Some call the story of Noah and the ark a myth while others claim it is cold hard fact. Kevin DeVries has led several expeditions on the mountains of Ararat in Turkey in the search of Noah's ark and gives his insights into why the validity of this timeless tale matters to us all.
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find out. Whoever goes up there and does
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it. We're on our way.
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We see it in every culture. The flood was a common story
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told and there was an arc that saved humankind.
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I think the Art of Noah would be the ultimate archaeological
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find. This is not a normal part of the
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world. This is a hospital part of the
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world. We had the PKK.
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We have the Turkish army. Needless to say, they don't like
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one another. If we don't go, we won't know if
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somebody has do you think of when you think
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of Noah's Ark? I think of a couple things.
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I think of little kids storybooks, little push plush.
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Little stuffed animals of a line and a giraffe head sticking out
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on a on a little boat, that kind of thing.
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And I also think of Bill Cosby. Seems like his voice is in my
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head, as you hear Noah. Well, that sounded pretty good.
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You might be too young for that, but he used to have a sketch.
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It was like 7 or 8 minutes long about Noah, and that's aging me.
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Because there's a lot of questions.
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It's pretty important story. Is it myth?
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Is it real? Was Noah a real person?
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All over the Internet, or at least the things I look at,
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there's these raging debates and even people's faith, depending
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on in their view, their faith depends on if this story is
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real. I'll give you an example I
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wrote. You know 60 page ebook about
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Noah and it's it's on Amazon and such.
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But while I was doing my research for that, I'd come
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across YouTube videos and one in particular, this guy.
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And I'm not mocking him. He's, I don't know, less than 30
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years old. But he was literally in tears
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and heartbroken because he thought his faith was ruined
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based on him finding geological evidence that a worldwide flood
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could not have happened. There go Noah's story isn't
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true. Noah.
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It's a domino effect. Noah's story isn't true.
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Therefore none of the Bible can be true.
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None of the Bible can be true. Where he thought he had hope, he
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has no hope and he's just living in a dark, vast world of empty
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void soul. So it sounds dramatic over a
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story. Is it myth?
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Is it? It's not a big deal.
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It is a big deal. And there's those that just hold
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on and say it's. True, the way it's written, no
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matter what, because the Bible says so.
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Kind of like closing their ears to science in geology.
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So I I thought it was an important topic to talk about.
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And I'm bringing in Kevin Devries who's considered an
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explorer. He's reached five of the seven
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Continental summits. He's explored, I believe, 64
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countries. He can correct me if I'm wrong.
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He skied the North Pole. He's.
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He can leap over tall buildings in a single bound, and he has
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led several expeditions to Mount Ararat of people who believe in
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this enough that they're willing to go to some of the most
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hostile terrain in the world politically in Turkey, climb a
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mountain that you probably pass skeletons on the frozen
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skeletons on the way. It's not for the faint of heart
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that truly believe. That they're going to find
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remnants of an ancient vessel that a man named Noah built.
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That's hardcore belief. And the one of these expeditions
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was featured in awardwinning documentary Finding Noah.
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Kevin has a more recent documentary entitled The True
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Summit. He's the founder and the
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president of an organization in Grand Rapids called Grace
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Explorations. And Welcome Kevin.
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Thanks for having me on. Ken Sure.
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So that was my intro. What say you on the well, you've
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been with guys, before we get to your personal thoughts on it,
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you've been with guys and led them on Mountain Ararat, where
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scripturally the Bible says that if I remember right, the arc
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rested on the mountains of Ararat.
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Is that how it's worded? Yes.
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Yeah, it's plural. OK.
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So in in a before we get to, I'd like you to summarize the story
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of Noah for those that only know of a cartoon coloring book kind
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of version of it. But how do you search on Ararat?
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The scripture says the mountains of Ararat, How do we nail that
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down? Have we nailed that down to a
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certain that everybody keeps going up or looking at satellite
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images or is it a range and you're just kind of it's like
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shotgun? Well, the scientists that I
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worked with and again they're this is their life discipline
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and they're calling, So they're immersed in it.
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But they believe that the plural version of that was that it was
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actually right there. You could see it.
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Every day that you're climbing, there's a greater air at which
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is at 16-8 and then there's a lesser air at which is right
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next door. And that's like in the 12 to
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13 foot range both of them are.
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Dormant volcanoes. And so from their perspective
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that made the mountains of air at plural and that's probably
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been there since antiquity. So they came out from that
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angle. There are many other explorers
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in the earlier decades that had some of the same results that we
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had in conclusive and have felt that the amount that they should
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be actually searching is in northern Iran.
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And it's interesting. The word Mount Judy can be
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translated in a couple different ways.
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It could actually mean a literal mountain called that, which is
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actually the name of this mountain in the run, or it could
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be the saddle between the actual summit and the eastern plateau
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of greater area at 16 feet. So there's debate over that.
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And it that's the hard part about when you are basing your
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explorations on, you know, the writers and antiquity.
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Going all the way back, you know to Genesis it there's words that
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are in there that are not that didn't necessarily make it all
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the way through the millennia. And so you're trying to do the
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best that you can with the clues that you have.
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But the guys that we were working with felt then they were
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mostly younger scientists. They felt like this mountain was
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a was the best option. It was an inch ancient
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Mesopotamia. So it's the highest peak in the
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entire region. Which would make sense if you're
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going to make a landfall after a, you know, a global flood.
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So their logic was OK, it's the tallest mountain in the region.
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It's plural because there's a greater and a lesser era.
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And there is a number of eyewitness accounts that place
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some type of vessel in the eastern plateau, which during
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various periods of history was more exposed than others, namely
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due to. Warming seasons that were
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protracted over numerous years and then more items, structures,
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whether they were rock or wood or an arc would be exposed more
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than it would be in a colding trend.
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And so the mountain, especially since the avenue of aviation,
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has been a real big hotspot for exploration because there's a
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number of anomalies that are in that mountain, that's.
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Look very arclike. It's it's almost a cruel joke.
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But there are numerous rock structures jutting ridges.
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I can show you pictures. I mean, if you're hypoxic like
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we were, it doesn't take a a huge leap of imagination to
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imagine that what you're staring at is the whole of a ship.
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You're hypoxic. You're not thinking straight
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anyway, 16 feet you've you've sucked at at least half
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of the oxygen that we have at sea level.
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So unless you're acclimated, you're going to be passing out.
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But we were somewhat acclimated, but.
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You're so hypoxic is something. Where can you be?
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Can you be? Can you see?
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Are you delusional? No, but you're you're not
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thinking straight. You know, I've watched guys
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digress until, like, first grade emotional level.
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You're just that your brain does weird stuff when it doesn't get
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the oxygen that it needs. You're thinking clearly.
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There could be some, you know? Hallucinations that are going on
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now, I don't say that to diminish the integrity of what
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we're trying to do because we were trying to let science speak
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for itself. So we had, we were going based
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on technical eyewitnesses. So unlike other expeditions that
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were solely based on eyewitness accounts, we were dealing with
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technical witness which was through remote sensory satellite
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observations and then. That's great, but you still need
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to put boots on the ground to figure out what.
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What is this anomaly that's underneath the ice cap that
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happens to look like a structure, like a ship that fell
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out of the sky and it roughly fits the biblical dimensions of
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the arc. You know, what is this?
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Well, you're not going to know until you put boots on the
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ground. Otherwise, it's just textures.
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So that's what we were aiming to do as we spent all of our time
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on the eastern plateau, which has got about 100 foot of ice at
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its deepest point, which could very well conceal.
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A structure like the Arc, similar to the fronic sunboats
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you know in the Nile Delta, being buried in the sand for
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millennia and being perfectly preserved.
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Or the Viking ships, if you've been to Oslo and got to the
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Viking museum, Viking ships have been preserved for perpetuity
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and and the bogs of Scandinavia. Or you know the woolly mammoths,
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those are kind of the bigger stories, you know where they're
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stuck in the permafrost and as the world is warming they're
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becoming more accessible to people that randomly happen to
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follow them. So that was our hope was that
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there was a structure buried under the ice and an oxygen
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free, bacteria free environment preserve for perpetuity and we
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could drill down and excavate timber that.
