So those first classes didn't count towards my degree. And then, know, after a few months, I was still afraid and didn't know how to handle the real world. I ran away from that and I went. I ended up in Chicago. I know that you spent some time in Chicago too. I loved that city. I was a flight attendant for United Airlines for a few years and I ended up being on a plane. when 9-11 happened and that really shook my world. I lost some friends that day and I decided it was time to go back to taking life seriously and I returned to UNLV. the time for me to get my degree was 11 years. It was 11 years before I graduated from UNLV ⁓ with a degree in business administration. And I can't even tell you how proud I am of that piece of paper. And that was another step along the journey that helped me say, you know what, no, I am not deficient. I am fully capable and in kind of rebuilding my confidence of who I was and who I could become. And so that's kind of the in-between of that messy middle ground where I was rebuilding myself. So if someone has had a rough start, and it doesn't matter what the rough start is, they are they are feeling like you were where they feel ⁓ unworthy, inept, not competitive. What would you what would you speak to their heart to make me get them started? ⁓ I'll tell you what is inside of me. Something is screaming to tell you right to tell them right now. And that is whatever you do, start with God. Don't abandon him. And it's something I've seen in my family. So many of my siblings, couldn't separate my parents from God. They couldn't separate my parents from faith or from Christ or for anything. And so they threw it all out. And I don't want to speak ill of my siblings. They had it very hard and some of them have gone through really, really difficult things. But I just use that as an example to say that I believe that God is the ultimate lemons to lemonade guy. and he can take wherever you're at right now if you don't throw if you don't throw out your faith you know there's a saying doubt your doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith like stay with that and just keep moving forward there are things that help me along the way you know and i've had i've had incredible mentors i've spent some time with with men of faith and and and confessing my sin and ask or asking for for guidance or or you know just direction. I have ⁓ I've received counseling from people. There's lots of tools that I received along the way but nothing can compare to what God has made of my life. I could not have accomplished anything that I've accomplished without him. So I would say to anyone who's struggling as you're trying to figure out what's wrong and you're blaming or whatever it whatever it is that you're going through don't give up God because he will never give up on you. I agree. ⁓ I want to sidestep just a little bit. There are people who were raised in rigidity, not yours, but at another church that was just as legal. I know that when I gave my life to Christ, the church I was going to, we couldn't go to the movies to see Johnny Cash. When there was a couple of Christian movies that he was involved in, we were not allowed. We weren't allowed to be on the sidewalk in front of it. ⁓ some of the young people that were affected by that are still not in church. Not because God isn't good, but because man goofed it up. So I'm not a big fan of the labels on the buildings. Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, non-Pentecostal, ⁓ door knocker. I don't care what you call it. If you are letting the rules run your heart, you won't know God. If you let God reveal Himself to you, you don't need the rules. You have the love. And God, through His Holy Spirit, will reveal the truth of His love. He will change you from the inside out. And you don't need to be a rubber stamp of anyone else in the building. You just need to be a genuine you. where God is working in your life and you hold on to God in faith, not because of the building. You do it because He created us to love. We were custom made to love. We've always been loved and there's not a thing you can do to stop His love. You can't shoot yourself in the foot or any other part of your body and stop it. You were created to love and that love belongs to you. ⁓ I would imagine in all the creative things you've done, There's been some things you looked at and said, I did that and felt real proud of it. Can you imagine what God does when he looks at and said, out of all the creation, he looked at and said, I'm going to make man in my image, not in my outside, but in who I really am. I'm going to custom make him like me. I'm going to give him the choice, the ability to choose so he can learn my love and he can choose to love me back. If we have that, boy, the future is much more bright because we don't rebel against the rules. We run thankfully toward the love. Wouldn't you agree? I would agree. I've often seen and my parents are good example, people who get really caught up in rigidity and enhancing and even enhancing their own rules to try to. ⁓ to feel like they're more worthy of God's love, you know, there's no question that God loves you no matter what. one of the things that I've realized over the years is that there is no, there's nothing you can do that would make God not love you. And so oftentimes