6. The Mission Minded Drug Dealer - Jim Reynolds

This was an episode I really enjoyed recording. Jim Reynolds is the founder and President of Ultimate Mission, an organization that is training health workers in remote villages of India and other places around the world. Jim’s vision is to help save lives through education. All of this is just a small part of Jim’s story. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it.

These two young boys came up to me about 1011 years old and both of them were saying, they told me, do you have any food? And I didn't have any food with me. I had a pocket full of rupees, but I have 300 people around me. I can't really start handing out rupees. And I said, I'm sorry. They said, We're really hungry. Do you have any food? And I said, no, I don't have any food. And I left those boys hungry. And I asked our doctors, and I said, what can we do? I mean, we can't feed all the children in India. And that's when the idea started coming because they were saying, if you could teach them to drink clean water and wash their hands, you'd make a huge difference, because a lot of the nutrition that they do get is going to fight off disease. Hey, everyone, it's the Simply Overcoming Podcast, and this is Aaron written hour. Thanks for joining us once again for another episode today, I have a very wonderful guest with me, a good friend of mine who is changing thousands of people's lives around the world. But before we start talking with him, I just wanted to mention something that happened recently. I was speaking to one of the listeners of the Simply Overcoming podcast, and he asked me a question. And that question was, Why did I stop recording the podcast a year and a half ago after the first episode? Because if you are somebody who started listening back then, I only recorded one episode and then stopped recording. And I really had to think about it. But I realized that the answer is very simple. I didn't feel like I was the right person to be talking to people about overcoming when I have things in my life that I have to overcome. I'm still struggling with things in my life, but I recently came to a realization, and that realization is this isn't about me. This is about the people out there who are listening to these stories, the people who can benefit from the stories from the people on this podcast. You should never feel like you're unworthy to help somebody by sharing your own experiences in your own story. Okay. Let's get into the episode I present to you, Jim Reynolds. I met you four years ago, right? Jim? I believe so. Yeah. In India. Yeah. I met you in India. It's kind of funny because I was thinking about this, and I realized that we were in Wallawala together a couple of months ago for some meetings. And I realized that other than one time meeting you in an airport in Seattle, that was the first time where I was hanging out with you on American soil in the last four years. That is funny. I don't know if you noticed that I did not even think of that because we have spent massive time going from village to village and in cars and trains and busses. I don't think we're all small buses, but mostly cars and trains and airplanes. So we spent massive time doing this cool stuff over in India, and I've yet to get you over to the Philippines, but I know that's coming. Yeah, I hope so. I'd love to come over to the Philippines with you. That would be great. Well, hey, Jim, thanks for being on the show today. I know you have a fantastic story, and I know it's taken me all these years, but I just listened to your audiobook that you have over on your podcast, the Christian Life Empowerment Podcast. It was great. I learned a lot of things about you that I didn't know whatsoever. Probably way too much. That's what I tell people more than you need in this book for being as small of a book as it is. There was really a whole lot of information. You did a really good job at telling the story and just talking about the most important parts of the story and getting to the ultimate point. So you wrote that book back in 2014. Yeah, I did. I tried to keep it succinct because I knew that the people I wanted to hand it out to were people that may not read a big book. I was doing talks at Salvation Army to a group of people that were trying to recovering alcoholics and drug addicts and stuff like that. And so in these talks and the people I'm talking to, it's nice to have something small to give them, because something big is too intimidating. And most people I don't know anymore. Most people aren't reading a big, thick book. Sure. Yes. Isn't that very accurate? Well, I would love to talk to you more about your work overseas. We kind of just touched on it just now, but I sort of want to go back to the beginning and talk about your book a little bit and your life. And you grew up in a Christian home. Yes. Yeah, I did. My mom and dad were both Christians. My dad left the Church at a point in time, but my mom has always stayed Christian. So at a certain point, you started falling off the rails, which may have started with your parents divorce. At least that didn't help the situation. No, that didn't help the situation. And really, you can't blame it on anybody but yourself. I mean, you can make your own decisions and choices in life, but the