Dave Ebert - Tears of a Clown

Dave Ebert is someone who has turned comedy from something that masked his own pain, into something that brings healing for others, including women released from sex trafficking. In this episode of Bleeding Daylight, we get to explore a little of the inner conflicts that Dave has faced over the years and the way that life is now so very different for him.

 

 

Gifts for Glory Ministries

Speaking, Improv Performances and Coaching, and Podcast

www.gifts4glory.com 

www.facebook.com/gifts4glory 

dave@gifts4glory.com 

 

Well Versed Comedy - Improv Comedy Ministry 

www.wellversedcomedy.com 

www.facebook.com/wellversedcmdy 

improv@wellversedcomedy.com 

 

(Transcript is a guide only and may not be 100% correct.)

Emily Olsen: Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen.

Rodney Olsen: It's almost a cliche, the comedian who is secretly battling depression, the person who makes everyone else laugh, but who is fighting their own inner struggles. Dave Ebert has a passion for comedy, but the laughs haven't always been easy for him. Today, we get to explore a little of the inner conflicts that Dave has faced over the years and the way that life is now so very different for him. Dave, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.

Dave Ebert: I thank you so much. I'm absolutely thrilled to do my first international interview.

Rodney Olsen: Now I know that your main comedy discipline, if I can put it like that is improv. So does that mean I'm going to have to be on my guard today?

Dave Ebert: Well, I am one to always throw something out.

I'm the master of one-liner. So every time I see an opportunity, I swing, they're not always going to be home runs, but, you know, you can't, you can't get a home run if you don't swing.

Rodney Olsen:  Absolutely. We're going to be talking about your comedy and a little while, and the amazing ways that you're using comedy to make a real difference for others.

But first, let's talk about some of those darker times. When did you really start to notice that what you were facing wasn't the normal ups and downs of life.

Dave Ebert:  For most of high school, I really battled with trying to find my self worth and trying to find my place, and why was I here? And, my dad was, very sick for most of my childhood.

He had served in the Vietnam war for the, for America. And, unfortunately caught the side effects of agent orange, which I'm not sure if your audience would know about that, but that was a chemical that the Americans used during the Vietnam war in the sixties that, caused a lot of genetic damage to the soldiers that were onsite. When he comes back from the war he's healthy young man and then within 20 years, he's fully disabled. He's unable to do the things that a man his age at that point should have done. So he didn't know how to handle that. as a young man growing up, I didn't know how to handle that. So there's a lot of conflict with my father on top of the normal teenage things.

And then my junior year in high school, 11th grade, I, was pursuing this girl and. she broke my heart and that, that was the moment it went from the normal ups and downs in the battles that I felt myself really like cross into this new threshold, where it went into depression where I was constantly looking, ah, for some kind of way to ease the pain, some kind of way to lighten the darkness.

But it would just always hung there. I never went to get it diagnosed. but all the telltale signs were there. I was always the class clown. So now that I was into this full depression, that humor was coming out is a way to defend myself and prevent anybody from knowing what was going on inside.

Because not only was I feeling bad, I was feeling bad about feeling bad. I was feeling. Guilty for allowing myself to feel that much darkness and for somebody that hasn't been through it, maybe it doesn't make sense. A lot of people think well just snap out of it, go for a walk or do this or that. But when you get to that darkness, any motivation to do the self help, that's actually beneficial, all that motivation goes away and you're just there in this dark pit. I was contemplating suicide on a regular basis. It was literally a day by day thing. If I could justify myself, I can make my life seem valuable enough to live another day I would. And that's where the humor was coming in was if I made somebody's day a little bit brighter, I made somebody laugh a little bit, then I could justify, okay.

Maybe there's a reason that I'm here, that I'm alive.

Rodney Olsen: And I'm guessing that the fact that you're using comedy as your way to cope and maybe put a smile on someone else's face. Doubles that issue of people not knowing that you're going through something because you're always laughing. You're always causing other people to laugh so there's no reason for them to be concerned.

Dave Ebert: Exactly. It was. It's a very, effective cloaking mechanism. It's a great way to hide severe depression, severe pain and to the untrained eye, you think, Oh, you know, Dave, you know, he's a great guy. He makes people laugh. He's always there to, to help people and try to brighten their day.

