Amazing Greats: Crazy great Jesus stories.
Amazing Greats shares inspiring Christian testimonies and faith stories from professional athletes, actors, authors, musicians, and other remarkable guests. Each episode explores how Jesus transformed their lives, strengthened their faith, and worked through both success and hardship.
Host Ric Hansen goes beyond careers and accomplishments to uncover the defining moments when faith became real. Every episode explores hope, redemption, purpose, and the remarkable ways God continues to work through ordinary and extraordinary people alike.
Amazing Greats is building one of the largest libraries of modern Christian testimonies from influential people.
Amazing Greats: Crazy great Jesus stories.
The Thanksgiving Dinner that's affected millions - DAN O'NEILL
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The ripple effect of a fund raising dinner at the home of entertainer Pat Boone continues to make a powerful impact on the world today. Last year alone 50 million people in 40 different countries were touched by the staff of 5400 team members at MERCY CORP. The star studded dinner, led to a dinner at the White House and gained the support of Jimmy and Roselyn Carter which gained the notoriety needed to spark the momentum that got the ball rolling.
In this episode of AMAZING GREATS you'll hear about the ugliness of war, and the 33 year mission to bring relief to those who were victims.
I talk with the one man who started it all in the late 70's, Dan O'Neill. He'll share his personal story of faith, and challenges as he grew one of the most powerful relief organizations in the world. From the birth of his miracle child to the reality of panic attacks and PTSD after spending time in devastated war torn countries. Real and raw he takes us on his life journey.
Dan is a writer who's written dozens of books, and despite keeping copious notes documenting his story through the years, he has yet to pen a memoir. It may be on his retirement game plan.
For Contemporary Christian music fans, you'll love Dan's biography of his good friend and the grandfather of modern Christian music, John Michael Talbot. It's called SIGNATURES
You can check it out on AMAZON
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Ric Hansen
"Amazing Greats" is a library of interviews with highly successful people who have amazing career and life stories and who share how God has impacted their journey. Hosted by broadcaster Ric Hansen & produced by Klem Daniels. Available on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Google and our YouTube Channel.
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This is AmazingGreats. We take a deep dive into the amazing life stories of authors, actors, athletes, musicians, and awesome world leaders like our guest today, Dan O'Neill. Here's a guy who started out on a one-man mission to make the world a better place and ended up building one of the largest relief organizations in history, Mercy Corps. What a great conversation with a guy who's helped change millions of lives, literally, for the better. Here we are, Dan O'Neill. Thank you for being with us today. Great to be with you, Rick. Thank you so much. So let's start out with um the the fact that you are the founder and led uh as the leader for years with an organization called Mercy Corps. And the Mercy Corps is um a relief organization. I'm gonna have you tell us a lot more about that, but they've been around since uh you started uh in its very infancy days in 1979, uh, and they continue today, although you are retired. Um and so tell us for those of them who don't know, uh what is MercyCorp and what is their mission?
SPEAKER_01Well, MercyCorps is a global humanitarian aid organization uh that works in in various sectors business, uh, micro, enterprise, uh financial assistance, loans, emergency relief, displaced persons and refugee camps, uh conflict management and war zones, um, a broad sort of mandate. And uh we have now about 6,000 staff working in 42 of the toughest countries of the world.
RicThat is so amazing. And you were you were there at the beginning, you started it, uh, but it wasn't called Mercy Corps in the day. Let's go back and kind of retrace some of those early days. How did how did this all come about? How did you get the calling to do what you're doing what you did then?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh back in 1979, my wife Cherry and I were working with Youth with a Mission as volunteers in their Hawaii headquarters, and I was the art director, and she had uh her own mission there, Cherry, my wife, and we kept seeing these daily news broadcasts, which were then delayed by by two days, believe it or not, while they shipped two-inch video tape from New York out to Hawaii. And it was about the Cambodia refugee catastrophe and the killing fields, and it was a horrific humanitarian scenario in which I felt that we must do something. Now, the reason I thought that we should do something is because back in the 60s and early 70s, America's ill-fated Vietnam War not only killed a million people in direct combat and violence, but it destabilized Cambodia with secret bombing and secret invasions, which brought down the government. And the Khmer Rouge, the radical uh communist regime, uh took over. And in taking over, they took anybody with eyeglasses or anybody with an executive position or anybody that had any political opinion that didn't conform with theirs, and they executed them and they killed over 800,000, some say 850,000 people. Oh man, oh man. And then millions left. They fled to uh Thailand, they fled to Vietnam, they fled in boats off the coast, they went to uh, you know, Indonesia, and many, many died of starvation or illness, or you know, the direct result of hostilities against them. So I thought that as an American, uh, that I should do something, even as if it would were to be small, uh, it was sort of the Mother Teresa approach that I'm just gonna deal with this one person uh or one situation as best I can, and that's all that God would ask of me. But it turned out to be a a much larger endeavor, as you know, over the decade.
