If you allow unforgiveness to go unchecked, then it does create a bitterness and

a lot

of people get hurt and a lot of bad behaviors happen. And I had just realized and was taking responsibility, if you will, for allowing that to happen to me.

Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.

Good morning. It's a great day. I hope everybody is ready to up your average. We are fortunate today to have my friend Rick Underhill join. Hey.

Good morning. Good morning. Rick made the journey. He and Donna made the journey from Heavensville, Indiana to Fishers in Carmel, and just it's gonna be a treat. I'm just really honored to get some time with you.

And it's hard to even put into words the conversation we're going. Yeah. I don't think either one of us have really much of an expectation of where this may go. But I put together a prequel before kinda tell a little bit about my background before we crossed paths. And even before the prequel, I put some disclaimers together so those who are joining us can have an idea of where we're going with this thing.

The first thing I would tell you is that I collect unexplainable stories, and that's a way that I just say I live by faith. Like, I can't explain the things that happen, and that's what happened in my journey. And then we have a list of five principles that we talk about at Gimbal that are a big deal. And the number one on that list of five is to think differently. And this conversation probably will cause some people to think I know I've had to think differently to even get to this point in this journey.

And it it's just really interesting. And so this this conversation today will probably have two at least two unexplainable stories and probably be longer than usual today because I I just wanted to get our conversation recorded for whoever it may help in the days and months and years ahead. It'll be both I think there'll be some spiritual things going on as well as some disturbing ideas that we may talk about. But at the end, it's going to be an unbelievable story of what God has And another disclaimer is Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast out there, and the one that I want to reference is called Free Brian Williams. And Brian Williams, the Free Brian Williams podcast basically says, You think you know what you remember, but you don't remember right, is what that podcast said.

And so whatever we say today is our best recollection recollection of what went down, because we're talking thirty years ago up until today. And so I'm probably gonna butcher some of the history, but if you'll give us some space to just get it hand grenade close, that would be unbelievable. And then the final disclaimer before I kick this off is that people change. Any reference to anyone was a historical point in time. And I have no idea where those people are with regards to how this story unfolded, And I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

And so that if there's anything negative that is implied or said about anybody, I'm not I hopefully mention in their names, and I'm only mentioning it on a point in time, I don't know how they move forward from that point in time. So I just want to make that clear that if it sounds like something negative coming across about somebody, you don't hear it that way. It just there was a negative experience. Yeah, yeah. And so as I kick off the prequel to the time that you and I spent together, what I thinking of is that your location influenced you more than you ever consider.

Where you spend your time, where you grow up has a bigger influence on you than you may have ever given it time. And I thought it's both the time that you spent there, the place, and the culture. And so for Common Ground for Rick and I, unbeknownst to us into our thirties, we both spent a good amount of time in Evansville, Indiana during the time I was there, I would say was the most unsettled time in my lifetime. The 1960s and seventies were very unsettling times. And so that that had an influence on who I am.

Those times, and then the place that I did it at in Evansville, Indiana was a unique experience. And then the culture in Evansville was a little bit different than some other places I've been in. So I went back and did a little research on Evansville. Evansville is an amazing place. Like it is, for the size of it, it's had some unbelievable things happen there.

And so Evansville is, in 1963, a guy named Ray Lowy, I think is his name, donated to the Evansville Museum a Picasso, 1970 Right. That thing was lost until 2012. It's such a crazy story that I have to go down there probably about once or twice, once every year or so, and go look at the Picasso, because it sat in storage for fifty years. And sometimes, maybe even the message that we're gonna talk about, if you allow possibilities to hit, you might find that you had the greatness of yourself sitting in storage a long time before you started learning how great you really are. In 1973, I would have been 12 years old.

Right.

Me too.

And the population of Evansville was about 137,000 people, and 10,000 of those people worked at Whirlpool, which is just mind boggling to me. I don't Maybe in Washington, D. C, you have probably a high percentage of people that work for the federal government or something, but that 137,000 would be all people. Like it would be kids and stuff. So families.

Of the adults, probably one out of every eight or nine people worked at Whirlpool, and that had an influence over Evansville at that time. The 1974, a guy named Titanic Thompson died. You heard his Don't name know that one. If you want to read about Titanic Thompson, Titanic would, he would go up and down the Ohio River on riverboats, gambling, conning people. He married a lady in Evansville and had an influence.

He had a big influence on some of the culture in Evansville, his style of things, And it was definitely a lot of the perception that I You know, my grandfather almost had a personality like Titanic Knobson. And so that book about, there's several books about him, but it influenced my thoughts about things. 1977, Well, I would say for me, Washington Avenue in Evansville, if you go from Washington Square Mall to Haney Corner. Is that what it's called Haney's Corner?

Right. Yeah. All the way downtown to 2nd Street.

Yeah, so that was kind of, I think, I don't know when, Haney's Corner was like a prostitute district in history. Was. Yeah. And so most of the time I spent it in Evansville, the majority of my energy was spent somewhere on that span, On Washington on Washington Like, I would say 80% of my other than like high school or whatever, but my grade school was right off of there. And so a lot of Washington Avenue.

Did you go to Washington grade school at all?

I went to Dexter. Okay. I went

to Washington grade school until third grade.

Yeah. I've I've spoken at Washington grade school. Okay. Yeah. And I played baseball in their baseball

field. Yeah. Great field.

Yeah. Yeah. Mean, Washington grade school is it's an unbelievable building.

It's just phenomenal. It's phenomenal. I've been in it as well,

and I've knocked on the door.

They let me in. I asked them if I could walk around and see the place. I went back to the cafeteria, sat in the same spot that I sat when I was a kid. Nothing's changed. Yeah.

It's a beautiful building.

Yeah, and all of that influenced me more than I could. Never, until I was prepping for our time together, just thinking of what all went on in Washington Avenue. Yeah. There's a fire station right across the street from Dexter grade school, spent a lot of time in there. They candy machines, you could come in there and buy candy and hang out with firemen, and we would do that.

Just all kinds of things went on on Washington Avenue, and I would walk from Dexter grade school to Lombard.

Do you

know where Lombard is? Yes. Yeah. Lombard was about a mile long. The South end of Lombard was projects.

You just move a little bit, a 100 yards from the projects. You're in duplexes, and those were kind of sketchy. If you look there, I'm just saying that's what it was like in the sixties and seventies. A lot of it was a transient. Then you cross this bridge not bridge, this ditch, and we were in about a 1,500 square foot ranch house just north of the ditch there.

On Lombard? Yeah. Yeah. And so then you go north, and you cross Washington Avenue, the road that I spent a lot of time on. Right.

Washington Avenue, north of it was two story houses that were, I don't know, a couple thousand square feet or something. And well, that's where the rich people live. Well, Bombard's pretty. Yeah. Then if you go all the way to the end of Bombard, those houses, the president of University of Evansville lived there, and there were millionaires that lived on the Far North End Of Blombard.

