Welcome And Episode Framing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go.

Introducing Davey Blackburn

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Hey man, thank you for listening to my interview with Davey Blackburn, the founder and director of Nothing is Wasted Ministries, a nonprofit organization that helps people in trauma, tragedy, and major life transition discover purpose out of their pain. Davey is also the author of the book Nothing Is Wasted, which I would highly recommend, host of the Nothing Is Wasted podcast. And man, his story is heartbreaking. It's incredibly powerful and healing. And I was deeply moved by today's conversation about grief, loss, how that can affect us sexually, and what it looks like to move through the valley of the shadow of death with Jesus leading you into his redemptive plan where nothing is wasted. Enjoy the episode. Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to a new friend, Davey Blackburn. Davey, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Thanks, Drew. This is such an honor to be with you guys. And man, what an incredible community that you have built. And I just love what people are gravitating around right here and finding healing and freedom.

unknown 1:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

I can say the exact same thing about your ministry, nothing is wasted, and your book, which is really, really powerful. Thanks, man. Thank you. You're welcome.

Davey’s Theology Before Tragedy

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Davey, what's your story?

SPEAKER_02 1:40

For me, I've talked about my story so many times. It's a part of now being able to share it and leverage what the enemy has stolen from me in my life for good to help other people. I'm so accustomed to talking about it that it can almost seem second nature to me. I'm traveling all over the country, sharing my story at churches and organizations and on podcasts all the time. But I also recognize that when I share it for the first time, or if it lands on someone's ears for the first time and they've not heard it, it can just suck the air out of the room and they go, Oh my gosh. Which reminds me of just the deep gravity of the story. And I'll just say this we've learned over the course of working with people who've gone through pain, tragedy, any kind of trauma, that we're it is an exercise in futility to compare pain. The hardest thing you've gone through, Drew is the hardest thing you've gone through. Hardest thing I've gone through is the hardest thing I've gone through. And it it hurts deeply. And we each have our own journey, our own story. And most of us would say this is not the story I would have written. And my hope is that as you as you navigate your story and as you let the Lord carry you through the valley of the shadow of death, you would at some point be able to say, and I wouldn't trade it for the world because of what it's done in me. And that's true of my story too. Back in 2015, I was a pastor, I was a church planter in Indianapolis with my wife Amanda. We had a 15-month-old son, Weston, and we were pregnant with our second in the fall of 2015. And we, you know, when you start a church, we were church planters. So there's a lot of struggle, a lot of grind, a lot of, you're just trying to get something up and going. You have this big dream, this big idea of what you think God is going to do in your life or what you want him to do and make a difference in the world. And you feel like God's called you to plant a force but dropped you in the middle of a parking lot. So it's just this really, it's it's tilling up the soil, it's meeting people, and you go through a lot of hard. But I would have said in the fall of 2015, hey, we we're, I know we're gonna go through hard, but I don't think we'll go through tragic because we have this impervious shield around us known as the center of God's will. Right? Functional theology for me would have been like, hey, I'm on the front, I'm answering God's call. Our family's sacrificing for him, and so we're he's gonna protect our family. That theology and that way of thinking was upended in November of 2015.

