Faith in Action with Jeff Faust, Lead Pastor of Vineyard Church of the Rockies

I met Jeff Faust last summer when I learned about and toured the bones of the Love Foco Resource Center, and I got to know him a little better at their benefit golf tournament last fall, which was my favorite work day last year. Love Foco just opened their facility and had the ribbon cutting last month, and in this podcast, Jeff tells the tale of securing the real estate by gift and the special community efforts that were made to build up the space into a full-service community health and resource center. We also zoom back with Jeff to his earlier chapters, including hands-on service work in the grittiest parts of Kansas City, his grooming to be the future lead pastor of an established church there, and having a little vision or a call from God to head west, and how we follow that call to four columns. Jeff is as entrepreneurial of a guy as you're ever going to get to know, and a heck of a communitarian. And so please enjoy, as I did, my conversation with Jeff Faust. Welcome to the Local Experience Podcast. On this show, you'll get to know business and community leaders from all around Northern Colorado and beyond. Our guests share their stories, and through it all, you'll be inspired and entertained. These conversations are real and raw, and no topics are off limits. So pop in a breath mint and get ready to meet our latest guest. Welcome back to the Local Experience Podcast. My guest today is Jeff Faust, and he is the lead pastor at the Vingier Church, and also the founder of Love Foco. It's right. Great to be here, Kurt. I learned about you through Love Foco, and we sponsored you guys this golf tournament last year. It was probably a highlight day for me. Whole number one. We put you guys front and center. It was very generous of you. You brought the truck out, so it was a perfect visual for everybody. It was great to have you guys there. I had a beer and ping pong with a young man with a really cool name. It's actually cool, Aiden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know him? I don't. He was in the golf tournament. Anyway, he remembered seeing the local think tank truck in that golf tournament, and I would say he's a qualified prospect. So we met at least one person to advance the business, and we saw airplanes. It's a sweet. No, it's awesome. We're doing the tournament again this fall, same weekend, and it's always the day right before like the Northern Colorado air show. So it's pretty sweet, because you're golfing. You're hanging out with the guys, and they're doing all their trial runs out there. So like all the F-16s, all the blue angels are out overhead, and so you can never control the official air show. It's not the official. And you somehow have no, we stumbled into it. We stumbled into that date, and we just keep doing it over and over and over, because it's been a fun thing to have the background for sure that was a superb experience. Do we talk about the vineyard church you want to set the stage for us, like how old is the church? How many members did you start it? Yeah, so great questions. No, I did not start it. It's about 42, 43 years old at this point. Okay. I know it's been there for a long time. Yeah, it's been there for a long time. It hasn't always been in that building. You know, like most churches that were planted, they'll hang out, yeah, certain high school, middle school, someone's backyard, and that's how it happened. So 40 odd years ago, gentlemen, by the neck, Rick Olden said, moved out here from California, planted a church with a couple people in his backyard, grew it into what it is now. And seven years ago, I became the lead pastor of that church. Seven years ago, almost to the recording of the show, I became the lead pastor of that church. Well, happy seven year anniversary. Yeah, thank you. It's a big moment for us, my family. We moved out here from the Midwest, so came from Kansas City, which is a whole story you can have itself, and man, we, gosh, we've been here. We were on staff. We were on his staff for a year and a half before I was kind of voted in and appointed as the lead pastor, which gave me a little bit of a lot of time. Not a lot of time. It's where there are multiple associate pastors that you were elbowing, be like, no, I like him the best. Yeah, no elbowing, but I was definitely hired for that job. Okay. So they were hoping that they would succeed in succeeding this guy. Yes, exactly. You showed some promise that your prior staff. Gritting determination can do a lot of things in the nonprofit. With willingness to try. Yeah. No elbowing that needed to happen, but it was definitely a full team when I came. You know, there were four or five different pastors. This particular church also had a satellite in Windsor. Okay. Windsor Vineyard. They've since gone to be their own vineyard church, because the vineyard is an association of about 400 churches. That's what I was going to ask. So this is due to came from California, was he planted by a vineyard kind of? California. Yeah, the vineyard, you know, the origin of the vineyard kind of follows the Jesus movement, you know, the 70s and I don't know if you ever saw or heard or saw a preview of the movie Jesus Revolution. Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of follows the story of one guy with Calvary Chapel, but there's another guy. So the people that shaved their heads ran running at the first, right? No. Similar, different. Different. Different. Different. But yeah, I mean, now there's I'm 450 vineyard churches in the United States. Okay. So in the grand scheme of things, small compared to like baptism, independence, things like that. All autonomous, but we're like kind of a collection, like a family, you know, and I'm sure you have some things that all the vineyard churches believe like your stuff that we think is essential. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're, we're denominational like, but we're fairly autonomous at the same time. Yeah. Gathered around a try to avoid the power concentrations that make all those other guys. Yeah. Not a lot of that, which is great because then we can, you know, develop a community and develop a church family that best suits the community where we find ourselves. Cool. Because every city is a bit different. So were you in a vineyard organization out in the business? Yes, and no. So I mean, I was right before we came out here, I was passing at a vineyard church in Kansas city. Um, I was on staff there for a little while. And there's, I mean, you know, we were, my wife and I, we started our family in Kansas city, both from the Midwest originally. We had been in Kansas city for about 10 years, but probably only on that staff at that vineyard for about a year and a half. We did a whole bunch of other stuff before that. Okay. And the conversation that was happening there was kind of like, you know, between the lead pastor in Kansas city and myself, I was just like a young adult associate pastor kind of dude hanging out on his staff. Yeah. I see the gifting in you, I feel like you could probably follow me and be the lead pastor of this church. Is that something you'd be interested in? Yes. That's what you want. But it's a 10 year thing. We don't need you. He was a long thing. He was in his 50s at the time. So we was about a 10 year thing. He's just like, I think, I think you could have it. Right. Um, but it was a serious enough conversation that we were praying about it. We were discerning. Right. Well, you can't just wait to get the job and then leave right away either. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And just never know. I mean, as a person of faith, like I, we're just, we're trying to discern all these conversations. We're trying to find out where does God want us to land? Where can we be the best version of who He's created us to be and, and blessed the community in that kind of way? And I tell you, man, we love Kansas City because we moved there after graduating high school or excuse me, graduating college. And were you from like small town midway? I grew up in small town Iowa. Okay. My wife's from small town, Minnesota. And we met in smaller town Iowa in a town called Pella, Iowa, where they make the doors and windows. Yeah, sure. They're the best ones there. They are the best ones. They are the best ones. Even down here. They're not close to the best. Yeah. No, I would fight. I would fight for because I was an employee of Pella Corporation for a season of my life. Got it. I sold those to home owners renovating their place and stuff like that. So yeah, we, we met there. So Kansas City was, if you were kind of like, I'm from North Dakota, some similar, like Minneapolis is like where the cool kids go from that general area. Kansas City is like where a lot of the, yeah, there's a handful of like metropolitan's right in the Midwest. I mean, Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, a couple of Kansas City gathered a lot of folks from the Midwest. That was definitely true when we were there. And we loved it, man. We started our family there. We started nonprofits there. Everything like that was the origin of our family, little family, you know, in our 20s and early 30s. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a little bit prompted by this guy was like, should I be choosing you to be my successor and then, yeah, somehow, how you learned from another guy that he might be a little closer to departure. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it's a kind of a crazy story. I mean, but it's, I mean, let it actually, can we put a pin in it just for a second? Sure. Because we said love Foco too and we haven't even introduced it. So let's give it like just a 90 second commercial and we'll come right back to this specific story. 90 second commercial of love Foco is that just last week we did our ceremonial ribbon cutting. We're opening this space in our community. And essentially what's happening is there's a 7200 square foot building in North Fort Collins just down the road from where we're recording this and we're putting five nonprofits in that space so that they can do what they do best all under one roof and that kind of integrated care will just allow rent prices to go way down so they can put all that overhead money back into programmatic services care for folks in our community and that integrated service. You know, you just do what you do best. Right. So we've got a free healthcare clinic in there and they're not great at the food pantry thing. But someone else is going to be in that space carrying for folks is physical needs and food and clothing and so you know, if you are putting off your medical care for a number of years, it might also be true that your food insecure. And so let's just do what we all do best but do it together, eliminate conflicts of schedule and transportation, things like that and just kind of have a one stop shop and a little bit in the model of there's a place in leveling like house of neighborly services is a pretty good model for what we're kind of we're much smaller there really is a lot larger. But definitely when we're doing our due diligence and like how could this work, what would relationships look like? Well, it would be my role. We did tours of house neighborly services met with their executive director and their leadership team and yeah, picked their brains. I want to dig deep into this whole conversation because it's it's really exciting as well. It's like the building was kind of mostly gifted but there's a whole crazy story. So but I said we're going to put a pin into your origin story and I'm getting here. So let's move back. Okay. Let's move back to the Kansas City era so yeah, I mean, when I look back, I just there's a sense of nostalgia. I mean, I like I just I love Kansas and I love my time there, you know, when you start happy to be here. Of course. Living this track. Well, I was just talking to someone up, I was just talking to someone about like starting nonprofits and jumping into ministry and it's probably the same is true for the business work. Like your 20s, you're trying all kinds of different things, right? And if there's a sense of resilience. I don't even know what I'm going to do. No, you don't. You know, you're it's kind of like this perfect time where you can try a bunch of stuff. The responsibilities are a little bit lower. The risk like you just have a higher risk tolerance. I mean, at the time it was just my wife and I, you know, we have three kids now, but when we started all that stuff in Kansas, we had zero kids. And so we really messed up. It was just on us, you know, it wasn't going to like the the circle of impact wasn't going to be as wide. Yeah, yeah. Well, Jill and I don't have children, we've hosted a bunch of exchange students, but no kids of our own, which I think just by definition, we've got a higher risk profile. And maybe a little bit lower, like, got to work really hard and provide for the children, right? Yeah. And there's all those pros and cons of all these things, right? But yeah, when we were in Kansas City, we actually started, I was going to Bible College, like postgraduate. I had bachelor's degree in communication studies. Okay. And then just always knew I wanted to go in and well, didn't always, once I was in college, knew I wanted to go in a ministry. Okay. And I tried to quit school a bunch of different times and then, you know, ended up committing to my four-year degree. And I'm going to come back to, we're going to come back in the time I've seen two when you were like five or ten first. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm curious that you grow up in the face of the whole community at all. Yeah. I grew really, really far from God. Yeah. I've been, you know, most of the churches I was, I went to before I was 14, I got kicked out of for a variety of different reasons that I can share with you, but let's come back to it. Yeah, yeah. You're doing stuff, started on profit. Yeah, started on profit worked primarily with at risk youth in the inner city. And so we were going to Bible college, ministry school, didn't really like what I was experiencing to be fully transparent. We were like studying all the stuff of the Bible. We were like doing all the things. Right. You're like, where's the applied Bible? And I had to sit out. That was like the hardest part for me. Sorry. No, that's absolutely correct. We were like reading all these passages where Jesus cared for the poor and the immigrant and the foreigner among us, and yet we weren't doing a lot of those things. And so John Wimber, who actually kind of made the vineyard famous so over a number of years, he always used to say, like, when do we do this stuff? Like I've read, I'm reading about the stuff, but when do we go do it? Right, right. And someone told him early in his career, like, oh, we don't do that stuff. We did, we talk about it. We read it. And they just bothered him so much. And it bothered me too. So we were like kindred spirits in that way. And so myself and a number of others, we are, like I'm a seminary dropout and we started a nonprofit to care for the most overlooked folks in Kansas City, which is seminary dropout. We loved it. I mean, it was perfect for us. Oh, cool. It was perfect for us. But I was 23. My wife was 22 at the time. We didn't know what we were doing. Recruited a ton of volunteers. You got some. No, you know, you know, I mean, no, that all sounds like really fantastic ideas. We didn't do any of those. I mean, I would say like we ran on youthful zeal and stupidity, you know, just ignorance. Yeah. So we started nonprofit. I was 23. My wife was 22. And we couldn't fill our week with like work. And so we started volunteering for different nonprofits in Kansas City who are already in existence. And so homeless shelter in downtown Kansas City would give them 12 hours a week. And we're just like, we're just going to show up faithfully, consistently going to be your best volunteers as we kind of discern and figure out what our nonprofit is supposed to be. Okay. So while we were there, a couple of things happened to us. And my wife also called us. No, she's got her graduate. She's got a four year graduate bachelor's degree, never