divorce probably didn't help. My dad left the Church, left, my mother got remarried and really started going down a secular path. We had a bar downstairs and we had parties, and that's where I started playing the guitar and played with the little country band we had going down there. And I thought, wow, this is exciting. And this is really cool because I was brought up in a very conservative Church. As you know, you and I are both basically brought up in the same religion. And so in a very conservative Church, drinking and smoking and staying up at night party, I mean, that's just not anything that you did. And, of course, the country music wouldn't have been something that our conservative Church would have really appreciated back in those days because you think about it that was back in the 70s, early 80s. Wow. Yeah. So growing up in that conservative environment, when you do finally start to experiment with drugs and alcohol, oftentimes people are unable to control it to the point where it takes them down a dark path that many people don't ever go down when they're raised around that kind of stuff. Yeah. And it did. I went down. Oh, boy. I was doing things. I've always been kind of an entrepreneur. And so not only would I go experiment with drugs and alcohol, but I realized that, hey, I could make some money doing this. And so I started buying quantities of pot and selling that. And then I started buying quantities of cocaine, and I cut it and then split it up and sell the cocaine. That's the only way I could afford to do cocaine. I mean, that was very expensive for a teenager. But if you could buy an eight ball and sell it in little quarters, you did okay. Is that how you started dealing is just because you needed to get your own fix. So you started selling so you could buy your own fix? No, really, partially. I think the other part is it always seemed like the drug dealers were cool, right? Oh, yeah. Everybody wanted to hang out with the guy that had all the weed or the guy that had the Coke. Back then, as a teenager, you did anything you can do to get the women. And so it seemed like the cool guys with all the drugs and all the Coke had all the women. And that didn't really work out as well as I was hoping. So this was back in the 70s. You said by the time this time, I'm a teenager, and this is in the 80s. This was in the 80s. Yeah. The early 80s, the cocaine period, the Scarface period. I don't remember you watched the movie Scarface. I haven't no. Oh, man, without Scarface, that was inspiring to be a lot of people from your generation. Give me a hard time that I haven't seen that movie. So maybe I need to see that movie. I don't know. I don't know. Probably. Yeah, maybe not. But back then, that was a pretty cool movie. Anyway, the one thing, though, with my Christian background, a lot of parents, they look at their kids, they look at their kids going the wrong direction. They're like, oh, what did I do? I really messed up. And some of us have. I mean, we just have messed up. But what I had with my Christian background is I didn't do what some of my friends did. For some reason. I always have that behind me. I always had that in the back of my mind that God was there, that God was watching me and that I couldn't go too far. I would go to the edge of the cliff. But I wouldn't go over. And I see some of my friends that went over with meth and with heroin and with cocaine and with alcohol further than I would have ever gone. And so I try to tell people they asked me, Well, what were you addicted to? Well, I was addicted to getting high. I didn't get the shakes. When I quit drinking. I didn't have to go to a treatment center. Not that that's a bad thing. Maybe I should have earlier. But when I did get clean and sober, it was through God. It was through the Church. It was through just understanding my situation and asking God for the help they can't do that. They need to go to a treatment center. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think my Christian upbringing upbringing kept me from crossing that line. Although I did some crazy stuff, and I don't know if the statute of limitations is over. If I can really say what I've done, some of the things I've done. Well, I know that there was something that happened in your life that really changed the course of your life and who you are as a person. There was an accident that you were in. Talk to us about the accident that you were in. Well, I was 21 and I was on my motorbike. Well, I got on my motorbike that morning. The funny part is I looked at my car and I looked at my motorbike. It was a nice day. So I took my bike. And it's funny how just a little bitty decision can make such a huge impact in your life. So I took the bike instead of the car, and I'm driving down the Hill, and I'm going down the Hill, this big old Hill on Thieveson Road. If you're in the Milwaukee area, everybody knows Thason Hill. And so I'm going down the Hill at the bottom of the Hill. Somebody pulls out of the driveway right in front of me. And so there was nothing to do. But I tried getting around him going in the other Lane. There was a ditch on the other side of the road. I put the bike down and the book is called, this Is Going to Hurt. And that's because I remember that's the last thing I thought. I put