The Day Everything Changed

SPEAKER_02 4:08

When I came home on November 10th, 2015 from the gym and I walked into my absolute greatest nightmare. My wife Amanda was lying on her living room floor surrounded with blood. She was unconscious, but breathing very laborously. And I thought something had gone horrifically wrong with the pregnancy, that she had gotten dizzy, had some kind of a spell, passed out, something, she had knocked something over, hit her head. And did not know until I got her to the hospital, fully expecting that doctors would come back and say, hey, we got everything's fine. Maybe at the very worst. You know, you guys unfortunately lost the baby, but Amanda's good. That was my worst-case scenario thinking, because finding her on the living room floor was so traumatic that my brain went into survival mode. So it failed to even pick up on everything that was happening there that was evidence of what had really happened. So when I get to the waiting room, doctors come in and they tell me she has, David, she has three bullet wounds in her. One's in her arm, one has grazed over her back, and one is in the back of her head. There's a bullet lodge behind her eye. And we're going to try to operate if the swelling in her brain goes down, but it doesn't, it doesn't look good. And come to find out, as they were piecing things together, there were three men who run a random crime spree through Indianapolis, had broken into the home three doors down from us, saw me leave for the gym that morning, and decided to take that opportunity to break into our home. And Amanda got caught up in that. So my world was turned completely upside down. Now I will say this, Drew, I believed wholeheartedly that God was going to heal her in the hospital. I had this just naive, I don't know if it was denial or faith, or I don't know what it was, but I was like, again, I'm operating from this sense of God, you're not, you're not gonna let anything bad happen to our family. And so I'm like, okay, you're setting our family up for a miracle, but 24 hours later, she was pronounced officially deceased. And what's crazy about, I think all of our stories show the fingerprints of God if we're looking for it. And sometimes that even comes through, for many of us, through numbers or through details that are like, okay, only God. And so one of those details for me is that it was November 11th, 2011 that we packed a moving van up and left this dream job in South Carolina, this fast-growing church that we were youth pastors at to go pursue this call to plant a church. It was November 11, 2011. It was November 11th, 2015 that Amanda passed away, four years to the day that we had together packed up this moving van to say, hey, we're we're gonna go take Indianapolis for the kingdom of God. So I was overnight thrust into my worst nightmare, just lost my best friend, my soulmate, my ministry partner, who was now a single dad to a 15-month-old, had just lost my our unborn baby, who we had already named Evie. Amanda had a real sense we didn't know, but she had a sense that it was a girl. So she was already collecting items for you know a girl's nursery. And I think moms just have that kind of sense. And and now I'm also pastoring this church that we had started by herself, trying to help them navigate all of this while I'm reeling, thinking that this grief is gonna overtake me and just not even knowing what to do, how to move forward. And on top of that, our story was a national news story. You know, when Jesus said, Hey, if you acknowledge me before me and I'll acknowledge you before the Father, that there was this sense that as everyone was peering in to go, how is this family gonna respond to this? I felt almost a kingdom sense of responsibility to respond in the way that I knew I was supposed to respond and acknowledge Jesus, even though I didn't understand anything that was happening, to acknowledge him before man on Good Morning America, and then try to tuck my tail between my legs and figure out how the heck I was gonna survive this. So that's where I was in 2015. How did grief change you? Well,

Wrestling With God And Loss

SPEAKER_02 7:58

in significant ways. Our ministry now, just to give you a little context, we help we meet people in pain and provide a pathway through. So nothing is wasted as the ministry. We have a lot of content, community that we build online, coaching. But one of the seminal ways we do this is through a course called Pain to Purpose that we launch in churches as a disciple, discipleship curriculum. So God's been really gracious to us to allow us to have kind of an open door into a lot of churches. So I work with a lot of pastors. And what I notice when I see a lot of pastors, especially if they haven't gone through something really traumatic or hard, haven't walked through grief, is they demonstrate the same kind of characteristics I did before walking through this. And that I was, hey, we're gonna charge hell with a water pistol, we're gonna take this city by storm. But all we were thinking about was mission. That's for me. I'm I'm already an ambitious person. I just have that natural inclination. If you study Enneagram, I'm a three on the Enneagram. So I'm goal-oriented. I like to take the hill. So a lot of it's altruistic, but we're all a mixed bag of motives. And so here, here I was planting this church, trying to pastor, and I'm like, hey, it's for your glory, your kingdom, for you, God. But I was terrible at having compassion and empathy for hurting people. And I would see them. I'm ashamed to say this, but I tell pastors this all the time. I would see their strongholds or their struggles or their pain or their grief. I would almost kind of go, Can you kind of get all that together so you can join us back on mission? You know? Because I didn't know what to do with it. I had lived a pretty charmed life up to that point. I grew up a pastor's kid. I didn't have any of that weird, like, I'm rebelling against the church because my dad's a great, he's an incredible father. My mom's an incredible mother. They provided a great stable home, a lot of great opportunities for me, even though they didn't have a lot of means. They really taught me how to love and follow Jesus. My life was pretty charmed up to that point. I didn't have childhood trauma growing up with. And so I just thought that if you're not chasing after the kingdom of God, then there must be drama going on in your life. That's kind of what I would chalk it up to. It's like there's some kind of drama that can you just get all that settled so we can go and like pursue purpose and get on mission and make a difference. And I would overstep or even bulldoze people in the midst of that on mission. And man, it's so embarrassing to even say that out loud. But it but very quickly I began to realize that all of the things that I saw in the people that I was pastoring who were going through pain, all of the struggles and the temptations, now after going through loss, I was experiencing the exact same things. This pull and this draw to soothe or to cope or to somehow assuage the pain or to run away from it, or to it was so overtaking that as I began to walk through it simultaneously, I began to have this deep sense of empathy for people. So people would come and share their story with me even early on, and I would just weep because I saw how deeply they were hurting, and I knew what that felt like and wanted to fix it for them, wanted to help them, wanted to help them heal, help, you know, and so it just changed me immensely. It also changed, you know, the way I saw God. I think I'd still have a propensity and a struggle toward being a performer with God, where it's like, all right, if I do all the right things, everything's gonna be good, right? And that again was that was my functional theology. Like, hey, if I follow

