Summary: Join us on the Death to Life podcast as we unravel profound stories of transformation and faith. From Paul Rayne's skeptic-to-believer journey sparked by a misplaced flyer to trials in the Zambian mission field and our own leap of faith, each narrative illustrates how life's unpredictability fosters spiritual growth. Through discussions on ministry, family dynamics, and the discovery of renewed purpose, we explore the resilience of faith amidst challenges, culminating in a journey that redefines grace, freedom, and the power of transformation.
View more resources on our website!
Timestamps:
0:00 - Transformation Through the Gospel
10:55 - Rapid Engagement and Mission Field Challenges
17:15 - Illegal Currency Exchange and Spiritual Transformation
21:01 - Door-to-Door Sales to Moving to Montana
30:33 - God's Expectations and Misconceptions About Performance
40:06 - Ministry Breakup and Pursuit of Bigger Events
56:04 - Transitioning to a New Ministry
1:13:32 - Discovering a New Understanding of God
1:25:16 - Freedom From Sin and Control
1:32:09 - Misunderstandings and Redemption in Parenting
Keywords: Transformation, Faith, Redemption, Skepticism, Spiritual Growth, Ministry, Challenges, Resilience, Grace, Belief Evolution
Summary: Join us on the Death to Life podcast as we unravel profound stories of transformation and faith. From Paul Rayne's skeptic-to-believer journey sparked by a misplaced flyer to trials in the Zambian mission field and our own leap of faith, each narrative illustrates how life's unpredictability fosters spiritual growth. Through discussions on ministry, family dynamics, and the discovery of renewed purpose, we explore the resilience of faith amidst challenges, culminating in a journey that redefines grace, freedom, and the power of transformation.
View more resources on our website!
Timestamps:
0:00 - Transformation Through the Gospel
10:55 - Rapid Engagement and Mission Field Challenges
17:15 - Illegal Currency Exchange and Spiritual Transformation
21:01 - Door-to-Door Sales to Moving to Montana
30:33 - God's Expectations and Misconceptions About Performance
40:06 - Ministry Breakup and Pursuit of Bigger Events
56:04 - Transitioning to a New Ministry
1:13:32 - Discovering a New Understanding of God
1:25:16 - Freedom From Sin and Control
1:32:09 - Misunderstandings and Redemption in Parenting
Keywords: Transformation, Faith, Redemption, Skepticism, Spiritual Growth, Ministry, Challenges, Resilience, Grace, Belief Evolution
The world doesn't think that the gospel can change your life, but we know that it can and that's why we want you to hear these stories, stories of transformation, stories of freedom, people getting free from sin and healed from sin because of Jesus. This is death to life.
Speaker 2:The version of Christianity that we had been plowing our lives into for the last 20 years had majorly let us down, so we were much more open. I remember saying to Carolyn if Christianity does to you what happened to us, I don't know that it's legit. I don't know that it's the real thing. I don't know that I want it.
Speaker 1:Yo, welcome to the Death to Life podcast. My name is Richard Young and today's episode is with Paul Reign. And if you've heard Hannah Reign's testimony which, oh man, powerful testimony we had back in 2023, I think you're going to really appreciate Paul. And this is a story of a guy who found out that all that Christianity had offered him didn't um, it hadn't delivered on its promises, and perhaps there was something better. So I think you're going to appreciate this episode. Let's just jump into it A little bit of legalism in this episode, so that's a warning. Watch out, keep your head on a swivel and hear how Paul's life's been changed by the gospel. So buckle up, strap in Love y'all, appreciate y'all. Here's Paul. Where does your spiritual story start, my friend? Where are you taking us?
Speaker 2:Well, you know it was. I was dating a girl from work and her dad who I never, actually ever met. Um, and even the girl herself were a little bit into Worldwide Church of God. I don't know if you've heard of that um Plain Truth Magazine, um, this was back in the mid 80s. Uh, herbert W Armstrong, they were. They were Sabbath keepers, they were, I understand. Later they they switched back to Sunday, but they had. I read some of their articles and I was not spiritual at all, I was just my love in life. At that point I was probably 20 years of age. My love in life was hand-guiding. My dad and I were into hand-guiding. We used to go off for the weekend, jump off hills and fly across the country. We just we loved it. So I was off, so I'd had that little introduction to spiritual things. But it didn't really land, I wouldn't say. But I was off hand-guiding for a week this time and the a church in my town, coventry, uk. They were going to be having some meetings, some evangelistic meetings, and so all the members of the church got there Sunday morning and they were going to go off for letterboxing, which I don't know if that's a British term, but essentially they were going to go door to door giving out these flyers for this evangelistic series.
Speaker 1:And this young girl is that like a mailbox here in the United States.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in the UK people would actually have a hole in their front door with a little flap and you could lift the flap up and you could drop a letter in there or a flyer. And if the houses were all next to each other, you just do the one and then you do the next and you do the next. So this young girl, simple girl, she gets on the wrong bus. She didn't have a vehicle. She was like 13 years old. She gets on the wrong bus, goes to completely the wrong part of town, part of town that they didn't plan on covering with these flyers. Anyway, it was the part of town that my parents lived in, where I lived, and so this flyer comes through the mail and I was off hangriding, like I said, but my mom, knowing that I was a little bit interested in spiritual things, puts this flyer in my bedroom. So when I come home it's huh, that's interesting. It was a revelation seminar. Not that I knew what one of those was at the time, but I thought I'll go along. So it was at the college where I had studied. So I go and I didn't want to get there early, I didn't want to get confronted by any religious nutcases or anything. So I'm not going to stand in the lobby and get into conversation, I'm just going to show up dead at 730 or whatever it was, I forget. So I get there and I have to fill in this little thing with my name and they give me a Bible, and then I go into the auditorium where it's happening and again, I don't want to sit next to people, but there was plenty of room. So, you know, I found this spot and just before it starts, this other guy comes in and it's like there's loads of places to sit and he sits like one seat over from me and it's like a theater style where the top row is high and the bottom row is low, and so I say high to him, and then it gets started, and then the evangelist comes on after the intros and starts with a presentation, and part way through the presentation, this kid next to me stands up and says no, I disagree, oh mercy, oh no, people think he's with me, he's not with me. I don't even know who this guy is and in the end he's so disruptive that what I later understand were the deacons and the pastor who they'd squirt him out.
Speaker 1:And meetings carry on, but yeah that was the start of my spirit. What did he disagree about? He's just no, the Babylon wasn't the gold head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was. I honestly don't know. I was just. This is a very, very start of my walk with the Lord and I probably forgotten more than I remember. But I do remember that crazy guy and six weeks. It was a six week series of meetings. After a few weeks they transferred out of the college into the local church and the meetings carried on. I went every night. My grandmother came with me some of the time my parents thought I was Waco. It's. Yeah, my dad actually, I think, was out of the country at the time. He was here in the US, but my mom wasn't, wasn't super excited by it. But my grandmother came and after six weeks I got baptized. I was on to. I was excited. I gained all this information and I tried to share some of the information with my dad. When he got back I said dad, the Pope, he's not the guy, he's not what you think he is. And my dad was like poor, I don't know what you're into, but it sounds really wacky. And I started. I started telling him all the crazy things that you wouldn't really start if you were trying to share the good news with somebody. It's just what was exciting to me and my dad and I got into quite some arguments. I remember, I remember my dad saying to me he says so, does this, this church that you're going to, does it teach the 10 commandments? I says oh yeah, dad, the 10 commandments, and it is really important. He said does it say in the 10 commandments something about honoring your father? I said, yeah, he says you might start with that one and I was flawed. They didn't talk too much about it was mentioned but it was mostly prophecy stuff.
Speaker 1:What was the good news that you felt like you came away with, Like, if you could say what is the news now that you experience this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the good news is that God has a a truth, he has a system of truth, he has a day to worship on, he has a law that needs to be kept and, yeah, it's that's what we got to do. We can't just be ignoring God. We've got to do what he asked us to do. Sounds like good news. Well, you know now I've got to say this. Oftentimes when you watch YouTube I like watching YouTube and they say, if they're doing a review or something they're saying, stick around to the end because I'm going to tell you which is the best one to buy or whatever. And I understand why they do that because YouTubers get paid by watch minutes. If you watch to the end, they're getting paid more. That's why they put the T's at the end. But in this podcast, definitely the best is at the end. So you can't skip to the end because you got to have the lead up. But if you short a time, just go to the end, because the good stuff's at the end. But for where I was at that time, the gospel was definitely information. It wasn't really about a person. There wasn't a bad of God that loved me and died to save me Although intellectually that was definitely part of it but it was information. It was what was right and what was wrong. God's done his part and now it's up to us to do it. It was something I needed to do I think is what I would say it was and I was going to do it, with or without his help.