when things go wrong, people keep asking the question, ⁓ my gosh, does God love me or why did he do this to me or he hates me or whatever, and they question God's love. what I've... realized over the years is that rather than questioning whether or not God loves me, the question that we need to reframe it as and that I try to ask myself is do I love God? Because his love is not a question. It's infinite. It is always there. But do I love him? Do I love him enough to whatever it is that I know I could do better in my life? Do I love him enough? I mean look at what you've done with your life and how many people that you have brought to Jesus through your abilities and you know as as I mean you were telling your story before we before we started recording and and being a clown being a trained clown and doing all these things to bring people to God you know you did that out of love love for God love for fellow man I mean weren't those wasn't that the great the great law and in that law there's actually three three pieces to the law that love love God and love thy neighbor as thyself and the one that I struggled with for a long time was the third one in there, which is thyself. Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. You can't love your love thy neighbor as thyself. It kind of assumes that you love yourself, but some people don't. And for a long time, I didn't. I felt like inside there was a darkness in here. ⁓ And it was maybe it was from some of the trauma and other things, but I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror and I didn't. love who I was, was always reaching for more and reaching for more and reaching for more, trying to find approval like I wanted the approval of my parents. And in a way, I kind of took that desire for their approval. And maybe I cast that a little bit on Bob, and was trying to do the same thing for him, you know? And it's like, I need to love myself. And it's taken me many years past that, you know, those initial things I shared with you and the successes I had. to be able to really open my heart and look inside and say, you know what? I love who I am. And I am good the way I am. And I've accomplished so many things. regardless of accomplishment, the love that God has for us is unconditional. I think that we should have unconditional love for ourselves as well. And then ask the question, do I love God? And God said, love your neighbor. So I'll love my neighbor. And so on. Yeah, well, I was until I gave my life to Christ. I never knew what love was. Not real love. I knew what how to comply. I know how to be. knew how to be cool with this one group of people and cool with that group of people. But I could never be in the same room with both both groups of people because I was trying to please everybody. Yeah. My parents wanted when they found out I was going to go to college, even on a handicapped scholarship, it meant I was the first. of the children in any generation to go to college. And oh man, when I had to drop out because I wasn't healthy enough to continue, that was a huge disappointment for them, which caused me to feel even less desirable to myself. If they don't love me, who would? And if my friends don't like me anymore, then why would anyone? And it took until I met Jesus. And I put my faith and trust in Him. And I asked Him to forgive me. And He forgave me. And then He allowed me to forgive myself. that I began to figure out who I really was. I really didn't think I had a talent one. I really, really, really did not think I had any skills. I didn't think I had anything to offer anyone, nothing. Even when I went to college, it was always trying to please somebody. Everything was about pleasing somebody. And ⁓ that's why when I gave my life to Christ, And he made it very clear that he loved me and that he would always love me. Then I finally found out what real acceptance, real love was. Not love if you, love anyhow. Not when you, just I love you. It's not performance based. It's not approval based. It's just, God, if you really love me that much, I'm gonna accept it. I don't have to understand it. You know, your brain is clearly bigger than mine. You understand what I'll never get. I can't wrap my head around who you really are. got a view, but I certainly don't get the whole thing. And I'm okay with that now. If you love me, then I can learn to love me. And I've been sharing that with people internationally for over 50 years, and it's amazing. I still get Facebook messages from all over the world reminding me of when they met me and when the litmus test happened, when God became real to them so that they could learn to love themselves. I didn't know I was doing anything spectacular and I was sharing it. I was just sharing it. But God used that to go, aha, in those lives. And hopefully through something that we're talking about today, it will be an aha moment for someone out there that's searching. Yeah. You talk about seeking acceptance. You know, for me, I ⁓ thought of it kind of like masks. would wear different masks for different people, and then you get to a point where you don't know who you are, and you're actually none of those masks. You actually had an actual mask, right? That was later. That was much later. But when you wore the mask, you actually knew who you were. before that, I'd say when you were actually out touring and things, you had a physical mask. before that, there was this emotional mask. Before Christ. There were these emotional masks, or trying to please people and what have you. I can relate to that so, so, so much, just 100%. And trying to please others and please others and please others, you lose who you are and you don't realize who you are. And it's not to say that you shouldn't be kind to people. It's confusing these two things. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be kind. I'm kind to everyone. But I'm not trying to please them. I'm not trying to be what they want me to be. If there's one person that I want to be who they want me to be, it's God. That's where you start to lose who you are and I certainly was there. There's a slogan in the performance world, when you give your life to Christ and you're now going to be in a performance world, you perform for an audience of one. everything you do is to please Him. If you like it, bonus. If you don't like it, I still got one. And it's freeing. It's incredibly freeing to realize that I'm not doing this so I can get another piece of paper, another certificate, another ordination, another something. I'm doing it because God told me to love people and I get to love people. What a privilege. to know that as He loves me, I can love them. And if I want more love, all I have to do is just love Him and He'll fill me to love more. If I want to be empty, just hold on to what I got. Because if my hands are closed, I can't receive anymore. But if hands are open, if I'm surrendered, then all of a sudden, my hands are open, I can receive more love, that I can share more ways. Beautiful imagery. Yeah. I that. As I've gotten older and moved through my life, I found something very similar. You were talking about the open hands. And for me, it was to open myself up to others and stop hiding. And when I began to be myself, instead of wearing those masks, when I stopped hiding and said, you know what, I'm going to accept who I am and love who I am. It's amazing the connections that I have made with people, the different relationship I feel like I have within my, with my wife and my children, with God, with people who I worship with to just be myself and to get out of my own way, you know, get out of, sometimes your, your mind is running and you're thinking, you're thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, and just to get out of the way of that and, just open my heart. Like you said, like with the open hands, just open your heart, get out the way of yourself, quiet your mind and and just be. ⁓ When someone puts up a gun and says, hands up, you surrender. When you don't need a gun anymore, because you've got pure love, you do the same thing, but you do it for a purer reason. I surrender because I trust you. I surrender because I know your love. I surrender because I don't have to do anything to make you happy. I can just love you. somehow with just loving you, you're going to help me understand what I'm supposed to do. And as I love them, as you love me, beautiful things happen. Things that I didn't think I had these skills. You could have... You know, I had no idea. People would say, you're so talented. And I'd look in the mirror and go, right. Uh-huh. Because I didn't see that. All I saw was my failures, my losses, my lack of ability to please people, my health issues that were severe enough that I couldn't do sports and I couldn't do this and I couldn't do that. My can't list was much longer than my can list. Philippians 413 says I can do all things through Christ which gives me strength. That's something to hold on to. It doesn't matter which book you're looking at. If you find it in any leather-bound version, Philippians 413 says the same thing. Through the strength of God, I can do all these things. You can go backward in that and say without the power of God, I can do nothing. But that's powerful. Yes. Yes, I agree. honestly, I look at where I have come to in my life today and I just have to give all the glory to God. And today I have my wife who is amazing, who loves me unconditionally. have two beautiful children and I've accomplished things in business and what have you. those accomplishments as you would say, I give the glory to God. I'm here because of him and I'm grateful to him just to be, to arrive at the place that I am. that's, I write in the end of my book, for my 50th birthday, I wanted to do, I've traveled a lot. As I shared, was a flight attendant. I've been all 50 states and have been to, all to six of the continents and so for my 50th birthday we went to Antarctica and traveled all the way down to the south southern tip of the earth all the way down there and it was an incredible incredible trip an incredible journey it felt like we were ⁓ explorers you know ⁓ I can't even tell you how beautiful I I was excited to check it off the list and to say I've been to the seventh continent and I thought it would be really you know adventurous and everything I wasn't honestly was not prepared for how beautiful it was. All of the ice in the water and everything just it was absolutely magnificent and and I write that we we got to this one place where we we got off the ship and we started hiking up this this hillside is not a large mountain but a hillside in in