How Grief Rewired Empathy

SPEAKER_02 11:20

after you, do the right things, check all the boxes, pursue these things in excellence, do my quiet time, pray, all that stuff. Like, as long as I'm in right, if I can do the things to earn favor with you, then my life's gonna be blessed. And I began to see that started getting untangled as I began to go, wait a minute, like this whole notion of following after Jesus is the safest place to be, that's not even scriptural. I mean, the guys that follow Jesus the closest, they're the ones that their lives ended horribly, but they walked through that voluntarily because their rabbi Jesus, their discipler, also walked through it voluntarily. That there is a different pathway for the kingdom of God, and that pathway actually it actually involves suffering. Right. Everything about the way I saw God, the way I saw myself, the way I saw this world, like it turned to everything on head.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

You entered the valley of the shadow of death. Can you talk more about the temptation that ensues after loss?

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Oh man, there's a ton of temptation, and a lot of it has to do with, like I said, soothing or trying to somehow either numb or assuage the pain that you're going through because it just it just feels too overtaking. You're like, I remember being on the couch and a month after Amanda passed away, and my body was, I was physically sick. You know, when you and I were just talking on our podcast, you referenced Bessel Vanderkolk and the body keeping the score. And I didn't know that at the time. I finally picked up that book months later and was like, oh, this gives me explanation for what was going on. But I was just trying to do everything I could to be strong for my son, be strong for my congregation. You know, like I'd never experienced this kind of deep anguish and lament. And so I'm just stuffing it down, trying to numb from it. So the temptation to alcohol, temptation to porn, deviant sexual behavior. There is a sense of when you go through something like this, there becomes this little lie that begins to creep inside of you that says, Hey, you've gone through something really hard. You deserve this. And that can play out in a lot of different ways. And I saw it play out. I would go to the mall and I'd be like, whereas I would have been a very frugal, I mean, we were church planters, we didn't have any money, right? So we're like watching every single dime and making sure that we're very stewarding it really well. And I would just go and like buy a whole bunch of clothes. I'm like, well, I deserve this, you know, like all of these different things that I saw fleshing out that would have been behaviors I would have judged. And now all of a sudden here I am, finding myself with that inner core temptation going, you know, you deserve this, this lie from the enemy that's just, hey, this is gonna help you feel better. Hey, this will just take the pain away a little bit. You know, then on top of that, we talk especially the context of this podcast. One of the things that was is so challenging, growing up in church, growing up around, you know, I went to a Christian college. You know, you grow up in Christian culture, you can have a tendency to think like, okay, I'm just gonna abstain, abstain, abstain, abstain. And you kind of just like guard yourself, head yourself, pluck out your right eye if it's causing you to sin, do all the extreme behavior, which I'm not saying is in is inherently bad. But what you can do is tend to believe that, okay, once I get married, then I'm not gonna have any sexual struggle whatsoever. Because now I finally have this outlet and it's gonna be everything that I imagined, that I had dreamed of it.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Totally. I grew up with that same attitude, and it felt like I'm gonna hold my breath as long as I can. And then when I get married, I'll let it all out.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