Speaker 1:CB let's go, all right, lr.
Speaker 2:So I joined this church and I start going to the young adult meetings that they had and across the room at one of these young adult meetings was the cutest girl. She was spiritual, she was vivacious, she was a bit of a rascal and I was attracted, for sure, but I really. I went to an old boys' school till I was 16 years of age. Girls were scary so I really wasn't that confident around girls. Anyway, a church member invited me to an event and also invited Karen, that cute girl, and we got to know each other a bit at that event and anyway we ended up going out on a date and 21 days after that first date we got engaged, which was fast. But Karen and I have since discovered of course we didn't know this then, but we've since discovered that we're both pretty. Go for it, people. A little bit's good, a lot's better.
Speaker 1:CB Did you say 21 days? Is that what you said?
Speaker 2:LR, we went from first date and we only had two dates. So we went from first date to engagement in 21 days with get this with all four parents in agreement. And you would have to know Caroline's parents, particularly Karen's dad bless his eyes passed away now, but Caroline's dad was super, super conservative and Caroline had had like oh forgive me though if I get this number wrong but probably 15 boyfriends, some of them serious. So Karen and his dad had seen all these boys. So I think when he saw one that was maybe half decent, it was like he was actually the first one. We went back to Karen and his parents and he's. Whilst I was in the shower one morning, karen's dad said to Caroline that's my son-in-law in there and Caroline was like yikes, we weren't even talking that.
Speaker 1:CB. I know this was only after four days LR.
Speaker 2:This was like, yeah, just a couple of weeks. And my parents loved Caroline because she was a good Christian girl and I'd become a good Christian. So they're like, oh yeah, you guys will get on great. Now, after that, caroline had. Before we got engaged she'd already signed up to go to the mission field. She's a midwife Even though we're engaged. We felt, since she'd made that commitment to God to go to the mission field before we got engaged, she should carry that out. So she goes off to the boonies of Zambia real boonies. Takes you two days to even get to the hospital. Hospital doesn't have power and anyway. So she's out there being the midwife. She gets sick with malaria over and over again. Eventually she has to come back. So she comes back and we get married six months later, lr.
Speaker 1:So how soon did you know we were going to get married? Three or four days, in Two weeks, in LR.
Speaker 2:Probably a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks we started talking serious and we had one of those moments. We were driving the car, I was driving, caroline was sitting there and Caroline had been an Adventist Christian all of her growing up life. I had not. I came into the church when I was 21. And we've got into inappropriate stuff, but on that, this is like our third or fourth time spending time together. We just shared it all. Karim had told me about her past experiences and I told her about mine, and we just had total freedom with each other and we covered a lot of ground real quick. So, yeah, is this like?
Speaker 1:1985?.
Speaker 2:Is this 1985? That's my guess 1988, we got married 1988. So this was yeah, this was the spring of 88.
Speaker 1:So that's three weeks is a lot for 1988. Why were things going fast back then? No, I think they were going normal, like I think the 50s or the 40s. Like you get back from the war, you get married in three weeks, not 1988. That's. But yeah, man, I love it.
Speaker 2:Well, recently our daughter podcast 119, our daughter got married and she was almost as quick as us, but not quite, and she was 26,. Her husband now is 25, I think, and they went fast. And some people say are you okay with it? They don't know our story. And it's yeah, we're okay with it. That's awesome. That's awesome. We did, after the youth pastor, pull us aside and say, hey, this is going way too fast, you guys need to slow up. But we were, there was nothing going to stop us.
Speaker 1:So how did that go? How did marriage go? Talk to us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was good Straight after getting married. So Caroline comes back from Africa. We get married straight after the wedding, like three days after the honeymoon, we go off to back to the mission field. Now I'm going and we go out to Zambia. And I traveled I'd been to the US and Europe and different countries, but I'd never been to Africa. I'd seen pictures. But when I got to Africa, what I was not prepared for was culture shock. This is Africa all around you. It's above you, it's beneath you, you can smell it. It's like I just don't like it. I just what am I even doing here? Right, I mean, I'm new in the faith. I'm new to this girl who's in her element. She's a midwife. She's delivering babies in the sand. I remember I was in worship in the outside and sister Caroline, sister Caroline, we need you. And Caroline disappears off to deliver this baby in the sand. I've left there in worship and it's like what am I doing here? How did I get here? I don't want to be, I want to go back to England, I don't want to be a mission. So Caroline continued to get sick. She got really sick. It's a miracle that she's still alive. The church said just get the first plane out. It doesn't matter how much it costs get the first plane out. So we did. We got the first plane out. We came back to the UK and, yeah, we rented a little cottage. And that's really when normal married life started for us, six months after we actually got married, because the mission field was just a. To me it was just a blur.
Speaker 1:Wow, but you wanted to like. You were all in for the faith.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was well when we get back. So now we're flat broke. We just come back to the mission field. We bought some African furniture back with us little carved tables and pictures and I meant this is off script. But we had a vehicle that we had gone to South Africa to buy and we bought the vehicle with US dollars, which are very sought after, and we exchanged these US dollars for South African Rand on the black market. Not that we knew it was the black market, we knew it was Dodge, because if you went to the bank you got 10 to one, but if you dealt with this guy you got 40 to one. We gave him US dollars and he gave us the local currency and we were super happy. We got a good deal. We found out later if the police had caught us they would have just shot us and him. Yeah, that was strictly illegal stuff, but we didn't know any of that. Anyway, we bought this vehicle, this Mazda, and we used it for a bit, but then, when we were leaving, we had to sell the Mazda. Now we're selling the Mazda in Zambia and we bought it for a thousand US dollars, but now we're selling it for 12,000 US dollars but we're not getting the money back in US dollars, we're getting it in Zambian Quacha, which is a soft currency, meaning it's got no value outside of the country, or at least back then. We are like almost millionaires. But we've only got a few days to spend all this money because we're leaving and we can't take it with us. We buy all this fabric and this carvings and pictures and all kinds of stuff and we pay for our tickets to come back, first class British Airways. We get the crate made and all that stuff comes on the airplane with us and we're both sick as dogs we've both got malaria. By this point. When we get back to the UK our only way of having any money is to sell this stuff. So we sell it and we rent this little cottage and I get a corporate job. My training was in telecommunications, so now I'm just installing radio towers and pages and that kind of stuff. But our spiritual life was good Somebody introduced us to in my notes I call this the Gaisley days. There's a little town in southern England called Gaisley and they were having some American speakers come over, pretty conservative Christian speakers who were really preaching heavy on the law. We didn't understand all of this back then. But we went to those meetings and we were entranced. It was like man, these people are serious. I mean, at church some people are serious, but most people just seemed to us like they were going through the motions and they weren't really serious. Karen and I were pretty serious, like I say, going off to the mission field and stuff. We start going to these meetings and they're talking about real good stuff lifestyle changes and your diet and not eating meat and no dairy and not mixing fruit and veg and not drinking with your meals and all kinds of what we thought was really interesting stuff. Like I say, karen and I are all or nothing.
Speaker 1:Was it in the way of good life's advice, like best practices for living healthy, or was it in the sense like if this is what God demands from you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is the way God's people live. If you're serious about preparing for Jesus to come again, these are some of the things that need to happen in your life preparing for translation, understanding the prophecies more deeply. And by this point, karen had started going door to door selling Christian books. She was having great experiences. She was meeting people and telling them all about the Lord and the Ten Commandments, and all of that. I was working this corporate job, which was good money, and they gave me a car, but I was getting a little bit frustrated. It's like Karen's having the time of her life. She tells me all these great stories and I'm stuck in this bunker down here with all these fans were, in a way, and I got to figure out how all this stuff works and why it isn't working. Eventually, I give up my corporate job and we both go off selling books door to door. Again, we're earners. If there's something to do, we will do it. We have great time. We're pretty broke again. We're living in a travel trailer at this point. We started a little church in Lutterworth, england, where John Wycliffe was the rector years and years before. We're giving Bible studies as well as selling these books. We sell books and then, if people want Bible studies, we give them Bible studies. Now we've got 14 Bible studies a week and we're not dropping the pamphlet off at the door and then saying we'll come back next week. We go in the home, both of us, and we sit down there for two hours and we go through this stuff. What are you studying? What?