So you go from projects on this mile to two millionaires. And so in 1977, I would have been probably a junior in high school. I was sitting at my desk. I was in social studies class, the desk shook. And one of my neighbors, for which I never knew, he lived on the North End of the Lombard, Ray Ryan, got blown up by the mafia.

I remember that. That's part of my history. Like that's in my neighbor. Yeah. And imagine you're a teenager, and you're trying to process all this stuff that's going on around you.

Trying to imagine that there's mafia in Evansville, right? Like, yeah, it was just a lot for me to process. And then that was 1977. I played basketball, I guess that's what you call it. The basketball, the 1977, we had a game, and we came I remember coming out of the locker room and everybody was traumatized.

And by then, we had moved off Lombard to the North Side Of Evansville, and I had to drive from Evansville Harrison to the North Side, and it was a foggy day. There were emergency lights flashing most of the way home because I hadn't drive by the airport. The University of Evansville's, I feel myself getting choked up even saying this, the University of Evansville basketball team died in a plane crash that night. Yeah. And there were people on there that were either friends or acquaintance of mine.

And so, these are subtle things that influence you, right? And that was a pretty big deal. The Evansville, size for of it, the sports influence, unbelievable. Was Bob Greasy was kind of famous when I was a kid. Right.

Guy named Scott Steadwell, played for the Vikings, linebacker. Yeah. And Scott's family, they fed into Dexter. So Scott, he

would come to our little

league practices and things like that. Who else was? Don

Don Mattingly.

Don Mattingly dominated me all the way through high school sports. And so so so the the influence of sports was kind of a big deal. Part of my back it's part of my backstory too. Probably

Jerry Sloane. Jerry Sloane. Yeah. Met him before as well over at Robert Stadium.

Yeah. Super nice to us. And then Arad McCutchen. Arad is probably not known by a lot of people, but he won five national championships. So, like, his name would be along with John Wooden.

Right? Mhmm. So Evansville was just a very kind of unique, diverse place for such I think for such a small place. And so when I think back about what all went on in Evansville, one of the things that impacted me when I think back about it was in in the seventies, central air conditioning was relatively new. Okay.

Yeah. We had window units.

Yeah. And and so in our neighborhood, you could hear what's going on because the windows are open. And today, you have a central air conditioning, so you don't really know what's going on. In my particular neighborhood, there was a lot of yelling going on in houses. I don't know if that was

Okay.

Yeah. So you could hear what was going on in your neighborhood. And that just kind of, I don't know how it even influenced me. It just made me think, Oh, that's just normal people, masochiality, everybody. And it was several houses in the neighborhood that was going on, and so it had an impact for me.

My parents would take me to church regularly. We went to a place called Northeast Park Baptist for a while over off, I think it was Baqui.

Okay.

Do you know where that is? Yeah. Yeah. My dad was the maintenance guy there. Like it wasn't his job.

Was one of the- Volunteer maintenance. Yeah, was one of the 10,000 at Whirlpool. And he finally quit going to church, and mom, I think the same time. And I was taught through this thing that was going on in Evansville that they probably are going to hell as well.

Oh, because they just stopped going to church.

Because they stopped going to church. So that would have been in the early seventies. And so church wasn't really a requirement or anything at that point in my life. And I didn't understand until later, and dad and I had a conversation about that, what really happened there. But as an adult, what I started discovering, was and this is just my take on it.

Anybody else that was there, they might have had a different take. But I felt like there were three influences that came at me, particularly the place where we would go to church in Evansville. Went someplace different. We were down by Haney's Corner once I was about Calvary or thirteenth. Calvary?

Yeah. Yeah. And so there was this seminary up in Louisville that a lot of those people would come down the river. They would take the road, I suppose, but they would come and fill in pulpits or youth pastor.

Yeah. Very common.

Yeah, and so that, whatever was being taught in Louisville, would influence what would happen in the churches in Evansville. Right. Then in the, I forget when it was, seventeen, eighteen hundreds, there was a thing called revivalist movement, which you would have people like Billy Graham came out of it later, but there was Spurgeon, I think, and other people that came. All right. And I wrote in my notes here, a guy named Jonathan Edwards, since 1700s, had a famous sermon that said, and something, well, can't read my writing there, living in the hands of an angry God or something like that.

Yep. Okay, that sounds familiar. Yeah, and so this real hellfire and brimstone influence from the revivalist movement, because it was What I take away from the revivalist movement was transactional. Like if I get you to say a prayer, and that was kind of the highest priority that I perceived. That's why I perceived as a youngster.

Revivalist person. So you had Billy Sunday, who was a baseball player for the Cubs, think. He was a revivalist guy in the more modern days, and then Billy Graham. And there was a guy that came to Evansville, probably in the '70s, Bill Glass. I I don't know if you ever

heard him. Oh, didn't hear him.

Yeah. And he filled Roberts Stadium, and he was think he looked for the Cowboys. He was And football

he was a preacher.

He was a revivalist kind of guy. Yeah. Yeah. He ended up doing a prison ministry around the country. But in the seventies, was in that whole revivalist thing.

So I remember mom and dad packing us in the car and taking us to- Oh, a Mercedes? Bill Glass. And ironically, in my story, a man who had a big influence on me was close friends of him, and when he died, Bill Glass came up here and did his funeral home probably in the late '80s. So it was funny how life kind of circled back Yeah. So the revivalist movement, you had seminaries from Louisville, and then there was a thing called Landmarkism that when I researched it again, it looked like it came up through Tennessee and Kentucky.

And the best I can describe the Landmark movement is that it is like, This is my football, we're playing by my rules. I can say, that was very church building specific that we're gonna have our own set of rules, and we're gonna do it our

way. Okay.

And all those things, best I could tell, were present in the churches I went to as a kid.

Yeah, we were on the South Side going to church as a kid and not going a lot, so it wasn't a big influence of faith based in our world. My mom was a teenage mom. We had a couple of siblings, and we were living day to day, week to week, and so we'd go to church some, but not much of an influence. Yeah,

And when I think about my time in Evansville, there's a good amount of violence close to me. And I think it just like the yelling that I would hear, that was a form of violence, right, like, yeah, just I just thought it was normal. We had mentioned that Donna worked works now right where my grandfather had a grocery store in Evansville, and he was mugged out there once, like they cracked him over the head with a beer bottle. Then a similar time, my grandmother in the day, in the seventies, I think that Social Security would send out all the checks at the same time. In the mail.

And so then the people at my grandma's age would go to the bank that day, and then they'd have cash and come home. Well, might have happened the same time grandpa had got kind of jacked with the beer bottle. Grandma was coming home from the bank, and two two thugs followed her home and just beat her, just, I mean, her face was

black Oh

my and gosh. So those kind of things happened. And I was telling you about jobs that I had as a teenager, that there was kind of violence around that, but none of that stuff really paves me. It just seemed like, Oh, this is normal.

Okay.