RicSo back in the back in that very first uh uh uh moment there was a fundraiser, which I I I had heard about and knew about, um, that kind of launched the whole thing and got you some some national recognition and and really the impetus for getting getting going. Tell us about that, uh, that that fundraiser.
SPEAKER_01Well, um Pat and Shirley Boone were very moved by the Cambodia crisis, and they asked me to organize a dinner in their home, and basically Pat opened up his Rolodex, and so I invited all the super pastors of the era. Um, you know, um uh like Oral Roberts and and um uh Bob uh Shuler.
RicUh Robert Schuler, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And Billy Graham's uh son was there. We had uh Lauren Cunningham, founder of uh Youth with a Mission, and others, uh uh Hollywood type folks, agents, politicians, who were to gather in Pat and Shirley's home. And so I had worked to organize the dinner to be November 19th, 1979. And the kicker was is that when I reached uh the White House and spoke uh at length with Rosalind Carter, then first lady, she was just fascinated by this whole idea and wanted to pitch in and help. So I said, Well, if you could come to the dinner that we're doing, the banquet, we'd love to have you as our special guest. And um, so I communicated that to all the invitees, and of course, then everybody wanted to come, right?
RicAnd so now you had a hot property going there for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you can imagine my shock when I get a phone call back, and the secretary says, uh, is this Dan O'Neill? And I said, Well, yes, and well, can you hang on for Rosalind Carter? And I said, Well, I think so, yes, you know. But she got on the phone and apologized profusely, saying that she had a special event in the Rose Garden with the president, Jimmy Carter, and she couldn't come. And so she said, But here's what I'll do I will send Bob Maddox, Reverend Dr. Bob Maddox, who is the special assistant to the president and uh and religious liaison officer, and uh he'll come to the dinner, and then I will invite all of your guests to be my guests at the Rose Garden and a special dinner at the White House. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. And so, you know, the dinner came off. Bob was there, uh, and um uh he presented Rosalind Carter's case and said that we should really take advantage of this to raise money and start something that we would call Save the Refugees Fund, uh, which we did. And then Rosalind Carter invited me to come to the White House, which I did, and I consulted with her at length. And she said, So I really I still want to invite your group. And so we went. We had a dinner at the White House. Rosalind was there. She was very kind and she helped me in the Seattle market to raise money by uh ordering the U.S. Postal Service to just take anything that said save the refugees, Seattle, Washington, and it would re it would reach me, and then we would bank the money and then make special grants to mostly faith-based aid organizations uh working on the Cambodia-Thailand border, and and that's what we did. That was our kickoff.
RicThat's amazing. And so, for all clarity here, so for those that kind of you you said you mentioned Pat Boone, and that is the Pat Boone we're talking about, the uh the singer, the actor, um, the Hollywood star, and his wife. And uh with all transparency here, uh, you happen to be married to the daughter of Pat Boone, who is Cherry Boone, who also you've referenced so far. So just want to get that on the table so everybody knows how that all kind of came together. And sure. You and Cherry have been in kind of this this um mission ever since then. Um pretty much.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we have. I mean, I was I was I plunged into it full time. Uh, you know, I worked in the early days with no salary as a volunteer. I had a donated office at uh World Concern in Seattle, and and the then executive director, um Art Beals, who was a family friend, former missionary and Presbyterian minister after that at uh University Presbyterian Church. Uh, he basically gave me a phone and a and a and an old metal army surplus desk. And you were in business. Well, at the loneliest day, Rick, you you gotta know this. The earliest experience of despair that I had in my life was staring at the phone in this darkened office and not knowing what to do next.