Speaker 1:are you preaching?
Speaker 2:Just yeah, we were going through the Trinity, we were going through the law, we were going through the church we were a part of was the Adventist church. This was basically the Adventist church fundamental beliefs we were going through. The studies were from a ministry called Steps to Life. John Grossbold wrote them years ago, I think, when he was employed by the denomination. Anyway, we got all these Bible studies. Some of the people got baptized and we're going through a study with a lady and the husband is just sat in the corner and eventually he says I'm interested in this. What do you want to do? Do you want to sit in? He says would you go back to the beginning? He says, sure, we'll go back to the beginning. We go back to the beginning and we go through 20 plus studies with this couple and they come into church regularly. They seem earnest. And then we show up one day and they say we've got some sad news. We're going to be getting a divorce. I'm thinking, no, that's not supposed to happen. You're just learning the truth. How can you get a divorce now? It just didn't make sense. It was a bit of a wake-up call to Caroline and I. So we're giving these people all this information but it's not actually changing their lives. Then we started to question ourselves Are we on the right track here? Anyway, we kept going to those meetings down in Gaisley, england, and there was a couple of families came over from the US. They came from Montana and they were a little bit different from the other speakers. They were speaking more about family and marriage and dying to self. I thought what is dying to self? What even is self? We connected with these families. They were into country living and child training and all of this. Caroline and I man the Bible studies have fizzled out a bit. The church linked up with the mother church. We could move to the country. I call Caroline and wifey. She says let's do it, let's do it, let's move to the country. We couldn't afford to move to rural England. It was very expensive. But there's a little piece of land right next to England called Ireland, the Republican Island. Over there land is cheap. If we saved hard, if we worked hard now I was part-time working for the corporate job again If we saved hard, we could probably just buy a place and renovate it and we could do it debt-free because we were not wanting to get any debt. That's exactly what we did. We moved to the Republic of Ireland. We didn't know a soul, we almost didn't do it. We're ready to do it, we're ready to pull the trigger. We're ready to do it. We'd been over there, we'd looked at, looked around, but then, in doing some research, found out that the Republic of Ireland is 97% Catholic. And I'm thinking, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if we want to move to Catholic country. Understanding some of our religious beliefs Would help you understand why. But in the end we figured, you know, let's just do it. So we go over there. Karen is 20 weeks pregnant now with our first child. We move over to this travel trailer that doesn't have any water or electricity. We had to go and get water from a neighbor and we eventually got the electricity connected and, yeah, it was wild. But we have our first kid and our second kid both there in in Ireland and we live in a simple life here. Now I've got a computer business, I'm selling computers to the Catholic schools and we're still listening to these cassette tapes about family life and living in the country and dying to self and Were you dying to self I think so. I think so at least I was more aware of when I wasn't, and it was a time, I think, of frustration in many ways Understanding what I needed to do, but not necessarily Understanding how to do that, but definitely was making a bit of progress. Our marriage was good.
Speaker 1:God.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean praise the Lord. I I love those Irish days. I often wonder, carolyn, I often wonder what would have happened if we stayed there. What happened was this ministry whose cassettes we'd been listening to. We'd actually got quite friendly with those families that came over from Montana and we would. We would talk backwards and forwards on the phone and Cassette messages, we would record a voice message and mail it off and was like a primitive version of what's happening. Yeah, that's a good listen to it and record a tape and send it back, was spread out by weeks other than moments, but we covered a lot of ground anyway. Eventually they they called me up and they said, paul and Carolyn, would you consider leaving Ireland and Moving to Montana? And you're in our ministry and I'm like yes. I didn't need to pray about that, as that would be epic. I always wanted to live in the US. We almost moved to the US earlier. I missed that part out, but, karen, it was a point of contention, because Karen said you can go, but I'm not going.
Speaker 1:What part of the US was the first, the first option. Say again what part of the US was the first? Michigan?
Speaker 2:okay, michigan, to join a independent publishing house. We actually came over and we had a tour and I was all for it and Karen was like no way, her father just passed away and she said you can go, I'm not going. So of course I'm not sure but so this time Carolyn is there's been a few years since her father passed her Her mother's stable. My parents are good. None of the parents were super happy with the thought of us going to America. That's a lot further away than Ireland, but we put it out before the Lord. We said if we can sell our house Because we'd renovated a house by this point, and if we can sell our business because I had a computer business and All those computers I sold had a warranty and I was the warranty, I'd come and fix it. And if we could get visas, if those three things would come together, we would see that as God moving us to Montana. We sold the house Before it even went on the market. We just contacted the guy who sold us the land and he says, yeah, I got somebody who buy that. So we bought it and made a healthy profit. So that was cool To sell the business. This was December 1999, if you remember what was going on. Why 2k? Why 2k? You try selling a computer business in December 1999? Well, I was convinced that it was all a hocus pocus, nonsense, and the guy who wanted to buy the business was also convinced it was hocus pocus. But we thought it's best to wait till January 3 or 4 before we actually sign on the dotted line. So when nothing happened, I sold the business to him. We got our visas. All of a sudden the rule changed that you could have a temporary visa and a permanent visa at the same time, or the two applications in at the same time. That was new. Over we come. We come over to Montana and we start working for this ministry. Me, as the my title was the general manager. I was just in charge of sales and the website and the newsletter and Everything and the other two families. There were the two families. They were out speaking most weekends and going on long road trips and stuff. Cut a long story short one of those families. There was quite some disagreements within the ministry between those two families and they went their separate ways. The one family left To go and start another ministry and the one family stayed and the family that stayed said, hey, we want you to stay with us, carry on being the general manager and Maybe even we can go out speaking together. So we said, okay, yeah, we'll stay with the ministry. The truth of the matter is we didn't have any choice at that point because our application for permanent residency was based on employment and we weren't at the point. If we'd left the employment, we would have had to leave the country, go back to Motherland. But our heart was here, so we carry on and after a few years they asked us to start speaking. So now Carol in and I'm still the general manager and we're out speaking five, six, seven times a year at first, and then it increased. And by the time we got into what year would it be like 2008, 2009, ish? The ministry we were a part of had Family camp meetings, as they were called. They then it got changed, the name got changed to family camps and then family retreats, and it was we just rent a building and we would go and do a seminar for Wednesday through Sunday, and there was a hundred two hundred, five hundred seven hundred at some of them and we had ten of these a year that we went around.
Speaker 1:And what's the main thing you're preaching? What are you? What's?
Speaker 2:it's that death to self thing and it is, we would call it, practical Christian living, how to have a good marriage, how to have obedient children. So there's a lot of parenting. My wife would speak to the other mothers, our kids, who were. They started speaking, hannah and Caleb. They were speaking with us in the pulpit when they were four and six years old, stood on stalls and when they were five and seven, and eight and nine, and then eventually doing messages on their own.
Speaker 1:Were these messages, were they like? You learned them first from this family that had brought you in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and a lot of it was based on the writings of Ellen White. If the listeners know who that is, it was. It was basically that information as we understood it.
Speaker 1:Was beneficial to your family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, regurgitated out in a way that was Maybe easier to understand. And so we would give the messages. And then my wife, particularly, would have appointments with people. Moms would come and say, oh my, my little Jimmy, he's a rascal, what can I do to bring him into line? And and Carolyn would give hours and hours of Not so much counsel because we weren't counselors, but like coaching to these moms, and we would do the same to married couples, although it's no secret that I just Do not like counts. I don't feel like I'm a counselor, it's, I'm a simple guy. I'm a big picture guy and you start getting to all this detail is he just does my head in. It's like Yo, just if you've got, if there's something in your life that you shouldn't be doing, just stop doing it. Why do we have to make it complicated?
Speaker 1:There's this Bob Newhart clip where I've seen it.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's like stop it, stop it. Yeah, that was me, that was me that I watched that and it's like that is me.
Speaker 1:That is I mean, which is isn't very helpful, but what, what did you feel like it was a powerful help in your in the rain family following all this council and it was some success, yeah definitely I wouldn't trade that.