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You know, would have to date if if you're following the Orthodox
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Biblical timeline, would have to date at least 4500 years or
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older. So if so is this kind of a high
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level of the process is satellite imagery to me would be
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everything. You can't just go out and scour
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the mountain like that. You got to have some place
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you're heading to, right? Yeah, something was seen,
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identified, it's an anomaly. You head in that direction and
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when you get there. You're drilling through the ice
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and realistically they're not really looking expecting a full
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intact ship, right? Aren't they really expecting
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maybe like you said, debris of? Yeah, Wood, the way it was
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explained to us, and you can read about it in The Explorers
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of Air Rat. It basically chronicles all the
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expeditions leading up to ours, and maybe that's in there now.
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I haven't read it recently, but you can get it on Amazon.
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But they take explorations decade by decade and the
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individual that we were getting our information from, who is
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blacked out in the screen, we call them Mr. X and and finding
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Noah that Gary Sinise narrated for us, he basically said, look,
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there's two pieces there. I'm not a believer.
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I don't believe the story is true, but it looks like as if a
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ship fell out of the sky and there's a spectral trail of
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debris between these two large pieces.
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That are right in the eastern plateau almost approaching the
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Ahora gorge which is a natural phenomena the mountain actually
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there was a massive earthquake that region is is a huge
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shifting tectonic plates. So there's massive earthquakes
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that happen in Turkey all the time it's not unusual and that
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particular region is is not immune to that and so.
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Actually was in 1820 or somewhere thereabouts, about 1/3
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of the mountain actually collapsed and that became the
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horror gorge. It's about 6200 feet down, so
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it's deeper than the Grand Canyon and we're camping
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literally a couple 100 yards from that.
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So it's really important that when there's a whiteout
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condition, you have a sense of where you're at because one
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wrong step and you're yeah, they it's a long way down, more than
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a mile. So yeah, they were he was
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telling us look there's a Spectre trail.
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I don't believe in this story but it's an anomaly.
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But I you can't prove anything until you get boots in the
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ground. And so he's giving us this
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information and then he's further helping us to try and
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locate it in real time. So as he's looking via the
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satellite technology that he has he's able to tell our our jacket
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colors where we're moving. But the problem is in there's a
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couple of complexities here the. Curvature of the Earth is one
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thing, the position of the satellite, like my kids go to a
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school and they had a 10 minute window to talk to someone on the
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space station. This year that's all they had,
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10 minutes because of the gravity.
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The Earth's the, you know, the Earth's rotation and and the
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satellite's rotation and so you have these brief windows.
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So he would be looking at us, but that's not a a that has a
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certain window of reliability. So you're dealing with the
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Earth's curvature, you're dealing with the positioning of
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the satellite. You're also dealing with a a
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area that has tremendous geopolitical tension.
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So to not allow different military groups to have exact
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coordinates, they'll scramble. So if you talk to pilots, there
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are various parts of the world particular to demilitarized
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zones where they can't use their normal instruments because
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they've been disabled. And so that's the other deal
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that we were working through. I mean, we had one the very
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first year we had a backpack that we were wearing that
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actually coordinated like 13 different satellites.
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So we had about as exact as you can get.
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The problem is we almost had to end up going old school compass
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and Boy Scout orienteering to hit the coordinates that he was
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giving us. And then you deal with the
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factor of the Howard, Howard Carter phenomena.
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You know, he dug for many years for King Tut's tomb and it
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wasn't until the final year. And they were only a couple feet
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off, but if you're a couple feet off, you might as well be 1000
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feet off. So you're dealing with a lot of
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very imprecise calculations. Plus you're dealing with with
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ice, which is kind of like a broken windshield that doesn't
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have the same computations or the same display that you would
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have on dirt. So most of the time when people
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are using ground pit trading radar, like finding a, you know,
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a lost king in England, they're doing it in a parking lot and
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they're going through dirt, well, we're dealing with ice,
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which. Has different dialectic values
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between old ice and new ice. And then there's all these
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glacial Moraine material that is layered throughout the ice cap
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where the crevasses open up and all this glacial Miranda dirt
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fills into the cracks. And so it has this marble effect
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where you're dealing with anomalies under the ice and you
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have to figure out, is that wood, Is that rock?
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Is that the salt? You know?
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What is this? Well, we don't know until we
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take core samples, which is. An arduous task because it's you
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have to constantly keep your drill bits moving.
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You're putting them, you're attaching them a meter at a time
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and you're going down to 60 feet and one slip and the whole 60
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feet of of connected drill bits are frozen.
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And then you then you're done. And now you have to dig a hole
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to get out your drill bits. And that's Herculean to dig a 8
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by 8 hole at 16 feet, 40 feet into the ice, which we did
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on on. 3 occasions It's herculean and you only have one
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window to do that. It's not like okay, we'll dig 1
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hole and then we'll dig another. Now that's all you have.
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Because guys, bodies are wasting away up there.
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Atrophy is setting in. Your body does weird things when
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it stays up at high altitudes for long periods.
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You're losing muscle mass. To the extent that some of these
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guys can even climb down on their own 2 feet.
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They feel fine up there. They don't realize what's
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happening and then they get into.
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More oxygenated environments. And they realized that, wow, my
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body is actually going backwards.
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Like with astronauts, these guys that are coming back, I mean,
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they're still setting this stuff and they will be forever, but
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guys that go into space, it it does harm to your body.
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Without a what? So if you were up there and you
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put a drill down, you're pulling up ice and debris or whatever,
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and you pulled up planks of wood or whatever piece of shreds,
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then what? How do you know?
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How would the world ever know or accept that this is Noah's Ark
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and just not a nice geological or National Geographic moment?
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That they found a historical boat or something?
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Yeah, you know, the problem with that mountain is it attracts a
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lot of charlatans throughout the millennia.
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Everybody's looking for, you know there's one guy that
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claimed he found like everything.
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I mean from the blood of Christ to the sphere of Christ to the
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wood of the cross to the Chariots of the Egyptians.
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I mean just go down the list. This guy was like a
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self-proclaimed Indiana Jones. And so you get guys like that
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that just can never admit that they're wrong and they're
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delusional. They need actually to visit
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someone who can help them unpack.
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They're missing in a complex. So you're dealing with people
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that are not well. That come in and they bring this
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circus with them. And so all throughout the ages
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people have been fabricating stories there.
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So you're starting from a point of high criticism, high doubt.
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I mean, the story itself is fantastical enough.
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It's probably the most fantastical story.
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If I can borrow Peter Jackson's favorite word it, It's probably
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the most fantastical story and all of the biblical narrative.
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And so you're starting with this deep suspicion.
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The critique is very high, right from the getgo, it seems like
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every year somebody's finding Noah's Ark.
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I mean that's calmed down a little bit because the mountain
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has been a bit off limits due to rising political tensions there.
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And just the fact that, you know, there's very few places in
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the mountain that could actually hide the structure.
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One of which is the horror gorge, which, you know, that's
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pretty much, I mean, we show short clips of it.
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We had some guys that got close to that area from the bottom
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looking up and it's yeah, if you want to die, that's the place to
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go to. People like, why don't you just
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put a drone up in the air and it's like, you know, that's
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great. And we did have a smaller drone
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and we had a military grade drone that never made it through
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customs and Istanbul. That sounds fantastic, but you
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have to remember you're in a Demilitarized Zone there.
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There's incredible amount of there was one year where they
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could fly helicopters in to rescue people.
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Every other year that we were there.
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Nothing gets up in the air because it'll get shot down.
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So you put grown up and do whatever you want.
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It still doesn't prove conclusively what you're looking
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at. So my personal take away of it
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is people always ask me what did you, you know, do you know where
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it is? And I'm like, well, we know
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where it's not. So it's more of a Thomas Edison
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approach, you know, thousand tries in the light bulb and and
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you finally find the 1:00, but it took 1000 tries.
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It still could be underneath the ice cap of the eastern plateau.
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I highly doubt it. I think that a lot of what we're
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looking at was the different dialectic values of old ice and
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new ice plus different layers of strata.
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Of glacial Moraine that uncanningly somehow were
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deposited in the rough dimensions of the arc, the width
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and length, and the broken pieces.
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We weren't looking for something that was 500 feet long.
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We're looking for two pieces that were smaller.
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But, you know, I think for the scientists that were on board,
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their faith was strong. I know the skeptics, you know,
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they're always looking. But you have to go back to,
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again, the Old Testament. There were all kinds of miracles
00:20:50
happening every day, and people still didn't believe.
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So if your faith is built on sensationalism and all these
00:20:57
things have to align before you can believe that, you're coming
00:20:59
at it from the wrong approach. Because our faith is not about
00:21:03
some guy in the Old Testament or a story.
00:21:06
Which I believe is historical because when Christ mentioned in
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the Gospels, which are very reliable documents, even though
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he was a master of theologic, metaphor or metaphoric theology,
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he treated the whole account of the flood as historical.