And it takes a trained eye and somebody that's got the ability to kind of pull back the layers and see, all right, there's something deeper than that issue. One of the things that when I address depression, suicidal tendencies, or thoughts in trying to raise awareness is look for the self deprecating humor, which was something that I did a lot and making fun of my weight because I'm not a small gentlemen, I'm way above 400 pounds. You know, being big has always been something that kind of defined me. That's actually a very good sign. If somebody is consistently tearing themselves down, find a time to pull them aside and say, Hey. Are you really okay.

But don't take the first answer because the first answer is always going to be the deflection. if you're really care about somebody in you're concerned that all the self harm, humor, the stuff that you're making fun of yourself, ask the second. And the third question, try to dig because when somebody is in that place where I was they're not going to give you the, the honest answer right off. It takes more than that first question of, are you okay? No. Are you really okay. You look at somebody that's international known Robin Williams. He was so good at putting smiles on other people's faces, but deep down he was struggling and he's a tragic loss to the world because his talent was so great but inside, he never, I don't think he ever really let anybody truly inside so that he could address the darkness that he was feeling.

Rodney Olsen:  So you're saying that you were trying to cover that depression, that you were feeling through comedy. Were there other ways that you tried to deal with the depression?

Dave Ebert: Even though I'm a larger guy? I would always try to play pickup basketball, get out of the house. I would try to be around people. And that was part of the humor thing is if I'm around people, even, even if it's playing pickup basketball, there's something about being in a community that I could find a way to either create opportunities for humor, or just have that comradery where if I'm running up and down the court, I'm not thinking about the weight and the darkness.

So I compensated by trying to be around people as much as possible. And then also the, the self-harming practice of eating consistently because food became a friend that I could go to. Food is kind of like the best friend that always gets you in trouble. the one that's always daring you to do the one thing that's crazy.

The one thing that's, you know, over the top. So it's one of those things where, you know, food became my best friend, but he was always getting me in trouble because. I developed an addiction and a habit of always going to food. You know, food kind of came, became my drug. Many people will turn to harder things. My drug was food, macaroni and cheese or cheeseburgers or different things like that.

Rodney Olsen: And that's, that's a lot more socially acceptable. Isn't it?

Dave Ebert:  Right. It is a, if you're a big guy and you eat and it's like, Oh, okay, he's a big guy. He eats, it takes people who are really, really close to you to say, Hey, you know, maybe four trips up to the buffet is a little bit much right.

Didn't you already have dessert. Why do you need another huge slice of pie? Those kinds of things. Yeah, it was that thing where I had that defense mechanism up so well that nobody got inside close enough to where they could see that all of these things were warning signs.

Rodney Olsen: And this started, as you say, in high school, how much further did it go? How long did this depression stay with you?

Dave Ebert: I finally kind of got out of the deepest recesses and the darkest places. in 2013. So we're talking from 1997, two a 2013. It was just a case where it didn't lift until I truly found a relationship and pursued a relationship with God.

Rodney Olsen: How do you go about finding a relationship with God? I mean, that sounds like an interesting turn of phrase. What does that actually mean and what did it mean for you?

Dave Ebert: As a Christian, I have the unique ability and the unique opportunity to have a actual relationship with the God of Christianity. It's a personal thing. It's not some mythical creature in the sky that I have to please in the Bible.

He clearly refers to himself as, as father. And that's the role that he wants to play to the father that, that takes joy in his kids. Now, how did I get there from depression? It's really funny because God was really a part of my life even when I didn't let him be a part of my life. you can look back at different places in my, in my life where it's like, wow, God really was there.

He, he was involved in my life. Yeah, throughout the depression, there were many times, where I took some silly risks that probably should have ended my life. There were times when I was driving a taxi for a railroad company and I would work driving 36 or 48 hours straight. That should have resulted in me not being here.

my diet and my, consistent consumption of energy drinks and things like that. That should have claimed my life by now. there are other things like I had taken a job at a radio station to be a DJ, to be an on air personality, introducing the music. Yeah. Really cool thing. And be famous and all this kind of stuff.