Speaker 2:I wish I had More of what I know now sure gonna talk about at the end, but I didn't at that point. But if I had my time over again I would definitely have that. But add the gospel into it, because Both of our kids to this day are solid in the Lord and part of that, I think, is because how they were raised it. It was hard because now we're the only family. There's two families, there was three and four at some points, but basically it was for the length of time we were involved. There was just two families and we're the family with the little kids and so we're speaking about parenting and stuff and obviously people are watching our kids to see. So is what Paul and Karen presenting here? Is it really working for them? We weren't really pretty strict on our kids. They couldn't. They were almost like PKs. They couldn't be normal kids. They had to behave themselves and so we had to. We didn't have to, but we did Control a lot of the stuff in their life that I wish we hadn't. But we were doing that because we felt like we were in a golf ball. We felt like everybody was watching us and if Hannah and Caleb were goofing around when Doing stupid stuff. That was a reflection on the ministry and we just couldn't have that.
Speaker 1:So I think I asked you this earlier. I think you you missed my question. Who is God? At this point, there's God. Who was he and was he happy with you? You personally, paul rain.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did miss that question. It's all good, I you are, you are on it. You were in the zone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Who was gone? God was. God was up there outlining the way that I and the rain family should behave, the way we should be, the way we should perform. We, like I said, we read a lot of and white books and there's a lot of stuff in there to do, and we just saw it as our job To do all that stuff. And God who was God expected me to do that stuff. He was going to provide the power, you know, and he'd set the example. Yeah, he set the pattern and that was for us to do. So. God was the God to be. His example was to be followed. Now, what we didn't understand Was the motive, the power behind all of that. We thought we did, we thought the power was in prayer and Bible study. And there is power in prayer and Bible study, but we didn't know the power was in knowing there was a God that loved you and that you were his kid and that you were secure in him and now you could just live life, just loving other people. Really, sometimes, when we were speaking, we would have people come to us and say why don't you weave more of the gospel into your presentations, more of Jesus into your presentations and I can honestly say I was confused by the question. We're just talking about stuff you need to do, what we're not really talking about the gospel and what? What does the gospel have to do with any of this anyway? So somehow we were definitely under the law, not under grace. We didn't even understand that concept. I don't think.
Speaker 1:Was was God happy with you or just depended on how you were performing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was. See, that's a hard question Was God happy with me? I would say, if you asked me that at the time, I would say most definitely. I mean, I was a church elder. I led family worship most days in our home. I commanded my household after me, just like Abraham did in the Old Testament. I was working for him. I knew what I was preaching about, I knew my stuff. My kids were good. They weren't rebellious. So I would say, yeah, god was happy with me. But there were. I think if I could answer that question more now, it was like I was giving God. It was like I was trying to pay God back for something rather than just accepting what he had done for us, and it was. This clicks into something I was going to share later.
Speaker 1:But see what.
Speaker 2:I recently heard a message and the preacher I can't remember what the message was about, but the preacher said something. And you know how sometimes you're listening to a sermon and it's just one thing is said and you're like, oh man, and then your mind just goes off on what that one thing was and you don't hear anything else of the message. And this preacher said because, or so that that was the term that he said because are you living your life because of what God has done for us or so that you can impress God? Not that he said that, but that's where my mind went for where it was, and this was just maybe four or five months ago and I'm thinking, yeah, I think most of my Christian life I'm doing stuff ministry, obedience so that one day I'll be good enough to be saved, I'll be part of the rent, I'll be translated. Not, I guess it was all about me and my righteousness. I know it was the label I would have put on it at the time would have been yeah, that's Christ's righteousness working in me. But now I think it was a lot of just my own efforts and it was totally separate, I feel, from a love response to a God who had died for me, and if I could give this podcast a title in fact, in my notes here I made this title just before we got on A rich, young ruler is totally flawed by the gospel. That would be me. Not that I was rich or young, but I was rich and increased with goods but somebody who had been doing all this stuff not from my youth, though, because I wasn't Christian in my youth, but since I understood stuff, I'd been doing my best to keep the law, but it was devoid, not totally devoid, but nowhere near full of the spirit or of Christ, as I wish it had been, as I understand it now. Yeah, I think if God could have just broken through Paul's brain at that time, he would have said Paul, it's great, All that you're doing is great, but you're only understanding 1%. There's another 99 I want to reveal to you, but I just wasn't ready. I was busy doing what I was doing.
Speaker 1:So you're doing this? For how many years are you involved in the speaking and doing all this ministry?
Speaker 2:We were on the road for 50, 16 years, 10 to 15, sometimes more meetings a year. These aren't just weekend meetings. This is a week-long meeting, sometimes back-to-back, sometimes overseas.
Speaker 1:So this is a pretty big. I've never you haven't said that this is a big ministry.
Speaker 2:Then no, it's just two families, just two families. We had a circuit. We had what we called camp hosts and they would actually organize the event. So they would rent a camp ground or a retreat center and they would send out all the invitations and do all the meals, organize all of that. We would just show up and preach. Now there was some crossover. My role as general manager meant that I was fairly involved with the hosts and there was some turnover in hosts so we had to train the new ones in. But yet there was. We knew by first name thousands of people around the country and we would see the same people year after year. We would have an event in Oklahoma and Indiana and Virginia and Hawaii and Florida and Washington, all over, and sometimes people would go to more than one and that used to mess me up. I would see this person and say I know you, but you normally go to the Washington one. What are you doing here in Indiana? Oh yeah, we were visiting family and so we thought we'd come. That would always throw me. It was a family affair. My wife was speaking, our kids were speaking. Our kids grew up in that culture. It was pretty conservative. There weren't many people there Ladies in pants, it was mostly skirts. We weren't running around with our shirts off playing freeze tag or whatever. It was pretty conservative, but they were good days. They were good days. My wife got pretty sick with all the travel. She's not really. She's not built for that kind of a life. I'm more extroverted. I loved it. We would get back on a Sunday night on the late flight. Monday I would have to go through all the money from all the sales that we had made and bank it all, and Tuesday I'd be ready to go again. And Carolyn's like do we really have to go again in 10 days? I don't think I'm going to be ready. And we were homeschooling the kids so they had to catch up with school. But I want to fast forward this a little bit if it's okay with you, unless you've got a question.
Speaker 1:No, I'm just on the ride right now.
Speaker 2:So the next subtitle in my notes here is the Ministry Breakup. We were just super close to this other family. We had other families come and go, but the main two families. We'd been in ministry now for 18, 19 years together. We'd been on vacation together. We'd been around the world three times over together. We knew each other's weaknesses. We knew everybody's ins and outs. When you're on the road and you're exhausted and you get to the hotel at two in the morning when who's got the keys for the rental car, I don't know where we left them. Where's the pizza gone? I don't know where the pizza is either. You just get into the nitty gritty of life and I'm a fairly strong personality and I have my wife says an endless stream of ideas. I'm always coming up with something, and so this ministry that we're a part of, I'm feeling like going a little bit stale. I don't know that it really was. Maybe it was going stale to me, not necessarily to the participants, or maybe not even to the other family, which was an older couple, just the two of them. At this point. Their kids have grown and gone, and I had these ideas of things we could do in the ministry and it caused some contention. Now the other couple. They were in the ministry from the start, so they were the co-founders with this other family that had now left ages ago. So really I should have deferred to them, but they were very gracious. They treated Caroline and I in many ways as equals with them. When we would go speaking, the main message of the seminar would be 11 o'clock Saturday and the other guy could have taken that spot, that slot, every time. He was older than me, been in the ministry longer, but he said no, paul, we're equal, so you do it one year and I'll do it the next. For one year, when it came to the schedule, paul would always speak at 11 o'clock Saturday and the following year the other guy would, so we would pay the same. Everything was very equal and I took that as I had equal say in all the things we did. And sure enough, they were very gracious and we did. But then there came a point when it's hard to go back and think it through and I haven't. But we started having disagreements on stuff. I wanted to do this kind of event and they wanted to do that kind of event and I wanted to do this and they wanted to do that. And Caroline, my wife, she is just the master at smoothing things over and I would get all passionate about national family retreat. That was one of the things I was really wanting to get off the ground. That would be like a flagship event. And the other family were like no, let's just keep them small, we don't need a big one. And I said, yeah, but we could invite this person and that person and we could have booths and we could make it a bigger and grander. And Caroline would like, yeah, I think what Paul's trying to say is this and she would smooth things over.