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So if if he treated as such and he's got access to information,
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I don't because I'm not. I mean, he's part of the
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Trinity, so he has access to all knowledge along with being human
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at the same time. I think it would it would be in
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our best interest as humans, finite humans who have an
00:21:44
eternal spirit, to also agree with the same that it is a
00:21:48
historical matter. I know there's scientists and
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guys like Robert Ballard who's done a tremendous amount of
00:21:53
research in the area. If you don't know who he is, he
00:21:55
found the Titanic, which is, you know, a big story in the news.
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And so they're having in quotes, you know, what does he think
00:22:00
about the submersible that collapsed and imploded?
00:22:03
So he went down into the Black Sea, which is a very fascinating
00:22:06
story. I think it was on a BC like
00:22:08
maybe 10 years ago. They did a series of of of
00:22:13
retelling the biblical stories and fact and fiction and all
00:22:16
that stuff. And so they were obviously going
00:22:19
to talk about Noah's ark in the flood and the delusion and the.
00:22:23
And what happened in that moment in time and so he came at it
00:22:26
from the angle which a lot of nonfaith based scientists will
00:22:31
come from, is that, yeah, there's probably a story here
00:22:33
because it obviously went worldwide before there was
00:22:35
global communication. I mean even the Chippewa in
00:22:38
tribe in Michigan has a story very similar to the biblical
00:22:42
story, except it's a canoe and in other cultures, you know, it
00:22:46
becomes a raft or some circular object.
00:22:50
So their cultural. Adaptations.
00:22:53
But somehow there's an original story.
00:22:55
So most people agree that there was some catastrophic event that
00:23:01
was something that embedded itself in the human
00:23:04
consciousness, something that became a meta narrative where
00:23:07
the debate is, was it global? Was it regional?
00:23:10
And so he came at it from the angle, and this is a very
00:23:13
popular theory that developed a few decades ago, that there was
00:23:16
a regional flood, it was localized to that area.
00:23:19
And it happened as during the melting of of an Ice Age period
00:23:25
and the water that was coming off the ice so that was becoming
00:23:30
liquid again was so strong and so powerful that it actually
00:23:33
carved out what we now know as the bhosphorus, which is the
00:23:36
channel of water that literally separates 2 continents between
00:23:40
western Turkey and eastern Turkey, between Europe and Asia.
00:23:43
And it's spilled into the Black Sea.
00:23:45
So the Mediterranean has been salt.
00:23:47
It spills into the Black Sea. The Black Sea is a very it's a
00:23:50
bit of an anomaly where there is a mixture of salt and fresh
00:23:53
water, and as you go lower, apparently the salt rises
00:23:57
higher. And I hope I'm accurate, some of
00:23:58
these terminologies, this is not my area of discipline, but it it
00:24:03
is a dream for guys like Robert Ballard oceanographers to go
00:24:08
into the Black Sea because the water is so clear and fresh.
00:24:13
Further below that, it's almost like the Great Lakes, that it's
00:24:16
like things are frozen in time. Whereas in in saltwater areas,
00:24:21
things grow quickly. And he came away from that
00:24:24
expedition. You can watch it, It's on a BC
00:24:26
news just Google Robert Ballard, National Geographic, Noah's Ark
00:24:30
and it'll pop up. But he came away with conclusive
00:24:35
evidence that the Black Sea at one point was a lot lower than
00:24:39
what it is currently, and that there was shorelines that
00:24:41
existed at various levels. And it appeared as if people had
00:24:47
left suddenly, like there was some catastrophic events where
00:24:51
all these structures and items were left behind and it was
00:24:56
again like frozen in time. And so he could see these lower
00:24:59
shoreline. So there's no debate about that.
00:25:01
And I think that's true of almost anything.
00:25:03
And we can find out the Great Lakes at one point were a lot
00:25:05
lower and certainly a lot higher as they've been glacial, carved
00:25:10
out of glaciers. But he came away with.
00:25:13
This idea that you know what, something happened, and it may
00:25:16
not be totally true from his perspective, true the biblical
00:25:19
narrative, but he came in as a scientist, as an oceanographer,
00:25:22
and he proved that there was some catastrophic event that
00:25:27
happened in the region. And then that became the story
00:25:30
that made a narrative that found itself literally retold in about
00:25:34
500 different cultural groups. That's a phenomenal thing.
00:25:38
So when we approach this, we realized, hey, this is a huge
00:25:41
story. This is a.
00:25:42
Watershed moment. You don't get many opportunities
00:25:45
in life to be part of something where, you know, this is not
00:25:48
just about finding a ship. You're actually finding a lost
00:25:50
link to a lost civilization. It's a length, maybe the last
00:25:54
link to the antediluvian world, to the land of dinosaurs and man
00:25:58
living to be 1000 years. You know what we read about in
00:26:00
Genesis and what fossil records show?
00:26:02
And so there was a bit of an Indiana Jones national treasure
00:26:05
fields who was like, wow, we find this, this ship, you know,
00:26:09
on top of a mountain, I mean. You can't even hardly explain
00:26:12
that. You can't explain it.
00:26:13
It's just no reason for it. And it fits some of the language
00:26:17
of of the writings and Genesis. Wow, it could be something that
00:26:23
would be very, very upsetting to a lot of academic communities
00:26:26
that have to rewrite their exhibits at their at their at
00:26:30
their museum. So this is a watershed moment.
00:26:32
So the scientists, many of them were a bit older than me.
00:26:35
This was kind of like their. Magnum opus.
00:26:38
I mean this was going to be their life work and you can't
00:26:41
apart from maybe finding the Ark of the Covenant, which is more
00:26:44
spiritual than it is physical. There's it's hard to argue that
00:26:49
if there's anything that would be greater to change everything
00:26:53
from A-Z anthropology to zoology and this is just not a
00:26:56
theological story. This is also it affects and
00:27:00
impacts all levels of scientific disciplines.
00:27:03
This could be a watershed moment and so we came into it with that
00:27:06
type of energy. But I think that bigger picture,
00:27:10
the, you know, that's more micro, but the the macro
00:27:13
picture, the bigger picture, the meta narrative really is.
00:27:16
As a believer, I can only speak for myself, but I think I can
00:27:20
speak collectively for those who call themselves followers of
00:27:24
Christ. Our faith is not based on an Old
00:27:27
Testament story. I think it happened because
00:27:30
Christ said it happened. But I also believe it's an
00:27:33
immortal diamond. I believe that all the stories
00:27:35
that we read in the Bible are diamonds, and as such, they have
00:27:39
infinite angles, infinite ways of interpretation.
00:27:43
It could be literal, poetic, spiritual, allegorical,
00:27:47
metaphor. It could be all of those things
00:27:49
all at once. It doesn't have to just be
00:27:52
limited to a literal. So you'll see in the do it the.
00:27:56
Jewish people understand this better than we do because they
00:27:58
value story more than we do in the Western world.
00:28:00
But they see all these parallels, you know, the 40 days
00:28:03
and all these parallels with Joan and with Jesus and this
00:28:06
whole rebirth and the tomb and these cycles that Joseph
00:28:09
Campbell really talked a lot about in The Power of Myth, that
00:28:12
there's these, you know, the heroic quest, the heroes return.
00:28:17
These stories follow the same cycle.
00:28:19
And so there's I believe it literally happened, but I also
00:28:22
believe there's poetic application and so.
00:28:25
I I view it more in a poetic lens because it's just my
00:28:27
orientation. It's the way I write, so the way
00:28:29
I think it's the way I live life that there's symbols there.
00:28:32
And so I walked away. My faith was you know, as intact
00:28:38
as it was before because my faith is not based on an arc.
00:28:43
My faith is based on the arc of our salvation, which is Christ.
00:28:46
And that's anybody with any intellectual honesty you you
00:28:52
have to admit that for. That the resurrection is the
00:28:58
fulcrum of our fate. That's the access point.
00:29:01
And if that didn't happen, then everything we believe is untrue.
00:29:06
And then you have to take a couple steps back and do a
00:29:08
forensics on and do, you know, maybe take the approach of a
00:29:11
skeptic like how in the world could 12 guys and a small group
00:29:16
of women and in a small community of people, how could
00:29:19
they literally change the world in a lifetime?
00:29:23
If the story wasn't true, like, how could these guys give their
00:29:26
lives? And we know that with the
00:29:28
exception of the apostle John, Christian tradition teaches us
00:29:32
that all the original disciples were martyrs.