You exhale, right? And now your guard's down, and now you're but then of course you're disappointed because you have all these expectations, you have all these imaginations, you have all these things that and it's like, wait a minute, this wasn't what I thought it was supposed to be, or this wasn't, and some of it's just a beautiful, it's amazing. Like, wow, this is incredible, right? And I found uh it didn't eliminate my sexual temptation that ultimately sometimes it even fuels it, right? Because you're like, oh,

Temptation, Numbing, And Sexuality

SPEAKER_02 15:21

now this I know what this feels like. Here we go. So that begins, Drew, to get even more problematic when you experience sudden loss of that person that you have begun to build this really, you know, you're working hard to build a safe, trusted intimacy, and then then one day it's gone. And so now you're almost like a locomotive that is still barreling down the track, but all of a sudden you have to, you're going, Well, I don't know how to where do I how do I channel this? What does this look like? It led me to a journey of having to go back to what it looks like to be fully content, fully and finally satisfied in the father in the same way, uh, but just with much more complexity as I've had to when I was a teenager or a college student. It led me to realize, oh, I haven't really gotten to the root of all of this yet. Because I'm I'm facing this temptation now to like to act out in other deviant ways, right? That are that are like, I know this isn't what God will want me to do, but I'm also feeling this like temptation, this pull, this, you know, and I don't know what to do with this. And it's all melded now and tangled up with grief and the desire to numb, a desire to man, it just becomes this like this like fire that can feel uncontainable and unmanageable.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

It makes so much sense. Our sexual thoughts and feelings often escalate whenever we go through something really overwhelming, painful, tragic.

unknown 17:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

When did things start to change for you?

SPEAKER_02 17:04

Across the board, things began to change with one very critical moment. I referenced earlier that I was on the couch sick a month after Amanda passed away. Most of it was because I was, like I said, stuffing all of it. And I had a pastor friend of mine reach out to me. His name's Pastor Levi Lesco. He wrote the forward of my book, but he I had read his book. And a really providential thing, several weeks before Amanda passed away, I was sitting at a Chick-fil-A on my lunch break, and I'm watching a message from Elevation Worship, but it was Pastor Levi Lusco. I don't know how I just kind of like, oh, this would be, I've never heard this guy before. So he shares his story about losing his daughter Linya, five-year-old, and has died in his arms of an asthma attack. And I'm in just, I'm in tears at Chick-fil-A. You know, again, keep in mind this is weeks, a few weeks before Amanda passes away. So I go home, I tell Amanda, I'm like, oh my gosh, you got to see this guy's like story, his faith. Like, this is so inspiring. Two weeks before she passed away, we decided we were gonna go to Chicago for a little romantic getaway. So we're train ride to Chicago listening to this message together, and we're both just in tears. Obviously, what's on our heart and mind is that she's pregnant and we have a 15-month-old, and we're thinking, I can't imagine losing either one of these. We get done listening to the message, she looks at me, she said, Davey, I think that God's leading us into a season of pain. And I said, Wait, hold on. What are you talking? Wait, what do you mean? She said, I don't know, but I just have this sense that, and she said, I don't want this to be true, but I think we're gonna lose this baby. And I pray that it's not, but I said, Amanda, what are you talking about? She said, You know, Davey, we both lived pretty charmed lives up to this point, and we've gone through hard planting a church, but we've never gone through tragic. And so we don't know what it's like to look someone in the eye who's gone through really hard things and to really truly understand what they're going through. Amanda had a counselor's heart. She wanted to be a counselor, she was gonna go to Moody Bible, get her counseling degree, all that kind of stuff. And I came in and disrupted her plans. But she had this heart for people, and so I immediately, when she said that, I'm terrified. I'm going, okay, God, well, I'm so I put on reserve in the library Levi Lescoe's book, and it comes available, Drew, three days after Amanda passes away. So I pick it up, I'm devouring this thing and I'm reading through it. So then when he reached out to me a month later, it was like this God send. It was like, I don't know how you got my number, but man, I've been reading your book, and this has been super, super helpful. And what he told me is that essentially I don't have time to get into like the full details of it, but he said, you've got to run toward the roar. And he tells us a metaphor in the book about this, that ultimately what it means is the things that are terrifying you, the triggers that are causing you to desire now to suppress or numb or run away from, you actually need to run head on toward those things. And if you do that, then God's gonna meet you in those things. Whether you need to do it with in the company of a safe, trusted therapist, or do it by yourself or with friends or family, you've got to lean into these triggers because if you do that, God will meet you in it and He'll begin to heal and resolve those things in your soul. So that was a critical point in my journey because I began just starting almost like Dave Ramsey style. Like, let me start with like the smallest trigger that's I think had the most like the snowball effect. And one of those triggers for me was there was a song that would play on my Bluetooth on my stereo