Yeah. And so what happened though, is when mom and dad didn't make me go to church, my siblings started going to Calvary, and I went to Calvary, and I was this awkward teenager. When I graduated, I was six foot five, one hundred and sixty pounds.

Had to dance around in the shower to get wet.

So, and I think by college, was one hundred eighty, so I don't have that problem anymore, but it was just, it was an awkward, you know, loping around like So that was me in those teenage years. But I worked into this friend group where they started partying, were Evansville's pretty heavily influenced, I think, by German Catholic people. So And since my parents weren't keeping tabs on me, I would go to the Catholic church on Saturday night. So I checked that off my to do list. Gotcha.

Yeah. And in the midst of that, my social network started building. But in the midst of all the chaos that was being created in my life, back at Calvary, there was this couple, Faye and Richard, they loved me in the midst of my awkwardness. Good. Yeah.

Calvary had this basement with these Mangio sofas down there where the teenagers would Okay, hang

I haven't been in there.

Yeah, don't even know what it is now. I think it's a development of something or another.

I think it's an office. Is it? Yeah.

So that youth area, it was just a sketchy little area. Like, even as a teenager, I wasn't scared of much, but that basement down there was kind of scary. But when you would come in there on a Sunday morning, Richard and Faye would make you think you were the only person on the planet earth. And I didn't Walking down Washington Avenue, like from Dexter to Evans, to our house, and the hellfire and brimstone I heard, as I just said, as an eight year old, I thought, I need to get this Willy Wonka ticket to heaven. I need to do this Bill

Graham Get out of hell, get into heaven.

Yeah, and so I remember as an eight year old, I had our pastor at the time, I was sitting on the piano bench at our house, and I prayed this prayer so I could get out of that thing and get into it. So it was the best I knew as an eight year old and that I had done this thing. But what that meatball of ideas that I had mentioned that came all over, I never really knew what that meant. Like, I never knew that was anything. And and Right.

That couple just expressed this kind of amazing love to me that just stirred my soul in a certain way. But, no, I didn't feel any obligation to them because I I was having a good time on Saturday night. So whether I'd show up on Sunday was an unusual thing too. And while I'm thinking of them that time walking up and down Washington Avenue, I don't even know if I wrote that one down in my notes, maybe 1980. So like this house I walk by every day home from school, the mayor of Evansville was assassinated in 1980.

Yeah. So when I say, I'm familiar with the violence, we had a guy blown up on one in West Street, another guy assassinated. So all those things just left me wondering. But Fey and Richard, they were kind. And one day I went on a retreat, and I remember Richard, he was talking about God's Holy Spirit, and he took a flashlight, and he took the batteries out of it, and he screwed the lid back on the flashlight, and he said, you see, there's no power in here, but if you get the Spirit of God in you, look at the power of that thing.

And that was, that had to be in the mid seventies. And to this day, I still remember His love and passion for us kids. And so I then left Evansville, went to Murray State University, and while I was at Murray State, a guy named Aldine Huff, and I didn't know what I was doing at school, Aldine Huff was teaching this philosophy class, and I sat in the back because I just thought this is just a screw off class. I just sat in the back, you know, if I can pass this thing, that's all I cared about. But he kept asking these crazy questions, and he would do two things that stuck in my head.

He would ask, What's the purpose of life? And I'm like 17, 18, I'm like, Who cares, man? Eat, drink, and be merry, right? And at the same time, there were Christians in the front corner of the room that kind of thought kind of like I did, but he would poke them and challenge their thoughts. Okay.

And they would get really angry. And I didn't really care that much about it. I just thought, why are you getting that angry with this guy? But he was challenging them to think, which is kind of how I started this off is that we believe at Gimbal, you need to think differently. And Aldine Huff planted a seed in my head to think, really.

I didn't know it at the time. Right? And so I went on and left Evansville, left Murray State, went down to Houston, Texas. And what I thought when I got to Houston was that you need to conquer the world and make as much money as possible. How'd that go for you?

I mean, it was working. I mean, I only there for a couple of years. Right? There were, I was introduced to people that that they made a lot of money and had a lot of power, and it was just a very fascinating time for me. But when I was driving back to Indiana from that, when I knew I wanted to get into this industry, I just had a, I think an intimate drive, just thinking about what really matters, and I hadn't thought about it much.

And so I thought, I had this prayer, was like, oh, I'll go to church, God, when I get to Indy, because I wasn't doing that in Texas, and I'll try to figure out what this stuff is. And so I started going to this church down here in Indianapolis, and one day in the parking lot, this lady came up to me and said, Hey Keith, you very serious about this girl you're dating? And I was looking at the lady, go, she's pretty attractive. I go, why do you ask? She goes, well, my sister's available.

And I'm

like, oh, I bet she's attractive. Right? That's I'll

and so I go, well, you know, I don't know. I'm I'm always open to possibilities. And so shortly after that, I started dating this lady's sister.

Right.

And so when I was dating her sister, I was still a knucklehead, and I hadn't really concluded what life was about. I still was leaning into that conquering the world, making And I wasn't convinced that her sister was somebody I needed to spend any time with, but I wasn't man enough to say no. And so one Friday night, I just thought I need to do something, I can't just keep moving down this road. So I had decided I was gonna break up with her sister, and I just didn't have the courage to do it. So I called her and said, I don't really want to go out tonight.

And so I just went back and spent the night at my apartment, went to bed early. At 10:00 that night, the phone rang, and it was my girlfriend. She was crying hysterically. A drunk driver had just hit the back quarter panel of their car, ran them into a southbound car, and they collided and killed her sister instantly. Wow.

And this girlfriend that I had that I was thinking of breaking up with that night, I thought, Oh, wow.

Here we are.

And what it taught me, that event taught me that I need to go back to what Aldine Huff said, and what's the purpose of this thing? And what am I really looking for?

Rebrief,

yeah. And so with that, I was just traumatized thinking through what really matters, and it really took Connie and our relationship to a different thought process. And so I then ask God, I don't know about this Jesus guy that I've been told about in my lifetime, and so I need you to let me know if Jesus is real or not, because I had a computer programming degree, and logic was how I thought through things. And the things I'd been taught through that mishmash of things in Evansville was illogical. It didn't make any sense.

It wasn't it didn't seem to be true. And so if this Jesus was true, you're gonna have to make it clear to me. And there were two parameters. One was you're gonna have to answer the contradictions I've been taught as a kid.

Oh, okay.

And secondly, if all this stuff I read in the Bible is true, you're gonna have to show me power. Like there's going to have to be unexplainable things in Yeah, the

it's reasonable. Yeah, it's reasonable.

Yeah, if He's God, it shouldn't just be a little,

if we

have these little felt boards

that they would put these. Right.

Yeah. I want something more than a felt Jesus, right? I want something powerful to happen. So that was the late '80s. The girl I was dating is Connie.