00:29:35
They died for their faith. And it's like Chuck Carlson
00:29:37
said, it's one of my favorite quotes and I'm going to butcher
00:29:39
it. But he basically said, hey,
00:29:40
look, there were 12 guys involved in Watergate and we
00:29:43
couldn't keep in Watergate. Again, for those of you that are
00:29:46
young, was a big incident with Richard Nixon and.
00:29:49
And it resulted in his resigning.
00:29:50
And then Gerald Ford came in one of our Grand Rapids guys and
00:29:53
became the president. But he was implicated in that
00:29:57
and and went to prison and then started Prison Fellowship, one
00:30:00
of the largest, maybe the largest prison ministry in the
00:30:02
world. But he said, look, there's
00:30:03
twelve of us guys involved in Watergate and we couldn't keep
00:30:06
our story straight for a week because it was based on a lie.
00:30:10
They were all telling lies, he said.
00:30:12
You have to take it from the approach of. 12 guys over the
00:30:15
course of their entire lifetime, their stories are perfectly
00:30:18
collaborating with each other. How it's It's mathematically
00:30:24
impossible that the story is not true.
00:30:26
It just doesn't play out that way.
00:30:28
People will. People don't die for a lie.
00:30:30
They only die for the truth. That's the only thing that's
00:30:32
going to bring them to the stake or to the spear, to the axe.
00:30:36
That's the only thing. It's going to bring someone to
00:30:37
that point of conviction. And so my faith is solidly based
00:30:41
on that fact and in fact. Contemporary individual that a
00:30:46
lot of people are aware of now. Jordan Peterson has been
00:30:48
wrestling with this for years, and I remember him writing like
00:30:51
three or five years ago, he said.
00:30:52
I'm a couple years away from either accepting or denying the
00:30:57
resurrection of Christ and he was smart enough.
00:30:59
He's brilliant. He's kind of a modern day CS
00:31:01
Lewis. I think that he realized that
00:31:04
the real fulcrum of our faith is not these Old Testament stories,
00:31:08
however true they are, however. Important They are the fulcrum
00:31:13
of our faith, the access point. The cornerstone is the cross of
00:31:17
Christ, and specifically the resurrection.
00:31:20
And he's now come to a place where he can't explain it.
00:31:22
As brilliant as he is, but he has, He has a certain knowing, a
00:31:26
spiritual knowing, that Christ did indeed rise from the dead.
00:31:30
His daughter, I think, converted shortly before him and his his
00:31:34
wife has been a believer even longer than that.
00:31:37
And so these are really important things.
00:31:39
I always try to remind people that really they're just trying
00:31:42
to either make the Bible say something it's not saying, or
00:31:46
they are more of a biblicist where they know the Bible but
00:31:50
they don't know Christ. Like, if you ask them when's the
00:31:52
last time you had a conversation with with the divine, you know,
00:31:56
where you feel like God was speaking to you.
00:31:57
There's just a blank. But they're super quick to just
00:32:00
recite a bunch of Bible verses. And it's like, guys, you got to
00:32:03
be really careful with this because there was a group of
00:32:05
people alive during Christ time, and they still are here because
00:32:08
we're part of it. We're part Pharisee and we're
00:32:10
part prodigal. We throw mud and we wallow in
00:32:13
mud, and then we have to figure out that we're beloved sons and
00:32:16
daughters and we come home to Christ and to ourselves.
00:32:18
But there's a group of people in Jesus's time that knew the Bible
00:32:21
really well, but they couldn't identify Christ even when he was
00:32:25
standing right in front of them. Literally talking to them.
00:32:29
Yeah, it's like the truth. The word is right in front of
00:32:31
you and so people like well the word is Jesus is the Bible.
00:32:34
No that's not true. He is the word of God that
00:32:38
created all of creation and Colossians one and Ephesians one
00:32:41
and and the Gospel of John and the book of John and then
00:32:44
revelations. We certainly see this clear
00:32:46
picture that Paul notably and and the Apostle John are are
00:32:50
very clearly portraying that the Christ the anointed one.
00:32:53
I mean when Peter had his revelation.
00:32:57
He didn't say, hey, you're Jesus.
00:32:58
So everybody knew he was Jesus, which is like saying he's Bob,
00:33:02
but he said no, you are the Christ, you are the you are the
00:33:05
Messiah. You're the one who's been
00:33:07
prophesied. And that's the difference
00:33:09
between the Peters and the Judas is out there.
00:33:11
They both did the same thing. They both betrayed Christ.
00:33:14
But Judas never called Christ Christ.
00:33:17
He always said rabbi, and he was always looking at it through a
00:33:20
Zionistic perspective, I believe.
00:33:22
And so his hopes were dashed because what he thought was
00:33:24
going to happen didn't happen. And he became disillusioned.
00:33:28
And so I also remind people, look, the people in in the New
00:33:32
Testament, they didn't have the Bible that we had.
00:33:35
Yeah, they had the Torah. And yeah, they could maybe read
00:33:38
it in the Temple and maybe some of them had private copies.
00:33:42
I don't know. I'm not a scholar to be able to
00:33:44
play that all out. But it wasn't like they had
00:33:45
direct access to the scriptures of the Old Testament.
00:33:49
It was in the temple. And and yes, there were some
00:33:52
private copies, but they were sacred scriptures that were read
00:33:54
by the priests on certain occasions.
00:33:56
And orally it was, you know, brought down generation to
00:34:00
generation because the literacy rate was I'm sure, a lot lower
00:34:03
than. But think about for the 1st 300
00:34:05
years before the Bible, the New Testament as we have it was
00:34:08
before it was curated and canonized in the 3rd century and
00:34:13
then became a state religion with Constantine, the people
00:34:17
that lived in those first 300 years.
00:34:19
They had the stories of Christ, but they had something that a
00:34:22
lot of Christians don't even know what to do with.
00:34:24
They had the Holy Spirit who guided them into all truth, who
00:34:27
guided them into a relationship with Christ.
00:34:29
And so we have a bunch of brainiacs running around
00:34:32
nowadays that are trying to computate cerebrally what has to
00:34:37
be accepted on a spiritual level.
00:34:39
And it's it's contemplative, it's transcendent.
00:34:44
And the Buddhists get this better than most Christians.
00:34:46
They're much more better at. Meditation that we are and
00:34:49
contemplation. Buddha always says his eyes
00:34:51
closed, the eyes of Christ are always open.
00:34:54
So you need both. You need to be inward and
00:34:56
outward, otherwise you have an imbalance in your life.
00:34:58
But I think that for those that are looking at the story and
00:35:01
they're looking for yet another reason to throw away their
00:35:03
faith, because boy, this isn't conclusively proven and they
00:35:07
didn't find the arc. They only know where.
00:35:08
It's not yada yada. I would say to them you're
00:35:11
looking at the wrong thing. You have to go back to the
00:35:14
resurrection. Deal with the historical fact of
00:35:17
that There's secular accounts, there's spiritual accounts.
00:35:20
It's not just the Bible telling us that that happened.
00:35:23
And you have to deal with the reality that something must have
00:35:25
happened that was miraculous that also paved the way for our
00:35:31
own resurrections. And I'm fortunate because I've
00:35:33
had a neardeath experience. So this is a lot more clear for
00:35:36
me than maybe people haven't gone through that.
00:35:39
I say that with great humility because it's actually changed me
00:35:42
in ways that. Make life now even more
00:35:45
difficult because I've caught a glimpse of the other side.
00:35:48
But you have to go back to the fact of just do I know Christ
00:35:52
and does he know me and and yeah, believe the story is the
00:35:55
Old Testament for sure but that's not what you're going to
00:36:00
that's not going to get you to the place where you want to
00:36:02
belong for eternity where where you have to believe is is he the
00:36:06
Christ? Did he resurrect?
00:36:09
Do I have a relationship with him And is my wife.
00:36:14
Is my communion with him so intimate that I don't have to
00:36:18
weaponize the Bible to make it say maybe something it's not, or
00:36:21
to prove that I'm smart, or to prove that I'm religious, or
00:36:24
some pious attitude, but it's more of, wow, I want to live
00:36:27
like those people in the first three centuries that didn't have
00:36:31
the New Testament that we have today, at least in an organized
00:36:35
sense. But they had stories and they
00:36:37
had a personal revelation. They had a visitation of Christ,
00:36:40
and they had the Holy Spirit inside of them.