RicYeah.
SPEAKER_01So I just started making calls, calling people, speaking in churches, flying around the country, doing radio and TV, and it's just like people responded very magnanimously and generously. And uh, and we took that faith in us very seriously as a mandate to proceed.
RicWhen was the first time that did at any time during that initial period, did you did you go to Cambodia? Did you experience the actual on the ground, what was going on?
SPEAKER_01Yes, I did. Uh in early 1980, um, I went to examine the field offices and programs of world vision, world concern, food for the hungry, um, Catholic relief services, and other organizations that were on the ground in refugee camps on the Cambodia-Thailand border. In fact, the war was still going. Uh, we were shelled for a couple days by by Cambodian Khmer Rouge artillery, and we had we had to take cover a few times. There were very generous Thai military folks that took care of us and guided us around, but it was a bit of a baptism and fire. But I'd been in I'd been in wars before, so you know, you just do what you have to do, keep your head down and and uh proceed with the mission.
RicNow, night uh 1981 was kind of a pivotal year for you personally and for and for Mercy Corps. 1981 was the year that uh you you you actually became Mercy Corps, is that correct?
SPEAKER_01Right, right. We uh we decided that we would go out on our own and um establish, legally establish a new legal entity, which I called Mercy Corps. I checked, you know, all the records legally to see that it wasn't already copyrighted or trademarked, and uh had a volunteer lawyer check all that stuff out, and then in July of 1981, or no, July uh of 1982, we formally inked the the uh documents in Washington State at the Capitol, um taking on the name Mercy Corps as a global agency.
RicAnd then also that year, you you personally had a a uh a change in your spiritual life as well, right? Is that the year that I understand that you actually became a Catholic?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, that was a longer story. It is a longer story because it was a it was a pilgrimage of many years, and um uh kind of opening the door a crack to the story. I can say that when I lived in Israel in 19 uh seventy three, uh, and by the way, I went through the Yom Kippur War because I lived on a kibbutz in Galilee, and we were right in the heart of that conflict. But I had been searching the scriptures, I had been reading church history and the early church fathers, uh, I was reading uh books on Jewish history, uh theologically, and you know, the ecumenical relationship between the faiths, and I was also studying a bit of Islam uh because the they say, you know, in that region, the children of the book are the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, because they all come basically as an inheritance from Abraham. So um I was raised in an evangelical family full of eight generations of missionaries and ministers, some of them very, very high profile and well known. But on my own journey, I tapped into the ancient faith in a way that brought me to the realization in 1974 that that I should enter the Catholic Church, which is what I did.
RicAnd is Cherry also Catholic?
SPEAKER_01Yes, it was in April, it was the Easter of 1981 that we entered, formally entered the Catholic Church. Uh, we were living in Bothell and it was St. Brendan's uh parish. And um that's you know, but we're we're very we're very open and welcoming of people of of any Christian persuasion and and any basic faith persuasion. I think there's you know, I feel a link with people on that level, but at my heart, I'll always be a Christian, and um my experience in conversion, if you will, uh has enriched my life just immensely. So yeah.
RicOne guy with a vision has made a huge impact worldwide. We're talking with the founder of Mercy Corps, Dan O'Neill. Gone amazing greats. A quick aside, uh, I also went to St. Brendan's uh in as a Catholic boy. Um we lived uh near near Bothell, um, and that was the closest uh Catholic church to us. And so, yeah, as it turns out, we were probably going to church at the same time and same place, for gosh sakes.
SPEAKER_01Well, we we may have been, yeah. And we named we named our son Brendan after our experience at St. Ben Brendan's. Interesting. But by the way, Brendan's godfather is John Michael Talbot.
RicUm, I want to hear that story too, yes.
SPEAKER_01Um well, we can tell that whenever you want to. In fact, I think it would be great to bring Johnny on and have him do an interview. Well, you know, if you want to. We can do we can arrange it.