Running Toward The Roar

SPEAKER_02 20:25

by default. I'd get in the car and it would play, but it was a song that was played at our wedding. So it was extremely triggering for me. I thought it was some kind of like sadistic trick of the universe. So I'd bang the dashboard every time I'd forget that it was about to play, and then boom, it would default connect and it would start playing. And I'm like, what? I'd bang the dashboard, I'd turn it off, I'd get so mad. Or I was again just shoving it down. And when he said, You need to go and run toward the roar, I said, I gotta go listen to that song and just let come what may, whatever needs to come out, come out. So I went and sat in my car and turned the song on and put it on repeat and just wept. And it was the first time I had let myself really feel all of the agonizing emotions that I was suppressing. And man, I just wept and wept and wept, wept. And about 45 minutes into it, the way I describe it is waves of grief were coming over me and out of me, and then waves of grace came over me. And that physical sickness that I was feeling, all of a sudden that knot my stomach just started subsiding. The science behind it now, I learned that that's a somatic release, is what was being facilitated right now, right there. And the Holy Spirit was interjecting in that to begin rewriting neural pathways in my brain. But it was just this beautiful moment where God showed up and I'm going, wow. And so all of a sudden I felt empowered. Like I felt like, man, I don't have to take this whole grief thing back on my heels. I can actually almost systematically begin running toward all of my triggers and let God do what he wants to do in that. And so that changed the trajectory of my healing journey. No longer was I facing this going like, I'm terrified, I can't do this. I've got to figure out a way to cope with or numb with this pain. It was like, no, I'm gonna run head on and let God do what he wants to do in that. That was a huge point. And then seeing counseling about five months into my journey, I went on counseling intensive and really got an opportunity to kind of uh verbal vomit everything that I felt like was happening and have someone see and validate and and mirror back to me what I was experiencing and right-size some things for me. That was so helpful. And so you need trusted guides, I think, in that journey, in every journey, to be able to say, I see you and I totally understand where you're at. And let's let's kind of look at this through the lens of God's narrative and what he's doing in your life right now and what he's doing in this world. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

And what he's doing in this world can be so agonizing to even ask about like, God, what are you doing? Yeah. Why? And you have this saying, nothing is wasted. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 23:06

It was a mantra that early on our family adopted. It came through a couple of different really important moments. The first of which was we're in the hospital waiting on, you know, between November 10th and November 11th, where we're just waiting to see if the doctors are going to be able to operate. So we're just by Amanda's bedside and just kind of holding our breath, praying, God, would you work a miracle here? And I'm sitting, I find myself on one side of her hospital bed and Amber, her sister, on the other side of the hospital bed. Everybody else was coming in and out, but this is one of those moments it was the two of us. And when I look back on it, I go, man, we were on the same side of the hospital, of her hospital bed that 15 months earlier she and I were sitting on when Amanda was bringing Weston into the world. But now we're in this like very different moment where we're holding her hand and just begging God to bring her back to us. And I put on my phone on Pandora Radio Station, Elevation Worship. I knew that Amanda, if she could hear anything, these machines seemed to be they were keeping her alive. She was unconscious, obviously. But if she could hear anything, she'd want to listen to worship music specifically,