00:36:42
They guided them into all truth. Yeah, what John said you know
00:36:45
you'll they'll know God by how you love one another not
00:36:50
specifically how much scripture you know.
00:36:52
And there he's and what you're saying is they're talking at a
00:36:54
time when they didn't have that much scripture to go by.
00:36:58
So people only knew God through their true relationship with
00:37:04
God. And that leads me to think of
00:37:07
like because I feel. You know, I found Christ and I
00:37:11
have the Holy Spirit dwelling in me that if anything, my faith
00:37:16
then doesn't ride on exactly in my young earth believer or an
00:37:22
old earth believer or a knower believer, or if some scientific
00:37:26
finding on this or that doesn't shake me at all.
00:37:33
I believe all of scripture is true.
00:37:35
There may be some interpretation I had a false.
00:37:40
Reading of it, yeah. It was portrayed in a way that I
00:37:43
didn't understand, and I read it differently, but it never shakes
00:37:46
me to the core. And I think of when I opened
00:37:49
this, I talked about this poor guy on YouTube whose whole faith
00:37:52
had crumbled because he specifically found out that not
00:37:57
only were there myriads of flood stories similar to Noah, that
00:38:02
there was one before written before Noah.
00:38:05
And I I I think they call it like from Gilgamesh or
00:38:08
something. Yeah.
00:38:10
And that crumbled him completely, that in his mind his
00:38:14
faith is based on history and geology and science, not on a
00:38:21
relationship with Christ. And then he could find out
00:38:24
later, which I don't know if you ever did.
00:38:26
I thought it through. And my mind would say, well,
00:38:30
just because Noah wrote an account, second even.
00:38:37
Doesn't mean it didn't happen the way Noah said.
00:38:41
If the the original happened the way it was, the world
00:38:45
repopulated after about eight people.
00:38:48
So the story would have spread all over the world because it's
00:38:51
a part of all cultures ancestry. They would have all had it
00:38:55
verbally handed down and somebody in Gilgamesh wrote it
00:39:00
down 1st and then God would have revealed Noah.
00:39:08
Exactly how Yeah. There's there's debate on the
00:39:10
timelines of the epic of yoga mash and and the biblical
00:39:13
narrative like that's not a conclusive.
00:39:15
I mean you're we see what we want to see right.
00:39:19
And that's the danger of spending five years on top of
00:39:22
Mount Air at as I realized that some of our team members were
00:39:26
struggling with objectivity. They it it's you just you want
00:39:31
to see what you want to see it until you can see what really
00:39:34
is. And let it speak for itself,
00:39:36
then you're you're never going to find that freedom.
00:39:39
And so, yeah, I mean, archaeological discoveries
00:39:42
happen all the time. And in many cases they are
00:39:45
revealing or confirming the biblical account, They're
00:39:48
confirming biblical stories with historical fact because they're
00:39:51
running this stuff. So our lead archaeologist,
00:39:54
that's what he does. He's an Indiana Jones type of
00:39:56
guy and he bounces around between Mount Ararat and the
00:39:59
Coumran, the peninsula there. Digging amongst the scenes and
00:40:04
then we he also was part of A and I was for two days.
00:40:08
So I can I guess say I was part of the team but I didn't do
00:40:11
hardly any of The Dirty work that many of them did.
00:40:14
But you know we found a Dead Sea Scroll cave.
00:40:16
The first one in like 60 some odd years that had all the
00:40:20
antidotal evidence of of that it once contained Dead Sea Scrolls
00:40:25
to the point where they even found some very very small
00:40:27
fragments. Of the papyrus and goat skins
00:40:31
and shattered vases and and all that stuff.
00:40:34
But yeah, we just got to be really, really careful with
00:40:37
this, that our faith is a it's a spiritual thing.
00:40:41
It's it's not even a physical place.
00:40:43
It's not a physical thing. It's spiritual.
00:40:45
And so if you don't come at it from that angle, if you can't
00:40:49
get into that space where you believe that we are a
00:40:52
trichotomy, that we're actually spiritual beings having a human
00:40:55
experience. If your worldview is just the
00:40:58
opposite, that no, we're nonspiritual beings having a
00:41:02
limited human experience and then that's it, then everything
00:41:05
that you look at will have to fit that narrative, which I
00:41:09
believe is ultimately false. But if you can come at it from
00:41:12
I'm a spiritual being first, that just so happens to be
00:41:14
having a limited human experience, then all the pieces
00:41:20
can start to come together. Then you don't spend your whole
00:41:22
life. Collecting, but you actually are
00:41:25
starting to connect the dots and that's that's a hard it's like
00:41:30
the Indiana Jones. I know that's the big thing now
00:41:32
because the latest iteration of it is in the theaters.
00:41:35
But you do have to take that leap of faith and step out and
00:41:39
believe that God will meet you in that place.
00:41:41
But how do you describe you know, faith, how do you describe
00:41:46
how we believe and what we believe?
00:41:48
It's it's it's more than knowledge.
00:41:50
It transcends that. It's more of a knowing.
00:41:53
So I tell people, look, if you want to argue about this stuff,
00:41:55
I'm not your guy. Just bring your Bible to heaven
00:41:58
and and you'll have all of eternity to figure it out.
00:42:01
I have a recollection of you, Kevin, way before you were ever
00:42:06
going up on Mount Ararat and all that, looking for Noah's Ark
00:42:10
standing in your office. Oh man, I don't know, quarter
00:42:14
century ago. We're pretty old and.
00:42:18
You're doing church work, but in your office you'd have pictures
00:42:22
of you whitewater rafting. Oh wow, whitewater rafting.
00:42:26
You were like, there'd be pictures of you climbing
00:42:29
probably some mountain or something.
00:42:31
There'd be a picture. There were all these, like,
00:42:33
adrenaline junkie pictures of you in various places in the
00:42:37
world doing crazy stuff from early on.
00:42:42
So what from that Kevin to? More life lived, Kevin and what
00:42:52
you call a near death experience.
00:42:53
I call a death experience when he actually died.
00:42:58
But you put your whole life experiences together and then
00:43:00
looking at those same fun and adrenaline things, has that
00:43:06
changed for you, motivation wise or your viewpoint of why we do
00:43:10
what we do or what drives you to that kind of life?
00:43:15
Yeah, absolutely so. This could segue really well
00:43:18
into the latest venture that we've had.
00:43:21
I took we took a group of 14 men last year to trek to ever Space
00:43:26
Camp, and I'm 55 right now, so I'm not as enamored about just
00:43:33
doing stuff just to do stuff like another notch, another
00:43:36
trophy, another thing you can brag about at the water cooler.
00:43:39
That doesn't really animate me anymore.
00:43:41
It just actually means very little to me.
00:43:44
But if I can take a group of men, then we can make a film out
00:43:47
of it and we can talk about some some ideas that we can use and
00:43:54
juxtapose against the mountain. Now I can get excited because
00:43:57
now this thing will outlive me. It's not just another adventure.
00:44:00
And hey, it was great, but yeah, only 14 guys know about it and
00:44:04
there's something wrong with that.
00:44:05
But what if we could take what we learned and put it into a
00:44:08
film? It was the place of my life
00:44:09
where I was so poor that all I had was money.
00:44:50
leads you into some some pretty dark moments, you know, when
00:44:53
you're trying to process. Do I still want to stay in this
00:44:57
story, the whole idea of going to Everest?
00:45:01
And to answer your question, I'll kind of do the roundabout
00:45:04
here, but we took the group tavers because we wanted to use.
00:45:09
The dramatic landscape of the Himalayas, which has no peer,
00:45:12
it's peerless. It's it's there's just nothing
00:45:15
like it in the world. I mean, it's it's the largest,
00:45:18
tallest, craziest mountain range in the world, where even the
00:45:22
foothills are taller than most of our continental summits.
00:45:26
So it you are left in awe. I mean, yeah, there's some ego
00:45:29
attached to it because you feel like you're cocking the
00:45:31
mountain, but it also at the same time makes you.
00:45:34
Fall in love with oblivion and embrace humility because you
00:45:37
realize that, yeah, maybe I could climb these things, but I
00:45:40
also feel very small because compared to them, I'm really a
00:45:43
little dot. And so it's very humbling at the
00:45:48
same time. And so we went and we wanted the
00:45:50
viewer to get the sense of, wow, they're going up, but as they're
00:45:54
going up to ever space camp and climbing Kalaputar and
00:45:58
neighboring peak at 18 feet. Which we got some really
00:46:01
dramatic drone footage. We wanted the viewer to feel
00:46:04
like they were going in. And so the whole idea of the
00:46:07
film was, and this is a John miracle that you're not in the
00:46:12
mountains, the mountains are actually in you.
