Pain to Purpose: Nothing is Wasted

About The Podcast

This month’s speaker is Davey Blackburn, founder of Indianapolis-based Nothing Is Wasted Ministries. NIW’s message centers on the idea that even our traumas and tragedies have a higher purpose—“God does not waste an ounce of your pain,” Blackburn says, and his ministry’s mission is to help those who are feeling broken and defeated to discover how God wants us to learn and grow from those major challenges. Through inspirational content and a close-knit community, as well as spirit-centered life coaching, he aims to help those who are hurting “walk through [their] valley well and come out on the other side equipped with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.”

Show Notes

Welcome and Guest Introduction 

Hi, I’m Paul Amos, founder of The Redeemed. We are a community of men who are coming together to discuss life’s difficulties as well as our ability to overcome those difficulties. Today, we’re blessed to have Davey Blackburn on the show, founder of Nothing Is Wasted ministries.  

Davey:  Thanks Paul. It’s great to spend some time with you guys. 

Paul:Thank you very much. We know you’re busy, but we appreciate you taking the time. Would love to hear your story today. Le’s start today with the same question we ask all of our interviewees:

What does redemption mean to you?

Davey: Man, I love this question, I absolutely love it. Because this is kind of a buzzword that we hear a lot of times in church world. Maybe you’ve read it in the Bible, this idea of redemption, but we don’t often understand exactly what it means in scripture.  You’re experiencing a redemption story. I’m experiencing a redemption story.  Many of the listeners are, and if they’re not, what I want people to understand is that God wants for them to experience a redemption story.  
 
Before we get to that, the way that I define it is essentially that what was deemed unusable is taken off the shelf and put into the glorious purpose. So here’s what I mean by that, If you’re going to take a gift card, Paul, and you’re going to redeem that gift card, you’re redeeming that gift card for something of value, but it’s sitting on the shelf, it’s not being used. So whether it was once used and then kind of shelved for a bit, for whatever reason ,or it’s never been put into use, so you’re paying a price to…Or someone paid a price on your behalf, if you’re redeeming a gift card, someone paid a price on your behalf so that this thing could be taken off the shelf.  
 
I believe wholeheartedly that as we walk around in life because of the curse of sin in this world, the enemy means for some things in our lives to happen, tragedy, trauma, major life transition, hardship, difficulty to paralyze us, to neutralize us so that our life has put on a shelf and we are no longer useful for the kingdom. But what Jesus did 2000 years, He paid the ultimate price so that our lives could be taken off of that proverbial shelf and put into glorious purpose.  
 
So what redemption means to me is it no matter what you’ve gone through, no matter what you’ve dealt with, no matter what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, your life can be used for a glorious purpose for your good and for the good of the world. 

Davey’s Salvation Story

Paul: For so many people listening in today, being put on the shelf is something I think they can really relate to. So I like your definition there, I like the ability to see themselves as being brought back off the shelf, being truly redeemed as a human being.  
Davey, if it’s okay with you, one of the things we’d love to hear is a little bit about your story of where you came to Christ, how you got involved in ministry, and ultimately a little bit about what brought you to the place that you are today.  

Time Stamp: 3:02  
Davey: I came to know Christ, at least from a salvation experience back in 1994. It was April 1st of 1994, I was eight years old, so I was really young, but I grew up in a pastor’s home. I kind of joke around a lot that I had a drug problem growing up, I was drug to church every time the doors were open, and some seasons of life growing up, I kind of resented that, I was like, Man, we’re always here. But honestly, now looking back and I’m so grateful that my parents had me in church all the time.  Growing up in a pastor’s home, we were there all.the.time! So there were so many deposits being made into me all throughout my upbringing that I didn’t even realize.  It was almost like I was just catching this epidemic of being Jesus people before I even really made a decision for myself.  

I’ll never forget, Paul, I was at an Easter play in April of 1994. It was one of those plays and I don’t know, you’re in the south, and I grew up in the South, we used to have these things called judgment houses. I don’t know if you remember that.  