Speaker 1:What do you think your motivation was? To go bigger? Were you just a little bored? Or what do you think your main motive was Go big or go home? It was bigger is better. Huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, bigger is better. That's where I was. We'd gone to some events that maybe some of the listeners will recognize. We'd been to GYC and ASI and it's like that was fun. You meet loads and meet people there and we don't want to get that kind of size because we don't want to have to rent a convention center in the middle of town. All our retreats were bad in the boonies, so you're restricted on the size of the event. But yeah, we can go from 150 and we can aim for 500 or 600 or maybe even a thousand and just reach more people rather than dragging our bodies around 100 here and 150 there. Why don't we go to an event and have 500 and all the networking that can go on? So that was my thinking. Carolyn got sick and she got stressed out with some of the disagreements that I and the other family would have in our admin meeting, and so Carolyn and she'll share her story, I think at some point. But Carolyn says I'm out of this. It's way too stressful for me, my health isn't up to it. I just want out of the admin committee, as we called it. So sure, I'd love you there, but I don't want you to get stressed out. So now it was just me and the two others in the ministry and we would sort and I don't want to paint it bad Probably 80% of everything we were just totally united on it was just some of the stuff we saw differently. We then, by this point we were living in Arizona that's from the other family we were living at in Arizona and we we hated it in Arizona. We wanted to go back to Montana. So we did. We moved back to Montana and the ministry was still good. We could still have our admin meetings on the phone it was before zoom, but we'd have a conference call once a week and we'd see each other at events and but then things just started to go a bit weird and Carolyn and I knew it was going weird. We started to get in weird emails that we didn't understand them. I said to the other family. I said I just get the feeling that stuff is not, it's not good here. And they said, yeah, we're coming to Montana. We want to get together with you and Carolyn face to face, and it sounded on a mess. Are we breaking up? Yeah, no, surely not. That was about. The idea of breaking up at this point was inconceivable. In fact, we shared some of the emails that we were getting with my parents. I respect my parents greatly, they're of the same faith and I just said can you just read some of this and tell me what you think? And they told us what they thought and I didn't believe them. I said, no, you guys, it's not that, it's definitely it's not that these guys are with us, we're one Anyway. So I couldn't wait for this two months in the future face to face meeting because the tension was high and I just wanted it resolved. So I said look, you don't live very far from Vegas, I can get a flight down to Vegas. Why don't we just meet in the airport? I'll fly down in the morning, we can meet, and I'll fly back in the evening. And they said, yeah, let's do it. And I got a ticket for the next day, I think it was, and Carolyn said I am not going. She was out of it. This is way too stressful for me. I wish I was a little bit more intimidated by stress, but I'm not. It's like I was a little bit nervous flying down there, but I was more curious, more wanting resolution. We meet up in Vegas, we find a quiet part of the airport and they said it's good to get together, we've got something for you. And they give me a letter sized brown envelope and I said what's in here? And they said you can open it. So I opened it and it's a typed up page and they said we're going to read it to you, so you just follow along and I'm like this is weird but I could see the title was severance package. I knew that, yikes, things are really bad. I knew they were bad, but this is really bad. So they read through. Basically, because of Carolyn being sick, we weren't performing as we should and oh, there's a bit of the story. I've got to tell you here self incriminating part of the story in total transparency, and this contributed to the problem and it was just one of those things. One of my responsibilities in the ministry was to run payroll and to pay for the state and fed taxes and withholding some stuff, and I had made an error on my dear wife's payroll. I'd have been paying her like I forget the exact number, but like $25 a week too much. We didn't use a payroll processing company, it was just a spreadsheet and this had been going on for a long time. And when the other family discovered it, because it was a shared spreadsheet, it was there for anybody to look at in the ministry. When they looked at it and they discovered it, we owed, or Carolyn had been paid $5,000 too much and I was devastated. I thought if it could have been anybody but not my wife, that looks bad. So they said are you going to have to pay it back. And I said, yeah, I get that, I get that. And so we did. We paid it back. But I think that went a little way or maybe a long way, I can't judge but to eroding the trust that we had. And it was super unfortunate, and I think sometimes the devil just gets in there and does that kind of stuff, but that was one thing. Now, as I'm going down to Vegas, carolyn gave me her resignation. She typed it out and she said if it seems appropriate for you, because I didn't know what I was going to she said if it seems appropriate to you, just let them know I'm done. She just couldn't handle it anymore. The stress was, her health was a mess. She was in the middle of some surgeries and her hearing was all messed up. She could hardly hear and anyway. So I go down there. We read this and I realize shoot, it's ministry days are over, this is it, we're fired. In fact they didn't fire us. They said you can resign or we can fire you either way. And I was at that point relieved, I think, because, okay, the stress is over. But just being brutally honest, I was livid, I was infuriated, not that you would ever have known that. But it's man we have given. We came to this country for this ministry. We have given 18 years and now you just toss us aside. Now I don't want in any way to portray the other couple in a bad light. I think if I had been in their shoes, with their life experiences and their needs and biases, I might have done the exact same thing. Zero condemnation, but it still hurt you. It was horrendous. It was I'd gone. What am I now? I'm 58 now. This was five or six years ago, so I'm like 52 years of age. Nothing, nothing had ever hit me in life like this. You know the feeling of being betrayed, being dumped, just ah, it was good wrenching. And where was God in this? I don't even want to talk to you guys. I don't know what this is about. I don't know what to do with this ministry now. I don't know what to do with what I stand for. I don't know what to do with the church I belong to. It's all messed up in my head.
Speaker 1:I'm just really not Really gutted, to use a British term. You were gutted.
Speaker 2:Yes, that was right, Absolutely gutted. I just went around in a trance for ages and I said to caravan what are we going to do? What are we going to do? I'm unemployed for the first time in my life. It's like well. Well, what we were going to do in the ministry that we just left is because caravan couldn't travel so much because of our illnesses, which I thought were probably only temporary. We were going to start some YouTube. Youtube were just starting to get big or big in our eyes. We thought we could take the presentations that we'd been given at the camp meetings and we could then condense them and give them as YouTubes. That's what we were going to do under the umbrella of the previous ministry. But now we thought why don't we just start our own ministry, our own 501c3, and just do what we were going to do when we can still travel? We'll just have to organize it ourselves. So we did. That's exactly what we did. I think we got fired in August and by October time, november time, it became public and pretty much straight away we had the 501c3 set up. We had the name, we had the website. I worked like a crazy man and within a few weeks of everybody, knowing that we were gone from the one ministry, we were up and going with the other. So we started doing these YouTubes. Soon as the stress was off, carolyn's health just went great I tell you, stress is a killer and she just got so much better. So then we started traveling again, we started doing some retreats and, as what we had been, doing?
Speaker 1:How was all this with the kids? Did they feel the brunt, did they feel the weight of this thing happening? Great question.
Speaker 2:Hannah Eldest had left home by this point and she saw what was going on. She has her degree in biblical counseling, her master's even, and she is very tuned into this kind of stuff. And she was saying parents, you've got to get out, you got to get out. We're like, but we can't get out. It's what we do, Get out and do what? To me it was like going along in an airplane and saying get out. What do you mean? Get out? You can't get out, we're in, we're going places. We actually had other friends who had actually been a part of the ministry years before and they were saying get out. But we couldn't see it, we were just blinded. Our son was living at home and he didn't take exit very well because it was his friends. He'd grown up in the ministry, so he had friends at the local church, but most of his close friends were scattered around the country that these various retreats we went to, and now, if we were not part of that, he was in a way separated from his friends and he was mad at that as well. It's a miracle. It is a miracle we didn't lose Caleb. He could have at 19 years of age, which is what he was at that point. He could have washed his hands with Christianity at that point. What saved him, I believe, was he just when he left home in the middle of all of this. Yeah, pretty much right, as all this was going on, he left home but he went to work for Adventist World Radio and got hooked up with a lot of really neat people and that kept him in the faith. Otherwise it would have been a sad story. So, yeah, we just missed it. But now we're out. We got our own ministry, but it was having a real effect on our walk with the Lord. I was just numb. I remember going to the bank to open up a business checking account for our new ministry and the lady at the bank was filling out a form and name, date of birth, social occupation, and for guys, whenever we get chatting, oftentimes they say what do you do? And so for the last 20 years I'm the general manager of a Christian ministry. But when she asked me in the bank, there, so occupation. I'm not the general manager of a Christian ministry anymore, I just got fired. So what am I? I guess you should put down there unemployed, because I was at the time. I was claiming unemployment benefit and looking for some kind of tent making work to supplement this new ministry that we were going to join and get off the ground. And that was. I didn't understand a thing about identity in Christ.