00:46:15
And so we were trying to create this idea that again, it's
00:46:19
spiritual, that the true summit is not a physical place, it's
00:46:23
actually a metaphysical space. And you could actually climb
00:46:26
Everest without climbing Everest.
00:46:30
And it has more to do with you making the inward journey of
00:46:32
discovering through your past what your future may look like,
00:46:36
what healing looks like, what transcendence looks like, what
00:46:39
recovering from trauma looks like.
00:46:41
And there's a line in the film that came out of my mouth.
00:46:46
And again, we're at 17 feet, so it's amazing that we could
00:46:51
even think. And we only had one day to film
00:46:53
at Everest base Camp because then we turn around and and come
00:46:56
back down again after we spend the night there.
00:46:58
But I said something along the lines of if you don't know who
00:47:05
you are, you'll always be defined by what you do.
00:47:08
And then at the end of the film, we take what I said right after
00:47:11
that. And and the director was smart
00:47:13
enough to realize, hey, wow, we have bookends here.
00:47:15
So let's start with that statement and then end with the
00:47:18
the other part of it, even though you said them almost
00:47:20
together. That our identity has to be
00:47:24
found in Christ and God, even more general.
00:47:27
That we are beloved sons of Almighty God.
00:47:29
And if that's not enough, then nothing isn't enough.
00:47:31
Nothing will ever be enough. And so part of my journey, and
00:47:35
this is part of the maturation, I think, in the masculine
00:47:37
journey and just what healing looks like is you start out as a
00:47:42
younger man doing things to identify who you are.
00:47:45
And there's nothing really wrong with that.
00:47:46
That's more of the warrior phase where you're.
00:47:49
You're just trying to figure out what am I made of?
00:47:51
What are my limits? What can I do?
00:47:53
You know, how good am I at this? And so you're constantly
00:47:57
defining yourself by doing stuff.
00:47:58
And so it's a very busy, active part of your journey.
00:48:02
It happens for most men in their 20s and 30s.
00:48:05
And they're at their peak athletically and and they
00:48:07
haven't maybe had enough failures to realize that things
00:48:09
can sometimes go wrong. And so you approach every
00:48:11
mountain like, hey, I'm going to climb this thing.
00:48:13
Nothing's going to get in my way.
00:48:15
And I was very fortunate that all these major climbs that I
00:48:17
did, I always summited on the first ascent, which is
00:48:20
remarkable because climbs like what used to be McKinley, now
00:48:24
it's Denali, you know, you got a 50% chance of getting to the
00:48:27
top. And it's not that you're a bad
00:48:29
climber, it's just the weather comes in and.
00:48:32
It's not happening. It'll sock away, you know,
00:48:34
climbers for 10 days at a time when you run out of food and
00:48:37
fuel and you're so demoralized. I mean, you can only live in a
00:48:40
10 for so long with 100 mile an hour winds beating on you, you
00:48:43
know, you just literally feel like you've you got the crap
00:48:46
kicked out of you. I I walked into these mountains
00:48:50
in my 20s and 30s with just a very idealistic approach.
00:48:55
And also was asking the mountain to do something that it wasn't
00:48:58
meant to do, which was to define me so the mountains can't heal
00:49:01
you. It can be part of a cathartic
00:49:03
process for sure. I mean this story, the biblical
00:49:07
narrative is filled with prophet priests and kings ascending
00:49:11
mountains for different reasons, whether it was to sacrifice
00:49:13
themselves like Christ and Galgatha or whether it was Moses
00:49:18
getting, you know, revelation and the 10 commandments on top
00:49:21
of Mount Sinai or you know. A king ascending a mountain or a
00:49:27
prophet to have some encounter with, you know, false prophets.
00:49:30
There, there, there's all this poetic, literal metaphors that's
00:49:33
floating there. But my orientation has changed,
00:49:35
especially in my 50s now, where I'm more interested in helping
00:49:39
people climb the Everest within, because I believe that that's
00:49:44
actually harder than climbing Mount Everest itself.
00:49:47
It's a heck of a lot easier to just climb a mountain, and maybe
00:49:50
something cathartic happens. And maybe something transcended
00:49:54
happens, but it's limited to that moment.
00:49:56
And yeah, you don't forget it and you can take it down at the
00:49:59
valley with you, but the mountain, you're not in the
00:50:03
mountains, the mountains are in you.
00:50:05
So until you conquer it. And Mallory was figuring this
00:50:08
out, unfortunately he didn't love long enough to totally play
00:50:12
it out. But he's one of our central
00:50:13
characters that we talked about because we just so happened to
00:50:16
be on 100 year anniversary of his first attempt on.
00:50:21
The north side of Everest in 1922.
00:50:23
And so we were there in 2022, a hundred years later.
00:50:26
And he has a bunch of killer quotes, some of which are
00:50:30
alleged, some of which are are written everything from, you
00:50:34
know, why do you want to climb them out And well, it it's
00:50:36
because it's there And then more along the lines of you know,
00:50:39
have we conquered the enemy? No.
00:50:41
We've only conquered ourselves. And conquering means nothing out
00:50:44
here. And so we were trying to take
00:50:46
that approach of of. This idea that if you can't do
00:50:51
the 18 inches getting out of your head again, which fits in
00:50:54
with the Noah story, if you can't get out of your head and
00:50:57
sink down those 18 inches into your heart, which is where the
00:50:59
deep life happens, the Bible doesn't say that the wellspring
00:51:04
of our being is from our brain. I've never heard a preacher say,
00:51:07
hey, every head bow, every eye closed, how many of you want to
00:51:09
accept Jesus Christ into your brain today?
00:51:12
No, it's always heart. There's something about heart
00:51:14
that's emblematic of the human spirit, the eternal spark that's
00:51:17
in us. And maybe it's not the exact
00:51:19
correct word, but it's the closest that we have to this
00:51:22
word called spirit, the eternal part of us.
00:51:25
And you know, that's what we're trying to get people into is if
00:51:29
you can do that 18 inch journey by getting out of your head,
00:51:32
which is where your trauma lives, which is where your false
00:51:35
narrative is living, and get into that feeling zone where
00:51:38
you're not just dealing with a bunch of facts and figures and
00:51:40
more information. And if I just get the right
00:51:42
amount of information, I'm going to transform myself.
00:51:44
It's like, no, it doesn't really play out that way.
00:51:46
It's helpful. But I know a lot of really smart
00:51:49
people that are actually, in some ways some of the dumbest
00:51:52
people I've met. It's almost like the more
00:51:54
plaques they got on their wall, they just got Dumber and Dumber
00:51:57
because they entered into the cerebral world to the
00:52:01
abandonment of their own heart, and they became robotic.
00:52:04
They could get all the right answers, but it was computated.
00:52:07
They couldn't give anything real because in the process they
00:52:09
almost denied their own humanity to the extent that they don't
00:52:12
even know what their heart is anymore.
00:52:14
They've lost heart, which is a terrible place to be.
00:52:17
And so we tell people, look, if you can't do the 18 inches or go
00:52:21
18 or, you know, do that small inward journey, then
00:52:24
you're forced to go 18 feet or go 18 miles like I did to
00:52:29
the North Pole. Because you always, and this is
00:52:32
really critical for people who are trying to enter into
00:52:35
recovery of whatever. If you can't internalize your
00:52:40
own journey, you will always be forced to externalize it.
00:52:44
You'll always have to go 18 miles, 18 feet because you
00:52:48
can't do the 18 inches. And so a lot of the people that
00:52:51
I climbed with and adventured with are not with us anymore
00:52:55
because they while it was math, you know if you're going to do
00:52:58
step in the mountains or in the polar regions, it's just a
00:53:01
matter of math that someday your numbers going to come up and
00:53:05
they kept pushing and pushing and I noticed that a lot of them
00:53:07
had the same. Struggles that I had with PTSD
00:53:11
and broken relationships and and just a trail of shame that
00:53:16
you're always trying to outdo with success and it is always
00:53:19
eluding you because you're trying to make the mountains do
00:53:23
something that it can't it can't heal you.
00:53:26
You have to go to the Messiah, you have to go to Christ.
00:53:29
You have to go on this spiritual journey if you ever hope to
00:53:32
recover and be redeemed. Everything you're talking about
00:53:35
is what you do with grace explorations.