The judgment house was basically like in Halloween, it was like the Christian alternative to going out and trick or treating as they would take you into these scenes of this play throughout a church, all these different rooms, and they would try to act this thing out. There’d be like this car accident, and then one group of people would dying in the car accident, they would go to heaven. They’d be this really flowy-type room with Jesus walking around and giving out suckers and hugs, and then the next room would be this depiction of hell where it was really hot, etc. And so then at the end, they would sit you down and they would go, Okay, which one do you want heaven or hell, pray this prayer. They’re literally scaring the hell out of you, so that was my experience with these kinds of plays in production.  

So when my friend asked me to go to this Easter play. I was kind of like, I don’t know about that. That’s going to be a little bit cheesy, but I’m telling you, Paul, what we experience is as we walk from room to room to room, they depicted the life and story of Jesus like I had never seen it before.  
I was drawn to this character for the first time, I’m eight years old, how much wrong could I have done at eight years old. But I was very aware of my own desires. There were some things I wanted that was outside of what I knew was right, and man, I just was drawn to this person of Jesus.  

They get to this last scene in the sanctuary, there’s three crosses up there, Jesus is being depicted on the middle cross. Tt’s just full-fledged production. Jesus is looking out on the crowd and there’s a whole scene happening, and the scene stops, and a pastor walks out and says these words right here: Jesus was murdered for my sin and for your sin.  

Now, that’s huge, because in a little bit, we’ll talk about something that happened to me that really was a pivotal tragedy that took place in my life, but those words right there marked me because I realized for the first time that my sin put Jesus on the cross.   

So I went over to the end of the pew, I kneel down and I just pray, “Lord, I’m so sorry. I did not know, Jesus, that what I’ve done put you on the cross and made you suffer this much.” I gave my life to Jesus right there and had a salvation experience. What was even crazier is when the pastor finished saying that the scene starts back up and Jesus lets out this cry on the cross and says, Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing. 

And so in that moment, I experienced this real sense of forgiveness. Now, from the time I was eight years old to the time I was 17 years old, I was just kind of living the nominal pastor’s kid Christian life, right? I go to church, but I had very compartmentalized lives, I didn’t do anything bad because everybody knew I was a pastor’s kid. I knew I couldn’t get away with doing anything bad and it would catch up with me and my parents would find out, so I was a good kid. But I just I wasn’t living my faith out loud until my senior year of high school. Right before my senior year of high school, I’m pursuing after everything that I want to pursue. Leading up to my senior year of high school, I’m wanting to go play division one baseball, I’m wanting to be an orthopedic surgeon.  Essentially, I was running away from kind of a stirring I felt already of a ministry calling, and I just didn’t want to have that lifestyle. I always grew up in here and we can’t afford that, or we can’t do this because we’re in ministry, and I’m like, well, I don’t want my family to do that, so I’m pursuing after my agenda, success, academics, all of those sports, all of those kinds of things. 

Right before my senior year of high school, my dad sits us down and says we are moving. He was resigning at the church that he was at. The place I grew up for 10 years there in Birmingham, and we moved to Tuscaloosa, which is only about an hour away from Birmingham. But this was pre-cellphone, pre-Facebook, pre-all those things.  It was like starting completely over.  

Well, essentially, long story short, God used that move as a way to strip me of a bunch of idols that were in my life, I was pursuing after my agenda, and those were idols in my life, and the Lord used that to strip me of those things and to really tune my years in my eyes to him.  

It was that winter at a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, 10,000 teenagers, Chris Tomlin is leading worship. Sunday morning of that conference, this guy gets up, old man, he was the General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Church. I mean, he looked like he just got off the boat with Noah. You know what I mean? He was that old? And he gets up and talks about, I want to talk about a full-time called a ministry today.  

Well, I completely checked out.  I’m like, that’s not me, I know what I’m supposed to do, D1 baseball.  I’m going to go be an orthopedic surgeon.  