Antarctica. I got to the top and I was standing there and I was just surrounded by the beauty of Antarctica we just walked past the. a penguin colony on our way up and everything. mean, was just, was surreal and unbelievable. And I just, I just couldn't believe that this boy from, who the most I could dream of when I was a little kid was maybe to move to like Salt Lake City, Utah. Like the big city of Salt Lake. I just, that was, or just to get out of the country. away from all of this the things that i was trying to get away from as a kid or to go to college you know i i just all of these things felt like mountains and that they wouldn't be possible and when i when i stood on that hills top in in anartica i'd just this rush and all this emotion and i cried some tears just how blessed i was and and you know it goes back to what i said in the kind in the beginning is that Don't give up on your faith in God because it's amazing what he can help you accomplish. And you know what? If what you've, I never imagined standing on a hilltop in Antarctica. It was incredible. whatever it is that you imagine, it's probably not what God has in mind for you. So if you're along for his ride, it'll be better than what you imagined for yourself. ⁓ absolutely. Without question. ⁓ I can assure you that ⁓ I've had experience after experience where I would I ended up feeling like pinch me. I can't be this can't be real You know exactly I've got that I'm gonna wake up from this and it's not gonna have been there But yet it was it was not only there is better than I could have imagined Yes, because because ⁓ God the only limit with God is what will let him do in our lives Amen. His willingness is abundant. Our willingness to receive it is incredibly infinitesimal compared to what he had planned. It's like you take a thimble and you put the whole ocean in it and you wonder why it won't fit. You take that same thimble and that's your mind and there's God and you wonder why it just won't fit. It's because It was never created to fit that. Our job was to be defined what a heavenly father really is, a good father is. Not a strange father, not an abusive father, not a rigid father. A genuine, loving, forgiving, compassionate father is. And when we discover that, then we can begin to drop our walls. We can stop being afraid. We can stop trying to to do this on brain power and do it by faith power because it's not about us having to wrestle our heads around it. We just trust him for the piece that he puts in front of us and then the next piece and then the next piece. That's what you do. Yes. And you know what that led to for me was acceptance. I accepted all of the challenges and the difficulties and my parents and the way that they, you know, the way that they believed and the thing the way that they treated me and the way they withheld education all these things you get to a point where you say you know I love who I am and I accept who I am and I'm very grateful to be who I am today and all of that makes me who I am and so I just accept I accept it and and I appreciate it for what it is and if if I if I were to go back in time and change something then how would I arrive here And so I think that maybe that's a message that can also support people in trials to say, you know, when, you get to the other side and you're better for it, then you accept it and it made you who you are. Exactly. So many times people have said, David, you, you, you've lived through so much and the answer is yeah. But if I didn't, I wouldn't be here now. Yeah. If I hadn't lived through it, I would, I would not be here physically now. If I hadn't gone through it, I wouldn't be defined as to who I am now. I had to come to the end of myself before I was willing to trust the beginnings of God. You know, and since I didn't have any Bible background, no theology at all, you had the opposite side. You had the no, no, no, no, no. I had the I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And as a result, both of those are crippling. Yes. And in my case, it took me being three days from my fifth suicide attempt. This time with a hunting rifle. Shoot, I drove a car off a cliff at 100 miles an hour the day before Christmas into a river. And because I was in Michigan, the river was frozen. The car went into the mud and ripped a big tree out by the roots. They towed the car out and I drove it home. Unbelievable. All I could think of in my head on the way home was stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. You can't even kill yourself. What's wrong with you? Because that's what my headspace was at. Failure, failure, failure, failure. And now I can award that. I'm going to reward that failure with another failure. Good job, stupid. And then I found Jesus. And I didn't have to anything. It changed everything. Well, like I told you at the beginning, this is a conversation. This isn't a one-sided thing. And I'm grateful that you and I have been part of this great conversation. ⁓ One of the things that... I've learned along the way is that I don't normally identify what churches I came out of or what churches I'm in other than the Salvation Army, is my career. That's my calling. But before that, I don't talk about those labels because every time I mention one, somebody's got a wall up. They immediately picture a picture