00:53:41
And it's primarily men, right? What's an overview of what you
00:53:44
do there and if there's either people listening that would be
00:53:48
interested in getting the materials or if they happen to
00:53:51
be near, if you explain what a base camp is in your website.
00:53:56
And before you answer that, I tell you I felt the impact of
00:54:01
that or The expanse you're having, the impact you're having
00:54:04
with Grace Explorations. I don't know, it was a couple
00:54:07
months ago, I was. I spoke at a Christian business
00:54:11
luncheon on this side of the state and there are some people
00:54:17
talking. One of the guys talking in the
00:54:18
middle was excited first time he found the group and he's sharing
00:54:23
with them these rubber bands to put around their wrist.
00:54:25
I have mine in my card. It was about there's always hope
00:54:28
it says something like that and what he was is he was starting a
00:54:31
ministry, online ministry anyway of awareness and.
00:54:38
Trying to connect a brotherhood of military vets awareness of
00:54:44
suicide awareness and prevention.
00:54:47
And he brought up to the group I was standing with that he was so
00:54:52
excited because he heard of this base camp nearby.
00:54:55
This group of guys that get together and talk and he's going
00:54:58
to connect with them and make this see if they're interested
00:55:00
in hearing about what he is and. I didn't know that guy who does
00:55:07
that. Yeah, it's a good group, that's
00:55:09
all I told him, I said, I said that's a good group.
00:55:12
Go ahead cuz he was kind of like questioning the group.
00:55:13
I think I heard about this. Well, I heard about this group
00:55:15
and I think I said, yeah, go do it.
00:55:16
It's a good group. They're connected to something
00:55:18
bigger in Grand Rapids. Yeah.
00:55:22
So Grace Explorations, our mission is very simple.
00:55:27
We help ministries reach men. So we partner with churches or
00:55:30
anybody that's trying to reach guys and we predominantly work.
00:55:33
We major in men, but when you touch men, you touch families,
00:55:36
you touch marriages. So it's never just about the
00:55:39
guy. And then now we have a film that
00:55:41
anybody can watch. So it has had a broader appeal.
00:55:46
Our vision is to connect a million men to immense ministry
00:55:50
through gospel centered storytelling events.
00:55:53
And we're just on the cusp. We have to finalize some things,
00:55:56
but it's trending the right direction.
00:55:58
We are hoping to be able to take the true Summit and put it on
00:56:04
the Panda app, which is what inmates use to get information
00:56:08
now, so. And for those listening, the
00:56:10
true summit is your recent. Yeah, that's the Everest
00:56:14
documentary. So we're pretty excited because
00:56:16
now Base Camp is Without Borders.
00:56:18
I'll get to the traditional art signature event here in a
00:56:20
moment. But we're now seeing that Base
00:56:22
Camp is, again, just like the film.
00:56:24
It's it's not a place, it's a space.
00:56:27
It's a place where, you know, prisoners can become patients.
00:56:31
It's a place where. The Broken can become, you know,
00:56:35
beautiful. It's it's not limited to a
00:56:37
brewery or to a barn, which is what we've been mostly holding
00:56:41
our signature events at. So now we have this idea of,
00:56:44
hey, wow, what would it look like to get this film into the
00:56:46
hands of prisoners who got who, quite frankly, are a captive
00:56:50
audience, pun intended. And so we're partnering with a
00:56:55
prison ministry and it looks like it's going to go through,
00:56:59
but that all. That'll be accessible to like
00:57:02
300 inmates at this point. It's a an incredible app that
00:57:06
started like two years ago. They've already had like 70
00:57:09
recorded decisions for Christ and it it takes Christian face
00:57:15
based content and it puts it right in front of a prisoner
00:57:18
through their tablet just like a Kindle or you know an iPad.
00:57:23
And so we're really excited about that, but the traditional
00:57:24
format. That has reached now like
00:57:26
probably 7000 men in person. So these numbers are hard
00:57:29
numbers. It's not like you put a podcast
00:57:32
down. You know it.
00:57:32
Who knows what those numbers actually mean?
00:57:35
I haven't quite figured it out. But these are guys that got in
00:57:38
their vehicle. They drove.
00:57:40
I mean, old school, hey, I'm going to make this happen.
00:57:42
I'm going to carve out. And they mostly happen on Sunday
00:57:44
night and they mostly happen in barns and breweries and they're
00:57:47
it's, it can be very simply defined as a safe place where
00:57:50
dangerous stories are told. What we noticed is that men in
00:57:55
particular love stories, and we've been doing this since we
00:57:59
have been drawing pictographs on caves.
00:58:01
You know, we love to talk about adventure, near death
00:58:04
experiences, fishing stories, hunting stories, stories of
00:58:08
redemptions, you know, heroic journeys, all that stuff.
00:58:11
We are just hardwired for that. And so we began to think about,
00:58:15
you know. Partnering with churches but not
00:58:18
doing what churches do. So our goal is not to get men to
00:58:20
church. That's where the church's job.
00:58:22
Our job is to get churches to men.
00:58:24
So where do men hang out? Well, we now know that they hang
00:58:27
out in prison by the millions, so let's reach them there.
00:58:32
We also know that dudes love to hang out in breweries and and
00:58:35
wedding barns and just, you know, bonfires.
00:58:38
And so we thought, well, what would it look like if we took
00:58:40
gospel centered stories and told them?
00:58:44
And just created a super easy on ramp for guy to bring his buddy
00:58:47
instead of saying, hey, let's go to church and see how
00:58:50
uncomfortable you can get. And you know, sometimes it's a
00:58:53
very effeminate atmosphere. And so these dudes are like,
00:58:57
yeah, I'm just not into that. But hey, let's come on over and
00:59:01
go to blah blah brewery and let's have a beer and the guy's
00:59:04
going to tell his life story. Yeah, that's great.
00:59:07
What else am I doing on Sunday night?
00:59:09
Right. So.
00:59:11
They've been showing up and guys have been inviting their friends
00:59:13
and it's been a huge deal. We started out with one at
00:59:15
Founders in 1997 and sorry, 19, 2017, I'm getting too far back
00:59:21
and we couldn't figure out what was going on because hundreds
00:59:23
and hundreds of guys were driving hundreds of miles in
00:59:26
some cases like man, this is, I mean Founders beer is, you know,
00:59:29
it's it's a global product, but it's not that good.
00:59:32
But the real secret was we were creating an experience for these
00:59:36
guys that totally. Defied and offended their
00:59:41
religious sensibilities like they've been taught since they
00:59:44
were a kid. God doesn't show up in
00:59:46
breweries. He only shows up in church.
00:59:49
You want the good stuff, you better come Sunday morning and
00:59:52
these guys were coming to these meetings are like, I can't
00:59:55
explain it, but I'm feeling the presence of God while I'm having
00:59:58
a beer and I it doesn't make any sense to me.
01:00:00
And it's kind of like, well, maybe now you're back to the
01:00:02
wedding of Cana to. Make a full circle, Noah liked.
01:00:07
His beer, right? He did.
01:00:10
He did. And there's all kinds of imagery
01:00:12
there too, You know, of what actually happened.
01:00:14
It wasn't just about getting drunk.
01:00:16
There was the the Jewish people get it.
01:00:18
We don't. Again, I think we misinterpret a
01:00:21
lot of the Bible as Western people because we want a
01:00:23
three-point sermon and it's like now the story is the sermon.
01:00:26
And by taking the frog of the swamp and dissecting it, yeah,
01:00:29
you figure everything out and you.
01:00:31
Critique. It's at the point of killing it.
01:00:33
But you've actually lost the sermon, which was a story.
01:00:36
Jesus, with the exception of maybe the Sermon on the
01:00:38
Mountain, but we probably had to do that for, you know, to curate
01:00:43
it properly. But really, he was just about
01:00:45
telling stories. And so yeah, we just tell these
01:00:48
stories and guys are just like shocked that, you know, I'm
01:00:51
feeling something and I'm. Sensing something that I haven't
01:00:54
sensed in a while. And then they begin to think,
01:00:57
well, what would it look like if I ever got to the point where
01:00:59
I'd have enough guts to tell my story?
01:01:01
And these are stories that for the most part will not be told
01:01:03
on Sunday morning. They're more R rated.
01:01:07
Some of the stories that we tell, I think moms would be
01:01:10
clutching their children. You know, quite frankly, these
01:01:13
are, these are stories for big boys.
01:01:16
These are stories for men. This is not a.
01:01:18
This is not a male ministry. This is not a boy ministry.
01:01:21
This is a man, a men's ministry. So we tell people it's kind of
01:01:25
like Vegas, what's talked about here doesn't leave.