RicI'd love that. Um, for those maybe who are not familiar, uh John Michael Talbot is kind of the granddaddy of uh contemporary Christian music. Um and you are very close friends of his. What let's talk about that now. How did you guys connect? How what's your relationship? Um, tell us a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_01Well, he had heard that I was a writer, and and you know, in a prior life, I I wrote, I've written 14 books, I've edited many others, and he said, So uh, Dan, this is John Michael Talbot. And you may not know me. He called me on a Saturday morning, right? About six in the morning, and he said, You probably don't know me, but I've been referred to you as a writer, and I have a story that I've got to tell. And I said, Well, I know your story. I spent time in the recording studios back in the you know, CCM days, and so I knew him by name. And uh we determined that we would meet, and I said, Let me come out to your, you know, where you are in Indianapolis and I'll interview you, I'll take notes. And he said, I need I need a pamphlet. And uh and I came away from that meeting saying, John, we need a book. So I I wrote the book um about his life, uh Troubadour for the Lord, which became a religious best-selling award-winning biography of John Michael, which is still available online, I think, by the under the name Signatures. But I wrote the book, and in doing so, we got to know each other very, very well. And um, he asked me to come on as the first board member of his monastery that he was building in Arkansas. And so I said I would. And I've been on the board ever since. And so we're in we're in regular touch at least two or three times a week. We we get on the phone and catch up on things and solve problems.
RicOh my gosh, that is so incredible. Um, and that's the yeah, I was looking for the Troupador book, but that it is titled Signatures, where I found it, which was on Amazon. So, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right, it was reprinted and re-renamed.
RicYeah, yeah. Well, that's that's that's a great story in and of itself. But I want to jump back before we get too far away from your Mercy Core story, want to get back into uh how things developed after also in 1981, something else happened in your life, and that was um the birth of your first child, right?
SPEAKER_01Yes, our daughter Brittany, who's now 40 years old and just had her second little baby. And uh back back in the late 70s and early 1980s, uh, we were told by doctors, Cherry was told specifically, that she would never be able to bear children because of a really severe eating disorder that had damaged her internally. And so, you know, we we were married in 1975, and and um right as MercyCorps was being born, we found out that Cherry was pregnant, seemingly you know, beyond our belief. And uh, but we we welcomed that. And so Britney was born in 1981, and and we tried to turn off the faucet after that, and that didn't work very well. And we we ended up with five kids, four daughters and and one son, and the oldest is Brittany.
RicWow, what a great that what a miracle story that is in and of itself. That's so so so uh you know, when I was reading about you and and doing my research on you, that was it seemed to me like 1981 was this this crazy turnaround year in a lot of ways. That's when you know you formalized MercyCorps, that's when you had your first trial, that's when you became Catholic officially. So that was a that was a big year. But then that that was still way early in the Mercy Corps years. Tell us a little bit about how that developed from this group of folks that are basically doing fundraisers to raise funds to this giant organization that exists today. Uh were there highlights along the way that you can kind of share uh glimpses of where God was taking care of this project with you?
SPEAKER_01Uh I would have to say yes. I mean, without the infusion of energy and faith and guidance that I think God gave us, uh I could never have dreamed that we would develop into the sort of powerhouse agency that now exists. Back in those days in the 80s, uh there were wars, they were called low-intensity warfare events in El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras and Nicaragua. You probably know that, that the U.S. was propping up dictators and and basically that forced the hand of revolutionary leftists to make war against uh those countries. So the conflict of the region became an very inflamed issue politically, not only down in Central America, but but in the US. So we went down and worked on several levels, conflict management, and we used diplomats and lawyers to speak to the leaders and bring them together and have off the record facilitated brainstorming sessions to get at the issues of peace and the issues that were dividing people. At the same time, we were working with farmers uh in very, very poor regions, helping to introduce new farming, uh new fertilization methods, new ways of working the ground and marketing their goods so that they could have a self-sustained village or town. And so we worked with an organization called Project Global Village, eventually merging them into Mercy Corps, and that took us into an area where we found the inevitable um sort of development of this kind of work is you have to adjust address the issue of human rights. So we spoke pretty boldly about human rights issues in the region, and I began to get phone calls from the big agencies. I'm talking about big name recognized organizations, most of them faith based, saying, uh, hey Dan, um You know, we noticed in your article in the Seattle Times that you were bringing up issues about human rights. And uh they said, you know, that's just a little too political for us, and we would advise you to really not go there. And so I basically stood up and said, No, no chance. We are going to speak the truth from the housetops and the rooftops, and we will be discreet and careful, but we will be bold and we will we will speak the truth uh in areas where we we feel it needs to be spoken. Now we found that to happen also in the very war-ravaged, conflict-ravaged Middle East, where Syria and Israel and Jordan and Egypt uh and even Lebanon were locked in these intractable conflicts. And so we've we found another sort of fertile field of endeavor in the Middle East where uh conflict was killing people and it was destroying societies and it was creating refugees. So that was another major development going back to your question. How did you develop?