started the seminary where I was at. So she's a pre-drop out dropout. Gotcha. She was unattractive. Yeah. Never signed her name to the papers. But you talked about it. Yeah. Yeah. No, we were. Let's do this nonprofit. Let's get out of here. Let's get out of here. Oh. Yeah. What was your living situation? Oh, we were poor. I mean, we were like 500 bucks a month, 600 bucks a month, we were bringing. So here's kind of what happened, right? We started the 501c3 and we did start meeting with all kinds of people, taken about for coffee. And we're like, Hey, this is what we're doing. Would you support us monthly, one time gifts, whatever. So we were just fundraised. We were grinding. Right, right. And when they said, Well, what are you going to be doing? Like we didn't have great answers, you know, we're a change of world, you know, I'm just like all the idealistic stuff. It's a little bit the FCA model totally, but we don't really have a plan. But we don't have a plan. Trust us, Joe. We have no like national spotlight to support us. Right. When we sound like fools, we don't have like a loco that we can say, you know, we were, we had a lot of you barely know what you didn't know at all. But while we were there, here's what happened, while we were at the homeless shelter, kind of two things simultaneously, one, because again, you're 20s, you're like learning who you are. We, I would have said it probably took us about six months to realize we're probably not called like vocationally to care for the homeless. We love the homeless. We love for them like because God loves them and we have a heart for them in a general kind of sense, but maybe not specific calling. But while that was happening, we were surrounded with a couple different, well, surrounded with three brothers who were there. They were all part of a gang called the Bloods. Okay. They were 13, 15 and 17 at the time. And they had 500 hours of community service each for armed robbery. And they were there serving alongside of us. And so for 12 hours a week, three, four hour shifts a week, we were there with these brothers serving behind the counter. They can't believe that you would volunteer your time to be doing this thing if they were being required. They were volatile to be there by the government, yeah. But you know, friendship grew and over time, we saw a tenderness under their gang façade. And all just like they were kids, I mean, there were kids and I don't know how to say any other way, other than we just like fell in love with these guys. And my wife and I decided that this was probably more of our calling. Like we love the homeless, but these guys, this is really make a difference in their lives. And so, you know, it started with little coffees, like during our break hour, it started in them. Non-sanctioned. There's no organization, no organization just hanging out. And then after about six months, we asked if we could take them out for lunch and we took them to this really sweet place called Arthur Bryant, Barbecue in Kansas City. What was their like living situation or they were in Juvee otherwise? They would have been, I mean, they didn't get locked up because they opted for the 500 hours of community service. Okay. So they had a home to go to. They did, they were living in a house. Yes. And you know, like most guys, it wasn't an ideal living situation. No, most guys get into gang activity at that age where we were at for a variety of reasons. But usually extreme poverty, lack of community and purpose. And so these things, like gang culture in a way, it provides those things. Sure. Yeah. In a way that's maybe a hard, father figure of service. Yeah, totally. In some cases. And if you've never been exposed to that, it's hard to recognize that. It's hard to like understand why that would be attractive, super attractive. And for you, you know, you say we fell in love with these guys, but also just the experience of seeing this whole different kind of perspective in small town, Iowa, really imagined. It was a culture shock. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you grow up in small town, Iowa, then you move to smaller town, Iowa to go to college, then you move to Kansas City. I mean, it was, it totally was a culture shock. And but you know, you throw yourself into it, you learn as much as you can, you, you basically become a sociology major for free, just by going to the public library, reading as much as stuff you can. And then it's just life-on-life experience. And so, you know, just logging hours with these guys, getting to know them, my wife looks like I do. We're both blonde hair, light eyed. You know, we stand out in the inner city Kansas City where we are and our kids all look like us too. And so we were in a zip code, there was 98% non-white. Okay. And so largely African American community, like 1% Asian, 1% other white white, you know. And so it took time. It took time. It took a lot of service hours, but you know, one thing led to another, we got for lunch. Arthur Bryant's, shout out to Arthur Bryant's, barbecue joint in Kansas City. And that day, things began to shift. We shared a meal around a place where they knew some of the workers, they ate half their meal. We drove them home and we met their younger brothers and sisters. So they were 13, 15, and 17, and there were other little ones at the house, and they gave their other half to those guys and we met their whole family. And almost over one lunch, the six months of relational work, turned into, hey, now we're going to introduce you to everybody else. And because we could kind of, they vouch for us, then we met their family, we met their friends, and one thing led to another. Yeah, they're fellow gang member friends. All of a sudden, yeah, we like knew the bloods in Kansas City. And so what was crazy is we were living in a suburb at the time and we were driving all day and then we would drive home. And we were really trying to pray into certain, like, what do we, like, is this the most effective that could be? Right. And you get little kids, but no. No kids at the time. Not yet. Not yet. And my wife, and I'm both kind of privately, and then, you know, like, when you have those private thoughts, and then like a couple of weeks later, you finally shared, you get the courage to share them, and you realize you both actually have that same thought. That's kind of what happened to Natalie and I'm a wife, Natalie and I, and it was a roundless idea. Like, we need to get out of suburbs and we need to move into their neighborhood. That's a big risk because it was a violent area, you know, a lot of gang activity, a lot of drug activity. And if you don't go into that with your eyes pretty wide open, you're going to get kicked out faster than you get moved in and that's just going to be actually redamaging to kind of the gospel message that we wanted to care. Well, and there's certainly something about, like, innocence or just feeling like, if I feel like it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay and stuff, but you're a husband at this point too. Like, can I allow my wife to be in this kind of potential danger? Right. We were asking that question. My in-laws were asking the question, you know, I mean, everyone was asking that question. And yeah, and so what we did was we would do this thing, which might sound like a foreign language to, if you've never experienced anything like this, but we would just call prayer drives. Like, we would literally get in the car and we would drive through the neighborhoods and we would just pray. Like, God, is this what you want us to do? We're just trying to discern and try to figure this out. And we did have for a number of months, actually. We didn't try to make a quick decision on this, but we did it over a course of a number of months. And it seemed like every time we drove in those neighborhoods, we saw someone we knew that these brothers introduced us to someone from the homeless shelter that we've been connected to. And it really, it really started to feel like, oh, this is actually our home and people know us and we know them. And so, 100% more, 100% more. I mean, totally different. It was just like the resting posture of our heart and our family. Yeah. And so we scratched together a few thousand dollars and we bought a abandoned crack house in the inner city. And it was just a couple thousand bucks. Right. Because nobody else wanted it. No one else. Everybody was moving out. It's like all this, all the stuff that you would imagine, right? Our property taxes were 300 bucks a year. Our neighbor's house is going for 500 dollars. We bought ours for a couple thousand. You didn't buy it for the incoming, what do they call it when it gets fancy? Yeah. What? The gentrification. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a speculative investment. No one had a speculative investment. No. We knew we were probably sinking that cash. And so we did. But you didn't have a two place to live at least, right? Well, we lived rent free for the first 10 years of our marriage because there was probably some deferred maintenance. We were already out for it too. I mean, Kurt, listen, the house was, we had raccoons in the second floor. No running water in the kitchen. We did our dishes in the bathtub for a while. And it was an abandoned crack. I was so like, the furnace didn't work. So we moved in right before Valentine's Day. The day after Valentine's Day, our furnace got fixed, but it could only heat the house up to 50 degrees. So we're still freezing. We're walking around in coasters. Right. But at least they were. Yes. But the secondary problem was before the furnace was fixed, everything was frozen. Once the furnace got fixed, all the vomit that was in the carpet, thawed out. And it just destroyed the house. I mean, it was so bad. I'm like, you know, taking my new wife and I'm like, welcome home, babe. You know, I mean, it was just a gnarly place to live. And on top of that, here's, like, you're in laws. Yeah. I'm wondering about like, were they people of some means or any, like, they're like, you're taking your daughter, yeah, I only daughter, yeah, they had a hard time, for sure. But so did my parents. I mean, everybody had a hard time with this except everybody thought you were crazy, except for the people they were crazy, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we've lost. And were you affiliated with a church or anything? No, we were like what's called an inter-denominational parent church organization. So we were faith-based, but we weren't tied to a particular church or denomination. So we had no real support. I'm telling you, this was a 22 and a 23. The ability to ask people to support you in what you were doing. Right, right. We did have that. So it was a real 501C3. Right. And once we bought that house and we actually were connected with the bloods, then fundraising became a little bit easier, because we had like real stories and real lives that were being touched. Yeah. Guys that we were having meals with, doing Bible studies with, I became a chaplain for the public school. Drinking pins that are like, dude, I heard Johnny appreciated you. Here's a grand. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, 100%. Yeah, the local drug dealer was three houses down. And I mean, he would have done anything for us. We had everything. Everything you could imagine right now in your head, anything that you could imagine someone offering to do for you in that culture, it was offered to us. And we were always, you know, just trying to lead them away from some of the violent lifestyle and towards violent or towards life. And drugs obviously too. Yeah. All of it. I mean, it's just, it was just hard, you know? I mean, it's a hard life and quite honestly, I mean, a lot of these guys just dealt a different hand than I was. Sure. And so one thing I really love about cooking channels and stuff is that like some of the best cooking techniques is developed to make the best out of poor circumstances. Yeah. Is there like black Kansas City ghetto classics because it's barbecue area, right? But meat's expensive and maybe there's, yeah, it told me about that. Yeah. I mean, Kansas City is known for its barbecue, for sure. And I would say, you know, the cool thing about inner city Kansas City was there like these local shops so that the brisket is just, I mean, that's really like burn ends, burn ends really. And brisket wasn't famous yet in those days, not like it is today. The burn ends was the thing, like I would say, and I'm an amateur, like, you know, food guy. So I'm not, I'm not trying to write in it, but I, but I think a lot of people would tell you the Kansas City Barbeque is really known for its burn ends. That's where it came from in general was. Yeah. And it was a rich railroad people of Kansas City that invented the barbecue. It was the poor workers on those railroads. Just chop that, chop the side of that brisket off, throw some sauce on it because there's more of a sauce base, kind of barbecue style. And oh, it was so good, it was so good. I like keep waiting to find like a good replacement. So you're engaged in this community for like what's the time? About 10 years. About 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Now we weren't one of that nonprofit for the whole time, but we were about living in a house for the whole time. Well, and so we ran that nonprofit for about seven or eight years. And then like most nonprofits started by 23 and 22 year olds, there was a time stamp on that thing. We were not known for our organizational leadership. We were known for youthful zeal, right? The state sends you a letter that says, guess what? You don't actually have the right top right. Yeah, no, we never got one of those, but like it just wasn't, I mean, it just wasn't working. I mean, by the time the time, you know, seven, eight years in, fundraising is a hard life. We had two kids at the time. Yeah. It wasn't sustainable for a good owner. And things, just all kinds of things in life have their time and their season, right? And so much like my business friends, like I did this for a while, I did this for, and I would say I'm probably a spiritual entrepreneur as much as I am a pastor now. I'm in a pastor now at the vineyard church, but this is like, I love to build things. But the fact that you can start the foco. It scratches that edge. Yeah. It scratches that edge. Dig it. But yeah, it was, it was a wonderful, wonderful time. And towards the end of that season, that's when we were attending a vineyard church. Okay. But to kind of loop this back down, getting more organized in organized, religion in general, or did you guys have a church, were you going to the gospel church? We were sometimes, yeah, we sometimes we would. And I would say like gospel worship has a really soft spot in my heart, my wife's heart. That's probably like one of our resting postures. Like we love the sounds of the gospel church. But we were attending a vineyard church as well. Okay. And we fell in love with that church, started leading small groups and just doing different things, just being a good volunteer. And you know, one thing led to another, started going to staff meetings and when the season of that nonprofit came to an end, I threw myself into a, you know, sales job with pelvic corporations, cylinders and windows, love those commission checks, love the grind of all of that. And learn, learn some things that made you a better, yeah, church pastor down the road. I think so. A lot of, I mean, if you're going to run a nonprofit in a really good, I mean, you've got to be a steward of finances are coming in and out and you've got real expenditures. You have to, you have to be wise with these kinds of things. And so I'm grateful for that season too, but we were just kind of exploring like, how do we fit it here in the vineyard and I still felt called to ministry, all these different things. And so then they, they invited me on the staff to like basically launch a young adult school for young adults who felt called to ministry and just needed some training. Yeah. So I did that for a while. And that's not like a full-on seminary type of experience, much more practical, like what I would call probably applied theology, right? So let's like read all the issues, the seminary in first place, exactly. Because you know, and I think this is true for most people who are looking for spiritual answers or pursuing a, you know, to become a member of a church, whatever, good ideas don't really save my life, right? Like I need those ideas to be applied to my relationships, to be applied to my heart, the way that I'm going to live that out. And so, you know, kind of across the Judeo-Christian ethic and the training around it, it's kind of like everybody, there is this really important thing of, you know, the sacrifice of Jesus saving us to a relationship with God, right? That's a very significant thing. Yeah. And there's this whole body of work that's also like, how can my life be better? Right. And there's a whole lot of it, and we, a lot of us know most of it. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. Well, I mean, like I, I would say, you know, put my little, my pastor had on right now, like Jesus didn't die just so that you could like have any eternal resting place. He actually died to bring transformation to your soul, but also to your relationships to the business world. To the education world, like to God's creation, like we should care about these things. Yeah. There are broken things that need to be transformed. And I thought it was for so I could have something to confess every Saturday. Yeah. I mean, you can also do that. But yeah. So the activity, I like to say sometimes an exercise, an exercise, like when you're doing something that is not necessarily fruitful at all, or as even anti-fruitful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I think. I wrote about that. Like, so we sent all the more so that grace couldn't flow. Kind of. Right. Yeah. Well, and I think anytime, like we're just going through spiritual exercises to just finish them instead of to be changed, we're probably missing the point. So it's easy to get, it's easy to fall into that, right? You kind of slide into the school opportunity or some applied theology while I'm doing that. I'm preaching on Sunday. I'm doing all those things. And then that's when the conversation started between my lead pastor's time, his name was Mark, myself around maybe following him someday. He was 55 at the time. So it really was like a 10 year run up. Now for me, that it was not so much about the time and waiting. It was much more about living a life of integrity around the calling that I felt like God had for me. And so that wasn't applied enough. Yeah. In some ways. Look, just like when we were preparing to move into the inner city, this was my wife and my mo is what we did. You know, we had a little community of people around us trying to discern with us. We're praying. God, is this what you want us to do? Are we supposed to be here forever? And crazy thing. I mean, I might sound crazy to you. I don't know. It's my experience. So it sounds very normal and natural to me. But I go to bed one night, have a dream. Now I want to preface what I'm about to say is like as a man of faith, it's a pastor in town. If someone comes to me and is like, I had a dream. God spoke to me. My dream. Yeah. Red flags immediately go up. I'm like, okay, I mean, maybe. But you were you binge watching Netflix all night before you went into it? You're not the first person to share that I haven't had a vision of about what I'm going to do now. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Well, I had a dream. And the dream was super simple. And I don't think every dream is from God. We could probably swap stories of dreams that are not from God. Yeah, yeah. Throughout scriptures, God would occasionally speak to his people. There was a squirrel eating the sight of my face. Yeah. I'm not sure what that one means. Yeah. Yeah. Probably not. But in the dream, I had a conversation with Mark who would offer me his job, you know, ten years down the road. And I said, Hey, Mark, I'm really sorry. I have to resign. I'm moving to Fort Collins to work for Rick Homestead. And then I woke up. And you didn't know about Rick? No. So I mean, I knew that there. I knew it was a name. Okay. I didn't know that that he was a name. So we will know each other better at the end of this podcast than I knew Rick at the time. So imagine 450 vineyard churches going to a national conference where all the past, he's in the network. That's it, right? But when I woke up, I had like a sensation like in my body that was different than the way you normally wake up. I would call it the presence of God. I just like felt the presence of God around me. And I woke my wife. It's probably like 530 in the morning. I woke my wife and was like, Hey, I think maybe I had a dream. I mean, you make a really important decision sometimes or something. There are times where you just have that feeling of peace and there's was beyond that. It sounds like it felt, it felt supernatural for sure, transcendent kind of like a transcendent reality. And then you're like calling this dude and yeah, so here's where it gets even more nutty. I put my pastor hat on. I'm like, okay. So it's probably symbolic, right? Like this is a literal dream. This is a symbolic. Like maybe I am supposed to find a guy with a shorter timeline or whatever. Of course not that I'm an asshole. We're not like cooking. Yeah. I heard like I'm not like making kool-aid for everybody or anything, okay? So I sat on it for a while and then I just couldn't shake it three days later. I ended up getting Rick homestead's phone number and in a parking lot of a bar and grill that I like was one of our favorite spots in the Kansas City area. I pulled over a part pulled into a parking spot and I gave him a call and I just said, Hey, Rick, my name is Jeff Faust. I passed from Kansas City. You're not going to believe this, but I had a dream with you in it and I'd like to share it with you and ask you to pray for me. I don't think it's a literal dream. I'm like qualifying before I, you know, but I just want you. And so I, he's like, well, yeah, I don't want to be crazy. So I share the dream with him, honestly, just to seek prayer and on the other side of the phone, he starts crying and he said, Jeff, for a week, I've been crying out to God asking them to call someone to come and take my job because I'm getting ready to retire. And I wonder if your dream is an answer to both of our prayers. Would you be interested in coming out for an interview and starting like the due diligence of what this could look like? And at that moment, I thought, Oh, this may be not symbolic. Maybe this is literal, like maybe this is what we're supposed to do almost can't not at that point. So we did all the stuff right like we did the interviews, the references, get a background check. Sermons are online. So you can watch anybody preach now. See if they're good or not. Yeah. How many times have you preached? I preach, preach like once a quarter, like I mean, I was young. Right. Yeah. You're brand new. 34 years old. Yeah. Well, and when you're doing a nonprofit with inner city members, like anything goes, you're just a cowboy in the wild wild west, and I mean, like, no, you know, it's different in a church. And were you like doing handyman stuff or anything like that on the side or anything like that? I wish I would have. I wish I would have because we were fundraising. So, yeah. You know, our salary was $24,000 a year. I, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I learned, including like how executive directors, how program, you know, operators interact with their board, vice versa. Yeah, yeah. And I would say one of the biggest learning experiences for me in my 20s running that nonprofit in Kansas City, helping run it. There was a team of us was the importance of a board and how that functions, how that works. Yeah. Your bylaws, all those things that 23 year olds don't think about a lot, but you have to, if you want to be in compliance, if you want to have a forward-facing strategic board. Well, especially in a nonprofit organization, because, you know, the boards change over every so many years and stuff. And so, unless you got- Yeah. And that's what really got us some- We had our founders board and part of the bylaws. They, you know, everyone would be appointed for two to four years or something like that. Right. And we should have done it like Congress or Senate, you know, or it was like people are staggered on and off. Everybody left at the same time. And so the whole board got replaced three, four years in. Right. And we let a different heartbeat in what we should be doing. Meanwhile, my wife and I are not even about this house. We had renovated it. We were living there. Right. And so it just became really challenging, but I was learning experience for a certain- Well, exactly what you were doing. Yeah. Like, you definitely changed- Did you keep in touch with these kiddos, these- A couple of them. Yeah. Yeah, a handful of them. And we took our kids back to Kansas City and went to the old house, you know, the guys that bought the house from us still live there. And so they were asking me questions about why I fixed the sink this way and that way. And I was like, look, man, mostly because I didn't know what I was doing. I bought the whole new book at the- Watch some YouTube videos and gave it a try. So we have a couple of mandatory segments here. I think I would like to drift into one now. Great. I don't know if you're familiar with- Have you met Clint Jasperson along the trail? Purpose-driven wealth is his business. Yeah. So they're financial planners, but with Thrive and Financial, which is kind of a faith- background, an organization, but we've got Purpose-driven questions. Great. That we've already drifted into some of these as well. But- Thank you to Purpose-driven wealth of Thrive and for sponsoring our Purpose-driven Question segment. At Purpose-driven wealth, they believe financial clarity leads to a life of contentment and purpose. Their mission is to help guide clients using a values-driven, stewardship-based approach, focused on provision, contentment, and enjoyment. With more than a century of experience, Thrive and helps individuals and families navigate life, and business transitions, and prepare for the future, while creating space to live generously and give back in meaningful ways. To learn more about Purpose-driven wealth, please call 970-330-7411 for a complimentary initial consultation. And now onto the questions. Um. This one's, you're pretty young for this question, but it's an interesting one. When someone gives your eulogy some day, do you have an idea of who you'd want it to be and what you'd hope they would say? Who I would want it to be, not sure, I don't want it to be my wife, I'd like to outlive her. Yeah. Um. And that would mean you hadn't. You would like to outlive her? I would, yeah. So that she can go first. See my wife plans on living with her twin sister for at least five to 10 years after myself and her sister's husband or a gun, but we have different plans. Yeah. Um. I think she's going to try to make it happen. I'm not sure. I definitely, so like one of the guiding, you know, phrases or, you know, guiding principles of my life that I would hope would ring true throughout my life to the point that someone would say it, uh, at my memorial service would be that Jeff oust was a man who showed the world the authentic Jesus. I think there's a lot of fakes. I think there's a lot of half stories, um, and I think there's, unfortunately, a lot of, uh, misinformation about who Jesus is and what it means to be his follower. And so my guiding principle in a lot of ways has been, I want to show people the authentic Jesus. Yeah. As best as I can. I'll do it imperfectly. Sure. But that's, that's the hope. Thank you. Yeah. Um, the, uh, experience of investing in people, um, like it sounds like there was some, some continued staying in touch and stuff, but in some probably real changes and probably a lot of ambiguity about what, what was that seven years impact of that? Yeah. Well, I think anytime you're investing in people in particular, people that are, are commonly overlooked or under resourced by the society at large, you can ask questions like, am I making a difference? Like it, is this working? And I, I probably didn't ask those a ton. Probably the question I asked a little bit more of was like, am I working hard enough at this? So it's partly my temperament or personality. But the investing in people, I mean, it's, it is a mixed bag. People are people. Right. You know, I'm, I'm a little broken and messed up and so is everybody that I'm interacting with. I mean, so I, I could go down the list of names of guys that, uh, life ended too short, you know, because of the lifestyle that they were stuck in. Yeah, yeah. And I could also give you a list of names, guys who walked away and moved out of town. Yeah. And, uh, you know, some incredible athletes that we helped get scholarships to get out. In some of those cases, even if they just got out of town and got a mediocre life, that's going somewhere and, you know, they're still married with two kids. That's winning, man. Yeah. I'll never forget going back to me. Like I said, we go back to Kansas City every now and then last time we went to the old house, showed our kids, they live in Northern Colorado and the four columns else. Even the crappy houses here are like sweet, you know, when we moved here, someone was like, let me show you around town, I'm like, show you some of the neighborhoods that you might want to live in. And someone you won't. Right. And we're like, you guys don't actually know. Right. There is not a neighborhood for college. It's ridiculously nice out here, right? But we, you know, one, one time going back, I took my son, my, you know, we were boygirl girl. So our oldest two, a wedding from one of the guys that we were really connected with and he was in our house all the time, you know, and man, that was really special. Yeah. And it kind of comes back in a way and sometimes you, you get the, you experience the fruit of that investment years later. Right. Well, and sometimes you don't even experience the fruit, but 10 or a dozen or a hundred other people do down the street and that you've not ever known about. A hundred percent. There's this passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus says that some plant and some harvest, but both rejoice in heaven together. And so we don't actually have control whether or not we're planting seeds or we're seeing fruit. Our job isn't, our job isn't to define success necessarily the side of eternity. Our job is to be faithful to plant a lot of seeds. And sometimes you don't see what those grow into, but it's always really nice when you do get to see a bit of it. Yeah. Yeah. This is the gift we've been giving our podcast. Lastly, you have, you know, hot sauce guy. Oh, yeah. Do like hot sauce. We're going to sample that here soon, which is one of the most awkward things because we crunch chips while we taste this hot sauce, but it's just what we do. My Midwest palate. We'll try to hang in there right now. It's, it's not super high price or high octane. Yeah. Maybe an eight. And we've got these low co-experienced shades. It's on a scale from like one to 10 or like one to a hundred. Yeah. Because the scale is important for me, Kurt. Like an eight as in people that don't really pursue hot sauce much will forgive me after eating it. They'll be like, that was really hot, but it tasted really good. Yeah. And it didn't like make my face hurt. So I was talking with Sean Godby who runs a spice shop. Well, Sean's who hooked me up with Matador. Yeah. Oh, sweet. Yeah. I love about sauce and spices. And I feel like you guys did a podcast with like with all the mayoral candidates from me to the series of them. Yeah. Yeah. So the hot ones. Yes. And that that series really made me jealous. I had kind of a okay hot sauce was my podcast gift sauce before a green sauce and it was fine. But now we have crazy ginger. Okay. Coco's crazy ginger, heavy on peach, habanero, garlic and ginger, of course. Okay. And let's give it a go and now available at Matador, Mexican Grill for sale. That's awesome. So pop in and tell them Kurt sent you and that Jeff really recommends it. Oh, that's a heavy hand. That was a big poor man. Maybe