We got married, and I just was chasing whether this is true or not still. Connie didn't she wasn't necessarily at the same pace or place as me, but I'm just trying to figure it out because I couldn't be angry at the guy that killed Donna because I could have been the one that killed her a month before it was happening. Was drinking and driving, and so I didn't have any critical attitude. I was just humiliated. It could have been me, I could have hurt somebody.

And so I was just regrouping on all these things. And so I started getting ideas from different sources, and I started thinking about things. And then in May 1992, one day, a guy that I'd spent some time with, I'd been investing myself in a thing locally called the Christian Businessman's Connection, and studying the Bible from 1988 to '92, but I'm still fighting through these things. And this guy calls me, and he says, Hey Keith, I've met this guy down here in the Western part of Kentucky, that his teaching has transformed my thoughts on what Christianity is about. This guy was a lawnmower salesman before he was a pastor down there, and so I knew he was very excitable, and I've already chased enough rabbits in life, so I thought, I'm just gonna give this a year or so and see what he says.

Like, I'm not giving any of my brain time.

Yeah.

And the very next day, another guy from Evansville, Indiana, my friend Larry May calls me and says the exact same thing about this guy.

Pay attention to this guy in Western Kentucky.

Yeah. And so what I would challenge you that if you're watching this, I, at that point in time, didn't believe there were coincidences. I just, even before I knew much about anything, I just think you gotta pay attention to things that don't make sense. And so I picked up the phone and called this guy, and I said, Hey, man, my name is Keith Tyner. This has happened the last two days.

Lima Colony. And he goes, well, I wrote this I wrote this Bible study about the book of Rome.

He was a hog farmer, man.

And I'm like, well, send me it. I want to read it. And so that's when I met my friend, Bob Warren. And what Bob started teaching me were answers to the contradictions that I'd seen in my life.

Wow. Gave you a place to hang some of this information.

Right. And he also, almost any time I call him, he'd have a powerful story that was unexplainable. Right. Yeah. And the one that comes to mind is they had this dormitory, and this guy rolls in with Red a bunch

curly hair. Is that- Yeah. And what did he do with the guy? He wanted to, he had came because of a girl at Murray State to the area, and he needed a place to live. He needed a job, and Bob needed a dorm built.

And he was a carpenter, framing carpenter at that. So he lived on the property for two years while he built that arc, what we call the arc. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and then I was even thinking of another story where they had built somebody had built all these bunk beds. Okay. And some guy rolled in with the exact number of mattresses for the bunk Oh, yeah.

I didn't know that one.

Yeah. And so when Bob would tell me these stories, I was just like, that can't be true. Right? But that's the two tests I threw out there to God was help me with the contradictions and show me a powerful God. And so there wasn't anybody in Central Indiana helping me navigate and think through the things Bob was doing at this point in time.

So we're in the '80 or in the nineties, and just a lot of things were going on. And I got a call no, no, no. What happened is my grandma died in probably '95, 1995. And so I left Evansville basically in 1979, and here we are in 1995. I'm at the funeral home, and I'm sitting in the room they have with, like for the family, people bring food and stuff.

I'm just sitting in there trying to avoid all the crowd, and this couple comes in, and I almost get teary eyed saying this, but it was Faye and Richard, and they represented the same idea that I remembered from the 70s. Just the loving kindness that was mind blowing to me. And at the same time, I was compelled from the inside. The next day, I was supposed to say some pretty harsh things to my family, like difficult things, that some of the things that had kind of built up inside of me was because there's an idea in the Bible that says the sins of the father will be passed down to the third and fourth generation. And there was some evident sins that it caused a lot of strife in our family.

And so that strife, I realized that as for me and Connie, we do not want that to go down to our children. Like, we're stopping it here. And so it was a really seeing Faye and Richard was a blessing, but then the next day, I was courageous enough to say it, and my mom and my aunt got into a rest of their life conflict the next day after I'd said those things. And so I'm just like, I don't even know what really matters. She knows what I was thinking.

And so what would encourage me is that the last weekend, I think it is of April every year, Bob would have a men's retreat down there. And at first, when I went there in the early nineties, there might only been, I don't know, 30 people?

30 or 40 at most.

Yeah. And I probably went 'ninety three or 'ninety four the first time, and I don't remember us meeting, man. We may have, it just didn't stick in my We probably met, but I didn't connect. Yeah. Yeah.

And so we had seen each other a few times down and it would have been just a weekend last weekend Yeah. In And so that's where we're at. I saw Richard and Faye, and no more communication with them. And then in the '7, I get a phone call from my sister. I always forget how hard it is to tell this.

Oh man, I was thinking about it yesterday morning as we were driving here, and I was thinking, and it was just upsetting again all these years. It was still upsetting. Yeah,

Caleb probably doesn't ever seem to get that too emotional, but this So my sister calls me and tells me that Richard took his life, and I didn't know what to do with that information. I think somebody, actually somebody on Lombard, a teenager, had done that during my teenage days, and I just played it off. I didn't know. Yeah,

I didn't have to think about it.

Yeah. And here is, from best I could tell, besides Gary and Donna, Donna got killed by a drunk driver, here's kind of the most ideal family that I had known, for what I thought I had known. And here the husband's gone. And I just couldn't understand it. And so I just started praying, because this powerful God that deals with contradictions and solves things, I'm getting to know who He really is at this point.

And so I'm like, I just tell him, I don't know what to do with this. This is a lot for me to process. I go to the funeral, and I saw a lot of faces of people that I don't even know how to I love the people that were in that room at that church building with me, but we were all believing the same thing. The adults in the room are believing it, but nobody in the room was telling me that the stuff I was learning as a teenager wasn't so. So I didn't even know what to think about the adults.

It was a really confusing time. And then as the service was starting, I noticed the pastor that was my pastor was in there. And so he was kind of the one that was the leader of the gang that was teaching this stuff that wasn't so. And so I didn't appreciate that, but towards the end of the funeral, he's doing a so called eulogy, and he says something, and again, this is that Malcolm Gladwell, I don't know exactly, I'm just coming from memory, that I don't know whether or not Richard is in heaven today. And he had been counseling him, and just the anger in me just fueled up like a mom.

Like, I wanted to stand up and yell at him is what I

Well, know that what we were being taught was that you had to perform a certain way in order to be acceptable by God, in order to be willing for God to interact with you. You had to follow a certain set of rules. You had to live a certain way to be qualified for a relationship with God. That guy's up there to do the eulogy, and Richard hasn't fit the qualifications in his mind. And so is that the God, is that a true story about God?

And that's what you were wrestling with him. And harsh. It was harsh

Harsh, for yeah. Because Richard exemplified to me what I thought a man would look like, right, up until that act. But I didn't know that that night that Donna died, I I took off the the mask that I I I acted a certain way. Yeah. Prior to that, what you see with Keith is what you get.

I don't I don't really act anymore. Just what you see is what you get. And so I don't know what Richard was acting. I know he's struggling. I know.

