Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. For those of you who don't know, You know, I lost a lot of people in the service due to that. Every day they say about between 22 and 44 veterans in active duty, take their own life, but it's not just the military. And there's a lot of different approaches and mental health research being done on how do we prevent this?
How do we deal with suicidal ideation? And one of the biggest changes to that environment has been the mobile phone takeover and social media takeover. And today I am here with Sean Dunn, the founder of GroundWire, where they kind of tackle that by focusing on phones being not an obstacle, but an opportunity to connect with those people who are dealing with whatever they are dealing with.
And since the younger folks aren't going to church as much, they have a lot of mistrust of the church. And it's not so much being done as it was in generations prior. They are bringing the church to them where they are. So Mr. Dunning, would you please tell us a little bit about yourself?
You bet. Thanks for having me. You know, I'm a normal guy who just loves Jesus. And I believe that when you have a true relationship with Jesus, you don't fall in love with the religion, but you fall in love with the relationship that he offers. You give him permission to lead you and guide you.
And so, my whole life. Has been pursuing him and trying to make a difference in the world. And the specific calling on my life is really to, I've been working with young people since I was 18 years old and I'm no longer 18. I've been doing it for 38 years to save you math. That's 56 years old.
But I'm an entrepreneur who in the face space. And ask the question every day, how can we bring the hope of Jesus? How can we bring the life that he offers the peace that he offers to as many people as possible, they might not come knock on the door and say, Hey, help me with this, but we have to figure out how do we get it to them?
Because as you just stated life is precious, it's fragile and it's fleeting. And so we need to do everything we can to introduce as many people as we can to the God who can really rescue them when they're struggling, as well as take care of all their eternal needs. Indeed, life is heavil.
That comes from Ecclesiastes, the Hebrew word for mist and vapor, like you said, fleeting, and I think it's important. I actually just read the book of Ecclesiastes, you have the teacher spending all this time searching internally, inward, looking around at the world.
And it's not really until the end when he looks upward toward God, outward toward God, that he finally finds an answer to the meaning of life and to all these, you know, kind of Dark, depressing thoughts that he was having, but with, mobile phones and especially social media being the biggest one, even social media is not new to the scene, but particularly in the past two or three years with the introduction of tick tock and other social media apps.
I think it has drastically grown, drastically. And so, people aren't necessarily looking outward or upward to God. You know, they're getting more and more internal and inward, and there's a lot of practices focusing on that internal search. You know, a lot of different types of mental health practices that focus really on the inward.
In fact, my last episode was on that. I believe that you need to have both, right? Cause you need to have room for God in your heart. And sometimes we get so filled up with the stuff of this world that we don't have that room. So we need to. focus both internal and external. So you're talking about bringing God to these younger generations.
So can you tell us kind of how are you doing that? Well, let me back up just a minute because you were talking about the what's going on in culture. I ran across this study in October of last year, and it was interesting. It was a graph and it, they had interviewed truly younger people. I mean, I know that a lot of your audience is probably in their twenties, but they'd interviewed eighth, 10th and 12th graders from 1991.
To 2023. Every two years they interviewed him. Three quality of life questions. Are you happy? . Do you find purpose in life? And I don't remember what the other one was, but it was right along lines, right? It in 1991, 18% answered negatively. So one out of five said, you know, I'm not happy.
I don't have purpose. In 2023, that number grew to between 48 and 52%, depending on which of the three questions. So grew from one in five to one in two is not happy. And if you look at the graph, it was very interesting. It climbed a little bit nineties and into the early 2000s. And then it began to increase around 2010, which is when social media was launched.
That's when Facebook became a real big deal. Of course, my space was before that, but it didn't have the carry that Facebook had and then took over. And then there was another spike right in 2020 with the pandemic. So the reality is there's struggle. It's real. Life is not hard. Here's something that I hope everybody hears.
Life is not always perfect. Life is not always good, but God always is. And the challenge comes when you stare at everything that's wrong, instead of fixing your eyes, as scripture says, on the one who's always right. Amen. Your perspective radically impacts your ability to deal with things. I have a really silly analogy.