Nothing Is Wasted: The Mantra

SPEAKER_02 24:10

Elevation Worship. That was the Pandora station she would listen to when she'd go for runs. So I put it on, and the first song that pops up, Pandora's randomized, Drew, right? So the first song that came up is the song Nothing Is Wasted by Elevation Worship. And it's like this moment where we felt like God stepped into that room right there and spoke to Amber and I both and essentially said, This is not going to turn out the way that you want it to, but I promise you, I'm not going to waste this. Because in my economy and my kingdom, no pain is in vain. I do not waste an ounce of the pain that you go through. Instead, Romans 8.28 says he works all things together for the good of those who love him, who've been called according to his purposes. And that's a really cute verse, right? And it really brings a lot of hope. But when you're in the middle of it, you're going, How in the world are you going to work this for good? That was a moment where, you know, you and I have talked about moments that God shows up where you're like, I don't have a theological box for that, where he orchestrated a song to play in that moment that was just like, and it felt like heaven touched earth. And I just look at Amber in tears. Well, then after she passed away, it reminded us of what she was doing as a hobby. Amanda was refinishing furniture. She would have me go pick up like some dresser that someone had thrown out on the side of the road, like I'm American Pickers. And she would take this thing and she would refinish it, sell it at some antique show for, I mean, a markup of like 500, 600%. It was unbelievable what she would do. But the first time I brought a piece of furniture back to her, I'm like, what are you going to do with this? And she said, Davey, trust me, give me a little time, and I'm going to turn this into something beautiful. And she would do that over and over. Well, that's what our family felt like. The Lord spoke to us and said that week, hey, trust me, give me a little time, and I'm going to turn this into something beautiful. So we held on to that as a mantra. It became something that was like, nothing is wasted, nothing is wasted. It's written on Amanda's tombstone, along with Romans 8.28. And in the middle of it, we're going, we don't understand, right? But we felt like we were the disciples in John 6 that when Jesus lays this hard teaching down and everybody walks away, he looks at the disciples and he goes, Are you not going to walk away too? Because these moments can cause us to either walk away from God or drive us to the feet of Jesus. And we felt like we're our response was like disciples, where are we going to go? You have the words of life. So I was in this place immediately after going, God, I I've seen you be faithful in my life. So I don't doubt your existence. I just don't know if I can trust you right now. So the next several years was a long journey of God re-establishing in his kindness and his faithfulness re-establishing to me, you can trust me. I'm going to turn this into something beautiful. And that's where nothing is wasted, has really become full circle for us. That now we're looking and seeing the evidence that God is using this in such powerful ways, in ways that Amanda would have dreamed her life to be wrung out for the kingdom of God, right? If she had lived 88 years, she would have loved to see how her life was served the kingdom of God in such a way that people were impacted in the way that we're seeing it right now. And I don't necessarily have an explanation for that. You know, I know that we see dimly, we see with finite minds. And so, but I do believe one day we're going to look at it and go, wow, God, you literally have not taken anything that we have gone through and wasted any of it. You've used every single ingredient and element of our story for a redemptive purpose, and it's going to cause us to say, to be just in awe of who God is.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Yeah. I have no words for that. It's beyond our ability to describe or even imagine. Davey, thousands of people have come to you and to your ministry in the midst of unimaginable circumstances. How

Meeting People In Their Pain

SPEAKER_01 28:12

do you start to meet people there and help us move forward through what we've experienced?

SPEAKER_02 28:21

I don't think this is some kind of like testament to ingenuity or anything like that. I mean, I love what we do as a ministry. I love thinking strategically, but I think what I've found is that people just want to be heard. They want to know that their story has meaning. And when we can just sit and listen and attune to someone's story and hold space compassionately for it, it does a lot of the work of healing.