that means no. My story is I came from, I am, now I'm a Jesus, and now this is who I am. Love it. And it's not, so the labels aren't there anymore because I found they were stumbling blocks to people. But it's not because I'm anti-church. I think the church is where God put us together to build each other up and hold each other accountable and to encourage each other. And when one of us wobbles to keep each other from falling down, we're there suppose... If we're doing it biblically, we're in a great place to be. If we're not doing it biblically, we're in an absolute miserable place to be. Because, you know, it's kind of like God says, OK, I'll be at the door. When you come back out, I'll still be here waiting for you. Well, when you're in that building full of misery, you're on your own. I don't stop loving you, but I'm not going to put my seal of approval on the misery that you're waiting through. So for many of us, it's not the building. It's that new discovered love and the freedom that it gives. the joy that it brings, which is exactly what you've been telling me about all this time. Yeah. I think that God can come to us in many ways. You know, I have experienced as I shared that story in Brazil where God is there for all of us in many ways. And if we open our eyes, we'll see him. Amen. Amen. Well, we have covered a lot of ground in a short time. This has been exciting. Now, Calvin, you've got a wife and two kids. How old are your kids? My son is 13 and my daughter is 8. Well, you're just warming up. My kids have got kids of their own. I got nine grandkids. So I'm in a different chapter from him. That's fantastic. For a guy that wasn't supposed to have any kids, I'm very grateful. Yeah, you're doing good. That's amazing. hear that having grandkids is the reward for having children. Yes, and not killing them. Well, I have two wonderful kids, but I would say that I'm probably a, you know, I'm an older dad, have an eight year old and I'm 50, but I would say that that's also part of the plan is that I'm a much better dad now than I would have ever been in my twenties. So I'm very happy. And as you should be. I'm grateful that you have a good family and you've got a supportive doting wife. That's a gift in itself. Yes. God gives us help meats, not to rule, but to help us keep from wobbling off the path. Amen. And that's a great place to be. I've been married 51 years now. Congratulations. Yeah, to my first wife. The way God intended. Yeah, yeah. Again, God doesn't do oops. No. You know, if we do it His way, it gets better over time. It doesn't get easier. It gets better. You know, my body is not near as good as it was 20 years ago, but I'm better. Who I really am is better. I'm content with who I am. I'm grateful for still being here and still loving people. Yes, absolutely. And 20 years from now, that's where you'll be. Yeah, we'll be married 20 years this summer, so we're getting ready to celebrate our big 20th. We're excited. Yeah, yeah. You're just warming up. That's right. The next chapter is easier. Is it? You promise? It is for us. Good. We're in that third chapter now. Yeah. And, you know, ⁓ It's funny, my wife fell in love with Jesus when she was 14. And she felt called into ministry when she was 14. And I was 20 when I found out Jesus was real. And yet when God put us together, was like hand in glove. And she has been, I mean, when I'm not aimed in the right direction, she'll pray and all of a sudden everything writes automatically. She doesn't have to say a word. She prays and all of a sudden I get the idea. You know, I would say with my wife, it's a similar thing. Her faith is just unshakable and ⁓ so pure. so, you know, in any weak moment I have, I rely on her. And you're better for it. Yeah. And then praise God for that. Well, let's see. We're down to that wind-up piece. So two things. You told us about the book. How can we get the book? You can get it anywhere books are sold. It's an Amazon bestseller. Amazon is one of the places that you find it. But you can also find it at my website, which is hiding from the school bus dot com. Good. I wanted to get that was my next question. What was your link? So, good. ⁓ if you were to take five minutes and give us a golden goose egg, a golden pressure point, something beautiful to take with us, what would you want people to hear now that they can take with them even after the show is done? Well... man that makes me want to give something really good. I love it. sure it will be. I'm sure it will be. You know, I think for me, one of the biggest challenges of my life has been to quiet the voice, the voices in my head, the ones of you're not good enough. You're not smart enough. You don't know as much as other people. You don't measure up whatever those are. Or sometimes it's not that. Sometimes it's just am I making a good impression? Am I whatever? You know, just those things like, well, you're just your voice, your mind is going, going, going, going. So I call it voices in the head, but a lot of times they're your own voice. And so you think that it's you. And I learned at one point that I had this realization through some books I've read and some of the things, know, I love one of the books that I really love is called The Power of Now. It's more of a secular book, ⁓ but it talks about how you are not your mind. And