RicYeah.
SPEAKER_01But we also, Rick, we also went to East Africa, places like Somalia, which had begun to entertain the nascent um military group that led to Al-Qaeda. Uh, we worked with refugees in Somalia and Kenya and Uganda and Sudan. And um our first major government grant was was to run truckloads of food and fuel into Ethiopia during the Ethiopia refugee crisis. And um, we did that for you know several years. It was a dangerous uh semi-covert mission where we would take truckloads of food to sustain refugees in Eritrea and Ethiopia and Tigray province. Wow. And you probably probably know from the news that Tigray and Ethiopia are now locked in another very destructive cycle of war and combat, and that's affecting the people on the ground, like the civilian population.
RicJumping back just a quick second, when you when you made that stance on on being bold about the the um human rights issues and the politics that go along with that, um did you have was there pushback? Was there some some kind of um uh negative retaliation in that regard, losing of funds or any of those kinds of things?
SPEAKER_01We never lost any funds. Um there was pushback. Uh some of the organizations said, well, you know, we just can't be affiliated with you because we were in some joint groups like ECFA, you know, and other other uh faith-based organizations uh regard around relief aid, that kind of thing. And so basically we just said, well, okay, we'll be on our way and and we'll we'll honor each other, but uh we will disassociate on this matter because it's a matter of to us of significant uh importance and it's often very central to the mission. So no thanks.
RicYeah. And but you did uh somewhere along the line, you were originally considered and and were a faith-based organization, and and that kind of pivoted too, didn't it, at one point?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah. Well, in the beginning, we were, you know, as Save the Refugees Fund, it was almost all faith-based folks, um, ecumenical. We had a Catholic bishop who was deeply involved, and and others, John Michael Talbot and others. Uh, but broadly speaking, we were faith-based, and over time we evolved into an organization that was more inclusive. Um, you know, we began to have you know Jewish and Muslim staff in different countries, and we found that uh being a non-sectarian organization, but working according to our inner faith dynamics was the way to go. So we we didn't have that label anymore, but the mission, as far as I'm concerned, was always inspired by my Christian faith.
RicWas during um during this this time that you're talking about, were you were you hands and feet on the ground yourself? I mean, did you did you were you face to face with a lot of the things that um were going on in the world?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yes, yeah, especially in the earlier days. I I was the one that would go out to the breaking situation with you know cameras or film. Oftentimes we took a news person with us, King Five sent crews with us. Uh, one of their anchors, Margaret Larson, went to three countries with me and did the stories, and then I would bring them back and do radio and TV interviews, informing people, and that would inspire people to team up and to help fund us. And in so doing, I found myself having traveled to you know close to 80 countries over all those years. Wow. So, yes, and I was I was in 12 really hot war zones. Uh, that's another story. It's it's one that was recorded, is recorded. I kept journals, daily journals from April of 1972 until just a couple years ago. So I've got many, many stacked, you know, several feet high with all the stories, every air flight, every war, every you know, humanitarian trip.
RicBoy. Um dig through all of that. That's that's what it what a new what the question's got to come out of that is when when's your autobiography coming out?
SPEAKER_01Well, I've been asked by several people, including a couple publishers, to consider doing a memoir. And um, there are several magazines I've published chapters in. Seattle Times did a major story on one of my visits. It was Rwanda, um, 1994, the greatest catastrophe I've ever seen. Um, and I told that story, and and they said, Well, gee, you could write 12 more of these. So uh I'm thinking about it, Rick. And I people like you, when you prod me, I'm thinking, there it is. There it is again.