But a week into the job I got demoted and I got moved over to a smaller sister station where I wasn't on the air, but I was operating behind the scenes. But the interesting thing is what was a demotion and a hard thing for me was God's hand in just kind of instilling different things in me, different opportunities to learn about him because I went from a country radio station to a gospel station and, the gospel station that plays, Christian music, there are live preachers on the air all the time and so here I am feeling again, that depression, but I'm, I'm listening to all these messages about God and the whole time that I was depressed and upset and not really receiving it, my mind was still hearing it and still remembering the messages. He took, what was meant for bad in my demotion and my removal from the fun job, and he turned it for good because for those two years, I was learning about God and hearing about God constantly. so it, it's a really unique concept because no other faith that I know of has that close relationship where God is actually pursuing somebody. It's all about us trying to catch their favor or do something for them but God, the God of the Bible, the God of Jesus Christ, he's a God that wants a actual relationship as your father, and as my father, he consistently reached out to me to try to get me to turn around and realize that living in the dark hole, where I was in the depression and the pain that I was, it was not the best way, was not the way that he wanted me to live as my father.

He wanted to pull me out of that. But I had to realize, and I had to choose that there was a better way and the better way is to follow and seek God in that one on one close relationship that was made possible, because of the life of Jesus Christ. So when I say I started a relationship with, with God, it was because he had put so many things in my way to tell me that he wanted to be in a close relationship with me that I finally said, okay, God, I'm sorry I've missed it for so much. Here I am.

Rodney Olsen: There's an idea that if you are not living the way that God wants you to live in any way, shape or form, then you really need to get yourself straight before he's going to listen to you. We hear so often the message coming out of the church is that you're not good enough. You need to live up to a certain standard. Was, was that the experience for you? Did you have to get your life together before you started this relationship that you're talking about?

Dave Ebert: Oh, absolutely not. I was still a mess.

So sometimes God will flip the switch in your brain and if you're somebody that's suffering from depression, he'll flip a switch and heal you immediately 'cause he can do that because God created our human bodies. So he knows exactly what's needed to flip those switches. If you read the new Testament, Paul talks about a thorn in the flesh.

Sometimes we just have to live with certain things because God's going to still use that in your story. Paul, the greatest writer of the new Testament of the Bible, he still had a thorn in the flesh, something that ailed him, that God didn't heal, but he used it. so for me, when I started praying and started pursuing that relationship and trying to develop that communication with God, There wasn't this great moment of suddenly I was healed and taken away from depression.

It became a gradual process of healing. Oh. Where God was doing, was working on my heart to strengthen it, to grow it up. So I would never tell somebody to believe that you have to get everything right before you come to God. one of the greatest stories of how God saves how Jesus saves is the thief on the cross.

If anybody is familiar with that story, when Jesus was sacrificed and  was dying on the cross, next to him were two men. one was a thief that mocked Jesus and the other was, was a thief that said, Jesus, when you die, remember me. Now this thief was dying on the cross. He was paying a similar penalty that Jesus was in that moment for completely different reasons, but they were both dying and he didn't have his life together.

He didn't have to fix everything. He didn't have to go and repay that for the things that he'd stolen. He turned his life over in that moment and said, Jesus, remember me? When you go into your kingdom, were his words. Jesus, remember me when you pass on when you die and he didn't have his life together, he had no chance to.

Now that's not an encouragement for anybody to wait until they're at death's doorstep to suddenly remember Jesus, because you're not guaranteed that moment. But I would say that you don't have to get your life together. The idea that you have to fix everything before you go and find God. If you could fix everything on your own, why do you need God?

That's that's the lesson that I think the church needs to get out more is that God wants you to come as you are, and you don't have to change to win his love, cause you've already, he already loves you, but you'll change on the inside because of the love you have for him. For anybody that's ever had a dating or marriage relationship where you marry somebody because you've fallen in love with them.

There are any things that you do differently because you've fallen in love with them because we have that special relationship. When we're married. There are things that we stopped doing because we love this person that we're married to. We love somebody so much that we're willing to sacrifice some of the things that we think we want.

And that's the similar relationship that you can develop with God when you accept Jesus as your savior, like the thief on the cross did. It's not about fixing yourself. It's not about fixing your life. It's about just saying I'm a mess. I can't do this. I can't figure this out on my own. I, I try hard, but I can't get it.  right and it's just turning everything over and saying, Jesus, remember me in your kingdom? God forgive me. I'm broken. I'm a mess.

Rodney Olsen: You use there the analogy of a marriage and how we view relationships and I believe that it wasn't all that long after you started that relationship with God that your own marriage came along.

Dave Ebert:  Absolutely. One of the things that I didn't mention in my story up to this was, in 2006, I got married, my first marriage, and it was not built in a proper way as we were dating, we had made some mistakes and, she said that she was pregnant. So we kind of hurried a wedding. she lost the baby just before the, before the wedding, but everything was booked and we said, well, let's go for it where we believe that we're going to be together, so let's get married anyway. Biggest mistake of my life. we got married and immediately we came home from our honeymoon and things just started falling apart and at this point, neither my wife at that point, or me had really known who God was. So we know we had no source of trying to find a way to fix the marriage.