that later one. Okay. I'll just do two, one two for each of us right away with that one's not the one's no holding vessel here. You think the fans, ooh, that one's heavy, yeah, that's, that's, that, if you want, if you want it, that's the lightest one there, I think. I'll start. I'll take this heavy one and now you can pull your face away from the microphone if you want to. Here we go. Okay. Here we go. I'm going to watch this face, that's the, the key. What do you think I should get to taste this? I am glad that I went with the light one. You don't want the heavy one in this one. Oh, I'll, I'll, I'll give it a go. Just because I'm on your show. That's pretty cool. But I will start to sweat. And so that's okay. But yeah. Um, would you like to, let's go for another one. You're going to do the biggie? Yeah. All right. I like it. I like it. Here's the big one. It's hot, but I'm going for more. Yeah. Here we go. To me, that's the, a very strong sign of respect though. Like I just, you said it's because I'm just because I'm on your show like you're scared of me or something like that or you think you would do more if it was just me and you sitting here. Yeah. You wouldn't go in back for that second one. Uh, no, I would eat that. Yeah. I would, I just wouldn't go as heavy. Right. Yeah. You wouldn't have gone for the biggie. I wouldn't have gone for the biggie is because I have a little flare for the drama here on your show. Let's go for it. I got, I got a little less wet. You poured me a nice glass of wine, which I usually don't chase the spicy tongue with red wine, right? It's all I got right. I should have offered you the water. I did offer you the water, but I didn't tell you that we were going to have hot sauce. And my fridge really doesn't stay cold enough to keep it. I love it. Yeah. There was some curve balls out. That's good. I would like to have one more purpose drip question for you. That is a legacy. You kind of talked about spreading the seeds, but what, I guess, yeah, what would you hope your legacy? Do you have a next stop? You've been seven years at the vineyard now, are you getting the seven-year itch? My nose is starting to run right now. Yeah. Actually, it's a, there's true sermon too, so if you're... You see, it's a great question. And embedded in that question, you said, like, is there a next stop? So, I don't think there is. What I feel like I could confidently say is that I feel like God's asked us to raise our family here. So right now, I've got a 14, 12, and nine almost 10-year-olds, so we're going to be here for a while. Another 10 years, yeah. But when, like, I have this conversation with my board or church members that I love and they ask me deeper questions, I always say, look, we came here because of a dream. God told us to come, he came, if I get another dream. So, like, the bar's high, right? Like, I don't know what surpasses that. Like, angelic visitation would be more than a dream, probably. So, all that to say, I like to live, the Jesuits, they had this phrase, we want to live with one foot in the air. So I've got, my life is planted here. My family is planted here. We're starting a second nonprofit, we're leaving the church. We love this community. We are in, but the nature of being a follower of Jesus is, if he tells us to go, we will go. I just don't think he's going to. I think that this is, I think this is, we're going to be here for a while. Yeah. What's the other nonprofit? No. It would be love, FOCO. Oh, OK. I think there was another nonprofit. Yeah, no. I mean, there is another one, no one knows an M of it, it's since failed. But, you know, this is kind of like the entrepreneurial spirit. For every company that exists and that you can live off, there's probably a few that you tried and failed and you learn stuff from. So, yeah, I've started, you know, I guess, gosh, three nonprofits, I've been part of two different churches. And so, yeah, this is part of who I am, I suppose. Can you talk to me about, like, you know, they have like those political survey quizzes and stuff like that? Like, who do the vineyard church oversee and come through whatever, who do they think is the coolest? Yeah. Or whatever. We're famously apolitical. And so, people who want us to like really make a stand usually don't like us. OK. And so, every four years, our church grows with certain people and shrinks with other people. Yeah. And so, you'll never, like, on a Sunday hear me, like, promote someone, actually bomb those power plants. It's just going to make the Iranian suffer more, it's not going to help us win the war. You wouldn't. We would also not like, like, bless a candidate or anything like that. Right. The book of Romans says that we're supposed to pray for our leaders. And so, every election cycle, we pray, generally, that like, people's hearts would be at peace. Yeah. That they would understand that Jesus is king and whoever the president of the United States is doesn't have like an eternal impact on our life. Yeah. And that always bothers people because they tend to want me to say who they're voting for as the right person. So, we're just not going to do that. So, what percent? Well, I will say, I will say, if you listen to our preaching, you will hear messages that would land on either side of the aisle because the gospel does. Yeah. Right. So, like, Jesus makes it really clear, you should be caring for the least of these, the foreigner and immigrant among you. You should care for them and love them well. And so, I would have to ignore large chunks of scripture to ignore that message. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to remember the recent scene where Jesus was a socialist kind of element. And I think for sure, at the scale that he operated, he grew up a lot of feathers then he would do the same today. Sure. At the same time, Jesus had a really strong like family sexual financial ethic. And those things are going to land on different islands, based on who you are. And so, again, what I'm trying to do, back to the eulogy, I want to show people the authentic Jesus. And that's probably going to make some people mad. It's probably going to make some Christians mad. And I can sleep well at night knowing that because Jesus offended a lot of religious people too. Okay. So, that's a central defining characteristic. Yeah. So, somewhat moderate is a political and then another thing. Yeah. Yeah. I would say another thing that we're not anti-war necessarily, whatever, stuff like that. Like one of the things that is really true about who we are is that we are going to stick, particularly on a Sunday morning, we're going to stick to the main and plain messages of the Bible. So, if it's like some... So, if it's like some... So, if it's like some... Yeah. Well, not so much in our preaching, but like... Let me give you an example. There's like little verses here and there that you read in the scripture and you're like, well, I don't know, that's kind of odd. You might hear someone preach a whole message or a whole series on that little odd verse. Yeah. That's probably not going to happen to the vineyard. But what we're going to do is we're going to say, look, Jesus made this very clear. It was plain. It was made plain to understand in scripture and it was one of his main messages. And so, we're going to repeat those over and over and over again because it's the main in the plain. We're not going to like find the little esoteric verse that's kind of like strange on this side. We'll have an understanding for that and maybe on one-on-one discipleship conversation we'll give you some tools to understand that in the context of the greater arc of scripture. But we're probably not going to preach that on a Sunday morning. So it's an imitational church of sorts, I suppose, like people that maybe haven't had an extensive church background would feel very... I think the vineyard... More intentionally. I mean, like I'm dressed like I go to church right now. Jeans and a t-shirt. You know, that's why I preach in most of the time. Well, we got cigars at the love foco. Yeah. We handed out cigars. We're having a glass of wine right now. That's very... We're like normal dudes. I mean, I'm a normal guy. I like to have a beer. I love to move into Fort Collins. Like when we came out for the job interview, we went to a brewery as part of the interview itinerary. I thought it was a trick because we were coming from Kansas City, which is almost Bible belt. You know, it's like... Right, right. What is this? You know, no, this is like part of the culture. Yeah. But we're... Well, that's going to be an interesting shift, right? From being probably in Kansas City, you're a Bible belt and so you were kind of the... For sure, the liberals kind of there as far as general demographic kind of thing. Yeah, I would say. But here, you know, you're probably slightly right of center just because you are church people, kind of. Yes. You think there's a God. Even though, like, even though like one of our monsters, like we are on the quest for the radical middle, that's like kind of one of the things vineyard is known for. Okay. That doesn't necessarily mean you're in the quest for a radical middle, like in Fort Collins. Right. You know, so we probably, you know, like to the outside world, maybe perceived slightly to the right of centrist, even though in the body of Christ we're actually not like... Right. Yeah. It's fighting for that quest for the radical middle. Yeah. You dig it. Find the common ground. Not the division places. Yep. Um, so I guess it just fairly quickly, this, because we jumped off on your timeline a little bit, kind of landing here in Fort Collins, and it was just like a pretty quick, feels good to you. We came out, yeah, we came out for a 40-hour flash interview. Our kids were four, two, and newborn at the time. And so, you know, I don't know, we grew up in the Midwest, so we drive everywhere. Like, we don't take planes anywhere, we just drive everywhere, if we're going somewhere. So what we did when our kids were that young, you know, we put the kids in a minivan, we would slam red bowls and leave it like nine o'clock at night. Because if they were sleeping through the night, we could do it. Like I could go on two or three hours of sleep, as long as the kids were happy, it was it. And as long as she was there to kind of talk to me once well. Yeah. Seeds and kind of, you know, like the caffeine and just get me to Fort Collins. The weekend felt amazing. It felt right. It felt confirming. I will say there were a couple of things that really shocked us, but they were never deal breakers. It was just like, oh, this is what we're getting into. One of them was, it was really funny. The pastor Rick, he was preaching that Sunday, and he was preaching a sermon series, like, so like a different topic for four weeks, right? And the topic was, I think the sermon series, if I remember, I was one word that would change your life. And so he would, you know, like forgiveness, you know, and different things like that. Just surrender. The word when we were there was no. And like, if you say no to some things, it will give you an opportunity to say yes to other things, right? That's like like the concept. Yeah. But I just remember like we were laughing because we went and our whole conversation with God was, God, do you want us to move here? And I've never heard the word no in a sermon more in my entire life. But if you were trying to recruit us in, you should have done a different, like pivot, you know. Right. This is all incognito, right? Like you hadn't talked to the head pastor. The head pastor knew he invited us out, but the rest of the team didn't know. But I mean, you're dude that you worked for back in Kansas. Oh, no, he did know. He knew. Yeah. Confessed to him. Yeah. I was trying to do it the right way. Yeah. And so many of the vineyards, you know, were relational, right? And so I wanted to get back to, yeah, I wanted to leave good and all that stuff. But yeah, we came out the second thing that was really shocking. We were sitting in the back row of the church and, you know, a couple worship songs and things like that. And I leaned over to my wife and I kind of tapped her and I'm like, hey, they're like no black people in this church, like it's just a sea of white. And remember, we came from a zip code, 98% African-American, right? And we went through culture shock going from small town, Iowa to Kansas city. But now we were like going to be facing almost reverse culture shock, like going back to something that was maybe more comfortable. I call it a white cheese fondue because it's a melting pot, people from all over the country. Totally. But just the white cheese. But I will say, like, and that was important to us. It wasn't a deal breaker, but like, you know, we was hard to adapt to, I'm sure. It was hard. Are you pouring yourself into the black community for? Yeah. And they poured themselves into us. Yeah. You know, I mean, we learned so much. Our lives were changed. Yeah. They were transformed. The way that you view poverty when you're from small town, Iowa, for instance, it's not congruent with the like reality of the world. Right. Well, and, you know, certainly there's there's a Hispanic population here that's not very well plugged in with the greater economy in some ways or whatever, although it's more contentedly so. Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. I don't know. Well, and there's, I mean, there's so many things. Right. So, like, you know, this is, I don't want to go too far off track, but like, one of the interesting things I was really wrestling with was we were in inner city Kansas city and we were doing this ministry in the area where we were at. And so our kids, a large amount of their exposure to the African American community was at or below the poverty line. You know. And your only exposure to like an ethnic group or a racial group is at or below that. That's not great. I mean, like, because there's a whole, there's a whole tapestry of what it means to be a black culture. Yeah. And so like, we were aware of that and we're like this, we have to balance this out there. There has to be like our kids have to be exposed to the fullness of black culture, not just in this particular little setting that we're in. Right. And so in some ways, we were really happy to also move. Obviously, it was just like, there was a time and a season for it. Yeah. You know, but I will say we just celebrated in the book of Revelation, it was the last book of the Bible, chapter seven, it talks about how in heaven someday every tribe and every nation will be worshiping God together, every tribe, nation, language, tongue. So a distinctness in heaven, not like you just go to heaven and we all just become like a beautiful light brown color and speak the same language. No, like God is a creative part. Others were going to remain these. There's going to be a distinctive reason that remains, right? It's about us. Yeah. But we'll be, we'll be worshiping together. And so we started this part of our church called every tribe, every nation, we'll really celebrate the diversity of God's creation and invite people to bring the fullness of who they are. And so we share a meal, it's a small group. Yeah. And then whoever's leading that group of that day brings, you know, a meal from their country of origin and we had a big party at our church a couple of months ago. We have now 22 different nations in our church. Oh, well. In four columns. That's really great. No, like because some of them are European things like that. So they look like you are, but 22 different nations from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, really, really, we don't have any Australians, but really, really sweet. It felt like in a way a gift to our community. Our church has quite a few dozen or more mostly mixed race with a white wife or husband and, you know, somebody from China or from Thailand or, or just, or not even other parents were from in many cases, but I don't, we have very few, like a Swiss couple that moved and started coming to our church or something like that, at least not that I can think of. But I find out every week that I know a lot fewer than I realize sometimes. Yes. I'm going to call for a short break, sure. And