RicWell, you've got all the research, it's all in your journals, you know. All you got to do is pick and pluck out the best of all of that, and uh, and you're a writer, so there you go. Yep. Make makes too much sense. Well, so tell me, um uh, you know, not that I want to mire in in the in the the tragedies and the negatives, but uh can you can you ex uh um give us a visual of um maybe some of the the worst scenarios that you were privy to along the way?
SPEAKER_01Oh man. Well I know right the war the war in 1973 in the Middle East, it was the greatest, most catastrophic war or conflict of the region of all time so far. Um, I was working on a kibbutz, which is like a little small collective farm. Uh I was studying Hebrew and studying Jewish and Christian history. And October 6th of 1973, the ground began to shake. And uh I was in the kitchen doing KP duty, and I turned to my friend uh to my right and said, Is that an earthquake? And he casually he was an older man, so he knew. He casually said, No, this is war. And it was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, and nobody worked, no tractors were to run, no airplanes were to fly. It was meant to be silent, a time of reflection, uh, and a time of repentance. That's what Yom Kippur is all about. But the ground was shaking, and it was artillery coming down on us from Syria in the Golan Heights, and uh the war just got more intense from there, and um I was asked to work out in the orchards and handle all of the large valves and irrigation uh systems to keep the crops alive during the war when all the men went to the front lines.
RicOh man.
SPEAKER_01So I was sitting in my my room at the end of a day, kind of you know, hot and sweaty and overworked and underpaid. We got $12 a week, Rick. Wow. I bet you'd really like to work for that week. Yeah, no kidding. I was sitting in my room and uh uh a representative from the U.S. Embassy came in and said, Are you Dan O'Neill? And I said, Well, yes. Well, we we've been informed that you are working here and we're here to evacuate you. And um, you know, my heart was kind of thumping because the racket and den of war, uh, you know, jets and sonic booms and rockets was going on all around us, and there was the temptation to say, Yeah, I need to get out of here. But instead, I felt moved to just say, you know, I'm not going. And he said, Well, are you sure? Because this is gonna be your last opportunity. We've got your papers, and you know, you have an hour to pack your stuff, and we'll we'll just go to you know, Tel Aviv. And I just said, No, I think I'm gonna stay. And I turned out to be the last American volunteer to stay on the kibbutz during the war, which lasted 18 days. And you talk about severity. The severity was uh touring the battlefield with my camera with an Israeli general uh in a Jeep and photographing the bodies and the planes and helicopters that were shot down, the many, many tanks that were blown up uh with their crews, and the mass destruction of the area. It was just shocking to see. Um it was at the end of the war, and we went to an area even beyond where Newsweek and Time magazine and the network news people could go. We went right up to the Syrian lines, and I photographed and I interviewed people and then came back with this experience that turned out to be pivotal. You taught you used that term, and it really works in that situation. So that was one, the first of many many conflicts. The other was Rwanda, 1994, where 800,000 people were killed in just a matter of like 90 days. Uh the Hutus and the Tutsis blew up into a civil war, and I was one of the first aid workers on the ground. I hitchhiked in on a United Nations C-130 Hercules from uh Kenya. And I was on the ground, I had my backpack, my camera, had nowhere to go. And I was recognized at the airport. There was no you know, passport control that had been wiped out. There was no air traffic control, that was gone. But there was this Jeep, and this guy recognized me and he said, Hey, we're from Samaritan's Purse. And I knew who they were. Franklin Graham was the the CEO, Billy Graham's son, by the way. Yeah, and they recognized me and said, Do you need a place to stay? We got a bunk. And so I said, Yep. And I just hitchhiked through the town and filed a report, took lots of pictures, but the the uh dismemberment and uh of the bodies was uh shocking. There was many, many people were murdered with uh hatchets and uh machetes were the main tool of destruction. So uh it was it was horrific. There was blood, there was skeletal remains strewn along in the ditches, even piled up in churches. And that would have been another, as you as you rightly said, a very severe situation. And you know, I can't say I escaped the you know psychological damages of that. That lasted for quite a while for me.