It's really stupid. Hopefully you won't shoot me for, or nuke me for sharing. I was in my twenties. I was moving from California to Colorado and I was a writer rental truck and I was just kind of barreling down the road, writer rental trucks. They had a governor on them. You just couldn't, you couldn't get them up and going and it hadn't, there was nothing to listen to.
And I'm just sitting there and I'm bored out of my mind when all of a sudden, just outside of Elko, Nevada. I remember it very clearly and it was such, it was one of those weird to think people would argue with me and say, this did not happen. It happened and it happened this way. You can't convince me.
Otherwise there was a seagull that flew in front of me and I swear that seagull turned and smiled at me right before he let go of the largest amount of white substance out of his body. And it whitewashed my windshield. And it was such a comical thing because I mean, like, I saw it in slow motion and I saw the seagull actually turned that I started to laugh.
I'm driving and I'm starting to laugh. I turn on the windshield wipers and it just, this is gross, but it just started to smear. And it was just gross, but I was laughing and what I noticed was, man, this is really nasty, but there was a chunk on the windshield in front of me and something inside of me.
It just added curiosity. I'm like, I wonder what a seagull eats. Right. I leaned in and when I did, I noticed something happened. I noticed that I started to drift in the road until I got to the side of the road where they have those rumble marks where they're trying to teach you to rail. And. All of a sudden I hear it and I sit back and I like readjust.
But it gets the best of me again. And about a minute and a half later, I'm leaning in again, and I hit the rumble march. And it was in that moment that I felt like I learned one of the most amazing. I had a self epiphany. I realized how easy I am to distract because in front of me is this massive road that God has given with life, peace, joy, happiness, fruit of the spirit, purpose, all of those things.
But sometimes if you stare at the little thing on your windshield, you lose sight of the road. And so sometimes you just need to sit back and you need to remind yourself, God, I thank you that you are good. I thank you that you know me by name. I thank you that you walk with me and talk with me that if I slow down, even when I'm having a bad day, I will hear you say, I've got you.
I've got this. I'm going to make good things come out of this situation. You're going to like where you end up. You might have a bad day, but you will not have a bad life. If you sit back, you allow God to really direct you. So thank you for letting me share that weird thing that I just shared with you.
No, I think it's very relevant, you know, so life is going to crap on us, so to speak, randomly unexpected. And if you just focus on the crap and not, you know, it's true. Drifty aside. And I think that's one important thing you mentioned was social media highlights. And whether it's intentional or not, you know, I can't speak for the social media companies, but that is what will trend.
That is what will be put out everywhere. Just like, and that's nothing new. The news channels before there was social media, what do they do? They highlight mostly bad stories. You have a few news outlets. It'd be like, this is, you know, you're refreshing Friday morning, here's some good things that happened this week.
But most of the time, they're highlighting the bad and the few. And what you see on social media is you're focusing on that. And I've talked about it in other episodes, like my episode about people not sleeping. And it's like, you're losing sleep, anxiously staying awake, thinking about stuff happening on the other side of the world, in other states, or something that doesn't affect you in any way.
And sometimes there's stuff that affects you, you know, across the world. But most of the time what you're seeing on social media is a passing blip. You know, it's meaningless under the sun, truly. But because they're so focused on that, like I said, they're not looking outward, they're scrolling so fast.
the attention span. I remember I was working with a guy who is an expert YouTuber at this conference and he was telling me, Mr. Whiskey, you got to get your reels down to 20 seconds. I said, 20 seconds. How do I get a piece of a conversation that is so insightful or comical in 20 seconds? I mean, we really are battling with such a hard attention span compared.
I think there's never been a shorter one in history. Yeah. And. Going back to that survey you said, I do think those stats are interesting because I was listening to a podcast a couple months ago and I believe it said it was either the, no one quote me on this, but it was either the second leading cause of the fourth leading cause of death in children between 8 and 14 was suicide.