01:01:27
So it has a recovery feel to it. But we're not sitting in a
01:01:30
circle. We're still doing the whole
01:01:32
story thing where the people are there and the storyteller is
01:01:35
here. But then we also followed it up
01:01:36
with Q&A because we find that guys learn a lot just by asking
01:01:40
questions in a group and then it really makes it for a group
01:01:45
learning experience. So that has grown and that's our
01:01:48
first stage. That's all we had for a couple
01:01:50
years is just. Hey, come here, a story.
01:01:52
And then we begin to realize, you know, that's just really the
01:01:54
first stage. The second stage should be us
01:01:58
helping them to retell their story.
01:01:59
Because if a man can begin to understand that his story is
01:02:02
part of God's story, that God is actually telling his story
01:02:05
through their story, Now you're giving a guy his satter, his
01:02:08
shattered sword back. Now his sword is being reforged.
01:02:11
It's emblematic of his story. And now you're giving him back
01:02:14
his identity. You're giving him back his
01:02:16
honor. You're giving it back ultimately
01:02:18
a strength. And so we try to tell a man,
01:02:20
look, if you can't own it Speaking of your story, you're
01:02:23
never going to be able to offer it and you'll never be able to
01:02:26
give it back as strength. So we created a video series
01:02:30
called the Retelling Your Story. It's a seven part video series
01:02:34
where we have an expert story guy, Matt Kenny help men
01:02:38
discover what that looks like and we actually simulate it in
01:02:42
real life with small groups. And we captured that all on
01:02:46
video so guys can see what a small group like this looks like
01:02:49
and what open-ended questions look like and how do you go
01:02:51
after a man's heart? Because most of life is about
01:02:54
digging dirt. Very little of it is actually
01:02:57
going for gold. There's a lot of people out
01:03:00
there that will remind you of who of of what you've done
01:03:03
wrong. But there's very few places
01:03:05
where you can be reminded of what is right about you.
01:03:08
And so we try to say, hey, look, we're not about policing
01:03:10
original sin, like there are ministries that'll do that.
01:03:13
Good luck. That, quite frankly, doesn't
01:03:16
sound Christlike at all to me. I don't even have the energy to
01:03:19
do that. But I do have energy to help
01:03:23
pursue your original glory. So I'm less interested in
01:03:26
policing your original sin. And hey, what did you do bad
01:03:29
this week? And how can I shame you into not
01:03:31
doing that? I'm more interested in saying,
01:03:33
you know what I think a lot of your problems are?
01:03:35
You just don't know who you are. You've forgotten who you are.
01:03:39
And we're here to remind you and to call you up into something
01:03:42
higher. And so men respond really well
01:03:44
to that instead of being browbeat, instead of being
01:03:47
emasculated or instead of, you know, hearing words to the point
01:03:50
where you're drowning in it of toxic masculinity.
01:03:53
It's like, let's just leave all that garbage behind and let's go
01:03:57
after the gold. Let's speak life into men and
01:03:59
let's do what Christ did, which is to call men.
01:04:03
What they originally were and who they are actually supposed
01:04:07
to be, which is beloved Son of Almighty God.
01:04:10
So that's the second step. And then the third step is just
01:04:12
to join a tribe. And so we try to get men to
01:04:15
realize that, look, we're not about a curriculum.
01:04:17
You can graduate from that. We're about a community, and you
01:04:19
really can't graduate from that. These guys are going to care
01:04:22
about you. It's kind of like a
01:04:24
Christianized version of Cheers. We're happy you're here.
01:04:27
We're glad you came. Everybody knows your name, and
01:04:31
there's no agenda. We don't have like a vertical
01:04:34
leadership line where there's some expert that knows
01:04:36
everything and has a really polished, perfect life.
01:04:39
Yeah, you won't find that here. It's flat, just like it was from
01:04:42
30 to 33 AD. That's where the magic all
01:04:45
happened. It was the original men's
01:04:47
movement, and it was before the Bible, the New Testament, you
01:04:51
know, so nobody's weaponizing Bible verses to beat each other
01:04:54
up. It's just about men doing life
01:04:56
together, following Christ, bending their need of Christ.
01:04:59
But everybody is under everybody's authority.
01:05:01
Everybody is a Pope and a priest and A and a pastor to everybody.
01:05:06
There's no vertical lion. So you don't have to hide
01:05:08
anything. You don't have to be some
01:05:11
religious robot that's, you know, computerized to give right
01:05:15
answers. We're after the real stuff
01:05:17
because when you get real, then Christ will make you right.
01:05:20
But until that point, you're just going to be.
01:05:23
Yeah, I don't know what you would call them.
01:05:25
I use the word religious robots. So we are really good at
01:05:28
handling the shame part, the sin part God deals with.
01:05:31
That's vertical. But we tell men, if you're going
01:05:33
to have your shame healed, which every man bears all the way back
01:05:36
to Adam, we're always covering, we're masking, reposing.
01:05:40
All humans do this. It's not just endemic to men.
01:05:44
The only way you're going to find the cure for that is you
01:05:46
have to let other people. Help you.
01:05:51
And that's horizontal. You've got to tell your story in
01:05:54
a safe place, all of it, or as much as you can.
01:05:57
And then in the process of owning that, you'll be able to
01:06:00
offer this strength. And then you come back full
01:06:02
circle. And now you're like, okay, I can
01:06:03
not only tell my story, but I can live it.
01:06:06
And now I've got my sword back. I'm not Eragorn in Middle Earth,
01:06:09
you know, with the Broken Sword for wandering around as a noble
01:06:12
exile. I have my sword, Reforge, and I
01:06:14
know who I am, and I know what I'm supposed to do.
01:06:17
That's powerful. If you can help a man do that,
01:06:19
you can change the world, yeah. Well, you guys do good work.
01:06:22
I'll leave. So the best thing is to leave
01:06:23
the on my show notes to link to your website.
01:06:26
Yeah, yeah, I'll do that. All right, one final question.
01:06:31
In all your years of climbing and hiking or whatever, you have
01:06:36
to have some opinion. Not only if I already know your
01:06:40
opinions, now if Noah was real, if the ark was real, the flood
01:06:44
was real. But I need to know, are yetis
01:06:46
real? Well, you know, they took us
01:06:52
into a monastery, a Buddhist monastery, and there's a
01:06:56
shriveled up claw in there, you know that.
01:06:59
And I think even the Sherpas were kind of getting their
01:07:01
giggles out of it. But again, I think these things
01:07:04
are all emblematic. Like there's a spiritual world
01:07:06
out there, and I think that we're just grappling with how do
01:07:08
we process it? And so we we gravitate towards
01:07:11
these phenomenas that are not explained, and it's because
01:07:14
there's something that made in us that knows.
01:07:17
That there's another dimension out there that cannot be
01:07:20
explained. The best and the closest that we
01:07:22
can get to it. It has to be expressed
01:07:24
poetically, which is what good movies do and what good writing
01:07:28
does. It takes the unexplainable and
01:07:29
it expresses it, but that's as close as you're going to get.
01:07:32
You just can't put words to it. And I think that all these
01:07:35
stories, they're all symbols. They're like stars in our
01:07:39
galactic universe, and they're meant to guide us into all
01:07:42
truth, but we often misinterpret them because we don't have the
01:07:45
right lens. We don't have the right eyes.
01:07:48
And someday you'll have the right eyes and you'll see it all
01:07:51
for what it is. That this was just a little
01:07:53
blurb. You know this human timeline.
01:07:57
But that there is that the real real that the that our real life
01:08:01
actually just begins at at death.
01:08:03
It's just a door. So I don't.
01:08:06
Yeah. There's probably some species
01:08:09
that are out there that are kind of in between.
01:08:11
You know, it's a diluvian. And in our world, I mean fossil
01:08:15
records can clearly indicate that there were some strange
01:08:18
animals running around before whatever catastrophic event
01:08:22
where there was an asteroid or a flood or whatever, you know, did
01:08:25
away with them or the the climate changing.
01:08:27
But I think we have to look deeper and just realize that
01:08:30
maybe maybe what's going on is this deeper narrative of.
01:08:34
Yeah. There's stuff out there in the
01:08:36
world that will just never, never be able to understand.
01:08:39
And. And that's Okay.
01:08:41
Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, you're welcome.
01:08:43
Thanks for the time. Gavin among the outlaws, he
01:08:47
said. Come follow me.
01:08:49
People from all walks alive since have been becoming
01:08:53
outlaws.