Speaker 1:My identity was a speaker and a general manager for this ministry and so when that got cut out, I was like I'm a nobody, I'm just so let me ask you this Were you desperate to get this and sincere question were you desperate to get this ministry started Because there are people out here that need to hear this message of denying yourself and how to live a good life parenting or were you desperate to get it off the ground, Because this is how I live my life, this is how we make a living.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it wasn't necessarily a burden for the message of how there was a burden, it was more. This is just what we do. This is our job. So if I was a welder and I got fired from one company, I would go looking for a welding job. So I mean, that sounds kind of curt. I think it was more spiritual than that, but it's all we knew. It's all we've done for 20 years. I did apply for a job being a trainer of bank systems. Local bank was looking for somebody. They were going to train you up and then they were going to send you around all their branches teaching people how to use the system. So I applied for the job. I didn't go anywhere. I applied for tons of jobs, but they were more going to be side hustles. Our heart and soul was still in ministry but as we were grappling with being let go and going through an identity crisis and even a crisis of faith, I would say COVID hit, our ministry did. A new ministry which was YouTube based, did pretty well during COVID because, of course, everything was shut down and people were just on their computers all the time. Our ministry did well, both in viewership and finances, so we were good, but I don't know which way to go here. I think probably one detail would be we got hit with COVID pretty hard.
Speaker 1:You personally you got the disease yeah three times over.
Speaker 2:We got the original COVID and then we got Delta or whatever it was that came there Delta variant, yeah, and then whatever it was that we got it three times, which was your favorite? The first one was absolutely terrible. Karen and I both got it at the same time. It was Thanksgiving and this was the mercy of the Lord. I know exactly where I got it from. I know exactly who I got it from. I like to play pickleball and I go to this place and play pickleball. Of course you're all handling the same ball, you're all huffing and puffing and shaking each other's hands, and Montana didn't really close down for COVID. Life just carried on in a big city. I understood it, but here in Montana, nothing really changed. The only thing that changed for me is church closed down Now we're on Zoom, but nothing else really closed down.
Speaker 1:When you got COVID I bet you were like me when I got it the first time. When I got it the first time we were all doing ministry in this house in Oregon. There was like 17 of us in this little Airbnb and someone said it says positive like their test, and I was like that must mean we don't have it because there's no way I can have COVID. I didn't think it was possible and then I realized, oh, I am feeling sick as a dog right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as was the saying. I was just doing some jobs around the house on a Sunday and I felt terrible and I just it's not like me. I've got plenty of energy and I, just Sunday afternoon I just sat in the lazy boy and just fell asleep and could hardly work Monday and Tuesday. I said to Carolyn we better go somewhere and get a test. So we drove to town and we got a test and tested me and tested her through the window in the vehicle, through the drive-through, as before they had kits available. We waited a couple of days and sure enough I came back positive. Carolyn came back negative, but Carolyn had it at this point and so we are both wiped out. And it was like who can make it to the refrigerator to get half an apple? I don't think I can. Anyway, I got it three times over. I got it was bad, but a month later I was fine. Got it again A month later, I was fine. The last one just worked all the way through it. But Carolyn, it just kicked all her sicknesses back into gear and she suffers with Lyme disease and it just got her out of remission and she's been messed up ever since. So our YouTube ministry is kind of ground to a halt because we did them together and Carolyn just doesn't have it. She just couldn't think straight. So this is getting really recent. Now we're getting to 2022, the end of 2022, start of 2023. So 10 months from when we're recording this. And we were snow-burding down in Arizona. We have a fifth wheel down there, or we had a fifth wheel down there and they were forecasting minus 37 degrees here in Montana. And I'm said to Carolyn I said so we were going to go down to Arizona after Christmas and this was like a week or two before Christmas. I said could you get us ready to go in two days before this cold snap gets here like minus 37? And she says, yeah, I could. So it's okay, let's just do it. So we get out of here, we go down to Arizona in our fifth wheel and it's just simpler when you live in a fifth wheel. You haven't got a house to take care of. And I start listening to some YouTube's and I can't remember even the name of the guy. I can see his face, but he's preaching on Romans not of my faith and some of what he was saying seemed really awesome, but some of what he was saying was definitely right on and I'd never heard it before. So what is this? So I start reading Romans, and I'd read it before, but it seemed like I was ready for something else. Now, remember that the version of Christianity that we had been plowing our lives into for the last 20 years had majorly let us down. So we were much more open. I remember saying to Carolyn if Christianity does to you what happened to us, I don't know that it's legit, I don't know that it's the real thing, I don't know that I want it. And for people in my faith to express those kind of things. That's why you're listening to the devil brother. Just don't go there. But I think my mind was open to something else, and so I started reading Romans and I started discovering what I now call the gospel. And then I started to be mad and I started to think what was it in Romans that you were discovering?
Speaker 1:What was the thing that was sticking out?
Speaker 2:There was. Therefore, there is no condemnation. So what Christ has done is already enough, and I knew that. I knew that intellectually, but now the same words were hitting me at a heart level I can't even. It was like my heart had been made tender by what we had gone through and I was open now to okay, it's not all about me and my performance, because my performance it's got blown out of the water. We got five and we were a nobody. We just we're barely holding on. So I was not so confident anymore in what I was confident in the past, and so I think that the Holy Spirit used that in Graham. I wish, and that's why I said to you before we started, this podcast is too soon. I'm still on my journey, but it's just a snapshot in time. I understand that and I would say it all different within six months, I'm sure. But I just felt like the Holy Spirit was revealing to me that Christ's sacrifice is enough and I am his child. He's got me. I don't have to prove it, I don't have to earn it, I don't have to perform well enough to be finally accepted. He loves me, he's died for me and I'm his. I'm secure and for the first time, I think, in my Christian walk, I was secure in my salvation with God, rather than always striving to try and get to it. I realized I already had it. And then scriptures just started flooding my mind, like when Mary got caught in the act of adultery and the Pharisees dragged her out half naked. Maybe we caught her in the very act and bad performance. And Jesus says after all, the Pharisees have left. Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. I'm like, neither do I. She hadn't repented, she hadn't confessed, she hadn't done anything about keeping the law. Neither do I condemn you. I just started to see a whole new side of God and I loved it.
Speaker 1:Isn't it interesting that if I would have asked you 15 years ago what does Romans 8 1 say, I'm sure you would have been able to say there's therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, yeah, but what I would have done then is majored on the last part of the verse. It's not actually in many of the modern translations, but it's in the King James, and it says to them that walk in the Spirit or in Christ Jesus. So yeah, there's no condemnation as long as you're behaving yourself, but if you step out, then yeah, you're condemned all over again.
Speaker 1:But the idea is that it wouldn't have hit you maybe 15 years ago, because maybe you didn't need it, because your performance was your identity and it's all going well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, precisely that's why I say this should be called the rich young ruler gets flawed by the gospel, because all these things I'm doing it. I'm doing what's what you require. I didn't feel necessarily that I was failing God. Yeah, we all have our moments of yelling at the kids or doing something crazy, but generally I thought, yeah, God's God and I are OK. But I think if I could look at it and say, OK, was I OK with God? Let's? Let's say there's five levels of OK the outside of your performance, your law keeping yeah, I'm pretty OK there. And maybe the next layer down, your prayer life and your devotional life. I'm pretty good there as well. I didn't even know there was a third layer and a fourth layer and a fifth. I didn't know anything about any of that. So I was happy where I was, but I didn't realize that I only understood like 1% and there was another 99 that I was totally oblivious to and it was just starting to come alive and it was it's good news. I started asking myself. So what was the good news before? The good news was that I had to do all this stuff. That's not good news. This is good news that Christ died for me Whilst.