He gives an invitation at the end of this, I don’t hear a word, he says During the message, He gives an invitation, and during the invitation, I don’t know what came over me, other than the Holy Spirit of God. I stand up and I start walking to the back to respond to a call to full-time ministry, and I get half way back and I’m like, What am I doing right now? And the Lord just whispers to my soul, Davey, this is exactly what I’ve built you for. And this rush of peace comes over me, and that was the moment I knew I was called to ministry, and that was the moment, Paul, I feel like I had kind of a second experience of grace, as John Wesley calls it, where I just knew that I wanted to sell my entire life out to this Jesus thing. 

Tragedy & The Way Forward

Timestamp: 9:12 
 

Paul: That is a truly great salvation story, and I appreciate you sharing with us.  Coming to the Lord at such a young age is truly a remarkable thing. I think about my life, and I think about a lot of the lives of our listeners. And for so many people their story of salvation has come much later in life. So growing up as a preacher’s kid, growing up around the church, it had to be a profound influence on you, and it sounds like you made the moves at an early age to go in the right direction.  

 But if we can pivot now and talk a little bit about how your faith walk got sidelined and about the tragedy that happened in your life, maybe you can just tell our listeners a little bit about that and then what you went through as a result.  

Davey: Coming straight out of college, I married this wonderful woman, her name is Amanda, and we got set up from a friend of mine, who was also an athlete at the college that I went to, and he is now married to her sister, we ended up having a double wedding, and it was just this beautiful thing. August 2008, we get married, we started this role at a large church in South Carolina called a New Spring Church. I’m a youth pastor, we’re seeing kids come to know Christ every Sunday, we’re seeing people come in to the Lord it was just an incredible movement of God to be a part of, but there was something that after about three years into it, that the Lord started stirring inside of us, and so we prayed against this thing for eight months and that was to move, to uproot where we were at, this community that we were in, this dream job that I was in, and to go and plant a church in a city that was my birth place, but I had never lived there before, in Indianapolis.  

Now, my wife at the time, Amanda, she was from Northern Indiana, so it made a little bit of sense that God might call us there and maybe bring some people around us to do that.  But November 11th, 2011, we finally conceded to God’s calling and we packed up a moving van, and moved to Indianapolis. We got on the ground to plant this church, but planting a church is being called to plant a forest and God drops you in the middle of a parking lot. 

It’s just hard work. But as soon as we got on the ground on there, I knew that we were supposed to buy a house. Amanda and I had prayed through this, we knew that we were supposed to make a statement that we were settled. This was not going to be this temporary, if things don’t work out, we’ll move back. But that we were rooted in this community, we’re digging into this community.  

So we find a realtor, we start looking at all these houses, the first house, we look at is 2812 Sunny Field Court. We walked into this house, and Amanda runs around the house. She comes back to me, all bright eyed and says, this is our house. This is where we’re going to live!  

I’m like, Okay, hold on a second. I’ve watched Chip and Joanna, I know you don’t buy the first house that you look at it, but there was something about it that drew her there, and so we go and look at 20 other houses or so around the area, and we come back to that house and she just knew that was the house we were supposed to be at. 

We started our life in that house.  We started our church in that house. There’s all these memories of people coming to know the Lord in our living room and starting this church and starting our kids ministry back in the master bedroom with Veggie Tales on the screen and we’re crawling into the sheets at night, there’s gold fish crackers and our sheets and stuff. It’s just like a really sweet time of seeing people come to know the Lord and really getting this church up and started.  

So fast forward about three or four years, we’re in this really just digging in, trying to plant this church, very slow growth, church planting was very, very slow, but we finally got to where we were running about just over 100 people at our church going into the fall of 2015, and just thought that, Wow, this thing is actually going to take. And we were just in a very, very sweet season, we had had a son in 2014, Weston, so at this point, going into the fall of 2015, he is 15 months old.  