the bike down and it was like everything was going in slow motion. And I could see that car coming at me. And the last thing I thought is, this is going to hurt. And yeah, I slammed into that car. So that was the wreck. And then that was back before cell phone. So somebody ran into a house and called 911, and the ambulance came and took me to the top of the Hill where Lifelight picked me up. And the lifeline had to pick me up because ambulance doesn't carry blood supplies. But Lifelight does. And so I was losing blood very fast. And so they had to call in Life flight so they could pump me back, put some blood back in me. And then they flew me to a manual hospital. I got to the hospital, and they took me in and my jaw was busted because my full face helmet got pulled off, got pulled off. Which is fortunate I had it on because my head went through the back windshield of the car. Were you conscious most of the time, or were you in and out? What do you remember of that specific time getting taken to the hospital by Life flight? Do you remember much of that? I remember them putting me in the helicopter, but then they give you a drug to knock you out once you get in the helicopter. Yeah. So I don't remember the helicopter ride, and it's the only helicopter ride I've ever had. And so it kind of ticks me off that I don't get any. We need to get you another helicopter ride, Jim. We do. I always thought the helicopter would work really good in India, the places we go in India. It's so messed up what we've got to do and the roads we've got to drive on, and the hours and hours it takes, we get accomplished so much with a helicopter, it would save a lot of time if there is a very rich person out there that would like to donate money for helicopter for ultimate mission. Aaron and I would both appreciate you very much. But, yeah, if you come out to Montana, Jim, we can go out to Glacier and take a helicopter ride in Glacier. That's a good place to do it. So you're in this accident, you're taken to the hospital. Your jaw is busted because your helmet was ripped off your head. What else was going on with you? Oh, boy. My whole face was mushed. They had to put 13 metal plates in my face, wire my jaw back together, reconstruct my nose. It's really weird. They used baby cartilage to reconstruct my nose. Wow. Yeah. From bays that died at birth. I don't know if it was a boarded Bay. I don't know where this came from, but I was just told that it was baby cartilage. They used to reconstruct my nose. Interesting. And then on my right leg, my femur was busted in half, and then my knee was shattered. It just completely shattered. And so they put my leg in traction, and then they cut off my leg above my knee. So now I've got an amputated leg above the knee. On my right hand side. I'm in traction. I've got a tracheotomy in I wake up and, boy, I tell you what. I was a mess. I tell people in the book is that was the most fortunate day of my life. I had walked away from God. At that point. At 16 years old, I had completely walked away from God. I had gone another direction. I had been experimenting with everything the world had to offer. I did everything but put a needle in my arm. I wasn't going to go that far. But whether it was acid Coke, we called a crank back then, but now and everybody calls it meth or whatever. I'm just glad they didn't have ecstasy, because that's a bad drug. And they didn't have that back then. But mushrooms, I mean, whatever I was doing, all this stuff, I was selling stuff I was doing really doing some bad stuff I shouldn't have been involved in. You had a motorcycle. You were talking about your car. I don't know how nice of a car you had. Did you have your own house at that point before the accident? No. I was 21 years old. I wonder if my wife's going to get mad at me and say that probably not. I was actually living with my girlfriend at the time in her place, which is now my wife. So it makes a little better. And that's another thing. Belinda, my wife. Belinda. We've been going out for three months before this, and I didn't actually move in with her. It's just like I had my own place. And I was living in an apartment with a couple of buddies. And then I had my own place and she just cooked really well. And so I just ended up staying there. Let me get this straight. Although I sold drugs, I never made any money. I mean, I made money, but all the money I made went back into putting Coke up my nose or whatever. You don't make money doing drugs. And some people do. I mean, I know guys that have grown pot and made money. So, yeah, people make money. But I tell you what, the lifestyle that's associated with drugs is not conducive to saving cash. It really isn't. Because if you do drugs, you like drugs. You sell drugs. It's just very few people make any money out of it. It's all a bad habit. It's all a bad habit and it's expensive. Yeah. And it just runs your body down. And, yeah, it's a horrible way to live. It's so funny. You keep answering questions that I have right before I ask the question because that was one of the questions that I had. But you said that that was one of the most fortunate days of your life when you had your accident. That's a pretty positive outlook. Have you always been a positive person in life, or is that something that you've