And and so I was really angry. I don't even remember who went to the funeral with me. I don't I I just told whoever was there with me, was so angry because the people started like, they finished it. It was the worst eulogy ever. And all these people that I had spent time with as a youngster are filing out of the funeral home.

And this kid, I don't even know how old the kid was, he gets up in front of the microphone and starts going. He's ten years younger than you. Okay. So this kid then, he had been like 25 maybe. And he starts going, And I bet 20% of the people have already left the funeral home, right?

And he starts impromptu eulogizing his dad, because the guy that was supposed to eulogize him did such a horrible job. Yeah. And I was just traumatized by it. I like, I fell in love with the kid. I probably knew him when he was like this high.

Right? And like, when I left town, he probably wasn't any bigger than this. Yeah. And I didn't even I don't think I thanked him or anything. I was just my brain was just so overwhelmed by everything.

I just had to breathe in and breathe out and think about it. And so that was my friend Richard. And his wife was a mess that day, and she was one of the most tender humans I've ever met. Indeed. Yeah.

And so then that was March '7, and just a few weeks later, I was going be leaving in Indianapolis and going down to the men's retreat in Hardin, Kentucky. And my brother went with me, don't remember if anybody else rode with me down there, and I told my brother, I said, I'm going to pray this weekend that God would open an opportunity for me to love on that family, somehow for me to minister to that family, for which they haven't really seen me for eighteen or more years, right? Like the kids wouldn't even know me. Right. Yeah.

And so that's, when I'm out in the woods, get my air and everything, that's all I'm going to spend time talking to the Lord about. And so if I recall this right, it might've been Saturday. This is the end of the prequel,

and we're coming out. Yeah, it's

Saturday. We're getting real now. And so, Bob Warren has everybody, I just remember we're kind of facing a podium. Yeah. Firearm I feel like I'm sitting on the end, and my brother's by me.

I have in my Bible, I've got the little fondue fold thing from the funeral, because I was going to pray for this guy. And Bob comes up and he says, Men, this is my recall, never trust, like with your soul, somebody who doesn't walk with a limp. And he said, I want to introduce you, my friend who walks with a limp. What he's saying is that you have been you've had to wrestle through some difficulties in life, and that you just you have a certain level of humility about it. And so he introduces his friend, Rick, and I just remember Rick starting his talk, your talk, talking about a verse in Hebrews that says to not let bitterness build up in you, because if you do that, you'll defile many people.

That's the introduction I remember of your Yeah. And if you want to tell everybody a little bit about where you went from there, and then pause for a minute for me to interject something.

Yeah. Well, a few minutes of backstory for that. So that March day when Richard took his life, I got a phone call that day from a family member saying, You need to look at the obituary. And as I thought about this yesterday driving again, there's been one year in my adult life, my career life, where I had a flexible schedule, and it was 1997. And so when we talk about God doing big things in the hand of God, that year for me to have the ability to come and go as I needed to put me in a place to respond to what was happening to us, and us as in me, but as in you and I and the Davis family.

So I got that call. So he died on a Tuesday. I got the call on a Thursday. He died Tuesday afternoon. Thursday morning, I got a call.

I left to go get a newspaper about 10:00, and I opened the paper, and I saw a picture of a man who looked a lot like me and my brother, and I realized I had made a mistake. And what I mean by that is my brother and I are the teenage sons of Richard, and we had not seen him in over twenty years or spoken to him, except for about six years before that, he called me one day and asked me how I was. I was 30 years old, and I hadn't heard him since I was six, hadn't seen him since I was six or nine. So there's this huge gap, and all I knew to do when he called me when I was 30 years old was just respond with, Are you okay? I made a polite offer that we could maybe read a book together and meet and have some conversation around a book, and that wasn't what he was looking for.

Didn't understand it at the time. But I had been indifferent to him, is my point. When I say I'd made a mistake, I had been indifferent. So there was a person in my life that had a ton of unforgiveness towards Richard, and they worked really hard to keep me away from Richard, and they succeeded. And they told me these stories that were terrible.

This was a scary person. And so I allowed their unforgiveness and their bitterness to create an indifference in me. And when I saw that picture and I saw that we looked alike, I knew I'd made a mistake somehow in my spirit. I had done the wrong thing by not doing more to receive him. So I got in my truck and I drove to that person, and they were at work.

And I went in and I asked them to explain to me their unforgiveness. And they fumbled around and they tried, they didn't push me off, but they too were obviously really thinking about their life, how they'd interacted with Richard. And so that was, again, on a Tuesday that he passed away, that was Thursday. And I found out where he had taken his life that day as well, and it was at a park by my house. He knew where I lived.

He knew where I went to church. We were at Grace Baptist Church at that time. He knew my children by name. How do I know these things? He had left a note in his truck and a handful of pictures of me in his truck and my brother.

So there was this real sense of obvious I had made a mistake. I had allowed someone else's unforgiveness to create an indifference in me, and I was wrong. And so that was what I brought to that retreat a month later. And when you said that, alluded when to

That was the story. That my dad had died, I didn't connect the dots right away, but I'm processing it. I pulled this picture out of my Bible, and I'm laughing, yeah. And just tears began to flow from my face. Like I couldn't even put because of the backstory I told you of all this stuff that I had seen go on in Evansville, including Richard's funeral, I still was at a place of, I don't even know what to do with this information, but to think, Indianapolis to Hardin, Kentucky, I'm praying this, and my friend's, guess son, that I didn't even

know was his son, speaking.

Go ahead.

And so I finished, I mean, I just told the guys I had made a mistake, and that verse in Hebrews twelve fifteen, that if you allow unforgiveness to go unchecked, then it does create a bitterness, a lot of people get hurt, and a lot of bad behaviors happen. And I had just realized and was taking responsibility, if you will, for allowing that to happen to me. So I mean, I could look at my family member, which I did go to them that day and say, Hey, tell me about your unforgiveness. But still, I was on the hook, and I was on the hook because this person had reached out to me, and frankly, I had actually thought, and I still think things like this, I don't endorse it, but I'd actually thought there would come a good time, a right time for me- A better time. A better time for me to try to address this.

And so when I finished that day, talking about unexplainable things that happened, I don't know if you remember, but when I finished talking that day, you came up to me and you asked me to step outside, and we stepped out back, and you showed me this picture, you asked me if that was my dad. And it took my breath away.

Yeah.

And before, I mean, it was a matter of an hour

or two. Because what you had said in that presentation is I didn't really know my dad, is what you- I didn't know him. Yeah. And I basically said,

I knew your dad. Yeah.

Like I knew, as well as any godly man I'd known, his dad was at top of the list. Yeah. Which is just breathtaking. I mean, literally took my breath.

Yeah. And so Bob kind of circled the wagons there, and the connection you and I had made, and there was more told to the men. That time, there were probably 60 or 70 men there.

Yeah.