November 10th, 2015. I go to the gym early in the morning, and I come back and I walk into my house and my entire world is flipped upside down. I walk into my absolute greatest nightmare. 

There on our living room floor was Amanda, and she was laying their face down in a pool of blood. I don’t know if your listeners have really experienced a majorly traumatic moment, but it’s everything they describe it to be. There’s this fast motion and slow motion feeling all at the same time, your senses get extremely heightened and tuned in to these really acute things, and yet all the unessentials seem to fade in the background.   

And I remember very clearly immediately rushing to her side and trying to turn her over and realizing that she is hurt very severely. She’s unconscious and she’s breathing, but her breathing is very, very laborious, and I just… I couldn’t understand what was going on in that moment. The only thing that I could think of was that maybe she had come out of the room and gotten dizzy and fell, and there was this decorative ladder that was laying next to her, that maybe that ladder had fallen on her and hit her in the head maybe, and that was the reason for the blood.  

She had been experiencing some dizzy spells up to that, just typically…Because she was pregnant. She was 13 weeks along. And so all I could think of in that moment was maybe we’re going to lose the baby, but if we can get Amanda to the hospital, everything is going to be fine.  

And that really just kind of stemmed from this feeling of bad things don’t happen to people like us, this sense of feeling impervious to tragedy, because after all, Paul, we’re following the Lord, we left everything our comfort to follow this call, to move to a foreign city and to plant a church. And for the past four years we’ve been digging in and we’ve been faithful to God’s calling. And so God and I had kind of this deal. This like hidden arrangement that I was holding Him to and that was, okay, we’ll do all this stuff for you, God, but you’ve gotta protect my family, you gotta keep us safe, you’ve got to bless us as a family. And so I’m like, Man, there’s no way any of this is happening. I call the paramedics, they get there, they attend to her. We go into the hospital and sitting in the waiting room, and doctors and investigators come in and they start asking me some very invasive questions, and I start realizing something’s up, this is not just like a miscarriage or something that’s happening right now. 

And they said, Davey, she’s got three bullet wounds in her.  One is in her arm, one is grazed over her back and one is in the back of her head, and there’s a lot of swelling in her brain, and if we can operate, we’re going to try to have to swell, I can go down. But it just does not look good.   

In that moment, there was something that arose inside of me, and I don’t know if it was faith or shock or some weird combination thereof, but I grab the doctor’s hands and I prayed this massive prayer of faith, I said, can we pray? And they just kind of looked at me stunned and I just said, Lord, I feel like that you’re setting us up for a miracle right now, there are people in this hospital who don’t believe in you, and they’re putting their trust in science, and I ask that you would do a miracle right now, and heal Amanda completely so that people begin to trust in you, that you’d sweep a revival across this hospital.  

I believed and I prayed fervently and for 24 hours, we sat and waited until test results came back, but 24 hours later, she was pronounced officially deceased. And I lost my best friend, my ministry partner, the love of my life and our baby, and that was on November 11th, 2015, which was four years to the day that we packed at moving van up to move to Indianapolis to plant the church. 

 The Aftermath of Pain

Timestamp: 17:19 

Paul: How did you handle that? In the aftermath of something that painful, what is it like the days following and then how does that impact your faith? 

Davey: Well, the question, how do you handle that? There’s really no answer to that, like the only answer, I don’t want to be over-simplified, but really the only answer is God. I mean, there is no way that you can humanly deal with something like that without the power of the Holy Spirit. And God meets us in these moments.  

Immediately, I felt complete shock you. For a couple of weeks, it’s just like you’re walking around in this fog and you’re going… this can’t be real. You’re going to bed at night and you can’t sleep. because you’re so anxious. But you’re going, I know that when I wake up tomorrow morning, it’s going to be not true at all. This was just a massively bad, terrible nightmare that felt very, very real, and so everything just kind of felt foggy.  