cultivated over time? I mean, you wake up in the hospital, your leg is cut off above the knee. You have all of these things that have happened to you. What is going through your head at that time? There's no way that you're being positive at that time. Or maybe you are. I don't know if you could call it positive. I mean, I call that the most fortunate day of my life, because as a Christian, I know the lifestyle I was leading. And if I would have died, I wouldn't have been ready to meet my maker. I absolutely was not ready to meet my maker. And being a Christian, I know what happens when you're not ready to meet your maker and you die. It's not a good deal. But I don't know. When I first woke up and realized what had happened to me, I was shocked. And then shortly, I don't know, I kind of looked at it as a challenge as. Okay, well, this is what it is. Here we go. How are we going to handle this one? And I assume you started following Jesus the very next day. No, you just gave up all the drugs, the alcohol, and you just followed Jesus from then on. I wish. But I thought about it because I remembered you have all this happened to you, and you realize that God probably saved your life. And I thought, Man, I should go back to I've got this Christian roots that I've been in this upbringing, and I had all the information I needed to go back to God. And I felt God calling me back. But I was 21, right? And your friends are really important to you when you're young, they are now, too. But you have your family and you have other things. But when you're 21, you're young, your friends are really important to you. And the first thing that came to my mind is, well, if I go back and become a Jesus guy and go to Church all the time, what are my friends going to think of me? And I felt that they thought I would be weak, that if I needed God, it meant I couldn't handle it myself. And I wasn't strong enough to take on this challenge that life had put in front of me. And so I decided I wasn't going to go back and ask God for help. I just kept living the way I was living just got out of the hospital. And first thing I did was call somebody to come get me some pot and some alcohol. And I was mixing some of the alcohol with the pain medications we had and seeing what those mixtures felt like because I was in a lot of pain right after this, like 17 different surgeries, 17 different surgeries. Wow. Well, when you grow up in that religious environment, there's no way that that is not going to cross your mind after an accident like that after an incident like that. But I assume that afterwards, your mentality may have been more like, hey, I just cheated death. Me. Yeah. But just I kind of took it in stride a little bit. I wasn't real excited about cheating death. I don't know. I was always 10ft, tall and bulletproof, and I just figured it would never happen to me. And then four years later, because, remember, I got blood transfusions during all that. I lost a lot of blood, right? Yes. And then four years later, I get a letter from the Red Cross. And they said, well, you got blood transfusions in what was it? 86 says you got blood transfusions. And then the letter says, the person that gave the blood that we gave to the hospital that went into you was HIV positive. Wow. And that was a show stopper. This was back before they ever tested blood. Yeah. The Red Cross really didn't. They weren't testing that hard for different things in the blood. And so in the letter, it said, Well, show up here and we'll test you and see if you have HIV. And so I had to make an appointment and then go to that appointment. And I still remember going in. And they apologized to me and said, yeah, we test the blood a lot better nowadays. And the nurse took it from my arm. My wife and I were in there by this time. I had a child, and I had been married for a few years back then in the early 90s is when this happened. Hiv was a death sentence. It is not like it is now where you have a cocktail of drugs and you can virtually live a normal life with HIV now. But back then, that wasn't true. Everybody. I knew that it had AIDS. Matter of fact, I had a friend named Jim Winkin, and he got a motorcycle wreck really close to when I did. I mean, super close, like, within the same year, and he got a blood transfusion. He got HIV, and he died. Oh, my. And that was a good friend of mine. I mean, that stuff was happening. A friend of mine, his brother got HIV, he was homosexual. But he got HIV. And he died. So back then in the 90s, it was a pretty serious deal with HIV. I mean, a lot of people knew people that died from AIDS. Yeah. So now they're saying, I've got blood with HIV. I'm going, I started talking to God. Then, like you said, that Christian background and that kind of stuff happens. And all of a sudden, God became pretty important to me. And I started talking to God. And I told him, hey, if you can't save me, at least save my family. And it was weird. I just felt this warm feeling like this presence of Jesus just come over me and say, it's going to be okay. And it was the weirdest feeling I ever had. And I went to my mum that day, and I told my mom, who? My mom is still very religious, right? And I didn't tell anybody else in the world. And so I told my mom. I said, God told me it's going to be okay, and