And if you look at suicide in children over time, if you search that up, it's certainly gone up. You talked about the launch of social media. I think what that also brought about was cyberbullying and this access to all bad stuff that we focus on it brought about, you know, sin spreading to so many more facets of life, and then just having a constant bombardment of these awful things.
And so you're fighting against all these other platforms like you said all these other distractions. I mean, we know how fast people scroll on their phones when they're looking through content. If they don't like it within the first few seconds, they're scrolling. So what is kind of your marketing campaign and strategy for getting their attention and bringing them toward y'all and toward God ultimately?
Well, first of all, you are right. The attention span of a millennial is 12 seconds. The attention span of a Gen Zer is 8. Now, I have a lot of friends who are my age and older who they think that they're either millennials or Gen Z because their attention span is just, but you are right. It is going down.
And it's because we've been trained to go down in the early nineties when MTV came out. MTV is no longer what it used to be, but when MTV came out, they said, We will not have a shot. We will not have a like a camera angle that stays on one shot for more than three seconds at a time. They have trained us to think quick, to keep moving.
And so we do have to, so yeah, you, we have to take that into consideration. We can't invite people to watch a sermon. They're not gonna, they're not gonna give us 30 or 90 minutes. So our strategy is really, we have to immediately connect with their emotion. We haven't how to use humor. We haven't figured out, but what we do, and we don't approach people and say, would you like to have a theological discussion with us?
Because that turn and run, but when they look up and they see how they feel. So one of the things about social media is we always post our best days, even when we're broken, very rarely actually tell people that we're broken. On, you know, in public format for sure. And so when they see someone who is broken emoting that pain, they're instantly drawn in.
They say, wow, that's how I feel. And then we've hooked them. And so our content, we have about 16 different websites. Our websites are everything from jesuscares. com to ifeelbroken. com to do I matter to what's the point to according to him I mean, we have all these websites and our content really goes in and connects with them visually.
They see , in the shot. And that's how I feel. And then it's like, one of our taglines is when life hurts. Jesus cares. Chat with someone who understands. Now, just in the little bit of time that you and I spoke before we recorded this, I get the impression that you've processed intellectually a lot of things.
A lot of the younger generations don't think they just, they respond according to emotion. And so we found that you have to connect with their emotion. Basically, you say, Hey, life's hard. We get it. Come talk to us about it. And so they do. Another secret to what we do is that we do offer conversation.
We don't just say, come read my opinion, order my book or watch my sermon. Our tagline is chat with somebody who understands. So we have this massive team of volunteers, almost 2000 now that are all over the world, and they're ready to engage. When somebody logs in and says, Hey, I saw this commercial, and it said, when life hurts, Jesus cares.
It sure doesn't feel like he cares about me. Feel a lot of young people feel like he's forgotten them. And so we have to remind them that he hasn't forgotten them. But a lot of people don't even know how to reach out and say, Hey, God, I need your help. Right, and in an interview I was watching you and you said something that I thought was truly remarkable.
You said a lot of young people feel like God loves them, but he doesn't like them. You know, he is just like a disappointed parent and that guilt and shame just builds up continually in them. I think that was amazing that you said that and I think also that's part of the one of the things is actually what I focus on in the non Fiction, faith, Facebook.
I have coming out called who would miss me. And it's about suicide and identity within the military and outside of it and other stuff. That was the biggest thing. Whenever I was talking to a shipmate who is feeling suicidal, it was, you know, Mr. Whiskey, who would miss me? And, you know, that's what boggles people when they hear about some of the suicides I talk about from the military, because they're like, well, that person was a chief or an officer, they had a wife or kids or a husband and kids, you know, how could they feel like No one loved them, you know, who, like who would miss them.
And I think a lot of that ties into the deconstruction of faith in our society, where you have people, their love, their self assurance, all of that comes from either other people or themselves. And when all of that fails, they don't have an unconditional, always loving God in their life. And not unconditional love.
And he never disciplines like, I think there's a lot of grace abusers out there. I think God is who we need and who so many people are missing. And there people, especially the younger people are ashamed to reach out because they're being raised up in such a immoral world, such a sexually immoral world, such a sinful world that they kind of are doing stuff without even knowing, you know, or they just don't have.