But in the moment in the hospital, God meet us in some really profound moments that at least began to carry us through the next several weeks and several months. One of those moments was this, we’re sitting there waiting for test results to come back, and I knew that if Amanda was in any way conscious, like if she could hear or understand what was going on, even though she was unconscious, she was hooked up and to all these machines and tubes, and these machines were keeping her alive, keeping your organ function going. I just knew if she’s here, she wants to listen to elevation worship, because that’s what she used to run to, that’s what she would listen to all the time. So I put on a Pandora radio station on our phone at the foot of her bed, I put Elevation worship on Pandora.  

Well, you know how, Pandora works. It’s random, right? You don’t know what song is going to come up. Well, the first song that came up, Paul, was a song called Nothing is Wasted, you can Google it and listen to it, it’s an unbelievable song.  

It’s like in that moment, God reached in and spoke to her sister and I were sitting on either side of the hospital bed, and we both just looked at each other and we just started weeping.  Because in that moment, like heaven touched earth, and God spoke and said I know this is so painful, my heart is hurting too, but I am not going to waste this.  

And so then a couple of days later, I thought about what Amanda did as a hobby. She used to restore furniture. She would have me go, like American Pickers or something, right? He had me go and pick up this beat-up piece of furniture on the side of the road, and I’d bring it home.  

The first time I ever did this, someone just threw out this dresser and I’m bringing it home and I looked and I’m like, What are you going to do it? This is garbage, right?   

Think about this, go back to what we talked about at the very beginning of this. The thing put on the shelf. I’m like, you can’t do anything with this. This is terrible. I totally discarded this piece of furniture. But she would look at me and say Davey, trust me, give me a little time and I’m going to turn this into something beautiful.  And she did over and over.  She would turn these pieces in something of value that other people would purchase, and they would use it in their homes. In fact, so much so that after Amanda passed, there was someone on our church staff was like, we should ask everybody who’s bought a piece of  her furniture to submit pictures to us of where they’re using it in their home. And we just got inundated with all these pictures from people all over the city who were using furniture that she had restored, but the Lord brought me back to that, this idea of nothing is wasted, and he was like, Davey, I know this is awful, I know the world looks at this as this horrific thing that nobody can do anything. This is senseless, this is like, you’re going to throw this out as trash this whole situation, but if you trust me and give me a little time, I’ll turn this into something beautiful. 

And so I think those first couple of weeks, that’s what carried us was those moments that God rushed in in ways that only God can. You can’t manufacture this and other people being there for you is great, but at the end of the day, you’re so gutted with these kinds of tragedies that the only thing that can truly be a salve to your soul in those moments is the Holy Spirit of God. 

 How Can I Come Off The Shelf?

Timestamp: 21:31 

Paul: That is hard to hear. As someone who’s been through trauma, as someone who’s been through tragedy, nothing even close to the scale with which you’ve been through, to hear you walk through that with Christ and hear you walk through it with God is aweing. It says a lot about you, your character, your faith. For a lot of our listeners, they didn’t go down that path, they went down a path that may have led them completely away from God, toward addiction, toward different choices.  

I know you’ve spoken to a lot of people, you’ve worked with a lot of groups, maybe you can talk for a minute about when people don’t make the right choices in those moments and how they can see themselves as coming off that shelf, much like to furniture your wife was restoring. 

Davey: Yeah, I would just say, if that’s you, if you would say, Hey, that essentially qualifies my story, Paul, what you just said is this thing catapulted me into a series of addiction or coping or something to just numb this pain, I would say, first of all, you’re normal, and I have a lot of empathy and a lot of grace for you because I felt the same way.   

Because after that shock wears off and you go into this deep, dark night of the soul where there were so many days that I did not want to live anymore. I was looking for anything that I could find to try to numb this just horrific rotting ball of pain that was in the pit of my stomach.   