And those men, that unexplainable thing, those men took pieces of paper and they wrote things on there that like unforgiveness or bitterness. And they wrote things on those papers, and they went out back there and they burned that in a pile, and they prayed and asked God to show them the error of their thinking and to set these things right. And you and I were just really in no position to give them anything. We were trying to hold

the pieces together ourselves. And that, what you just explained, kinda, I didn't realize we'd go there, but when I put that disclaimer is that people change, and any reference to anyone was a point in history. And I started learning that then, that people do change because people could have carried bitterness over a lot of things over the There just is bad things happen on planet earth, and it's hard to accept them when they happen to you, but there is hope and redemption in God.

So go ahead. Well, you gave me, if I remember that weekend, you gave me Faye's information.

I did not. What happened?

How did you give

me that? Yeah. What happened then is the answer to my prayer, how am I going to help this family? As I said, I will call the widow. I will call Faye.

Yes. I recall that, man.

Yeah. And my office was on over on Keystone down here, and everybody had left the office, And because I didn't wanna do it. I didn't wanna make this call with anybody around because the last time I saw Faye was at the funeral, and they had to give her some kind of something to take the edge off of her because she was so traumatized by this. And so she didn't she saw me at my grandma's funeral, but that wasn't even the best of time just to talk because I had, you know, that in my head. And so at Richard's funeral, we didn't really talk.

I just gave her a hug and walked by. But that night, I had to call her and say, I want to see if you will meet with my friend Rick. And Wow. It it was one of the most intense phone calls of my life because I only knew this tender spirited faith. And the anger of what happened to her husband, she would tell me her opinion about it.

And that's why in the prequel of our time together, that unholy trinity of things that got into the preaching of who God is in Evansville, whether it was I'm not saying anything negative about that seminary other than you get whatever flavor that particular person is bringing down the river from Louisville. The landmarkism had its negative effects, and the revivalism, what all those things did is just made people very regimented, not very caring. And she concluded that the person who was counseling her husband led him to the place to make the decision he did. Right. And there was a lot of anger.

And that's a person she had known for probably twenty five years, a long time. And to just give her a place to vent was humbling to me. But then the ask for me was, would you and your kids allow Rick into your house? And she said, Keith, that is the very thing that the kids want. They want to meet their brother.

And so that, after that call is when I gave you the phone number. So yeah, that was, I'd say, all the crazy phone calls I've had in life, that was top 20 intense. It was an intense phone call.

And she is one of the she will be one of the bravest people always I've ever met to allow me to do that, to come into the life of her kids. I mean, how vulnerable was she at that moment? I can't imagine. And her children? I can't imagine.

I can't imagine that happening. I can only imagine. So you gave me the information. That was early May, perhaps. So I have the information, but I'm not sure what to do.

And so again, another thing that, God, I can only explain. I'm reading my Bible, June, July, early July, I'm reading my Bible. There's one chapter in a book called Obadiah in the Old Testament, and a big part of that one chapter is about the conflict between brothers, and brothers can help each other, but a brother chooses not to. God's response to the one who won't help is, You're guilty as the people who hurt your brother. You're like that.

And I'm like, Really? Seriously? Okay. And from that, I draw the impression that I should call, because I think, like you, I've learned a little bit now about who God really is, enough to share to someone hope, you know, and joy and peace, which that's what I want to offer. And so I called Faye in August, early August.

Had you ever talked to her

before I never knew who she

was. You had no idea who this- I

didn't know who she is. I know who these children are.

She was gonna be violent.

No I idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You had no idea she was the sweetest human on the planet.

She has been a cheerleader of my life since. Yeah. Until she passed away earlier this year. Yeah. So I call in early August, and those were the days of voicemail on answering machines.

And so we played voicemail tag on our answering machines for about a week. We finally caught each other, and she said, Yes, I could come. And so I drove, we had one of those old Dodge Caravans, you know?

That's the middle of the young kids.

Yeah, the curse of the middle class, as

some people would call it,

but it was great for us, we loved it. And so I drove over there, north of Central High School is where they lived.

Yeah, I remember.

Parked about a block away, because I thought, This is the hardest thing I can imagine. It's like, really? God, are you sure you want me to do this? Because I just had that sense. You know, was 97.

I had been mentoring, counseling people since about 'eighty nine. So I had a sense of, while I'd not been in this situation and not been vested like this in this situation, not personally attached, I had a sense that this was going to change lives, including mine. And I had a wife and two sons, our life was traveling pretty much in a straight line, and it was about to blow up. And I was just like, Had that conversation with God, or potentially, you know? It's gonna change a

lot when I say blow up. So I sat there and wrestled with God a

little bit in that band and decided I would do it. So I got out, walked the block, knocked on the door, and I guess for the sake of clarity, I'll use these expressions, half sisters, and sisters, and brothers, and stuff. So what would be my half sister came to

the door,

and Jennifer greeted me. And I went in, and Jeff, my half brother, greeted me at the top of the stairs, and Faye, and they looked at me with kind of wandering eyes, and part of that was because I looked so much like their dad. And I'm 10, 12, fifteen years older than them, and so we're not exactly peers, though we're siblings. And so I sat down with them and Faye, and it was a really good conversation. They had such a huge hole in their lives.

Just can't describe it. Well, Jason came in, knocked on- Now Jason is the one that disrupted the people leaving. The 25 year old who called everyone back into the Jason came to the door with his wife, Amy, And as they walked up the stairs, that split level home, I saw Amy, and I said out loud, Amy, are you serious? I'd known Amy for probably ten years in business, and she knew who I was all that time. She knew?

She knew. Wow. But she never spoke, but we interacted in business environment. So Jason knew? Jason knew.

He knew- He about you then. He knew who I was, He knew what I looked had seen me, I had not seen him. And all that sounds kind of maybe weird, but it wasn't weird at all. They were curious.

Right, bet they Yeah, their dad.

And so I didn't know. I mean, we spent maybe two hours together that afternoon, and I told them I was available, told and them where I live, gave them my phone number, gave them the freedom to never call, but prayed for them a verse from Romans 15 about peace being over them, and hope being over them, and told them I would continue to pray that verse over them regardless of whether I saw them again or not, and left to go home.

Interjecting, like going back a little bit, like when I started learning some of the ideas Bob taught me, I'd asked my sister if they might let me speak at Calvary one Sunday night, because the Baptist churches would meet whenever they could get the doors open. So she somehow got approval for me to have the pulpit, which was a really on a Sunday night. On a Sunday night. But there was still a good crowd there. And I recall presenting this loving God to a I think in the hands of a Angry God.

In the hands of a to people who've been taught. In the hands of an angry guy. I'm presenting a loving guy. I pointed to a place that I sat many Sunday mornings with a hangover saying, I've learned about this guy that that wasn't what he was keeping score on. He wanted to know me as his friend.