I said that to me that relates to what I believe. I believe that I have my body and yes, I have my mind, but I have my spirit and together the spirit and the body make the soul of man. And so there's something more inside of me than just my mind. In fact, my mind is a tool that God gave me. but my mind comes with the body and there's something behind it. And what I have learned and what I've found that helps me is to just observe what my mind is doing and what my body is and what my, sensations and feelings that I'm having in my body, whether if I'm having, if I have a moment of anxiety, if I was feeling like the voices in my head are running or I'm disconnected in some way, I just observe. can't, you can't control your mind by, by by thinking because your mind is doing the thinking. you try to control that by doing more thinking, you're just doing more thinking. And so the more that I've been able to just be where I am right here right now and just observe what's happening in my mind and in my heart or the feelings that I'm having, the more I've been able to get through those feelings of inadequacy or whatever it was that was holding me back at the moment, the racing of the mind or any of those things. So. I would say that's been one of the tools that's been very, very helpful for me. you know, I closed in my book talking about accepting where I am and accepting who I am and what have you. Being able to quiet my mind was a lot to help me do that. And then there's a place for seeking professional help. And I have a really wonderful therapist and I was always a little afraid to seek professional help with my, you know, the struggles that I had because so much of that is very secular and anti. religion and anti-god and and i just didn't i was afraid and so when i found a really good therapist that that shared with me faith in god faith in christ and also could help me to sort through some of these complicated feelings and and challenges of my childhood that for me was a great moment a great blessing you know it's like god's hand in putting the two of us together so I would say that for some, if you're listening and you have really, really deep struggles, then you don't have to do it alone. You can find people that can help you as well. So those are two things that I would share. You are not your mind. And so your mind is running and running like what you went through, David, when you said you tried to kill yourself. And then you're like, oh, I'm not gonna, I can't even do that right. There are times when I'm not sure that our body And you know, there are, there are, there's evil in this world, just as there is good. And there's evil that wishes that it has what you have, which is maybe it wishes that it could have the body you have or whatever, you know? So, all of that racing, it's okay to say that's not me. I am deeper than that. I am the spirit within my body. I'm the soul. And, and then if you need it, seek professional help where you, where it can help you. I agree. For me, the key is that I am no longer my own. I belong to Jesus. And when the gerbil starts running on the wheel, no, no, no, no, no, no, okay. I need to do something that draws me closer to Him. He's my stability. Now the counseling, yes, I certainly, counseling I think is a great thing if you find someone who your faith and their faith match so they can accept you as you are. I think it's a wonderful gift. But ⁓ who I am is who I am in Christ. That is my defining moment. And so for me, that's the piece that changes everything. But everything you've said is right spot on. So I'm grateful for our time together. And ⁓ as we close our time together, ⁓ I'm going to close this in prayer. And ⁓ as we do, ⁓ I am... Those at home, you're welcome to join us in prayer. If you're not a praying person, just allow, just humor me as I have this moment. Heavenly Father, we're grateful that we come in Jesus' name and we're grateful that we had this chance to share your love with one another. I'm grateful for Kelvin and his transparency as he opened himself up and showed us who he really is and the struggles he's had and how he's discovered who he is and who he intends to be in you. We ask that you bless his family. You bless his career. You bless his faith walk. You bless every part of him and draw him closer to you than ever before. Let your love be shining through him in every different aspect of his life. Lord, touch those that are listening and those that are watching. whether they're struggling now or whether they've been through struggles and they're trying to find a way out of it, reveal your love to them. Through your Holy Spirit, draw them close to you. Speak peace to them. Help them to understand that we're not talking about buildings, we're talking about relationship with you. And we ask that you would relate yourself to them and bless them so that they could fall in love with you as we have in Jesus' Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for coming and being a part of our program. And we look forward to the opportunity, as I always remind people, just keep seeking because He will be found. This has been the God Says Yes Podcast with David Ebel. connect with David, email him at godsaysyespodcast.gmail.com. You can get his latest book, When the Doctors Say No, God Says Yes, at amazon.com.