I feel fortunate. You said, Wow, that’s a huge testament to your character in your faith. No, I think it’s a huge testament to what we talked about earlier, in that I lived in that, I had that “drug problem” growing up.  It’s like my drug problem growing up preventing me from having a drug problem in the tragedy that I went through.  These deposits were being made, I have a legacy and a heritage of family that has been my foundation, my solid rock, even before faith was my own. And there’s something to that.  

And not everybody has that. Not everybody is fortunate enough to have that. And in a lot of ways, it’s not your fault, and there’s so many things that we cannot control about how we grew up or where we are in life, or whether or not we were in a healthy family, and therefore how we see the world and how we perceive trauma that we go through, there’s so much that we can’t control.  And yet there’s always a moment that we are given where we can go, Hey, from here on, I can control what I do with this.  I’ll say it this way, we can’t ever control what happens to us, we can control how we respond to what happens to us. And therein is the key, how we respond to what happens to us is the key that will determine what we do moving forward and how our life plays out.  That ultimately determines the redemption story, and whether or not we’re going to experience that. Now, immediately I felt these like, I don’t want to live, I don’t know how to get rid of all this pain. But the Lord, in His graciousness, He’s surrounded me with some people who helped me understand a couple of things. One, that I’ve got to lean into those deep, dark, difficult emotions. That the pathway to me wrecking my entire life and wrecking the lives of people around me that I care about the pathway that that is to suppress and numb and escape and try to cope with the pain that’s going on. That that’s going to ultimately lead to this festering of this pain, and it’s going to come out sideways. I can say it this way now, on this side of things, and if I don’t let God transform my pain at a deep heart level, I will inevitably transfer my pain on somebody else.  Because pain perpetuates pain. That’s what it does. Unless you let God come in and intercede.   

God wants to intercede, this is his MO, that’s what he desires. There are so many theological implications as to why pain happens to us, why things take place in this world that are difficult, that are tough, we talk about in our ministry, the four perpetrators of pain, the four basic reasons that there is pain in this world.  

The Four Perpetrators of Pain:

1. We live in a fallen broken world, and so this world is fractured, and we are living in the fallout of that ever-increasing fracturing of this universe because of original sin with Adam and Eve. 

2. You may have made some poor choices and you’re living in the repercussions of that pain. There’s nobody that’s hurt me, lie to me, duped to me more than me. 

3. You might be living in the repercussions of someone else’s sinful choices. You may be a victim, and that’s why you’re experiencing pain, right.

4. Maybe there is a spiritual attack, that the enemy sees your capability and your potential, and so he has targeted you to try to neutralize your effectiveness by discouraging you, by just essentially wanting to destroy the effectiveness that you can have in the kingdom. 

So those four perpetrators are kind of four basic reasons why we experience pain. God allows pain to happen in our lives, he didn’t cause evil to happen in our lives, and that’s a very clear distinction. So one of the reasons that people grow bitter and mad at God is because they interpret, God, You caused this to happen, or maybe this is some kind of punishment for something that I’ve done wrong in the past.  

He is not out to punish us, that is not his MO. He is always out to restore us and to bring us into relationship with Him and then ultimately redeem what’s going on in our lives to leverage that for the good of other people. Right, and so I call God the Jujitsu artist. He always takes what the enemy means for evil and turns it around for good, that’s what jujitsu is, you use the opponent’s momentum against the opponent, and that’s what God does. 

Tim Keller says it this way, that God gives evil enough space that it ultimately terminates itself. So while God’s not coming to intervene to prevent things that happen in our lives because everyone has free will, everyone has free choice, and sometimes people’s free will encroaches on my free will, and that’s why we have the things like what I just walked through.  These three men broke into my home, their free will encroached upon that. God, He didn’t intervene to prevent.  But when he doesn’t intervene to prevent, he always intervenes to produce something good out of it.  

So I had people who came around me in those darkest moments who encourage me, Davey, lean into those emotions. It’s by leaning into those emotions, not escaping them, not numbing them, it’s by leaning in that you’re going to find healing. And that’s how you’re going to find breakthrough, and that’s how you’re going to overcome. 