then we'll jump back into the time machine a little bit and, you know, just talk more about more stuff. Love it. This episode is sponsored by LocoThinkTank. LocoThinkTank provides peer collaboration for business owners. We build smart, safe places to help business leaders navigate every stage of the business journey and we love what we do and who we do it with. Our model features gift-back-minded business veterans and the role of Loco facilitators. And we're always looking for abundance-minded individuals to add to our membership, facilitator team, local community, or to feature on this podcast. Listeners of this podcast who go on to become members of LocoThinkTank get their sixth month of membership for free. Just mention the Loco Experience Podcast on your application. To learn more, visit our website at locothinktank.com, that's l-o-c-o-thinktank.com. We left the timeline a little bit, kind of figured out the puzzle of how you got here. Yeah, that's a winding road, isn't it, man? There's probably stories out there. But I wanted to talk about love focus since it's so timely, you just cut the ribbons. Just had the ribbon cutting ceremony, I had never done one of those before, so I mean, but thankfully no one really had been to many of them, so they just thought that I knew what I was doing. I had no idea. I learned a lot, because I didn't remember hearing a lot about commercial real estate, development, or things like that, and getting a profile. So much. And it was hard, it was hard work, good things though, they're usually hard, you know, but I had to learn so much, and one of the reasons why we all have come to love for calling so much is because how beautiful it is and how well it works together. It's functional, the space, all these things, but it also means that when you're trying to renovate a space and you're trying to like maybe flip a commercial building that there's a lot of like rules, there's like a lot of, I thought you were going to say the ease of working a project through the process, it was so hard. And you know, so like the story, even of how it all started is pretty cool. So I was preaching a sermon series titled Love Foco, and I just wanted to do a January, this was like five years ago, I wanted to do a January sermon series to start our year off to really again, show the world, the authentic Jesus, this is pre COVID. This is pre COVID. Okay. Jesus would love his city really, really well. He wouldn't just love the churches, he would love the whole city. Yeah. And so for four weeks, I talked about what it would look like to be a church that like if we didn't exist, our city would know it. They would miss us. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But what would that take? And the last Sunday, Wade Troxel, who was the mayor at the time and Darren Addaberry, his city manager, I had them up on stage and I just said, hey, like what are some of your goals? What are some of your hopes for the city and how do you think the faith community could come along side of it? We had this great conversation with them on stage and I thought it was just a kind of a landmark. Neither one of them was a regular member. No, they were not members of our church or anything like that. And so I was thankful they gave us some of their time. They didn't know this, but about, you know, a month or two beforehand, I had gotten a tour of this building at 1213 Riverside. It was a kidney dialysis building that for Sennius medical owned, they did kidney dialysis in that building. They're a commercial real estate agent gave me a tour of the few other pastors and they said, hey, we're going to put this on the market and we were wondering since it's so close to your church. It's not part of the church, but it's a separate building, but it's so close, would the church be interested in buying it before we put it on the market? Right. We give you a good deal on that. We'll save you all fees. We have a classroom space. All the stuff right. And I said to them, hey, I don't, like, I don't think it's probably good for me to raise a bunch of money, like my first year being the lead pastor of this church. So my proposal to you is that you would donate the building to us. And if you do, I commit to you right here right now to renovate the space and use it to care for the under-resource families in our community. And everyone kind of laughed, like what is, I was 34 at the time. Yeah, right. We don't donate million dollar assets, son, you know, and they laughed and the laughter died down. I said, hey, no, no, seriously. Like could you go ask your boss, whatever is hedge funds, hedge funds, if they would donate the building and tell them. Tell them. We'll make you the hero of the story. It'll be the biggest tax right off of the year for you. You can write off the fair market value and we will commit to it. I don't need it for an office or another sanctuary. We'll use it to care for families in need. And so her commercial, the commercialization, she went back and told her boss is that. And I was in this in between time of like asking for it to be donated and then having this love photo, sermons years. You haven't mentioned any of these people, the material that they want their name mentioned in the story. So, Fresenius doesn't mind if they're mentioned. Okay. But I actually never had any contact with any of their higher ups. Okay. So I couldn't give you a name, actually. Like the commercial real estate agent that you mentioned, I don't remember her name yet. Just a person. I'm not the source of the story. Yep. But I was on stage with Darren, Adabarian, Wade Troxel, that follow, you know, a couple of Sundays later. And I told our church, I said, hey, one of the ways that I think our church could help on love our city is to get this building right outside those doors, to get it donated and we'll renovate it and then I said the whole thing. And the whole church left, you know, the church was like kind of like chuckling like it is. It's young, dude. Location is good. It's accessible to downtown. Yeah. I said, no, really, let's, like, will you join me in praying for it? Well, it didn't happen right away. It took a year and a half. COVID hit. They offered the building. They offered to sell. It was about a million, 1.1 million dollar asset. They offered to sell us for 800,000 and I just repeated my mantra, hey, no. But if you'll donate it, we'll use it to care for the most under-resource people in our community. Six months later, they offered it $500,000 and I just repeated it again. Yeah. And six months after that, so about a year, a year and a half after I was in there, they donated the building. Yeah. They probably found somebody who appraised it for like a million, seven. Yeah, yeah. I think they'll have total right off the point, too. But you know, like, here's the thing, Kurt, like, like, the building was, it was vacant. They had already moved on. They got their other dialysis down on Harmony, I think, now. Right. And there was a hole in the roof. And so that whole time, we were praying for the building every time it rained or snow, like the inside of the building got a little more beat up. There was mold in the drive, all kinds of stuff. And so when it was donated, it was like, okay, now the work begins, right? So that's when I started doing this. And this is circa, what, this is 20, 22, 23, 22, yeah. And so starting a long process of due diligence with different nonprofits that I knew, you know, I met with Seth Fordwood from Denver Rescue Mission. And they always needed like overflow shelter in the winter. So maybe this space could be overflow for some of the guys that you're serving. Sure. But there are some challenges there because we have to put sprinklers in the building. If people are going to be sleeping here, there's a lot of codes. You have to get to get it up to. Yeah, yeah. And so we were like, hey, bring some money to the table, maybe the city can bring some money to the table. We'll bring money to the table. And that kind of fell apart because it's money, you know, and I was really honest. I wasn't trying to fool anybody, but I just said, hey, if you're building a really large facility in the future, then I'm going to have to renovate the renovations because it won't be an overflow shelter forever. And so we're going to be on the line for that. And so can we like share the cost of these things? And we just, you know, just we didn't run into a good, agreeable thing for that. Yeah, I like to say at local thing tank, we look for the win, win, win, win, win. Yeah. And sometimes you just can't. That's one more than Michael Scott had, right? Right. Well, we'll settle for the win, win, win, win if necessary. But it just didn't work out. And so then I looked at like low income or, yeah, low income daycare, you know, like, what would that look like? I went through leadership for Collins with Anne Hutchinson over the Chamber of Commerce when I first moved here, learned a lot about the struggles of the city. And I was like, 7,000 square foot building, we could tackle this. Yeah, we got the early child, but man, that's hard. You know, it really was hard. There are a lot of, there's a lot of nuances to that. And if you're going to really care for folks who are under resourced, you need to have your child care service at a high bar so you can get the C cap dollars so that they can use the vouchers. Right. I mean, it's this whole thing. Right. And so again, we just ran into something. Things that are intended to spur development of those things and make it easier to start up and stuff, actually, tender sometimes they, I 100% they can get a hold of to a higher standard. Yeah. A attainable standard. A attainable standard. Yeah. And I was, you know, probably some unintended results to some of the things the decisions they made. But you just became impossible for us as a, as a nonprofit. And so throughout that whole process, I learned a couple of things. One, there's a ton of nonprofits doing really good work in our city. Yeah. I mean, like incredible. And so I don't need to create something necessarily brand new because a lot of people are already doing great stuff. Yeah. The other thing that I, the other thing that I learned is, so I mean, that was one of them. The other thing that I learned is that like in order to serve the city as best as I possibly can, we probably need to create a second nonprofit that's separate from the church legally, financially, and board wise. You got it. I don't need to the church. Yeah. The building donated the church. Like it's not just like vineyard church community center. Right. Even though we're having a glass of wine, I feel like I'm a pretty agreeable guy. I can hang out with anybody. Not everybody wants to hang out with a pastor. Totally. And not everybody wants to go to a church. Well, and even people from the, the Baptist and the Presbyterians don't want to hang out with a vineyard church. Really? Yeah. They're like cheating on their church with the vineyard folks. Right. I mean, maybe. Yeah. Which I don't have that in my heart, but you never, like you just don't, I don't want to come off that way. Yeah. And so I went to our church ward and I just said, hey, look, if this is going to be before the community by, by the community, let's start a love foco independent 501 see through because it'd be faith based and it is still faith based. You don't need to share our faith to receive our services. It's just this is why we're doing it because of our faith. And so the church agreed and I'm so grateful for that because I think it's created a much more open door to invite all kinds of folks in. Yeah. No, we have multiple churches supporting what we're doing. We have faith based and secular based folks interested in what we're doing. And I think we've removed a few obstacles so that anybody can go to the love foco resource center. If you can now go to the vineyard, even if you never go to a religious service because the goal is, we don't want hungry people in our community and we want people who can't see a doctor. We want them to be able to see a doctor and get a prescription. So is the whole building full at lunch now or is it not full and who's it's not? Yeah. And I should have, I should have explained that a little bit more so throughout our process, not only we started out that own 503, but I realized, you know, like for some reason, I think it's a faith reason that God has invited me to kind of steward this space. And so I want to do it with the most integrity possible. I think what we could do is we could invite some of these nonprofits who are already doing great work into this space. Let them do what they do best at low rent so they can take some of the money they were spending on rent, put it right back into programmatic services and serve more people. And my mom was a single mom for a number of years. And so you know, so many of these origin stories come from somewhere. And so really when this started to come together, I started talking to my mom about this. My mom was a single mom and she would work a nine to five nonstop, you know, she had six days a week, she had one day off and on her day off, she would tell stories about putting my older brother in the backseat, young baby, and she would drive around all these services in her area, get, you know, wick and diapers and wipes and rent assistance and daycare assistance and run all of her errands. And at the end of the day, my older brother was tired with her day off. That was her day off. And tomorrow morning, by the way, she's got to show up at a work all chipper and ready to rock. And she needs to get promoted in order to make a living. Right. And proof to the, yeah, and as you know, like she can't just get promoted once. She needs to be promoted like four times. Because you get promoted once, it's a slippery slope. You might lose some benefits to get promoted again. You're going to lose another benefit. So what we need to do is we need to create a community and a culture that will walk with families through three or four promotions to the point where they're like paid with benefits. So they're like on and there's, I think there's a vacancy in our community in that space. We're caring for the homeless in a really, I think a good way and even maybe the next up, what love folk was going to do is this going to unite these nonprofits to create this collaborative hub where everybody can do what they do best. And we're really going to be targeting kind of like maybe 20k a year to 50k a year kind of household income. That space. Yeah. Now, we can walk with people working poor, they're in danger of becoming homeless or in danger. They're just non-financial emergency away from some impossible decisions. Yeah. And so we've got a free healthcare clinic. Christ Clinic will be taking up space in a whole wing of our building. They offer free primary care to anybody who needs to see a doctor. No matter where you're from, no matter what you need, no matter what language you speak, you can come and you will see a doctor, a nurse, you can get a prescription, you can get a referral. And they're doing incredible work. They've been working in the kids wing of vineyard church and the lobby of faith community church in southwest core columns. And now they're going to have a building with locked doors. That's cool. They can put medicine in there. They can do like they can follow HIPAA in such an easier way because they're going to have like their own space. Down the hall we'll have prenatal and parenting classes. We'll have English as a second language. We'll have food and clothing, financial coaching, parenting, parental mentoring and coaching. We're going to be walking with families who are on the verge of maybe losing their children due to some struggling and heart circumstances kind of prevention in that space. My wife spent a casa for a couple of years. Yeah. We'll be hanging out in that space a little bit. And then celebrate recovery will be in there in case anybody is struggling with addiction and they can just help around substance abuse as well as like what we're calling a car care like ministry. So they'll do basic repairs and maintenance. You know the average I think blue book Kelly blue book would say the average auto repaired about 500 bucks right now. So if you've got a $500 bill utility bill and a mortgage in this area I mean those you're making choices. Yeah, yeah. If you're in that working poor classification. So what we want to do is want to come in and alleviate some of those pain points, connect you with some people because it's not just about writing a check actually money. If we could have sold the problem with money would have sold a long time ago, we have plenty of resources in our nation, but it's not not money. So we want to alleviate. Right. It's not not hustle. Yeah. Your mom was running the circuit. Oh, she was grinding out man. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Right. So we want to alleviate a little bit of all those pinch points and connect them to relationship. And so what I love about love FOCO, I mean, you know, I'm biased of course, but car cares are really great example, but we're going to change your oil again. I'm not, I'm not worried about creating some kind of like codependent relationship because that because I'm secure in that we're not, we're not going to do that. It's not how we're going to operate. But in four thousand miles or so, we're going to see you again, and we're going to check in on these things that we talked about. How are you doing with this? How's your physical health? How's your emotional health? If you're curious about spiritual conversations, I'd love to have those with you too, but again, you don't need to share my faith in order to receive these services. You're not just doing this to get more new members. No, no, no, no, because we're doing this because of our faith not in order to like shit. So like, again, the authentic Jesus would care for the people who are outcast by society, every time he would be out on the fringe drawing people to himself. And so, of course, I would love to point people to Jesus, but I'm not going to let our religious differences keep me from loving you in the name of Jesus, you know what I mean? Well, I think that's the defining mark of Christians probably in certain, at their best, and their best of times was that they were loving the poor and doing the things that everybody else that was done. We have forgotten this, but if you just look at like Christian history throughout time, the Christians were the one who stuck around when everyone else fled the cities during the plagues, and they contracted diseases to help love people until their last breath. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a, I mean, and this seemed throughout history. And so yeah, it's got to be part of what we do. That phrase, the Christians shared everything except their wives, everybody else shared nothing except their wives. Yeah. Yeah. I digress. It was revolutionary, though. Mm-hmm. It was. A whole new way of thinking about it. Yeah. So, love Fuku again. I mean, just because I've got to celebrate this. This is just fresh off for us. We just did the ribbon cutting. The building was donated, so we have no more hit on the building anyway. Elder construction was our construction crew. They did a fantastic job. RB and B, architects and designs. They helped us with the design of it. They did an incredible job. Cool. Um, as of last week, all of those bills were paid. So I've been on a huge fundraising campaign. It cost us a fair amount of money to do it, and we had to do it according to Fort Collins standards, and we did it really, really well for a lot of reasons, one, because, you know, I mean, this is also in my heart, like, you know, like, this population is used to getting secondhand stuff. And so we want to create a space that's hospitable and inviting us. Like, we thought of you and we built this place. And so you can come this proud of this place. And the whole renovation cost us over a million dollars and it was about 1.5, we'd have raised about 1.5 total between all the bills permits. We totally got the building and rebuilt it. That's quite a bit for a free building. It was. We have to buy the building. So we're starting at zero. So that's good. We were starting negative. I think they offered it for 500,000 before they offered it for free. Yeah, they did. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Well, we kept getting it down. Yeah. No, you great job. But it was, it was expensive. And, you know, we only got a handful of grants, a handful of grants, no, no grant. And a whole lot of red tape. Yeah. A lot of red tape. Yeah. And there was almost all private donors. And then can you make money on it? You're, you're, some of these tenants are paying rents. Yeah. There are more tenants out there. Because you need to at least cover the, well, I guess there's no property. No property taxes, right? No property taxes. Yeah. No property taxes, but property insurance. Right. Well, and maintenance sounds like something that they really didn't keep up with. Maintenance is a real thing. Maybe. And, and you know, like right now we're starting from scratch. So there's no like little fund for when the building breaks down. Right. So we got to build that fund. Sure. We're in the process of building that fund right now. But yeah, property insurance, utilities. I would like to not be the executive director of that space forever. It seems. Because I'm a leave pastor. You know, well, and you're like a big dreams and ideas things. Yeah. And so for you to do the 17 necessary things to do that building. Kill me now. It's not going to work. Right. I'll just do it. Just do it the same every month forever. Yeah. I will do it very quickly. Right. And wait until the 11th bus to do a whole bunch of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, but, but I don't need like a full time job with benefits. You know, it's probably a part time gig because every nonprofit's bringing their own operating budget into the space. Right. And so I need someone to like manage the space. Manage the volunteers. Do some donor retention. Because the nice thing is like I say somebody gives a monthly gift to LaFoco. None of it's going to a building. None of it's going to a loan. None of it's going to it. All of it's going to services. Yeah. And so overhead is easier for other organizations to serve the needy. Yes. Yes. And so there will be some operating expenses. We will have. There's a way to to gather income. So we, you know, our folk, our love Foco golf tournament, which you mentioned earlier. That should be able to raise the entire operating admin budget straight away. So the rest of monthly donors and one time gifts will go right to program act services, which is incredible. Then some of which will be offered directly to through the love Foco structure. Yep. Through love Foco structure, through the nonprofits that are existing in that space. You know, if we're doing car repairs, like we're doing tires for somebody, that's an expensive purchase. Just going to buy some tires and put them on for it, right? That's right. It's just going to, that price goes as high up as as many people as we serve. And so in some ways, it's a finite budget, but it could be as big as we make it. Yes. And there's opportunity, like because you're not a profit, you can kind of do a bunch of stuff without getting taxed about it. It's true. Other things would have to. Yeah. Even personal property taxes. You know, to, to have a car lift in your building, your commercial building, it's probably freaking $400. The personal property taxes on that stupid lift. Yeah. That you save. Yep. So it's, it's the nonprofits competing with the for profit businesses again out there. Just kidding. Well, some of these guys are not going to go into a place, right? Because they're not going to be able to afford it. Like a, like a auto shop, they hate it when they know somebody needs $1400 worth of work on their car. Yeah. They don't have it. You know, and they can't, if they fixed it for $500 for everybody that didn't have the 1300, they couldn't have enough margin. They couldn't pay. Totally. You know, and so the best thing it can be is a relief belt. Yeah. For that kind of quote unquote customer. But I think that's what we'll be in, and, and you know, like our, our city is trying to press forward with a lot of things like public transportation and creating. Right. But the reality is Northern Colorado, like without a vehicle is still really hard. Yeah. And if you don't have reliable transportation, a bicycle with a cart that you can pull your kids around with or a double-seater bicycle is way better. Frankly, most of the time, except for when it's too cold because it's buses suck. Yeah. Like you can't live as a person having to take two one hour and 20 minute bus routes to get to where you want to go. Super challenging. You know, order to get within four blocks or 14 blocks or 24 blocks of where you'd actually need to go. Right. And then take it over or something. Yeah. It just isn't realistic. Like the city thinks that people should ride the buses, but they should spend more time riding the bus. Yeah. I drove here. Yeah. Well, and, and you can do, like, except for if you got a couple of three kids, a bicycle becomes a little less relevant. But honestly, for like just a general working poor, if you don't, not more than one child per person, bicycle is pretty high functioning in this town. At least that you can time when you're going to get there. Yeah. Um, I feel like we could go two more hours, but then Ben's going to be like, dude, we can't like do that. Yeah. Um, I mentioned earlier that we have a spirit sponsor and you said that you like bourbon before the show. Yeah, I do. And, uh, so I thought we would dive into our final segments with a, with a quick. Can you have strong hands? I don't know. A pastor. Ben out there. He's, he's so strong. He can just pull it. Okay. Oh, did you hear that too? It was. It was. So we're going to go tasting notes. This is part of their forged and fire line from seed and spirit distilling. So they have got a line of military honoring. I don't know how much is left. It might be only like two quarter shots or two. Half shots or something. No, we're good. And you're well here. I'll give me the bigger one since you're driving. I'm not. That's still only half a shot. So this is a. Call it a medium shelf bourbon from seen spirit. Cheers. It's very authentic. Squish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's not as good as their. Yeah, the right whiskey one that I've shared one bottle on here and that's. Yeah. Asia a little longer. It's a little kinder. This is quite nice. Yeah. But you will like to whizz calmore. I'm sorry. Yeah, no. That's okay. I saw it on the show over there. And I think my next appearance on the look was going to get me to go to check out. Check out your sponsor. Yeah. I had one of my recent guests. You don't have an effort. You guys would like each other very similar. I've met Elaine Everett. No. No, same family, not the same thing. Well, Aaron's family, yeah, the real estate family. So he, Aaron's the guy from the third generation that could have run the whole thing if that was any fun for anybody. But with, you know, 41 cousins and competing interests and stuff that was. But, and like, he started writing essays and turning them into blogs on Twitter back in like 2023, I suppose. And eventually came to support the candidacy of then presidential candidate RFK. Interesting. As a democratic nominee. Yeah. Even though he'd been kind of a lifelong libertarian, you know, crazy guy like me. And ultimately did like 100 essays and got like tons of notoriety. And ended up RFK found him. He went to the inauguration as RFK's guest. And now he's on all these public health like the public health apparatus wants to know from Maha people. Why don't we trust him anymore? Huh. You know, it's anyway, my podcast with him was titled Becoming a Public Intellectual. Oh, awesome. And yeah, and we drank a couple of Whizkel. A lot of Whizkel. And I enjoyed it, so I was empty. But, so that's kind of his most recent local experience. It was kind of that, you know, with no credentials, no PhDs or anything, having this kind of increasing voice in that weird space of the world. Your local experience. Well, let's do this actually. Before we go there, we haven't talked about little Jeff. Oh, and I think we, I think it deserves. What do you want to know? Like a, like a seven to ten minute stretch. Because we kind of jumped in on you. Yeah, yeah. After coming to faith. Yeah. After dropping out of seminary school virtually. And there's a single mom out there. 19 years before all that. One a whole bunch of Iowa where, you know, single moms and stuff are arguably less common than in the projects where you spent a little later. Oh, for 100%. Yeah. So let's jump back to what I've been asking lately. What's your earliest memory? Great question. Yeah. Earliest memory. One was being burped recently. It was super annoying. Yeah, mine's not that early. You know, if I sat and thought for a really long time, I'd create too much dead space on your podcast. Just the early, really early one anyway. I've got good ones and bad ones. I grew up in a very interesting family. Good memories and very dysfunctional ones. But I lost my voice really early on. Okay. Which is funny because I speak for a living now. And so I lost my voice early on. It's like elementary school. Maybe second grade, first grade, something like that. So it's about that time frame. And they couldn't figure out why. I mean, like I had to go in. They like did like a, like a tube down my throat. Look at my vocal cords. I had problems. They were almost scarring. They're like this kid. I sounded like this. Cur, I'm not even kidding. This is what I sounded like growing up. It's so good. I feel like I've been back in my wardrobe. Smokey, marvelous. Since I was two years old, you know. And they just couldn't figure it out. And so I had to go to speech therapist. And then, you know, it's like a first grader. That's like a little embarrassing. Like, why do I have to go? Why am I getting removed from this class? Go figure out how to talk. Like all these different things. You know, like all these different insecure thoughts. And they couldn't figure it out. Like they were like, I don't know. He talks normal. Like he's pronouncing things normally. Like all this is fine. Like this is really strange. And so they assigned a para to just follow me around. When I go to school, figure it out ways. And within the first 30 minutes, the para called a meeting, she's like, I figured it out. I know it's wrong with Jeff. It's like I followed him around the morning recess. And the only thing he did was, Hey, everybody, come over here. We're going to the monkey bars. No, we're going out to the field. And I was just yelling at everybody nonstop all the time. I would literally lose my voice every single morning before class started. And so I would show up and I'd be like, Hey teacher, I gotta use the restroom. You know, just like this kid sounds psycho. And it's just because I was screaming nonstop from the moment I got school. It was really just that teacher, the, It's just that para that follow me around, unlock the code. And then they taught me like, Hey, maybe like don't yell at everyone all the time. Right. Which is like, just wait until you're on stage. So yeah, it's like one of my, you know, it's it's kind of like in a way I had somebody ask me like, when's the first time you like realize you were leading something? I always say it's very similar to that story. I was just leading kids all over the playground. I wasn't leading them into faith. I was leading them to a non-profit space. It was just like, hey, we're going to get crazy right now at school. So come and like do these things with me. And I was a little helly. I mean, I was, I was doing all the stuff that you shouldn't be doing. We would steal stuff from the cafeteria and put off the hives. I mean, just like joy in Iowa. Small town Iowa is a group in a town called Mason City. Okay. Yeah, so my, my mom ended up getting remarried to my dad. They had me. So my brothers, I have my brother's biologically half, half brother. And then myself and my younger sister kind of in our family. And great memories and hard memories, man. You know, I mean, their marriage wasn't stable. Their marriage wasn't great. My mom was married a few times. And