RicWe're talking with Dan O'Neill and his compelling story about how he created and grew Mercy Corps. Gone amazing, great. And then in uh it was like 2006, I think um you uh had a what you thought was a heart attack, but turns out it was not that. Um, but it was just a a panic attack, right? Uh and you experienced PDSD, PTSD.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. I I I did. I had numerous panic attacks that I had to suppress. I had a lot of uh really horrific dreams and sort of visualizations, and I wasn't the kind of guy that would went postal, and you know, I didn't pull a gun on anybody, but it was internalized as sort of like an inner deep uh sort of destructive acid running through the heart of my being that I couldn't escape, and that lasted for quite a while. I was diagnosed by four different doctors, and and uh, you know, I had some you know therapy for that. Um, and you know, after having gone through uh guided meditations and therapeutic sort of assistance from some who were doctors who were friends of mine, I I I felt the total, you know, release from any of that. I don't feel it anymore at all.
RicOh, good. Okay, that's what I was gonna ask. Is there is there any residuals at this point? But that's uh that's that's that's great news.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's really good news, and it's kind of hard to explain unless you've been there. But it's sort of like when you witness something that's that horrific and you're in the middle of it over time, yeah. Same thing happened in Lebanon and Israel and Syria, many, many of those situations, the Balkans, the Balkans war. There's a I I I picture it as like a mini camera or a mini tape recorder that's inside of you that is recording all of this, and it's there forever unless you find a way to appropriately digest it. And and that's what I had to do is find a way through various practices of prayerful meditation.
RicThat's my question is yeah, how did how did your faith help in in all of that? Was that a key role?
SPEAKER_01Very much, very much, but we know look, Jesus was anxious. You remember in the Mount of Olives when he was praying with the apostles and they were falling asleep, he was sweating blood, literally, because he knew that it was imminent, that he would be tortured to death on a Roman cross. So when the scriptures talk about Jesus identifying with us in every possible way, that is one of them. He experienced high anxiety, and so having felt that it's a bit comforting to know that you know I'm not alone in that. And um, so yeah, it was it's hard, it's not easy, and I don't think anybody who's been that deep into those kind of scenarios really gets away unscathed.
RicI wouldn't think so, or yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01But you say my faith, now Rick, you mentioned this, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but for me, practicing meditative prayer, contemplative prayer, and practicing mindfulness, which I do a couple times a day, really helped. The mindfulness is defined as paying attention all the time, on purpose, without judgment. And that's the foundation that I kind of build my prayer life on. And without that, I think I'd kind of be floundering in the waters again.
RicYeah. We're where um along the way, even during some of this um the the horrific things that you had to deal with, um where was where where was where was God in all? Where was that got where was God in that for you? Uh, where was Jesus for you um to try to get through all of that at the time?
SPEAKER_01Uh where was Jesus? Well, first of all, I internalized Jesus as someone God who I have taken into my life, and so Jesus is dwelling within. But then when I see the orphan or the dying person or the beggar or the sick, I also see a dimension of Jesus in them. Like Mother Teresa clearly identified, not only with being the incarnational witness, that is, being Jesus to the quote least of these, but recognizing the Jesus in them. And so it brings about a really sort of overarching spiritually based humanitarian sensibility that sort of completes the equation. It's like I see Jesus in these people, the less fortunate, sort of like Matthew chapter 25, and some of those very clear dimensions where we see Jesus through his parabolic discourse talking about such people as the good Samaritan and how that Samaritan reached out when even priests and other Jews didn't. The Samaritan reached out and helped the Jew, which in those days there was much antipathy, as you know, between the Samaritans and the Jews. So that that dynamic for me as a scriptural lesson has continued with me through my life, even until this day.
RicThe founder of Mercy Corps, Dan O'Neill, is our guest this week on Amazing Greats. How do you internally justify when you um were in these scenarios where there were literally bodies stacked up and dismemberments and all of the ugliness that you saw? Um the temptation would be to say, where's God in all of this? How how could a good God do this? How could a good God allow this to happen? Did that did that come cross your mind?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because there's a part of me that immediately would react and go, how could this have been allowed to have happened? Where was God in this? But then I would I would reduce it to the scriptural story of Jesus' crucifixion when he was on the cross. As you remember, when he was dying, he cried out and said, Eli Eli Lama Sabachtani, which is Aramaic for my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And so that becomes an issue, a reality where even Jesus felt forsaken by God. And so I'm in a similar situation on a lesser scale, if I'm in the presence of moral evil or destruction or death. My first action or reaction is to recoil at the horror, but then it's sort of like, well, we are living in a world where people are free agents to decide if they're going to be murderous or loving.