So it became fight after fight after fight and then suddenly just reawakened the depression in me. And we were married for four months to the day when we filed. We got married on August 26, 2006, filed for divorce, December 26, 2006. So the day after Christmas we're meeting at the courthouse to file for divorce. It was, it was excruciating because here was the depression coming back.

The, the voices in my head, they were telling me I'm not worth anything. They're like, see somebody promised to love you forever and they couldn't even make four months. And so, you know, all these things came back. And so that really fed into my depression for the remainder of that time. But once I finally found that relationship with God and I started reading the Bible, started to really pray.

That's when life turned around and I left. A small rural town in West Virginia, but I went from there to Chicago, which is completely different world, but I came to Chicago and within two years of moving here, I moved here in 2013 and in 2015, I got married to my wife, Bobbie, as I've grown closer to God, I've also grown closer to my wife because the relationships are so similar to have a successful relationship. There's gotta be vulnerability. You gotta be vulnerable and willing to pursue truth and not your personal truth, you know, intimacy and vulnerability. That's how you have a successful relationship that builds closeness and love and the ability to trust that the person you're with or in this, or in my case, the, the God that you're trusting.

That you know, that they've got your best at heart and that you can trust in them. You used to use comedy as a way to suppress that oppression. And really it was something that he'd what was going on underneath.

Rodney Olsen: You're using comedy in a very different way. Now tell us a little about that.

Dave Ebert: Absolutely. So when I moved back to Chicago to pursue opportunities, to use humor as a way to do much of what I was doing when I was depressed, using humor to make people's lives better, to brighten their day to encourage them. But instead of having it as a defense mechanism to hide where I was, which was exhausting now I'm using it as a way to try to invite people, to find their own relationship with God.

so we do clean comedy that's accepted, you know, that's accessible for people of all ages. we don't want families to feel excluded. So we love having kids come to the shows. We've even done shows for entire audiences of children. And it gets crazy because  we're built on audience suggestion and feedback.

So when you start asking for volunteers or ideas, you get 300 kids shouting. Some shouting the same thing. Some shouting outlandish things, but you get 300 kids just shouting. It's it's so much fun. Yeah. So doing comedy now is all about bringing people up. One of the things that I like to tell people is I used to use comedy to hide who I was. Now I use comedy as a way to reveal who he is and that he is God, because God is joy and light and love and he's eternal. He's bigger than what we see in the world so much is going on in the world, especially right now in America. There's just so much turmoil. We're in the middle of an election year, there's the virus thing that's been going on,  there's the, the racial climate that's just exploding right now. God's bigger than all that. God's going to outlast all of that and no matter how bad things get, I know, and I have a hope that. This is going to be the way it is forever. It's going to be painful now, but eternity is a really long time.

And eternity is longer than we could even understand as humans. When we make people laugh. We can kind of break through some of those walls that are built up by the world. there's walls that separate us between black and white or this race or this gender or, or this socioeconomic class, we can break through those walls and realize there's so much more that makes us similar, that makes us different.

Rodney Olsen: I believe that there's a special group of women that you've been teaching improv to as, as a way to, to help them to heal.

Dave Ebert:  If I don't do anything else with comedy, but I can do that. That's one of the things I'm most humbled and proud of, which is really kind of a interesting oxymoron that I could be both proud and humble, but it's really exciting.

I use improv as a way to, to improve the lives of women. Who've survived, sex trafficking. In America, you know, sometimes people in America think, wow, that's something that happens overseas that happens in Europe or Africa or wherever, but no right here in all throughout the world, every country has women and men and children that are caught up in this billion dollar industry.

It's on the most wealthy and powerful people and they're bought and sold like cattle for the purpose of sex trafficking. And sometimes women are able to get out and there's this organization called Salt and Light Coalition based in Chicago and at Salt and Light they help these women basically rehab and go from the life that they've lived for however many years, to a new life where they are getting job skills.

They're getting interview skills so that they can get a job or they're getting life skills so that they can cook and clean and prep for themselves. And so what I do is once a month is I'll use improv to work on their communication skills, to help them tap into some of the things that they've probably shut down, that as they've dealt with this, the horror that they've lived through.