The word in their life. And then when they realize it, when they discover the word or God, all they can think is Wow I'm destined for hell, or you know, God must truly despise me because of all this stuff I've done and I think it's such a particular spot when, you know, you don't grow up with the word, you don't realize all of that stuff that you're doing, and when it's incorporated into social media and our society to promote sin so much and to spread it and to I think you De sensitize us to it.
Yeah. Well, you know, you did use the word you said deconstruct, but I would, there are a lot of people deconstructing their faith, but I will say this. Most young people haven't deconstructed. Most young people haven't even rejected most young people have that grew up in church that have some form of faith actually just have neglected.
They've just they've failed to pursue. They failed to incorporate, to include God. And so it becomes way too easy to build a life apart from him, as opposed to, you know, engaging him and everything that you're looking for, you're going to find in a true authentic relationship. Yeah. With Jesus, but it takes a little bit of work.
It takes time to pursue and it takes, you know, so, I had a really interesting conversation with a waitress one day in Chicago and she came up and she was, it was after we eaten our meal. I think it was, I think she was a buster. She was 19 years old and she came up and she said, can I help you with anything?
Can I get anything out of your way or whatever? And I just, I talked to people. And so I looked at her and said, Hey, how's your life going? And she goes, it's going pretty good. And she smiled and she was an attractive girl. I just say that not to say that she was beautiful. I'm just saying she looked like she had it together.
You couldn't tell that behind you was struggling. And she said, I'm doing pretty good. And I said, you know, I work with young people and you know, I just read a statistic the other day that said that 46 percent of your generation say that they're depressed or anxious. Either all of or most of the time 46%.
I said, what do you think about that? Is that true? And she goes, yeah, I guess I fit in that. And I said, and I told her that my generation, we had bad days. But many people in the younger generations, they feel like they never have a good day. And so we, we continue the conversation and I just continue to encourage.
I said, you know, I said, I just want you to know that I believe that God wants to walk with you through this. And she said something that was fascinating to me. She said, you know, she said, I believe in God. I just don't think he can help me with my anxiety, my fear, and he can't heal my broken heart.
I have to do that on my own. Now, first of all, let me stop before I finish the story and tell you that makes me sad, incredibly sad that somebody believes in God, but they think he's either incompetent or he's uncaring. Those are the only two options. If you believe in God, but you don't think he can help you.
You either think that he's incapable or he doesn't want to. And that's so not true. I mean, scripture says that he has loved you with an everlasting love. It's unconditional. It's everlasting. You will never, no matter how many words you learn, how many languages you, you learn, no matter how many songs you write, you will never be able to adequately come close to describing his immense love for you.
And so I just looked at her and said, you know, what's interesting. To me. And by the way, here's another interesting statistic is that 72 percent of the younger generations believe in God. They might not believe in the God that I believe in, but they believe in God. So you're not going to offend them when you bring up God.
But I said, you know, I had a sense that you believed in God. I said, but I just want you to think about this. The God who created you, who you believe in knows what created your anxiety. And I felt like the Holy Spirit nudged me, elbowed me. And so I actually took a step of faith. I said, my guess is when you go to your therapist, cause she hadn't mentioned a therapist.
I said, when you go to your therapist, my guess is you don't even know how to articulate what's going on with your anxiety, where it comes from. And she goes, yeah, I don't have words. I said, But think about this, the God who created you knows where it's coming from. So he can heal you. And we walked through the other two things too.
And at the table, I said, Hey, can I pray for you? So she said, sure. So we just prayed just a really simple prayer. God, just reveal yourself to her. God remind her how loved she is. And at the end of the prayer, she backed away and she rubbed her arms and she said, wow, that was awesome. I felt that. And I said, that's because he's real and he loves you.
It's his presence that you felt anyway. Fast forward two weeks later, she ended up giving her life to Christ on one of our chat lines. But the thing is what, what shocked me is she said, and I know young people sometimes believe and behave this way. She actually said, I have to do it on my own. And you know, I don't know who's listening right now, but man, Mr.