And I've spoken, and so people like a lot of the people in that room would've been at the funeral years later, right? Sure. And I remember Faye and Richard coming up and just thrilled. I think maybe my public speaking is what I don't know if they grasp what I was saying at the But then the pastor came up and he said to me, If I'd have known you were gonna say that, you would not have had the opportunity here. And I was like, good thing I got it done.

Woah. But

like all the ideas, I can't imagine those kids now that you're in the house, and you threw the welcome Matt out. And so did you guys hug and then you go on your way? Is that what happened? Politely.

Yeah. I mean, not inappropriately, but just politely. Yeah. There wasn't anything rude. Like I said, they were so brave, Faye was so brave, but the emotional hole that something like that creates in someone, and we just had no idea what might come of that, but there was a need bigger certainly than I had any idea how to,

or any hope of ever making a difference in. So we spring forward. Tell us some of the highlights of things. Like you and I have been in touch over this whole time, and almost every time you'll say, You won't believe this. So tell us five or six of you won't believe this.

Yeah. Well, I think just shortcutting to some of that would be like, so that was August '7. In the '7, I asked Jason to go with me. Jason took an interest. Jeff took an interest.

They came to the home. They came to church with me a few times at Grace Baptist or church type events. '97 that we wouldn't have been at Grace Baptist, would been at Grace Community. Anyway, they participated some. They took an interest, that's for sure.

And in August, I had made that open door. They had, particularly Jason had taken an interest, and in October I asked him to go with me to Washington, D. C, and there was an event at that time where men had been invited who had relationship with God to come and pray for the country, and you could come, anyone, just at random. And he agreed to go with me. And so, so many wonderful things happened in the trip that he and I laugh about, but the thing that really locked us together was that day.

So the day we were there, we were on that lawn there between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, that long grassy lawn, and we were there before the sun came up, and we were there when the sun went down. So we watched it come up over the Capitol Building, go down behind the Lincoln Memorial. And what we did that day is we prayed. We didn't eat. We didn't eat, not being super spiritual, just say we didn't eat that day.

We prayed, we hugged, we talked, right there on the grass in like a two foot square. We just each had our own little square, figuratively speaking.

And you've known each other how long now? A couple months. Okay.

Yeah, we met in August, it's October.

Okay.

There was another man who had come with us who had helped me after you gave me the information and after God used Obadiah to tell me this was time. I called a friend named Troy and had him help me think through this. Well, Troy was with Jason and I there on the lawn there, and at the end of the day, Troy and I stood just shoulder to shoulder, just as close basically as we could get, and we had our hands in the air, and we were looking at this guy, and we were crying, we were praising God. We were thankful for our families and our friends, and what we were learning about who God is, and we're praying for the country. So we're crying, and we're thanking the Lord, and we close our eyes, and I feel someone come up beside me on my left side, and it's Jason, and he stands up and he reaches up and he's doing the same thing.

I grab his hand, and so there's three of us, and we're just shouting and screaming and crying and praising God. Something happened to us that day that we became very trustworthy of each other, and we would spend the next ten years together meeting at Westmont Park once a week. We'd sit at picnic tables, or if it was too cold or rainy, we'd sit in a car, and we just unpacked this thing for ten years, what happened to us, and particularly what happened to him and what I had done wrong by being indifferent. And during that time, he went to seminary, and he got his doctorate degree in biblical counseling and became a pastor. Well, before that though, he, wasn't he a chaplain somewhere?

In Henderson Jail, he was a chaplain.

And before he met you, he was just going about his life. Was going

about his life, man. And so he ends up as a pastor in that ten year span of life. And certainly, we just unpacked.

Now are you comfortable talking about him becoming a pastor and becoming an interim pastor? Are you comfortable telling us?

Yeah. I'm gonna get there. Just I to didn't know. I didn't that's where I was going next.

Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. That's where

I was going next. So that's what, now that's like 2007 or something like that, where he's in this role, and Donna and I are on vacation in Alabama. This And family member who had been indifferent and who hadn't fed me this unforgiveness and stuff, by which I had adopted and I had done wrong, that family member was on vacation in Alabama while we were there. Okay. And so we stopped by to see them, and while we were there, the phone rang.

And so this person answered the phone and was hearing from her brother about this pastor in Elberfeld, Indiana, that was changing the way people think.

Like those of you that have never been down to Southern Indiana, Elberfeld is not two like 100 people. Yeah. Is. It's a pretty small subset on the planet.

Pretty much. And so so this lady's brother is calling and saying, you can't You can't believe what this young pastor's teaching us. This is amazing. Because he's brought this message of love and identity and grace and peace. And they've all heard this landmarkism.

If we knew you were gonna tell us that.

Yeah, they'd heard that message, but here this guy is giving them all this freedom. And so my mom's like, Oh, great. Well, what's his name? And her brother says, Jason Davis. And my mom has no idea who that is.

So she tells me this story when she gets off the phone, and those were the days of cell phones. And so when we were leaving there, I called Jason. I'm like, Jason, are you preaching at a church in Eberfeld, Indiana? And he's like, yeah. I said, is there a Bobby Brown there?

Well, yeah. I said, is there a John Brown? And I started naming all these relatives. And he's like, well, yeah, who are they? I said, they're my aunts and uncles.

And he's like, no way. I said, well, the neat thing about this is they throughout my life said, we will not listen to you because you're the younger. Listen to you, you're They're not going to listen to me because I'm the younger. That's part of that thinking. But here's a guy that they'll listen to, who's learned from Rick for ten years.

And so he's giving them the message they wouldn't receive from me, and they're receiving it. And so he goes back the next Sunday.

And they have no idea. They have no idea who he is. They have no idea that he's somewhat related to them.

Right. Yeah. And so he goes back, and this is how he tells it. He goes in the next Sunday, and he's at the end of the service and people are milling around, and he's standing beside my Uncle Bob, and he says, without looking at him, they're shoulder to shoulder, he says, Bob, he said, you know Rick Underhill? And Bob's like, well, yeah, he's my nephew.

And Jason said, He's my brother. Bob's like, Well, sure he is. Sure he is. Like, we're both believers, and there's that- He's my Christian brother. My Christian brother.

And Jason's like, No, he's my brother. Like really, my brother. DNA kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh

my. And so my mom's there, and my mom calls me and she's like, I had no idea. And the lady who had created this unforgiveness is there. And she says, I

don't

know if I can keep going there. Because every time I see him, see the man. Richard. Yeah. I see Richard.

And when you go back to the beginning, this trash that people believe and teach, when you go back to the beginning, you have a 16 year old woman and a 16 year old girl and a 17 year old boy, they get pregnant together. And the response is you can live behind the house in the chicken coop with your newborn. And so So you lived in a chicken I lived in a chicken coop for two years with my teenage parents.

I don't I I know what that looks like. I just can't envision that that's actually true. Does that make sense? I have

a picture of it. Yeah. Have to see that. I could have brought it with me.

Yeah. It's mind boggling

to Yeah. Think about So there were no chickens in there. There was a pool table and a piece of plywood, and that's what I slept on.