So we tap into their creative mind. We tap into their communication abilities and we also try to use it to build up their self esteem because you know, these are, are you frankly broken people that have been so abused and so misused that they're still trying to find their self worth outside of that business.

So with improv, we're able to create these opportunities where, you know, they can be funny, they can be creative,  they can tell stories. They can make each other laugh and if nothing else sticks, once a month, we spend an hour together and they laugh like, like little girls, again, probably something that they haven't done for decades, if ever, and it's such a blessing to lead one of these workshops where I'd come in and work with these ladies.

And I see, you know, they're still carrying the burdens of the world with them because they're still trying to figure out what am I going to do to provide for my kids. Am I going to be able to get my kids back? because many of them resort to drug use to cope with the lifestyle that they're forced into.

so a lot of people will look on them and realize they may have a drug history because drugs history we'll leave scars and we'll leave its impact on, on appearance. So, unfortunately they're labeled before they even get in the door, even if they're clean. And so they're trying to deal with how do they live their life now as a clean individual, outside of all this hell on earth that they've been through.

And I get the opportunity, I get the blessing of being able to go in there and let them laugh. Give them an opportunity to laugh and see, their countenance change to see their physical stance go from one of burden to one of freedom, even if it's just for that one hour and I just, I love that opportunity.

And I also appreciate how important that opportunity is because these are women who have been abused by dozens or hundreds of men and now I have the opportunity as a man to go in there and to be a positive male influence. And I know that that was a risk, but that the organization took in asking me to come in and I, I appreciate the weight of that because I hope that my influence can help them start to trust all people again. And like I said, if nothing else sticks, once a month, we get an hour of just pure laughter and it's such an amazing gift to be able to do that.

Rodney Olsen: I imagine the depression that you went through those years ago is something that said to you, there's not really much to look forward to. There there's no hopes or dreams coming in the future, but now you're in a place where there are hopes and dreams. What are those dreams for the future for, for you and for your wife?

Dave Ebert: Our hopes and dreams are to continue to use. Our gifts as a way to draw people closer to God, through comedy, through teaching comedy and performing comedy, that's kind of where I'm at.

My wife helps behind the scenes with the comedy, but she is also, I'm a sign language interpreter. And so somehow God and his amazing ability to orchestrate and is going to use that somewhere. We know that we're both eventually going to serve in a missions field, which is going out and trying to reach people outside of church walls.

We have no idea where that's going to be. It could be here in Chicago. It could be in Ireland. it could be in Australia who knows. We're just kind of waiting to see where God wants us to be. Well, our biggest thing is we want to make sure that we tell enough people that the world is that is like the Titanic it's sinking and there's one life raft that's going to get you off of that and that life raft is named Jesus and however God wants us to do it because he's orchestrated so many different things for us so far, we know that he's got some plans ahead, because you know, the comedy team I have without some divine intervention, there's no way I would have met these ladies.

Which is another interesting thing that's the comedy team, that I'm a part of, I'm the only man on the team, the rest is four ladies. So it's so interesting to see how God can put things together without it being possible in any other way. I mean, you can call it luck or coincidence, but when so many things line up and so many things work, you're like that's designed that that's a plan.

That's not an accident. You don't get a 747 jumbo jet by accident it's designed and planned. so we're just looking for any opportunity that we can to make people laugh, to make people closer or find a closer relationship to God. My dreams would be that I could do that from a comedy stage for the rest of my life.

I don't know if God's going to open that door. I'm kind of hoping, because it's what I'm good at is what I enjoy, but I'm also open to whatever he has because I've seen him orchestrate so many really cool things so far that I, I, you know, I have dreams to perform in front of thousands of people, but yeah, if I don't ever do that, but I help one person change the course of their life because they found a relationship with God, then it's all been worth it.

Rodney Olsen: I'm sure that despite the fact that you have this relationship, you're talking about with God, that things aren't always rosy. So how differently do you deal with some of the issues that you face now as opposed to back then when you were battling that depression?

Dave Ebert: It's really interesting because we recently went through a painful, end to a relationship with somebody in our church.

And before, before I really knew the Lord and really it was in that place where I was pursuing when I was deep and then depression, I would have lashed out. I would have found ways to mock them to hurt them on social media, because that's what I did after my first divorce. After my first marriage ended is I found ways to lash out and try to make sure everybody knew that my ex wife was the bad guy that I had done everything, that, that it was her choice. So lashing out is something that I would have done. And there's still the temptation, because you know, I'm human and whenever you're hurt as a human being, you want to see justice. You want to see somebody pay for hurting you. So there's an instinct in it, that desire. But now that I have that relationship, I know that there's a bigger plan and that God loves the person that's hurt us as much as he loves us.