SPEAKER_01 28:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Like you don't even have to say anything. In fact, I would often caution people like, don't say anything, because you're going to actually muck this up if you say something, right? And God gave us that pathway. I mean, he the ancient Jewish practice of this the sitting Shiva, but all that was is just the Jewish, the Jewish practice of sitting with somebody after they had gone through loss specifically, and just mourning with them, weeping with those who weep, mourning with those who mourn, not trying to solve or resolve their pain, not bringing some kind of pithy theological phrase or trying to search for some explanation as to why they're going through what they're going through. None of that. Nobody wants to hear that stuff right then. And so I think what I found, I didn't realize this until I started kind of speaking in different places and sharing my story, but I would have this long receiving line of people that came up to me. And I think I was still at that moment, partially in the season where my pain was about me and about my pain, not about others. But then God quickly opened my eyes up because this long receiving line would come up first time this happened. And I'm like, oh, they must be coming up to say, Hey, we've been praying for you. We've seen what you've gone through. We just want you to know that like we're with you in this. That's not what happened, Drew. Each one of these people came up and shared their story with me. And man, it broke me. And I'm like, what in the world, God? Like, almost as if it was the first time anybody had given them permission in church to talk about their story. And I'm like, and it was amazing how cathartic it was for them just to share it and just to have me put my arm on their shoulder and cry with them and say, I am so sorry. I'm so sorry. And maybe pray with them, not pray for them, but pray with them, right? To go, God, I don't have any words. But you see my brother right here, you see my sister right here, you see them in ways that I can't see them, and you understand in ways that I can't understand. We serve a empathetic high priest who has gone through every trial, every temptation, who knows our pain, who's well acquainted with grief, who chose this road of suffering on our behalf to give us an example, like to just be reminded that he, the power of the Holy Spirit, it can really do way more than what I can do with my words. Or, but just being a representation of Jesus there in his presence. That I think is really the first start. Like this, it's the first step for helping someone. We call it nothing is waste. We say we want to meet you in your pain and provide a pathway through. That's kind of the two parts. Often the church has been guilty of trying to provide a pathway through. I was guilty of that. Just like, wait a minute, okay, how do we get you through this as quick as possible? Because we are feeling awkward about someone's pain. We want to resolve it because we're trying to resolve the dissonance inside of our own heart with just sitting with somebody. But that's never what how Jesus approached it. And so that's why as an organization, we've said, hey, we're gonna really focus on meeting people in their pain. We're not gonna be the kind of person that when someone falls into a pit, throws a rope down, and from the top screams, like, grab the rope, come on, right? We're gonna crawl down in the pit, sit down with them and go, Hey, I'm here with you, man.

Guides, Sherpas, And Pathways

SPEAKER_02 32:04

And then when they're ready, because they'll actually be ready faster when you go sit with them. You know what I mean? Like, because they feel validated, they feel seen, they feel understood. They're like, oh, and then they feel empowered. And so it's like, hey, when you're ready, let's go. I'll climb up this with you. You know, and that's like it just changes the game. And you know that with what you do you do with husband material. Like it just changes the game.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yeah. The withness is where it starts. Yeah. And then we run toward the roar together. That's right. Love that.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

My friend Daniel Brooker, who I mentioned earlier, he runs that refuge widowers ministry. He always says this. He goes, Hey, he gets up in front of all the widowers in every retreat. He goes, Hey, listen, we're not here to tell you it's gonna be okay. That's not what we're gonna tell you. We're here to walk with you until you can say it's gonna be okay. Man, that's dynamic. It's crazy how that just like every one of these men just lean forward, they're like, Wow, I've got a brotherhood to walk with me.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

Yeah. The understanding that each of us needs to come to that place ourselves. Like we can try to speak a truth that might be exactly what the other person needs, but it's so much more effective when they come to that truth.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Yeah. And the other part of that for us is like we say, we meet you in your pain and provide a pathway through. And there that's where like having a guide is helpful, someone who's a little bit further down the track, who knows what you've gone through, who's been there, who can point out the pitfalls. Like if I'm climbing Mount Everest, I'm not doing it by myself. I want to hire a Sherpa. I want to know how many trekks have you made to the summit and back and survive this thing. Right. And that's what we want. We so we there is a pathway. We say often, there's no one right way to do this to heal from whatever these wounds are in your heart, but there's a thousand wrong ways to do it. So our job as the guide is just to help you stay away from the thousand wrong ways to do it, so you can really follow the big G guide or the big S Shepherd, the big T teacher, right? So you can really keep your eyes on him and he'll lead you through the valley and you don't have to fear. That's so good.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Yeah. And climbing Mount Everest, I would rather have the Sherpa who's been up there a bunch of times than the PhD who has studied the mountain.

unknown 34:29

You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Yes. So for someone who's interested in Nothing Is Wasted, what are some of the practical ways they can get connected?