Speaker 1:I was a sinner. The gospel is you get to do all this stuff. But yeah, I think what's striking me is when all that stuff got stripped away. That's when your heart was ready to receive what you didn't know you needed to receive before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And as I was, as I was getting fired from that ministry, the other guy said to me he says, paul, you don't understand what's happening now and you're probably really mad, but in time you will come to know that it was the right thing. And I was mad at him just for saying that it's. That's all right for you to say you carry on with the ministry, I'm out, I'm on the trash heap, so to speak. So it's all right for you to say but now, five or six years later, I'm thinking he was dead right. Yeah, I, god needed to get me out Of that before he could get me into the next thing, because I was hiding behind it. Not that I would ever have understood that, but I guess that's where I was getting my security from. And when it was stripped away, then God had an opportunity to get a layer deep. At the same time as this was going on for me, studying Romans, I heard Hannah, our daughter, talking to Carolyn. She would FaceTime as regular and she is talking about all kinds of interesting stuff and I'm listening to their FaceTimes. That's like what I'm learning. Where's Hannah getting that from? And she had been, I think the Love Reality team had been to Barry and Springs.
Speaker 1:It was like a year ago.
Speaker 2:Hannah had gone to some of those meetings and Hannah was there and now she'd learned some stuff and she was learning the same stuff that I was learning and sharing it with her mom and I was learning what I was learning and it was like I don't know how God does all this, but it was super exciting and I forgive me if I get super excited in this point, because it is honestly this last 10 months I have has been the best 10 months of my walk with the Lord ever. If my walk with the Lord had been a 10 before, now I'm on a 3000. It's just way just out of this world and so many things come together. Some of the Death to Life podcasts. I was listening to some of the other episodes and it's man. Some of these people have been into crazy stuff. I'm listening to some of these pastors having affairs and it's. I would never do that. I could never see myself doing that. But then I saw that when they were at their lowest, I don't even know who the guy was, but he's in the conference office and the conference office is nailing him and he's slowly, slowly, dawning on him. Oh shoot, they know what I've been into. You probably remember the story and I'm thinking, yeah, god has a way of getting to you when you give up on yourself. And the other thing that's really funny is Hannah, our daughter. She'd started listening to contemporary worship music and a few years before we were on a road trip with Hannah and I was dead against contemporary worship music. It was just like we in our family, when the kids were growing up, we used to call it washing machine music, because you would hear it in somebody else's vehicle and all you would hear is the bass and it sounded like laundry going around in the washer. Just so we'd call it washing machine music and it was definitely perhued in our home as the kids were growing up. But Hannah, she's left home now and she says parents, hey, some of this worship music that I know you don't like, it's really good. And we were actually traveling from Tennessee, where Hannah was living, to visit Caleb in Maryland where he was living. So it was like an eight or 10 hour road trip. And Hannah said I said to Hannah, play us some of your favorite contemporary music, I just want to hear it. I'd never heard any of this stuff before. And she's playing it and it's oh, that's a good message. I can't really deal with the moon, but I appreciated the message. Fast forward now and I've started listening to some other contemporary music and I am blown away by the words. I am thinking where did these guys get these words from? From the Bible. Somebody said to me one time he's not into contemporary music. They call it 7-Eleven music. I don't know if you've heard that the same 7-Eleven music. I've heard that the same 7 words 11 times. It's derogatory. But I'm listening to this song and I remember exactly where I was, when I was in a parking lot outside a store and I didn't want to get out of the car until I'd finished to the end of the song, and it was. I can't remember the song, but I wrote the words down here you didn't want heaven without us. So, Jesus, you brought heaven down. My sin was great. Your love was greater. What could separate us now? What a beautiful name. What a beautiful name. That's how it is. And I was. I was sat there in my vehicle listening to the music. What could separate us now, After all that God has done I mean, he has done, he has done so much what could separate us. Now I mean, yeah, I can totally spoon, I can totally reject, but I'm not going to do that. What could separate us? Now? I'm, I'm one with God, I'm a child of God, and I was just, I was there, just sitting in the vehicle, just so I, I can't believe it. This, this staunch conservative guy who's sat in the car here, absolutely blown away by contemporary worship lyrics. I was just, um, yeah, and, and shortly before this, Hannah had gone to a passion conference, uh, down there in Atlanta, and we had live streamed some of it. And it's man, these guys have got something I have never experienced. They know how to worship. For me, worship was you go, you sit in the pew, you yaw on your way through the same sermon that you've heard 20 times and you stand up to sing a hymn that you sang a hundred times. And no, no condemnation for any of that. But now, seeing these people, just, you know, uh, another song, if you've been forgiven, if you've been redeemed, singing the song this is a Chris Tonning song forever to the lamb, if you walk in freedom, if you bear his name. Singing the song forever to the lamb. And I want to sing, because this is just blowing my mind. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal journey and I think for me, probably just realizing that in Christ he is enough for me. I don't need anything else. My performance doesn't necessarily um have to determine my destiny. I mean, yeah, character development, I'm good with that. Uh, obedience, I'm good with that, but it's not a means of meriting God's favor. Grace does that for us.
Speaker 1:Yo, we're going to take a break real quick from this episode to tell you about what we're doing in 2024. We're trying to put DTL Death to Life. We're trying to put it on YouTube. We're trying to put it on the World Wide Web. We want more people to listen. Slash, watch the podcast. Uh, that's what we're on and we're not stopping. We want you guys to partner with us. Loverealityorg uh, slash, give, we can get this gospel out there. Uh, if this is a blessing to you, partner with us, let's do this thing big in 2024. Let's get back to the episode. What did you think about freedom from sin when you were hearing Hannah talking about this idea from Romans, chapter six?
Speaker 2:Well, at first it was. Yeah, hannah was sharing with Carolyn, I was reading it. It's freedom from sin. This sounds like heresy, how can you say? Because my understanding of sin, um, still isn't clear, but certainly when I first heard that that's freedom from sinning. So when it's somebody saying they're free from sin, you mean you're never going to sin again. That's wacko. I mean that's like you reckon you got holy flesh. I mean, hannah, and I don't go with that. But now realizing what it means is is freedom from the condemnation of sin, freedom from having to live a sin life. It's like, woohoo, this is, I can buy that, I can, I can get behind that and like I say it's still, it's still developing my friend Matt McMillan.
Speaker 1:He says like this when someone says, can you sin if you want to? And he says yes, because he knows that Christ has actually given us his heart and we, I don't want to sin. I don't think you want to sin. I think before we believe the lie of the enemy, any temptation meant that we wanted to actually sin, yeah. So when he says someone asks, can you sin if you want to, he says of course, because he knows that we actually don't want to sin.