Whiskey, I want to remind your listeners. You don't have to do it on your own and no offense. You can't. I know the world says you can manifest peace and you can manifest joy and success, man. You can't do anything. But the good news is he can. He can change circumstances. He can make sense of the world. He can give you everything you want.
You need to stop trying to figure it out on your own and you need to just come to him and say, God, I need your help because I'm hurting. I don't this. This is not fun for me. I don't understand why that person wounded me or left me or abandoned me. I don't understand why I struggle internally and emotionally with anxiety or depression.
I don't know why I have these thoughts of suicide in my head, but I don't like them. And God, I need you. to help me get through them. And I promise you, he will. Amen. You know, I was thinking about one of my favorite, it's probably my favorite line in the whole Bible. There's a lot of good lines. Honestly, you know, I'm one of those people.
I have a lot of highlighted, you know, I got different colors though for different things. So it's not all just a jumbled mess, but the Psalm. Or the particular quote from the Bible comes from a psalm, and it's the one that I've quoted most in my life, is Psalm 34 verse 18. The Lord is close to the broken hearted and saves those crushed in spirit.
You know, you talked about, she had a broken heart, she was anxious, and It really breaks my heart, too, that she would say that, because here's the thing. People, like you said, most of them believe in God or know of God. They don't know God. And I think one of the big distinctions, too, is most people, especially from my generation and even maybe the Millennials and definitely the younger generations, they've never read the Bible.
You know, if they did go to church, the only Bible experience they have is whatever. You know, the priest we're reading from that particular day, X, Y, Z, maybe they have their daily quote that they have from their Bible app or that they see on social media or that they put in their Instagram bio, but most of them haven't read the word and I'm not saying that young woman didn't, but if you had read the word, you would know it says, don't be anxious.
Don't be afraid. You know, that God can mend a broken heart. Everything that she was worried about. There are multiple lines of scripture for it. Like you said, I mean. God knows all beginning to end. He knows what created your anxiety. He knows what can heal it. So to me, like you said, it does break my heart because I think, and that's the focus point of my book, is reflecting on my life, if I had known the word throughout my youth, all these decisions that I would have made different.
And I think that's part of the issue. Is so many believers and nonbelievers have not read the Bible and it's not, and I've seen some pushes through new technology to try to engage with that audience by creating apps where you could have famous celebrities. You like read you the Bible and stuff like that.
I've seen AI image generators and video generators being used. And you kind of mentioned comedy earlier, I think. I follow a lot of comedic, you know, religious accounts but that, that really is a balance because You want to entertain, but truthfully and accurately while still guiding them back toward that.
And I think that requires a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge. It's definitely something that I want to work on as well. But yeah, I really liked everything you said there. Well, again, I just would remind you, Scripture says it's very clear. He says, draw near to me and I'll draw near to you.
And we have this image of God where we're chasing him and he doesn't want to be caught. He's the genie behind the screen in the Wizard of Oz that he doesn't want to be found. Every promise that he makes in scripture is, man I'm pursuing you. If we're not drawing closer to him, it's because we're either neglecting him or rejecting him.
Those are the only two options. And so when we pause and we stop and we turn around and we say, God, I need you. He's there. The problem is we just don't do that all that often. Even people who are strong believers who believe that prayer is effective and believe that prayer connects us with God, many times prayer is a last resort.
Instead of our first line of thinking, it's not until we've hit rock bottom. Do we cry out? And and I'm, some people might say that I'm neglecting the reality of the pain in the world. I'm not, I just know because of the pain in the world that I need God. Some people say, well, it's a crutch, man. It's a wonderful crutch.
I'm okay with that. If God says, Hey, let me help you. Let me bear your burdens. He says, come to me when you're weary and I will give you rest. You know, so here we are, we're weary, we're worn down. He says, come bring it to me. I had this experience with my daughter. It's kind of a she was about seven years old maybe.