Paul, I’ll share this, I love the fact that you have a lion on the back side of your background right there, and maybe this has been shared on your podcast before, but this was a huge part of my journey. Pastor Levi Lusko as a pastor that everyone should go and listen to.  Pastor Levi about a month after the tragedy reached out to me, and I had started reading his book, Through The Eyes of a Lion, it’s a book about how he lost his five-year-old daughter.  In that he tells a story about how we should lean into the pain. He says that lions hunt in gender roles, so it’s actually the female lion, not the male lion that does the bulk of the hunting. 

We would love to think as men, that we’re the ones that are going out killing the prey, bringing it home, providing the bacon. In the lion world its the females.  The male is more bark than he is bite, and so what you’ll see is like maybe the scene on National Geographic of the watering hole, a male lion will go and prowl around, and then he’ll get up on his haunches, then he’ll flare out his main hell, let out this huge roar. His intention is to scare the prey into an ambush that the female lions have set up. And so when the prey runs away from the roar, they get booby trapped. 

What the prey needs to do is run toward the roar because there in lives, their safety and their freedom. They need to run toward what makes them afraid, the reason that we hang on to pain, that we suppress it, that we push it down that we escape it is because we’re afraid of it.  Somehow in our masculinity as man, we kind of think, Oh, we’ve got to just pick ourselves up by our boot straps, we’ve got to just deal with this and move on. We’ve got to be men, and it’s ultimately because we’re afraid of how vulnerable those painful emotions make us.  

It’s interesting Paul, that scripture says, the enemy is prowling around like a roaring lion seeking whom he can devour. The enemy wants to scare us away from leaning into these painful emotions. If we bury these emotions, they will booby trap us later, just like those female lions. It will come out with an even more vengeance.  

And so what Pastor Levi told me that day is you’ve got to lean into these difficult emotions, run toward the thing that scares you, get vulnerable of these emotions. Because in getting vulnerable with these emotions, talking about them with a trusted counselor or advisor or a mentor, opening up and coming to God with these emotions, these raw, real gritty emotions, the anger, the frustration, the rage, the sadness, the deep disappointment, all of those emotions. When you come to God, with those and when you get real about those, that’s where God can do the healing, and that’s where he builds you in strength. 

Helping Others Through Pain

Timestamp: 31:33 

Paul: So you’ve taken all of this wisdom and you have taken it to Nothing is Wasted, and created a real opportunity to help other people.  Maybe you can talk for just a few minutes about what you’ve been able to do and how you’re translating this wisdom into something that’s tangible for people to put their hands around. 

Davey: Yeah, we have a ministry now, I was a pastor at the time that all this happened, and in 2019, I stepped away from pastoring that church, and now I preach all over the country at churches as kind of a fill-in and almost like a traveling evangelist.  And I’m a teaching pastor here in town at a church, and what I get to do full-time is build and lead this ministry called Nothing is Wasted ministries. It all started out of our podcast, the Nothing Is Wasted podcast, where we were doing the exact same thing you’re doing. We were just sitting down with other people who have these difficult stories, but have shown through the power of God that we can overcome anything that overwhelms us.   

So we kind of started that podcast, and that just really started growing a ton, and then God just stirred us to we’re going to have to build this thing into an entire ministry, Because people kept asking us, Hey, what do we do next? This is so inspiring. What we’re hearing. But what do we do next?  

And so what we did is we created this pathway, and that’s what Nothing Is Wasted ministries is.  

There is a pathway that we created called the Pain to Purpose course, and surrounding this pathway, we use content, community, and coaching to help people find purpose in their pain.  

So if you go to nothingiswasted.com you’re going to find all kinds of different resources and content and stuff up there that just inspires people to move forward in their pain journey. Whatever their pain journey is, no matter if they’re the ones that have put themselves in that pain point or if they are a victim of somebody else’s wrong doing.  