Speaker 2:That's right If we do if we do do that, it's because we believe the lie momentarily. We can just put it behind us, we can confess and we can move on. It's not. Oh, now I'm lost and I'm never looking around for comment, you know where with me and I'm not going to be translated and God doesn't love me and all of that stuff. The freedom because because Carol and I were so entrenched in your performance is super important and I don't mean to minimize it now, but it's Christ's performance ultimately. That is important. As a conservative Christian, when performance is important, like it was in our ministry life, then naturally and I guess as a consequence, the performance of other people becomes important. With other people are doing wrong stuff, it's easy to cast judgment, to have a condemning heart, Not that you'd ever say that to them, no, you might say it to somebody else, but it wouldn't have the guts to go and say it to them. But now, in freedom, just realizing that hey, I don't have to have an opinion about what everybody else is up to. If they want to go and you know worship on Sunday with their hands in the air, okay, it's fine, I don't have to. It's not sort of the devil. You shouldn't do that I don't have to go there anymore. If my daughter this is real life, I'm sure she wouldn't mind me sharing. She says, dad, I'm going to go and get a tattoo. Now, from where we came from, this is that would be like, yeah, I'm going to go and get my head cut off. I mean, it's just, it's terrible. And I said, so what kind of tattoo you're going to go and get? And she said I'm going to get a little tattoo. And it's going to say and I might butcher this, but resurrection power lives in me, or something like that. And I was totally cool with it. I had some temptations. What will people think? Poor's daughter got a tattoo, but it was momentary and I realized this it's not for me. I mean, bless her heart, she's not getting on there. I love Satan. It's like resurrection power lives in me and just freedom from having to have an opinion about everybody else is glorious. It's phenomenal and I just can't wait for the next year to roll out. Carol and I are just gobbling up stuff left and right, just going through books that we've read in the past and reading them again. It's amazing how you can read a book with a lens over your eyes, that you can read. That means you get out of it what you want to get out of it. And now we've come to understand the gospel and freedom. And you have those glasses on, you can read the same book and it's like, why didn't we see this before? It says it there in black and white. How come we didn't see it? It's unbelievable. And so we have to read another book, and it's in this book as well. And so we've gone through steps to Christ's object lessons, the Mount of Blessings now, and it's like it's on every single page. You can't get past it. And it's like how did we ever miss the gospel? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you this, and then we'll start to wrap this up. When you heard Hannah's episode on the Death of Life podcast, she said some kind of gnarly things about growing up. How did it hit you and how were you Talk to me about that and moving forward from that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So if you're listening to this, you'd have to go to episode 119. I looked it up before we started and you'd have to listen to what Hannah said. But just in summary, hannah didn't really appreciate later in life the conservative, strict lifestyle that we imposed upon her. She saw something else that we were totally blinded to and she was moving towards that and we were stamping it out. I don't mind admitting that in my more conservative days I was definitely tending towards being a control freak. In fact, we went to Handel's Messiah one time when we first came to the US. Pastor friend and I went to watch the Messiah because his wife was playing the violin in the orchestra. And he said to me afterwards he says, paul, so if you could be in the orchestra there, what would you like to do? And I knew my answer straight away I either want to be the conductor or the guy on the drums. And he said, ah. He said as quick as a flash. He didn't even hesitate. He said so you want to be in control or making a lot of noise? Yeah, that's definitely my tendency. So I ran a pretty strict show when our kids were growing up. There was no room for misbehavior and Hannah and I had a. We had a good relationship. But what I didn't understand is when I wounded her with sharp words maybe she had been disrespectful, as I felt and I would say get to your room, young lady. And she was cut to the core and I would feel bad and I would say, hannah, I'm sorry, she wanted more than Hannah, I'm sorry it had gone way deeper than that. She wanted to sit down and she wanted to talk it out and get to past layer one. She wanted to get down to layers three and four that I didn't even know existed and so we had a lot of misunderstandings. In fact, when she left home, finally she left home against my will. First time she left home, we were right behind it. Second time she left home, I was not happy and she knew it, but she had the guts to push past it. Bless her heart. And I went into quite a decline at that point. But when she shared her podcast and she was just open and vulnerable and, let's face it, I didn't come out the star of the show. I did not, but I was totally fine with it because what I liked about her testimony was that she had chance to give it. She had the courage to give it and she had the freedom for me to give it. To give it, she knew I wasn't going to blast her out of the water because, yeah, a lot of what we did as parents in the goldfish bowl of a super conservative ministry, a lot of that stuff I wouldn't do again if I had my time over, or I would do it different. There would be more love, there would be more gospel, there would be more freedom. It was all very tight. I'm just glad she came through it. I remember when Hannah was just starting to understand some of these things she was studying her biblical counseling and she came to the meal table one time and she says Dad, let me read this before we have the meal together about a personality type, and I was actually a little bit uneasy. This, what she's reading, is describing me at a depth that I didn't know anybody knew. And I said to Hannah so where are you getting that from? And I forget where it was, but she said that you're a classic INFJ or whatever. It was not those letters, I'm lousy with those letters, but you're a classic and it just started to open my eyes. It's Hannah is on a different planet to me. So when she got chance to share, I was delighted. I actually, when she shared it on social media, I commented on the post because I wanted my peers, the people who were bringing up their kids like I brought up our kids I wanted them to hear that because I know they're making similar mistakes and their kids are gonna have similar issues to deal with if they don't catch the gospel. If they just pound them with the law and you must and you're condemned if you don't. Some kids are gonna recover from that, but some kids are not. Some kids are gonna go wild with it. Praise the Lord, both of our kids didn't, but they cut off and that would have been scary.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm trying to think where are we gonna go back? And I just love to hear your transparency. And if you got to go back to this guy who, yeah, maybe he's sitting in this in this revelation seminar in Coventry and you got to tell him, you know what it's also like, what happens at the end of time, you know that's important, sure. Yeah, do we know what's actually gonna happen? Probably not. Do we know when he's gonna come back? Probably not. What would you put your arm around this sweet kid and tell him?
Speaker 2:Great question. First of all, I think people, somehow we present at least the faith that I've been a part of and I'm a part of. We present God in a way. I think that scares people into the faith. I would love to and, like I say, I really only discovered the gospel 10 months ago. Carol and I spend hours just sitting in bed just reading and praying. So I don't know what I would say, but I think at this point I would say and it sounds so trite, so cliche is that there's a God up there that loves you to bits and he's after you. If you don't resist him, he'll get you, he'll get your attention, you'll be fine, and we all have to go on different journeys. Maybe you have to go through Daniel too. Maybe you have to go through Revelation 14. Maybe you have to go through not mixing your fruit and vegetables and wearing skirts down to your ankles. I don't know where you have to go to get there, but I just wish that I got there a whole lot quicker. I can tell you one thing I was mad for a long time. I was, I still am a little bit mad. Just I think about it. How come I can be in the church. For so what am I 58 now and got baptized when I was 21? Do the math? How can I be in there, in here, that long and only just realize the depths of the fact that the God who loves me is, I feel, cheated? Somebody should have told me and the truth of the matter is probably there's been that dozen people and a dozen sermons that I've listened to and they're told me just exactly what I needed to hear. I just wasn't ready to hear it.
Speaker 1:Well, now you got eternity, so you can feel sorry and say, oh, I wish I would have known. And even on this side of the resurrection man, the harvest is out there. It's the workers that are few, and so we just got to tell these people like, yeah and I always end up going back to this that, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, they're a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God who, through Christ, reconciled this to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ. God was reconciled on the word of himself, not counting their trespasses against him To tell the world hey, he's brought you back, but he loves you. He brought you back through Jesus Christ. Will you believe?
Speaker 2:The truth is he had me all the time and it was just. I wasn't experiencing the joy of it. I'll close with this. Just, this was just a week ago, caroline. We have a grandson now, our son Caleb, and Shelby is his wife. They had a baby. He's three months old, little Maverick, and we got to see them recently at Ian and Hannah's wedding and we're taking pictures with our phones and Caroline got this picture and she runs off to Walgreens and she makes it into a print and she puts it up above her desk and it's a picture. I'll send it to you if you want. But it's Caleb, our son, holding his son, maverick, who's three months old, and Caleb's looking out in the distance and you can tell he's got a look on his face like he's checking something out what's going on over there. But he's holding Maverick like this and whoever took the picture might have been me, I don't know. He's standing over here and Maverick, the little three months old, is in Caleb's arms looking at the camera and Maverick is totally peaceful. He's just looking and he's content. He's got his head resting on Dad's chest here and that picture, it just broke my heart. I was looking at it. I'm even gonna get emotional now just talking about it. I'm not even looking at the picture. And as I looked at that picture I saw Caleb and Maverick, but I also saw God and me. I saw God looking out there, watching out for me, and I saw I was Maverick, just in Dad's arms, totally surrendered, totally peaceful, not a care in the world, because, I mean, dad is arms. What is there even to be afraid of? I don't even know what there is to be afraid of. I'm just three months old and Karen showed me the picture and I just started weeping. And she says what's up? I said I couldn't say it. I said that's me right there and that's God. And it was, yeah, it was powerful to me. I don't know if it means anything to anybody else, but it was deep.
Speaker 1:It was a level three or four Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story with us. It's a testimony to me, man.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us, richard, god bless. Talk to you later.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, man. If this is your situation, if you're in a similar boat where you feel like Christianity has not delivered on its promises, then this is for you, father. Perhaps I've been misunderstanding what you've done and what you've accomplished through Jesus Christ at the cross, and I'm asking for a revelation of that. I need a revelation of your truth so I can see it clearly, and I'm asking for it in Jesus' name. Amen. Want to invite you guys to kick it with us every other Friday night at Internet Church. Text Internet Church to the LRT number man. It is a party. The after party gets wild. We have such a great time and we're gearing up for more of it in 2024. So I want to invite you guys to Internet Church. Kick it with Justin and myself and the whole squad. We're gonna have a good time. Thanks for listening to this episode. I love y'all, appreciate y'all.