This is what comes to my mind, Rick. Like, because 1961 wasn't the late sixties, because by the late sixties, what happened to your mom and dad, like a pregnancy out of marriage, I don't think that anybody cared anymore. The hippies were coming to, but there was a lot of guilt and condemnation by it happening in 1961. And when I was talking about Evansville, it's hard to tell somebody that's never lived through the sixties and seventies kind of the chaos that was going on then. Yeah.

But I can just imagine the guilt and condemnation both your mom and dad felt by all that because of the landmarkism, just the condemnation-

You have to be qualified.

Right.

Yeah, and a lot of things disqualified you, which we won't even get into, but it wasn't just your behavior.

Right.

Where you were from, what you looked like.

Right.

So for a month, here my family is sitting under Jason's teaching, and they know now, and they all have to make a decision. Are we gonna listen? Are we gonna leave? And the person who had created this indifference and unforgiveness chose to stay and listen. Wow.

And so after about six weeks, Jason calls me, and we talked frequently in between, but he called me. He said, That person wrote me a letter and gave it to me today after the service. And the letter was an apology for the way they had treated his dad and the condemnation and the unforgiveness and the mean spirit for forty years, thirty five years that they had piled on this man, Richard, as they now realize contributed to our loss of him, for him being gone. And so they wrote this letter of apology to Jason, and Jason read it to me. And I got off the phone and I called that family member, and I called them by their maiden name, their childhood name.

And they're like, Why are you doing that? I said, because you've been carrying this crap for fifty years, and it cost Richard his life, and you just gave it up. And I'm so proud of you. And she said, You're right. I have been carrying it for fifty years.

And she said, I told God, if you would let me just let it go, I'd really appreciate it. I don't want to write this letter. That was fifty years ago. Can we just leave it under the table? Do really have to bring this into the light?

And the Lord impressed upon her the Spirit of God and said, Yeah. And so I called her again by her maiden name, and I said, You did a

good thing.

And she received that, and was Jason then gets back to me and says, Rick, if nothing else happened, if me going to seminary and becoming a pastor only brought me to this letter, it was worth it. And that's how he received it.

I honestly don't understand the dynamic of suicide. I have opinions about it, and I think my strong opinion is that you, as a person who are tempted by that, have been told a lie, repeated that lie, the lie is like a backpack that just keeps pulling your shoulders down. It just gets and it stays with you time after time after time, and eventually, another lie says, There's an easier way out. And the lies that get intertwined in people's lives are just hard to imagine. And to be a messenger of redemption, messenger of hope is just a big deal, think.

Yeah,

yeah. So through Jason, I would come to meet Faye, or through Faye, I would come to meet the kids, however you want to sort it out. And eventually, Faye, Donna, and I, we would be in church together. Jason would now be my pastor, even though he will tell people that I'm really the one taking care of him. But he's my pastor now, and here we are these many years later.

It's amazing to be a part of his life. It's an unbelievable gift to be there when his children were born, to pick up those little newborns and carry them around, and to be given the opportunity to perform the wedding for his daughter. His son's not married yet don't mean that I need to do it, but just saying to be part of that kind of intimacy, and now they have a granddaughter, and the granddaughter was handed to me as if I'm just another part of the family. And so there are many other things in that story we could unpack about how God has redeemed the time, but it would be really important to understand that it's not something we've orchestrated. It's happened by taking what we thought was God and moving that direction, and someone receiving it and picking it up.

And we've just found God to be very faithful to love on us just the way we are. He is such

a good God that whatever I told that Sunday night service, I would've used more and more adjectives back then if I'd have known them then, right? Right. I would've probably got thrown out forever because of how good a God He is and what I think, and the magnitude of how much he cares and how quickly he'll redeem. And the goodness of the story is beyond my thoughts. The contradictions and the power of God is what I said earlier, that really, you're gonna have to show that to me.

This story, I can't even believe this story. And every time I would see you and need to add another chapter to it, it'd blow me away. We told a version of this, you told me last night, 2014. Right. And so that one, when somebody has a suicide, I'll send it to them to listen to, to say there is light at the end of that tunnel.

It's a dark, dark tunnel from what I can tell, and there is light in it. And one of the guys that listened to this years ago, that version of it, he was driving up on I-sixty 9 in Michigan, and his brother had just taken his life. And he had got that to listen to, and he called me, and he was just crying. He's like, Keith, I can't believe what I've just heard. I can't believe that there is a God that that's that powerful and that can redeem a horrible story like that.

And I was like, That's him, man. He can do it. And that guy has started a ministry to men that are struggling with these sorts of thoughts here locally, and it's had a big influence over Central Indiana. But what other kind of things, messages of hope would you tell Because unfortunately, this is a part of culture that people are making these decisions. There's temptations and pressures, but as they walk away from our time together, want them

to know that there's hope. Yeah, Jason, last year at Father's Day, he said, Would you sit with me in front of the congregation, and let's tell this story? And I'm like, Oh, oh, I don't know, man. There's gonna be people in the room that are part of that story, and I wanna always tell this with such respect. Because again, what we do is not necessarily who we are, and people do learn.

And he said, Well, here's the way I wanna tell it. He said, I wanna tell the perspective of how God I lost my father. Richard was out of my life. He said, You lost your father that way, and yet God provided you fathers and a man to raise me. He said, I lost my father, and God provided me a father in you.

Wow. So I wanna tell them how God provides fathers to men who lose their fathers. And so we sat there together and told that story together from We told it from that perspective.

Right.

And that level of hope and confidence, we didn't have that in 1997.

Right.

When my mom remarried when I was six years old, I didn't go to the wedding. She allowed me to stay home because I wanted my dad. And so to say, there's a lot of conversation about what does that mean, what does that say? But I would say it's a sense of belonging that I had lost, a sense of belonging. And when I saw that picture of him, I knew where I belonged.

And so you bring all that forward and then have Jason say, Hey, God provided fathers for both of us. Let's tell that story. And he did. He certainly did. Wow.

He raised me with a man. A man raised me. However, those guys in Western Kentucky, the Bob Warrens and the Johnny Trailers and the Buddy Moody's and Al James, and all those guys we met were like fathers to us, to me. And Jason

and I saw God do that. Man. Well, those of you who are wondering about this and wondering about a hopeless situation, hopefully you've heard an unexplainable story, a redemption story that we're almost thirty years into it. And who knows? Probably The way that I see the world is this story will be influencing people a hundred years from now, and your story can as well.

Like whatever you're struggling through, whatever, maybe it's a hit and run car accident that kills somebody you love, maybe it's something else, but there is redemption. There's a good God. He's not an angry God. He's a God that wants the best for you. Yeah.

And, and, and man, anything we can do to cheer you on with that. We really believe this will help up your average. And anything else that they our friends need to know, Rick? No.

Just keep going, man. Yeah. Keep going.

Thanks for hanging out with us today.

It's been

a really special time.