since divorced from my dad and been married a few other times. And you know, like if you even go back generationally there's just a lot of pain in my family. A lot of patterns of abuse that got trickled down into the family. I grew up in as well. And so you just start to believe lies about yourself. Yeah. You start to believe like this is the best way for me to show up in the world. Maybe the safest way for me to show up in the world. And those things, they do have a way of beginning to define how you live your life. Yeah. But what I mean is the story is that you tell yourself or that you allow into your brain even that's why the freaking doom-scrolling culture is such a dangerous thing. It's like, you know, on a scale of one to ten like everything's kind of bad for you. But some of it's terrible for you to put it to your brain. And you don't like... And the algorithmic stuff is crazy because it's actually supposed to train you at your worst. Right. Not your best. Yeah. So, no, I grew up a bit before some of that, which I'm thankful for. But I was just a bad kid, man. I mean, you know, like, and what's funny is like, my brother, myself, and my sister, we all responded to the family dysfunction in a different kind of way. Yeah. And so, what I did was I was like, I can play the game. I was a high achiever. I was like, so I'll just create a facade. I'll play the game. I went to college on an academic scholarship, played football. Okay. I'm not a very big guy, but I was quick and I was ordinary. Yeah. And, um... But you showed up. You kept good enough grades together. I was a functioning alcoholic by the time I was 13. Wow. Because the family, the kind of family that I grew up in, there's only so many ways you can deal with that kind of pain between the system. And so, what my brother did was he embraced the pain and tried to pretend like he liked it, and then showed that to the world. And what I did was I hated the pain. I numbed it and I achieved so no one would see it. Yeah. Same family system, two very different responses. Um, and I continued that for years. For years, from 13 to 19. Did you have any male role models in that? My dad was around, um, but he, you know, he was a doc. He was super busy. He was busy. Yeah. But he was, he was financially stable. financially stable. But not emotionally available to you. Right. Maybe not to your mom that much, whatever. Yeah, and, and you know, like, I mean, I love my parents. I mean, I've tried to talk about this stuff like not in a way that's like, hey, look what's happened. More like, hey, this is just the objective reality. This is what's happened. This is, these are the stories I made. And thank God, like I have a faith here's how I'm walking out of that and seeking transformation out of that. But, you know, my mom was a senior mom and she was poor for a long time. And so all of a sudden, now she had money. Right. And so people think that's like the dream. Well, it's interesting, actually. It's challenge. For sure. It's a challenge. But yeah, that's the family I grew up in. Hey, so you show up at this small town Christian university? Yeah, like Christian heritage, but I went to play football. Right. You go to scholarship, but it was in three school. Yeah, I was, oh, sorry, I just hit the mic. What's happened? I am a, I'm an academic guy. So I went on an academic scholarship and I was like, invited to play. Right. So I wasn't like their number one recruit, but I was, but they were kind of like, right, we would want him. You got some moves. We would want him on the team, but maybe he's not going to be like the premier. Well, in those kind of schools, a lot of times give you big academic scholarships. Yeah. Yeah. May or may not be influenced by the size of your thighs. Yeah. Well, you know, whatever. So it was so you're there, but your experience with religion was pretty modest. Oh, it was like next to nothing. You know, I mean, I'd been to a few church services when I was 14. I got kicked out of a Methodist church for slapping a kid and body slamming them on a table. Oh gosh. Actually, before that, here's a, here's, here's real crazy story. I think it was like eight or nine years old. Went to a church service day like donuts there. You know, so like you walk around, get the donuts. And then they like put you in a kid's classroom. So just imagine like now I do this for a living, but like I always tell my people like, I know how strange this is. If you've never been a church before, you invite a family and then you separate them. Yes. I mean, that's an intimidating thing. I was a very effective separator. I got the donut and I went to my little classroom, but you know what they were doing when I walk into the classroom. There was like an elderly lady there. And she was handing out slips of paper to everybody. And there was the 10 commandments. So the first person didn't got the first commandment. Nice. I got like the sixth commandment, Douchon Law Committed Oldtree. That was, that was the commandment that I got. Yeah. Your mom's on like her fourth name. I said, yeah. No, I sat down, they gave us all giant sheets of paper. And they're like, illustrate the commandment that you got. I'm eight years old. Douchon Law Committed Oldtree. I don't know a lot about Jesus, but I had seen enough TV and I grew up in a pretty gnarly family. So I started sketching that bad boy out. Oh. And I didn't know like, how am I supposed to do this? So I look up on the wall. And I see this picture of Jesus. He's like a little white feathery Jesus with blue eyes and he's holding a sheet. And I was like, I don't know. I guess Jesus loves sheep. I guess he really loves lambs. You know, I didn't know the symbolism. I didn't know he's like the good shepherd because I'm outside of the faith, right? So I like draw out a comic strip with a couple sheep like interacting with each other. Okay, so it's a couple sheep. Yeah, yeah, not humans. Thank God it wasn't Jesus with a sheep. No, it wasn't Jesus. Jesus is a pastor. That's gonna be weird. Now I just got a sheep and I drew it out. And then, you know, the elder lady she comes over my shoulder and it's a pretty descriptive little comic of now she'll not commit adultery with sheep as the main characters. And I got kicked out so quick. I was like, wait, whoa, whoa, what? Like I did what you told me to do. I didn't know there were so many rules around here. Right. You didn't know so many rules. And so yeah, my early experience of church wasn't great. So now I find, well, ironically I find myself a pastor. I'm like, I'm not into, there's a whole genre of church out there called like a secret friendly church where we're just gonna make it super easy for people to come. That's not me. Right. That's faith has changed my life. It's changed everything about who I am. And some of my darkest histories have been healed and transformed. I want that for everybody that I encounter. Yeah, talk to me about the, I call those and stuff and the journey like right here this dude. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, yeah, I've already shared the story about the dream. But I like the way that got to showed up in my life is pretty supernatural. But I was so far away from God that I think it was the only way that I could have actually become a Christian. So I'm 19 years old. I'm in college doing the football thing, going to the parties, doing all the stuff that you would expect 19 year old. Secretly a heavy boozer. Yeah, that point, I'm probably not even that secretly, but just like that. Right, because they're a celebrated, right? Once I got to college, I just had more freedom. Right. Went to Cancun on a spring break, binge trip with a couple buddies and did everything you would expect a college student to do on spring break in Mexico. Fishing a lot. Yeah, lots of fishing, yeah. Yeah. Now we were doing all the stuff. Jackass was popular. So I think Johnny Knoxville was there. I mean, just trying not to get killed. Yeah, all the stuff. And one afternoon, we just wanted some harder drugs. And so we started asking around for some Coke and we're like, well, what's some Coke? And so, you know, one thing led to another and we got led to a... So you met Pedro? A drug lord's house in Mexico. And it was a room kind of like this, except everything was white and there were drawers everywhere. We pulled out a drawer. And this guy put a bag of Coke in my hand about the size of a tennis ball and told me the price. And I'm not... It was just like $800 in terms of... Yeah, a lot. There was a lot of Coke. You know, Frodo, from Lord the Rings, like when the ring hits his palm. And you could just like, you could like, they like add the actual experience kind of thing. So when the Coke hit my hand, I hadn't experienced like that. Like, get away from that. Like, I don't know what this is, but if I buy this Coke, my life is over. And my personality, my temperament, like, I know enough, I had friends that had been doing cocaine for a number of years. I would have been really bad cocaine addict. Yeah. Like, it... Not all in. Yeah. I didn't make a purchase that day. And 24 hours later, I went home. And while I was in the bed of my parents' basement, I was getting ready for bed. And I had like a supernatural out-of-body experience with God, where I had... Well, I would call now like visionary experiences, but I would have never had the language for it then. Yeah, yeah. Something was happening to me, and quite frankly, I was a little scared. And had you been like reading the Bible for going to some more churches or things in the meantime? But like, six months before this, the passion of the Christ came out, and I remember going to that movie and being like, oh, this is strange. Like, what I'm feeling right now is different. It's a little more realness to this than what I was giving and credit to you. And my mom had given her life to Jesus. She got a Bible for Christmas from my grandma, and it created a huge family fight. Because like, you know, my mom's like, like, why do you think we need a Bible? Like, you think we're all jacked up when you need a Bible? Right. My grandma's like, yeah, I think you all need a Bible. She's been jacked up for 20 years. Yeah, I've been watching, and this is not good. But she ended up giving her life to Lord and started praying for us, and I literally thought she'd lost her mind. Right. Like, for real, I told my dad, I'm never bringing friends over to the house again. Right, right, because mom always prays for those two. Yeah, she was like, and she was like, she was like a quite little quaker in the corner. She was like more like a penicostle, man. She's like sticking her hand out and praying for people. That was, that was Jill's family to me when I first came to town. Yeah, yeah, I was, anyway. I literally told my dad, I'm not bringing people over anymore. I just want you to know. Like, I want us to be aware of what I'm doing. I'm not bringing friends over anymore. Yeah, I was like, Jill's really cute, but her family's really, really just, that's weird, and it wasn't that religious, frankly. Yeah. But way more than I was a customer to you. Way more than I was a customer to you. No, it had nothing. Like, what's your framework for understanding this? And mine was next to nothing. And so, but she just praying for me, like moms do. And I had this encounter with God. And what now I would call like a visionary experience, the first, almost like a movie screen rolled out in front of me. I was like sitting on my bed, and I just like watched it like I'm looking at you. And I was going down this dark, windy road to a giant bonfire, and I was taking hundreds of people with me, scores of people. And I was just bragging about my life, how much I could drink, how many people I could sleep with, how all the things that I could do, all the lifestyle that I was living. Oh, yeah. And I was just taking this. Were you having a successful season in your football career? Yeah, I mean, I came in as a freshman, and I was the bottom of the totem pole, but then a bunch of people graduated. And I was, we went and played in Europe, and I was the, I was the starting cornerback. I'm not a very big frame guy. This is all speed and agility. Yeah. And so. Well, that's kind of cornerback. Yeah, that's what I was, that's what I was, this is the hardest position that I felt to play in my opinion. I mean, but I'll buy us that. Yeah, linebackers don't say so, but whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that was like this first. But yeah, so you had to, like I'm just taking as many people as there as I can. Right. Well, and you, how do I say it? Like we've had in some ways, almost an opposite journey of sorts, where, well, there's a lot of similarities too, but where I gained humility kind of later or whatever, but it was kind of things were easy for a long time and stuff. For you, you kind of got to where you could brag about it, but you were a academic leader and stuff like that. I was arrogant, man. I mean, I feel like right. You would kind of made that transformation into this kind of arrogant, young bunk ass. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Whereas maybe you were that in high school too, as you're earning these colors. Yeah, I mean, I probably was not the greatest guy to be around. Yeah. You know, but getting the college is a different thing. Yeah. You're out from underneath the where everybody knows where, which house you grew up in. Yep. Yeah. That's right. So anyway. So if all this is happening, then I become really aware of darkness in a spiritual sense. And I've met, you know, a lot of people in the inner city that we used to work with. We would ask them, like, what do you have thoughts on God? What do you have thoughts on Jesus? Like, would you like to do a Bible study with us to learn more about Jesus? And they would commonly say to us, like, oh, I know God is real because I've seen darkness. And sometimes people will come to faith because they have this wonderful experience with God. And sometimes people come to faith because they really need something to be the opposite of the darkness they've experienced. Yeah. And I became keenly aware of the darkness that I was living in, the bondage that I was living in. And I've been living it for six or seven years, but I became aware of it. I mean, in a tangible way, in an oppressive way. Yeah. Not Emily, or exorcism of Emily Rose kind of way, but like more like that than not. And it just felt like, that just could sense it and feel it and I became aware of it. But you didn't have like this 12-step thing. No, whatever, right? No, I was in the basement of my church. But the control of alcohol over your life or you're leading into it. Right. I was like, high functioning. Right. You know, my grades were still up socially. I was stewed. I was convicted. You hadn't quite as if your brain sufficiently yet to be able to not be able to escape it, kind of. Yeah. Yep. And so that kind of visionaries experience played out and then it flashed and it went white. And there was a small path. It was narrow and straight. And at the end of it was Jesus. And he said, I want you to lead people to me. And that was it. And I remember thinking, if Jesus will show up to me in this kind of way, when I met like my absolute worst, when I had just gotten out of a drug lord's house and narrowly avoided by the most amount of cocaine I've ever seen in my life. And I just became aware of a life that I was living, taking all kinds of people down to this bonfire of sin, celebrating all of our lives throughout my life. We were war heroes or something. Yeah. If you come and give me a different purpose and show me your love in this place, then I'll commit my life to you. And so in that moment, I was 19 years old, March 17th, 2004, I surrendered my life to Jesus and felt call to full time ministry from that point forward. Well, now I didn't say like a classic, like I give my life to you, Jesus, and you're my lord and my savior, all that stuff like you would maybe see in a church. Nothing. Yeah, but you start listening to your conscience just like I'm surrendered to you and I'm going to live for you. And I'm going to do, you told me to do. I'm going to leave people to you. So two days later, I went back to college and I started gathering people