And and I came home from work one day and her mom had her, she was holding her on the front porch and she was, the daughter was crying and I didn't know what was going on. So I walked in and and as soon as, She saw me, she turned to me and I could see she, she was cut. She had a cut above her eye and she had a, like a concrete burn, like where she'd fallen on the concrete, right at her lip.
And she was she was just hurting and she was just sobbing. And you know, when kids cry, they don't cry. They ooze. I mean, there's stuff coming. But she turned to me, I was wearing a dress shirt and she turned to me and she reached out for me, but I'm the dad. I don't say, well, let me change. Like, I just grabbed her and she just buried her head and her fluids on my shirt.
And she just started crying. So I kind of gathered together. I said, what happened? And she told me my cousin was chasing me with a snowball. And I fell right down there and we walked down and I could see the scuff marks. I could see where she hurt herself and I could see there's probably a little skin on the concrete and I'm a dad and I don't know how to fix it, but I want so badly to fix it.
And so I offered her just a very sincere, but very ineffective answer. I just looked at her and I said, Miranda, do you want to go to Dairy Queen? I mean, but she said, yeah, I do. And so the two of us, we got in the car, we went down to dairy queen and I remember she got a cherry dipped cone and I taught her how to like curl up her lip and put her the ice cream on the lip.
And so that felt good. And we were having this kind of fun time. And then I said, do you want to go get a movie? And so we went and got a movie. We went home, went up in the kitchen and I hugged my wife and I said, Hey, we're going to go downstairs and watch a movie. So went downstairs and. My daughter crawled up in my lap after she got the movie started.
And for an hour and a half, she sat there and she stared at a movie. And for an hour and a half, I stared at my daughter. I was just, I was brushing her hair and I was kissing her head. I was, I just, I was about her. And that's what God wants to do for us is his presence is so real. Like that waitress, he will just wrap his arms around you.
The problem is we just don't often reach out for him. We you know, I mean, some people You know, coming from your background, there's probably some people who it's substances that when they're hurting, they turn to something because they want to forget, or, you know, maybe it's a relationship that's physical because they want, this makes me feel better, but this doesn't last.
This lasts. And so we do have to train ourself to say, okay, I'm going to reach out to God because he's promised me that he'll hold me close, that he'll take care of me. And again, acknowledging there's really challenging, difficult circumstances in life, but we have a God who's bigger and better than it all.
Amen. And like you said, I think a lot of people picture God is up on his throne in heaven, and he doesn't want to have anything to do with us down here, but some of the best, you know, illustrations I've seen artists make of what it's like is They've drawn, you know, Jesus in a room trying to talk to people and everyone's just buried in their phone and no one's paying attention to him or, you know, Jesus is waiting for us at a restaurant for us to join him for dinner and we show up hours late, you know, the waiter keeps saying, Are you sure?
And he's like, I'm here. I'm waiting for them. And then the person shows up, he's like, Oh, Hey Jesus. He's texting on his phone. Good to see you. Yeah. Yeah. I got could you give me some wisdom for my meeting tomorrow and can you help me get a new girlfriend? And yeah, I gotta go by. And that's the reality of it.
You know, it's not that, you know, Jesus is out. There he's here and we're, you know, in our phones or in our own lives, you know, we're the ones putting up all this distance between us. And like you said he wants to hear from us. And I think you mentioned prayer being a last line of defense. And I think that is something that is is truly, I don't want to say necessarily abused, but that is something that's definitely practiced where, you know, even though the Bible calls us to, you know, pray at all times through with prayer and Thanksgiving for joyous occasions, for, you know, both joyful and somber occasions.
And I think a lot of people are only praying when, you know, things are bad. In fact, one of my favorite singers. I don't know if he wrote the song or not, but NF the song, Oh, Lord. And it's a song that really covers the modern relationship between man and God, which is just, God only becomes real to us when we're sick and dying in bed.
And then when we're healthy, it's like, I'll call you when I need you again, is a kind of a paraphrase of one of the lyrics there. And I think that's really how it is. And also just for anyone who thinks that God is only at the church, you know, I mean, God is the word and the word is with God, you know, first and foremost and nowadays.