How To Connect With The Ministry

SPEAKER_02 34:40

Yeah, there's a lot of things that we offer at Nothing Is Wasted. So you can think of it in three buckets. We offer content, community, and coaching. So we have a lot of great content. Probably the easiest, most accessible one is our podcast, Nothing Is Wasted Podcast, which we just interviewed Drew to share his story and a bit of his journey on that. And there's like 400 some stories of just people we've met along the journey and we've said, wow, look at how God has brought you through this. Can you come share your story? And it's just powerful to hear how God uniquely custom tailors everybody's journey. It's just incredible. And then we've got a lot of other content, master classes, many courses, different things that we've done. We've got our signature pain to purpose course, which is like it really came out of Drew a couple of things. All the podcast conversations I was having, the my own healing journey, the conversations I was having with counselors and pastors around healing. I was studying to be an ACBC biblical counselor before Amanda passed away. She was studying to be that as well. Just to kind of give you context, in 2019, I stepped away from pastoring the church to start doing this full-time. And in that, I started traveling and speaking and coaching people. And what I noticed when I was coaching people, didn't matter what their story was. It wasn't just like loss of a spouse. It was a lot of different kinds of stories. Out of all of those things, I started noticing some common denominators surface to the top of no matter what your story is, these are the main tenets of the pathway that you're going to have to walk through in order to go from what we call pain to purpose. And so that is the idea of the pain to purpose course. We, you know, now have the opportunity to launch it in churches all over, but people can go online and take it as a self-directed study. They can do it with one of our coaches, they can do it in a group, they can do it. But that's where we often point people to is like, hey, here's a great starting point is to take pain to purpose. And then there's a lot of ancillary content to that. And then, like you, we've got online community where we connect other people who've gone through similar things or the same things. You've found this that it's it's so isolating to go through what you're going through. And the lie the enemy wants us to believe is that you're the only one going through this. And man, we have two really great things right now. We have the power of technology and the promise of 1 Peter 5 that tells us,

Custom-Tailored Healing And Closing

SPEAKER_02 36:54

let us not forget there are saints all over the world suffering in the same way that we are. You pair those two things together, and we have an amazing opportunity right now to help other people find solidarity in what they're going through as a way to walk through it with others. So that's what our online community is about. And then we have coaches who we pair people with, just like I was talking about with guides, with a Sherpa who's gone through the exact same thing you've gone through. So if you come to nothing is wasted, and let's say your story is child loss, we'll match you with our child loss coach who that's their story. And then they've been trauma certified, certified through our pain to purpose pathway. They have a huge heart. Whether they are a pastor or not, whether they're a therapist or not, they have a huge heart and the skills to be able to walk with you through that journey. So that's ways to get connected. But if you're like, okay, that sounds like a whole lot. My suggestion would be go to nothing is wasted.com/slash start here. And we have six question assessment that will help you discover where you are on your pain pathway. There are actually six stages of a pain pathway, and we'll help you discover that and then kind of give you, hey, here's your next step. Like, here's here's some resources we would recommend to engage with if you're looking to go from this stage to this stage. You can't bypass any of the stages, by the way. You have to go through each one of them. It's part of the critical journey of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, unfortunately. And most of the time we get stuck or we wallow in it when we try to short circuit it. So you got to go through the whole thing. That's why scripture says, though I walk through the valley, it doesn't say though I pray to get out of the valley, right? It's I got to walk through it. That's the only way out of it. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

I'm definitely going to nothing is wasted.com/slash start here. And I hope many of you guys will join me. All the links are in the show notes to get connected to Davy and this awesome ministry. Davy, what's your favorite thing about healing?

SPEAKER_02 38:44

Oh, just seeing people walk in freedom. I mean, and again, that it is so custom tailored. Drew, I hear story after story after story after story. And my favorite thing is to see the thread that God is weaving in their story that is so unique to them. There's like images and metaphors and stuff that pop out where you're like, oh my gosh, look at that. Do you see that? Sometimes it's fun to point that out to people and they don't see it. And then other times it's fun when they've already done the work and they've seen it. And they're like, let me tell you how God has custom tailored my healing journey. You know, it's like what we referenced when you and I were talking about this on our podcast, but you mentioned something about the blind. Like Jesus never healed the blind man the same way. There's multiple instances of healing the blind man, but like one time it was spitting in the mud, another time it was, you know, it was all these different ways because he always is writing something new in everybody's story. And it never ceases to amaze me the new things that he brings in people's healing journey.

SPEAKER_01 39:41

Praise God. Davey, thank you so much for spending this time with us. Thanks, man. So go to nothingiswasted.comslash start here. And gentlemen, always remember you are God's beloved son. In you, he is well pleased.