and trying to take them to church. I started gathering people, trying to do Bible studies. I read the Bible, so like, I didn't, you know, but I just thought I knew what I was doing, right? So I was like an arrogant little kid. I remember going to a campus ministry, this little campus ministry is called University Christian Fellowship, it was on our campus, a few hundred students gathered there. And they sang worship songs together. And I sat in the background and I thought, this is the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life. Usually when I go to a concert, they sing for me. Why are they asking me to sing with them? And they, the lyrics up on the screen, it's like a normal church service. It was so strange to me. And I sat through the whole thing and this guy named John Heatbrink spoke and he was the leader of that little campus gathering. And when I was all set and done, I went up and I introduced myself to him and I said, Hey, John, my name is Jeff. I just had this visionary experience with Jesus where he told me he wanted me to lead people to him. And so I just want you to know, like, I think you've done a really good job of like gathering all these people. And I think I'd like to take it from here. I got some ideas on how we could leave. And he'd just like put his arm on my shoulder and he's like, maybe we should have coffee, you know? Like maybe we should get together, so that. And to his credit, we had coffee every week for two years. Wow, he taught me how to read the Bible and how to pray. Dude. And what that experience might have meant? Yeah. Maybe why you don't walk up to someone and say, let me take over your ministry. Well, you could have been a flash, right? Like you could without that foundation, you know, for me, frankly, the time I spent in Bible study fellowship, created a foundation because I'm a big picture guy. And the years of that actual foundation matters because then I don't have to worry about the intricacy of those little lines, those little spots, those little things. You got to figure out, you can focus on the big picture. A big arc of scripture. Yeah. Would you, that there's a couple of eligible stories from just there that could hit our local experience. But when you were preparing for this conversation, was there a story that you said, okay, the craziest experience that I would be willing to share with Kurt? Yeah, I mean, I would. So let me ask you, sure. And then maybe we can have another conversation another day. Yeah. So I've got two, I know you and your podcast this way, right? Yeah, yeah, usually. So let me pitch to you two phrases, you pick one. Okay. Two phrases. You're just gonna give me the phrase. Different stories and you pick, okay? So one of two, either in glorious bastards or longest canoe race in the world. Oh, I think glorious bastards was a pretty darn good movie. I believe it's the Titanic guy, right? Maybe. Brad Pitt. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Quentin Tarantino is the director, producer. A lot of F words, a lot of blood. That's what that means. Yeah, yeah, it was rough. And then the longest canoe race ever. Yeah. One of those two, I'll tell you one of those stories. I'm gonna have two. I mean, I could tell both, but I got, yeah. I'm gonna have to go to the longest canoe race ever. Okay, so the MR340 stands for the Missouri River, 340 miles. I was living in Kansas City at the time. And I was a, I can call a job late. Mandy Mullin was, she just released this week. She's running the Kokodona 250. So it's 250 miles running, which makes 340 at a caduce, him, I think 250 running is harder. But also the river is very unpredictable. Well, and is in July, and this is maybe four people did stupid shit like it was insane. Almost every year. Okay. So MR340 stands for Missouri River, 340 miles. You're in a canoe or a kayak by yourself or with one other person. Okay. And there's like a, there's like a grim reaper that you have to stay in front of. Otherwise you're disqualified. Okay, yep. So you have to hit certain checkpoints in certain times. Yeah, like the ledville 100 is kind of similar. Very similar, very similar to Mullin's race, like where you could stop theoretically. But if you do that grim reaper, you're gets closer. Right, right. And so you have to keep going, right? And you can have teams that give you cheese for each one. So like 20 minutes dirt nap is gonna have to do for nap. And actually what we did is like one person would paddle while the other slept in the canoe. Right. I went with a buddy. And so I took five guys out to breakfast one morning. Five buddies. And it was like a, okay, hear me out. Well, yeah, it was. It was like, remember the Aunt Artica, like add, what's that guy's name? Like, like he's famous for taking an article out, like because he wanted to go on a voice to Aunt Artica. And he's like, you're probably gonna die. It's gonna be long hours, but honor for your name forever. Right. And like he had so many applicants. I'm gonna have to look that guy out. It's a fascinating story how he like gathered this crew. So basically I took a mile out for biscuits and gravy. And I was like, guys, here's a race. It's 340 miles. The longest nonstop canoe race in the world. Every year since they've started it, someone's died. And let's do this. Circa me in your career arc, in your college arc. And like was this pre coming to faith? Post. Post. So you think you're gonna go to heaven if I had these? Yeah, I feel good, man. I feel good. We were running an inner city ministry. Kansas City at the time, attending the vineyard church. Yeah. So let's bend these boys. Mind the late 20s. Yeah, we remarkably changed your life. Yeah. They're just friends. I was playing pickup basketball with them and stuff like that. Sure. And I was like, guys, let's do this canoe race. My dad's got a canoe. He'll let us borrow it for a week. I'm sure it floats. Still. Yeah, yeah. On the side of his garage for 22 years. Everybody said no. One guy said yes. Okay. Blaine. Blaine. Big man, Blaine. And we trained twice. We trained twice. We went out. And we were so bored. We like canoeed for two hours. And we're like, dude, let's go home. This is so bored. This is what happens when the back person pedals left. This is what happens when the back person pedals right. Let's just keep it going in the right direction, right? And so we committed, man, we went for it. And it took us 74 and a half hours. We slept about an hour to two a day, an hour to two hours a day. And the Grim Reaper never caught us. We beat the Grim Reaper. My arms from shoulder to forearm were black and blue from broken blood vessels. Not even like I didn't hit anything just like knowing non-stop. Completed experience. Just like a blue. I have a motorcycle. But it would be like me taking off on a 2,000 mile motorcycle ride that I have to complete in my three days. I mean, like I'm not even joking who I was delusional the last day. I'm sure. I had my ore and Blaine would tell you he was much sharper than I was. Like for some reason, he hung in there longer than I didn't think God. Because I was taking my ore and beating the water because I thought an alligator was chasing us. In Missouri. I lost my mind. And so I'm just whacking the water and he's like, bro, you just need to sleep and sleep. And sleep. Yeah. And now he'll tell stories. I was just talking to him. I'll maybe about a year ago. And he was thinking about writing a book about the experience because it was a gnarly experience. And just like what we learned about. Manhood and trying hard and like like facing failure. Right. All the different things that you would expect in crazy endurance races. Starting up for endurance events. Yeah. We haven't practiced the sport. Yes. And he said there was going to be a chapter on what happened when he got tired knowing that the guy in the front me had an ego problem. Because he would just say, Jeff, I don't know if we're going to make it, man. And I'm like, we're making it. And I just start rolling like crazy for like a solid 30 minutes. And I'd be cashed out. But it would get us going. This is after coming to faith, but before you do much humble pie. No sanctification at all. No sanctification. No sanctification. No sanctification. But you know, like we're created in a way. We are created in a way. It matters. You know? And like I'm surrounded by staff. My wife is way more pastoral than I am by the way. She's a pastor at the vineyard as well. And so like she's way more pastoral than I am. Wait, like if you were to pick, who do I want to be like as a pastoral kind voice in my life? It's not me. I wanted to ask about her. Where did she pop in? Like I'm guessing just quickly post conversion. Yeah. It was about a year after I gave my life to the Lord. So I gave my life to the Lord and then I went home for the summer because it was like March, right? March 2004. Went home for summer. And then the next semester, I took a semester abroad in Spain. We hadn't met yet. I took two suitcases to Spain clothes and Christian books. I like, I was fascinated by prayer. That's what really got me in the Christian faith. Like, we're talking about the creator of the universe once to like talk to me and he'll talk back to me. You can have like a conversation, things might happen in my life based on prayer. It was, I'm telling you for someone who didn't believe in Jesus and then started believing in Jesus later in life, that was mind-boggling to me. So I went to a Christian bookstore before, you know, Amazon and I bought all the books they had on prayer. Everyone, I put them in a suitcase and I went to Spain and I traveled Western Europe and I read my Bible and I read these books on prayer and I fell in love with the Lord. Properly. Yeah. I mean, I had an encounter with him before. Yeah, yeah. But now I was like, oh, this is real and it's actually not a leap of faith. It is a step of faith. There's something. Yeah, yeah. But we all have these deep spiritual questions. It was just a step. It wasn't as big of a leap as I thought. Yeah, yeah. There's like some veracity behind the historical Jesus. Like we could like dig into this. He's like an actual guy that people realized he walked the earth. And so I fell in love with him and and then shortly after that, I met my wife on a blind date back after Spain, back after Spain. Okay. Yep. Her friend. I thought maybe a fun of Spanish girl. It didn't know. Yeah, yeah. Her friend passed me a note that said, would you like to go on a date with one of my friends? And I said, no, like, like, it's a long story, but I thought I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I lived such a hard life. Yeah. I lived such a dark life that I just thought I could never marry like an actual Christian woman who shared my faith. It showed partly my ignorance to just what was out. I mean, just didn't know. But you know, I just didn't know. And that's part of the blessing of having 250 long podcasts or for you, 500, deeper than I thought we were going to go today, kind of conversations with congregants and stuff, right? Like as you start to realize that we're all pretty messy and we can all pursue Jesus and study what that means. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm surely not a Christian because I figured my life out. Right. I'm a Christian because I realized I'm actually not the best leader of my life. That he is. Yeah. And I will continue to make mistakes and so I need help. I've got some homework to do for local think tank, which is to look at some pages of some website stuff that needs to be going out soon and I and I said today, you know, it's hard for me sometimes to do these things because when it's just me deciding, I struggle. Yeah. You know, and the thing I'm thinking about now is when it's, it is when it's just me deciding. But if you study Jesus in his life enough, if it's you and Jesus or my best understanding of Jesus deciding, then it's probably a lot easier. Yeah. I probably should give that more credit in my decision tree. Yeah. I don't know if you got anything else you want to make sure you plug in there. If people want to come to vineyard, you go to service times, you've got a podcast of your own. Yeah. Sunday morning at the vineyard nine and 1045. We love for anybody to come. We really would. It's a place I think that you could ask questions, but also still go deep at the same time. We do have a podcast trying to be a little bit like you, Kurt. We've got a podcast called Love Foco podcast shows. It's no video. We're trying to figure this out, but we're basically telling stories about why people love our city and what they're doing to make a difference. Cool. And then, you know, love Foco, man, just open. Really excited. Yeah. If you love to golf, if you love to give back, there's like volunteer opportunities there for sure. There are. Yep. And some of them are a little different, you know, because like if you're going to volunteer with the healthcare clinic, for instance, yeah, you need to go through their process. Right. Because they've got regulations. My wife's mother was a volunteer for Christ clinic actually. Yeah. So incredible, but like also hip-a-violations, like you can't, right? You have to like do, you know, you have to be wise. But if you want to be a part of the golf tournament and help us to get together a bunch of stogies and have Panda pass them out to people, you will have a good time. I promise you that. Yeah. Or if you're a business out there, honestly, and you want to be a part of one of the cooler golf tournaments out there, have a forceome, whatever, I don't know if you can have more teams this year. Yeah. Obviously playing golf on that, which is a rain dance national with the views of the like training. The air show. Well, it's going out. It was pretty special. Yeah. No, it's a good, it's a good time. I think it's up towards the top. Might not be the top yet, but it's towards the top in terms of golf experiences. And you know, now that the building is paid for and the loan is paid for every dollar raised goes to make a difference in our community. None of it goes. I'm going to tank again. Or should I just put a team together? Oh, are you a golfer? Terrible golfer. Yeah, but it's a good time, right? Yeah. Here's my commitment to you. I could do both. If you come to golf, that will be fantastic. If you bring the truck, I'll make sure to put some stillies on the side and make sure that you guys can have a cigar while you're hanging out there. I definitely want to have the truck there because the pictures of that thing with the views from that golf course are pretty cool. Yeah. We'll put you on the first hole again. I dig it. Yeah. Godspeed. I hope you've enjoyed this conversation half as much as I have. Yeah, it's been great. And we should many good things and I would say, you know, let's check back in in a couple years when we have a little bit more news to report on how this is going. Yeah, I know it would be great to come back and continue the conversation. Godspeed. Yeah, you said that you like bourbon before the show. Yeah, I do. And so I thought we would dive into our final segments with a quick, you have strong hands? I don't know, man. I don't know, man. Ben out there, he's, he's so strong, he can just pull it. Okay, you can. Oh, did you hear that, too? It was. It was, it was, it made it nice. So we're going to give tasting notes. This is part of their forged and fire line from the seed and spirit distilling. So they have got a line of military honoring, I don't know how much is left. It might be only like two quarter shots or two half shots or something, no, we're good. And you're, well, here, I'll give me the bigger one since you're driving and I'm not. It's still only had a shot, but so this is a, call it a medium shelf bourbon from seen spirit, cheers, it's very authentic, swish, yeah, yeah, that is. That's not as good as their, there's a right whiskey one that I've shared one bottle on here and that's Asia a little longer and it's a little kinder, but this is quite nice. Yeah. But you will like to whizcal more, I'm sorry, I didn't have that. Yeah, no, that's okay. I saw on the show over there and I didn't. And your next appearance on the, well, it's going to get me to go to check out, check out your sponsor. Yeah.