The word, it should be engraved in our hearts, of course, but with our phones, we have access to all these different translations of the Bible. You have your phone almost 24 7, which means you have the word almost 24 7. And I think it's really important to remember that. Well, again, our perception of God is very important.
Some people think That he's just up in heaven, waiting to catch you do something wrong. And I would challenge God is very near just waiting to get your attention. You know, again, another parenting analogy, which you probably haven't understood yet. I don't think you have children, but when my kids, they were young, I would just wait for them to wake up.
I couldn't wait for them to wake up because I wanted to communicate with them. I wanted to talk to them. And one day I had this picture, God's just waiting for me. To wake up. He's waiting for me to say, okay, God, you got my attention. Let's talk. And it's a beautiful relationship. I'm telling you the reason that people don't embrace Christianity.
It's because they think it's the rules of religion. They do not understand the rewards of relationship. And it's so amazing. That that the God who created the universe, it doesn't surprise me that I want to pray to the creator. What surprises me is that the creator is waiting for me to talk to him.
The creator is waiting to even reveal himself to me. The creator is waiting to tell me what's on his heart. And what's in his agenda, what's on his agenda for the day. And when you understand that you just, I mean, we don't we don't run away from healthy relationships. We run away from dysfunctional ones.
We run away from institutions. We run away from organizations. We do not run away from healthy relationships. And so when we truly are caught off guard by his amazing goodness it'll last and we'll keep wanting to do that. Amen. I totally agree. In fact, I've been reading through Psalms all week and one of them, King David was just crying out, you know, Lord God, how I long to see your face. And that's the same longing that I want to have to see him, to serve him and to be with him. And so Mr. Dunn, I understand that you have all these chat lines set up for people to reach out to you.
And again, ladies and gentlemen, the focus here being on. And not even if you're just suicidal, you know, even if you just want to have a conversation about God, to talk to someone who, like Mr. Dunn said, who understands, who knows that life is hurting whether you're depressed or anxious, but again, a big focus on this week in particular, the suicidal ideation.
I know most of us at this point know someone who either took their lives or we know someone who knows someone. It's become a widespread epidemic, so to speak. And in my previous episode on suicide with Douglas Brinker, we spoke about 8 to 15 people are left behind. Whenever someone, anyone takes their life, about 8 to 15 people are directly affected and hurt by it.
And, I think that's an important statistic to know, thinking about, like I said before, who would miss me, you know, who you have. That's 8 to 15 people here, in addition to God above, but think about that, 8 to 15 people. And you might not be able to think off the top of your head, well, who's the 8 to 15 people in my life?
You never know how much impact you have on someone else's life until you're gone or they're gone. And so that, I think that's something important to remember. Yeah. As a youth pastor, I always hated the the question, what happens to you when you go, if you commit suicide, like, will I still go to heaven?
And I would turn it around. It's not the right question to be asking because our questions shouldn't be. Where will we go? Our question should be, God, what is your plan for my life? And how do you want to use me to encourage and bless others? And again, there's times when you go through, through valleys of the shadow of death.
There's times when you go through pits that are just murky and miry and you just are not enjoying life. But if you grab hold of Jesus, he will not only pull you out of that, but he will begin to spark this light inside of your life that will bring you joy and bring joy to others. He will start to instead of causing grief on that 8 to 15, he'll start giving you an understanding of how you can impact 8 to 15 to hundreds to thousands.
And so the wrong question is, should I be considering it? Should I be considering death? The question is, how should you be considering life with him? He is my. obsession. And one of the interesting things is Hebrews 11 6 says he rewards those who earnestly seek him. There are times when I've gone through difficult, challenging times where I've reminded him what my prayer life is sometimes different.
It's not crying out for, Oh God, help me. Sometimes it's just reminding myself and in doing so I feel like I'm reminding him, but it's more for me than him. I'll just say, God, I thank you that you are good. Instead of saying, God, I need you to help God. I thank you that you are good. I thank you that you are always with me, that you will never leave me nor forsake me.