Then we have this online community where people are interacting with each other and they’re interacting in groups or forums, if you will, of other people who are going through the same thing they’re going through. We have forums like categorized based on different pain points Like young widowers or young widows, we’ve got young child loss or adult child loss, we’ve got women who have survived sexual assault. We’ve got men who are divorcees. All these different nuanced groups where people are connecting with each other with this one mindset of, Hey, me too. I get it, I’m in that same boat. But not just me too, me too. Now, let’s move through and they all want to see, how do we walk this path in a way that honors God, and it’s going to ultimately be the leverage to help other people. That’s what redemption is.  

Then we’ve got coaching.  We have 35 certified guides, as we call them, that coach people one-on-one in different areas of nuance. So anybody who’s listening to this right now, no matter what your pain point is, whether it’s drug addiction or whether it’s lost by suicide or whatever it is, we have a coach that could help walk with you one-on-one through that stuff,  

Here’s where we’ve kind of dialed in this content, community, and coaching, it’s all because I started doing CrossFit, and I realized that I was seeing and watching everybody else see all kinds of crazy results physically through doing CrossFit, and I noticed that that’s how they triangulated their results. Content community and coaching.  

They gave you programming, here’s this program that you follow it, that’s the content, they put people around you that encouraged you, that stirred you on and then they gave you a coach. Who was a little bit further ahead of you in the process.  When you kind of see the convergence of those three things, you’re going to find major life transformation. So that’s what we’ve tried to build. A 

Now its a ministry that’s reaching thousands of people all over the world to what we’re producing there. 

Shame and Fear

Paul: Shame and fear are such a big component of what holds people back from community. Maybe you can just speak for one moment about breaking through that fear and breaking the route to actually open yourself to other people and the importance of that community in helping you heal.  

Davey: That’s exactly what we’ve experienced too Paul, is that shame and fear, especially for men, it holds us back from experiencing community. It keeps our community, it keeps our relationships at a surface level. So we’ll get together as guys and we’ll do fun things and go and watch a football game, or we’ll go play around the golf or something, but the conversation rarely gets below the surface to where it really meets at the heart level to get in order for us to experience that true feeling of connectedness and the true transformation that can come out of that.  

I would say that the enemy wants us to think that we are alone in what we’re experiencing and what we’re feeling. He wants us to think that we’re alone in what we’re being tempted by. He wants us to think that we’re alone in the season that we’re walking through. And this inevitably happens, I’ll teach workshops around the country, usually churches that I’m speaking at, and I’ll ask people, Hey, raise your hand, just be vulnerable for a second, Raise your hand if you’ve experienced this right here, and I name some kind of situation, and you’ll see his hands go up and I go, Hey, everybody, look around, did you ever realize that that many people in this room has experienced the same thing that you’ve experienced?  And it’s like these light bulbs go off, these Aha moments. 

And I think as we can realize that the enemy’s ploy is isolation to get us to think that we’re alone, but that the Lord is connecting us strategically with other people who have walked through or are walking through the same thing, it can help us to lower that shame, lower our guard and go, Hey listen, here’s what I’m experiencing, here’s what’s going on, it becomes a lot less intimidating to begin to share vulnerably because we’re dealing with pain.  

Pain is the common denominator of life, everyone’s experiencing this, and yet nobody wants to talk about it. And I think that’s what’s holding us in bondage, it’s holding us in shame, it’s holding us in fear and ultimately preventing us from being able to experience the fullness of what God has for us. 

Paul: Well, Davey, thank you for taking so much time out of your busy schedule to be with us today. You’ve given us a profound and impactful message, and we just want to thank you and hope that you will continue on your journey of healing. I love your content, coaching and your community philosophy together. It really speaks to the heart of what we’re trying to do here at The Redeemed.  

To all of our listeners and all of our viewers, thank you so much for tuning in, we want you to know that we’ll be back on the third Thursday of next month with another great episode, please look out for us on our website as well as following us on social media. Godspeed and God Bless.