And he wants to see that person grow closer to him. So if I interfere in God's plan by trying to hurt them for hurting us, that's going to push them further from God and that's going to interfere with his relationship. So I know now that I don't need to interfere with that relationship, I don't need to go after that person.

Because God is going to deal with it and he's going to handle it in a way that's gonna make everybody better, and so having that knowledge and knowing that number one, God has forgiven me for hurting people. I've hurt people, you know, after my divorce or some bounce back relationships where I didn't treat the lady that I was dating correctly and I was more or less trying to meet my needs without really meeting her needs, and it was awful, but I know that God has forgiven me because, he promises in his Bible that he is faithful and just to forgive and that just means that we can count on him to forgive us when we seek it and when we genuinely want to be forgiven of what we've done. And then I've also, you know, because of this new relationship, I've went through the process of reaching out to the people that I know I've hurt and apologize to them.

There's a bigger picture than what I go through. There's a bigger picture of God's got a plan and he loves us all so much that he doesn't want the division and he doesn't want the hurt, to spread. He really wants to see us when we get hurt, literally turn the other cheek, literally, and the cycle of hurt with yourself and turn it over to him so that he can deal with it.

so I now know that, so I, I now want to make sure that I never continue a cycle of pain. That if somebody hurts me, mistreats me talks bad about me. I never want to be the person that's gonna take that and carry it on to another person, which is completely different than when I was in depression.

Because if I was hurt, I wanted somebody else to hurt.

Rodney Olsen: Dave, on a lighter side, as soon as you tell someone that you're a comedian, do you get the, the usual response of, okay, then make me laugh?

Dave Ebert: Yeah. I get, I get two responses. Usually. I usually they'll say something like, Oh wow, make me laugh. Or tell me a joke, which is really weird because I do improv comedy where it's just unscripted.

There is no plan. It's like we'll set up a scenario, we'll get the audience to tell us some ideas on how to incorporate new things into that scenario, but it's completely made up. So I don't have set jokes like a standup comedian. so it's always funny when people kind of, bring the two together and get them confused.

So like, Oh, make me laugh or tell me a joke or they'll say, Hey, I heard this funny joke you can use this in your, in your show. It's like, Oh, I don't plan what I'm going to use. I appreciate it. but yeah, people, it's one of those weird things you don't walk up to a doctor and say, Oh, you're a doctor well operate on me.

Or, you know, you're, you're a mechanic. do do my oil, you know? So, so, but it, it, I, it's always an opportunity to talk more about what we do. And it really can lead into this conversations where I say, why I do clean comedy. it's not just that I do improv or that I do comedy, but the why and the why is the most important part and that why is so that. I can hope we bring people closer to God.

Rodney Olsen:  It's been fascinating chatting to you today to find out about firstly, the battles that you've been through, but also the place that you are now in. Dave, thank you so much for spending some time with us on Bleeding Daylight.

Dave Ebert:  It's been my pleasure and my honor, you, God bless you on your show and everything that you're doing.

And I, one thing, if I could just send this out to anybody, my email address is always open. So if there's anybody that's been, or is where I used to be in that place of darkness and depression, I know that there's no one answer that's going to help you, but I am willing to listen. I am willing to chat.

I'm willing to talk. My email address is open it's dave@gifts4glory.com and that email will go directly to my phone and we can start a chat and conversation. I don't ever want you to think that there's nobody that will listen. I want you to know that there's somebody that wants to listen because they've been there and I'm not going to throw scripture or Bible verses at you.

I'm just going to listen and, we can talk and figure things out together, but you're not alone. That email address is for anybody that needs a listening ear. If you're in depression or if you're in the middle of considering suicide. I want to be there for you because I've been there. And I know number one, that there's hope and number two, I know that no, two depressions no two suicidal moments are the same, so I'm not going to preach to you. I just want to listen. That's dave@gifts4glory.com. It's always going to be open. So anybody that needs it can reach out and I'm willing to listen.

Rodney Olsen:  Dave, thank you so much.

Dave Ebert:  Absolutely.

Emily Olsen: Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight. Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others. For further details and more episodes, please visit BleedingDaylight.net