RicYeah. Um, yeah, and you said that you study you speak Hebrew, uh Hebrew?
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah. I mean, I studied Hebrew on I studied Hebrew, I began studying it on the kibbutz Ginnosaur, located right on the shore, by the way, the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. And then I continued for nine months on a kibbutz on the Mediterranean uh called Ma'agon Michael, where I was in a what's called an Ulpan. It's a language program that uh many, many Jews from around the world, a lot of Americans, by the way, come to study Hebrew when they're in college or high school. So I joined one of those programs and was accepted. I was sort of the token uh you know, uh Christian. Uh, you know, uh I it was an interesting dynamic. People would always say, Well, what are you doing here? You know?
RicYeah.
SPEAKER_01So, but for me, it was learning the language of the region, uh, getting down into the culture, uh, and exploring the richness of the scriptures. I I could actually read, not not read them well, but I could read the Jewish Bible a bit, and I could write, and and uh I'm a little rusty now, but when I go back to see people like my closest friend of all my Middle East friends is a man, an Israeli named Moshe. And we're the same age. We were actually born the same month as the state of Israel was born in May of 1948. And when I visit him, I can slip right back into the accent and to the you know the the words, and yeah. So, you know, it's it's nice to be able to to know a few words and Arabic as well.
RicYeah.
SPEAKER_01So um, yeah.
RicSo what are you gonna do? What's what's you seem like you're you're so full of life and so full of um passion uh to this day. The question's gotta be what's what's next for you? Are you you got plans? Are you gonna sit around and watch Jeopardy, or what what's gonna what's gonna happen?
SPEAKER_01No, I don't watch Jeopardy, but you know, I I have to say I'm a newsaholic. I watch uh CNN, I listen to NPR radio, I uh listen to the BBC for one hour every day. I read the Seattle Times and sometimes the New York Times, so I'm kind of a newsaholic. But when people ask me, they say, Well, O'Neill, what are you gonna do now? And basically I've said, Well, I'm gonna visit my 96-year-old mother in Shelton, Washington, who's living in gosh, I'm gonna visit her. Melba Jean is her name. She's in great shape, by the way. She is just a wonder. And then play with my grandkids. I've got four of them, and the fifth is on the way, and then ride my motorcycle because I'm a lifelong motorcyclist. So those are those are my pursuits that sort of, you know, in and out and maybe woven around that uh book you tell me I should write is kind of what I'm doing.
RicI I have a suspicion that that's you're gonna you're gonna relax and do that for a while, but there's something something inside you that says I I gotta do something, um I gotta do something meaningful too. And I'm gonna I think that book is is what what we're waiting for.
SPEAKER_01So it might it might be. I think it could be the foundation for continuing to tell the story. Part of what I do, Rick, and I think as a radio guy, you you know this, um part of part of what I did as an aid worker guy and a fundraiser, which I was, uh, is storytelling. Really getting the story down concise, compelling, convicting, and motivating. And so as long as I can be a storyteller in some regard, uh, I think that'll be enough for me until I see more specificity in the mission, so to speak.
RicThank you so much for your time. This has been enlightening. It's been fun, it's been informative. You you're a great guest, and I appreciate that. So God bless you, Dan. Thanks. Blessings to you, Rick. Thank you so much. Wow. Another awesome look into how God works through the faithfulness of great guys like Dan O'Neill. Thanks for joining us and supporting AmazingGreats. Check out our website at www.amazinggreats.net with our complete library of episodes there, plus a handy resource for some compelling videos that we found for you, as well as all the latest scoop on contemporary Christian music and tips on other similar podcasts that you might enjoy as well. AmazingGreats is a voluntary project, but donations are accepted on our website just to help us in outreach and to spread these great stories every time goes to finding new listeners. Amazing Greats is published every other Wednesday, and it's uh published by our producer and editor, Clem Daniels. Until next time, God bless.