God, I thank you that you will move mountains in my life, that you will open doors that need to be open. God, I thank you that you'll protect me, that not one not one tongue that rises against me will succeed. God, I thank you that you are going to Fill me with purpose and with intentionality. God. And you know, as I begin to pray that way, as opposed to kind of draw out of that misery, I start to draw on the truth that I know is there.
Scripture says, God, I thank you that I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. I don't even really understand all of that. But God, scripture says, I'm your masterpiece created in Christ Jesus. To do good works, which you prepare in advance. God. Thank you that you have not forgotten me that you're walking with me God that you've gone before me and man when I You know three four minutes of driving in a car and just praying those spiritual truths out loud And I get out of that car and i'm ready to conquer the world Because those are spiritual truth that god wants me to be reminded of but too often the distractions of the world steal my focus Right, and before we end here, Mr.
Dunn, just for anyone who's listening, not watching, Mr. Dunn has had a Bible quote in the upper right hand corner this whole time. I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields. They are ripe for harvest. John chapter 4 verse 35. Mr. Dunn, why out of all the quotes in the Bible, do you have that one displayed on the screen right now?
What does it mean for you and for GroundWire? Yeah. Well, I'm an evangelist. I believe that, first of all, the calling on my life is to know Him. Amen. Out of that relationship, he assigns you different things. He says, here's why you're here. And my assignment is to share the love, hope, and and peace of Jesus through the gospel message that not only takes care of who you are now, but opens you up to understand that God's eternal plan for your life began.
With the fact that God sent his son, Jesus Christ to die on a cross to pay the price for your sin because you could not pay it, but there was a price and either a substitute was going to pay the price for your sin or you were either going to be separated from God for all of eternity, or somebody was going to pay that price.
Jesus did that. The reason I love this scripture is because these are Jesus's words. If you look it up in a Bible, it's red. He, he said it and there was an urgency behind what he said. Even back then, he basically said, Hey, stop saying four more months until the harvest open your eyes. The harvest is ripe right now.
And I believe that's even more relevant today than it's ever been. I think if Jesus was here, he would look at all Christians and he'd say, Hey, open your eyes. People are more open to the gospel right now. People are more willing to consider and respond to the claims of Christ right now. Why? Because the world is more messed up right now than it's ever been.
People are more confused right now than they've ever been. There's so much depression and there's so much hopelessness right now. That's why they're open to the gospel. So that is that's a reminder to me to make sure that everywhere I go, that again, I look past what's whatever's on my windshield and I see him and I see the harvest field that's in front of me saying, you know, be intentional, be aggressive, share the gospel.
That's beautiful. And ladies and gentlemen, in the description below of this episode, I'll have. Some of the ground wire websites. But Mr. Dunn, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your time with us and for letting us know all that I think it's important for people to hear.
I don't think a lot of people realize how bad the state of the world is right now, especially in terms. Of the unhappiness in terms of the depression of the unbelief. So thank you for sharing all of that with us Well, hey if I could share one more thing, mr Whiskey you know, I have a tool that i'd love to send to you whoever's interested It's basically it's a 28 page thing that we create.
I'll send it to you digitally But what it is, it's just it's some of the things that we teach people about how to have meaningful spiritual conversations With people and there's one of the pieces called four assumptions and three questions. I use every day You To have meaningful spiritual conversations with lost people.
And if you're interested in that, I'd love to email it to you. If you just email me, I'll give you my email address here. It's S done D U N S done at ground wire. net. I would be happy to send that to anybody that's interested. We kind of created it as a lead behind for some of the teaching and some of the things that I share at.
So if that would speak to you, if you'd like to see that, please let me know, I'd love to send it your way. Thank you for sharing that. Ladies and gentlemen, you can find that email in the description below and definitely reach out. Not even if it's something you need, but also if anyone you know can benefit from it.
You know, we are meant to help one another and to share those kinds of resources. So ladies and gentlemen, please do that. But once again, Mr. Dunn, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Mr. Whiskey.