she kind of go, yes, I hear you kind of like, I want to believe you, but, yeah, whatever. But sure enough, after I did the test, I didn't have HIV. The test was negative. Wow. So how does the guy that give me blood have HIV, but I don't have HIV. Did the doctors give you any explanation at all that they could come up with? No, they couldn't come up with any explanation. Wow. I don't know what happened. Maybe it didn't get into that. Maybe he got HIV right after he gave blood. I don't know. Maybe I got some age resistant strain of something in mind. But what I really like to think is maybe God saved my life again. I thought about going back to my Christian roots. And again, it's so hard to change. It really is. It just isn't easy to change. And then I'm sure you're going to get to the part about my kid, because I don't know. I do want to talk about that. But I wanted to ask you about a warrior in all of this, which is your wife, Belinda. Yeah. How did all of this affect Belinda? You had been dating Belinda for you said a few months before your accident, a few months before your accident, she stayed with you. She took care of you during that time. What was it like for Belinda during this time? Oh, boy. It couldn't have been easy. She just took it on like it was a new project. It was just something that she had. Her maternal instincts just went into hyperdrive because I was out of work for a year. She was the only one working at the time, and I ended up getting a settlement, which was okay. Which helped us out quite a bit. But, yeah, she had to work. She had to come home and take care of me. She did an amazing job, and it was amazing that she stayed with me through all of that, because, you know what? When you're in pain and when a lot of things are happening in your life is changing that drastically. You may not always be the nicest person to be around, and it would have been really easy for us to split up during that time. But, yeah, my wife has just been incredible. How long after the accident. Did you guys get married? A year. A year? Yeah. Wow. I had to keep that one. She was there to stay. Yeah. I wasn't going to wait around for that. I was going to make sure she couldn't go anywhere. You know, there's a part in your book where you were talking about how I think at this point, you had two boys. You were still dealing drugs out of the house. You're still smoking pot yourself, drinking alcohol, I assume. And you came to a point in your life where you said you told God, if he could help you find a way to support your family, you would stop dealing. Yeah. And at that point, I only had Brock, which Brock came with Belinda. And he was the light of my life. I mean, he was just the saving Grace of that whole thing because I would watch Brock. Well, Belinda was at work. Brock was three or four years old at that time, and he would just come in with a beaming face and everything before. I'd been selling drugs all the time before this accident. Now, when the accident happened, I was selling drugs and working before. But when the accident happened, I could no longer work. And so the only income I had was from selling pot. And I had two guys that grew in their basement, and I was their sole person that would go out and sell it once they harvested. But the thing is, I was selling cocaine, too, because I like cocaine. And so I do that just to be able to get my own Coke every once in a while. But the people that were coming in and out of the house when you sell drugs? Yeah. You don't always sell to the high. I don't know how to call it, but, I mean, I don't want to offend anybody. Okay, here you go. You sell to some real stumbags. I mean, there's some people that crawl out from under the rock to come in to buy some drugs. It's not a good environment for a kid. It's not a good. I mean, you sell to nice people, too, because there are nice people that do drugs. But there's a lot of people that really shouldn't be hanging out with your four year old kid that are coming in to buy drugs. It's just simple as that this is happening, and I'm feeling bad. These people are coming in and out of my house, and I got this four year old kid that's just wonderful. And I said, God, I can't do this, but I don't have another way to make a living right now. And if you will just figure out some way for me to make a living, I will stop selling drugs. And my lawyer calls me. We've gone through this thing because we tried to sue the county because the road was messed up. We tried to sue the guy insurance who pulled out in front of me. But it turns out he had no insurance and he had no license. So he had no license, no insurance. And then my hospital bills were so high. If I would have sued the county for the messed up road that nobody could see anything on those at the time that anything I got from the county would go straight to pay for my hospital bills. So I would see nothing so it made no sense to do that. So there was no way I was going to get any money. Then the lawyer found a loophole because the guy didn't have license or insurance. My uninsured motorist kicked in, which is $20,000. And I got that. And so in $20,000, I think it was a little before. Yeah, it was about $87, actually, $20,000 was a good amount of money. And so, yeah, this was right after I told God that it wasn't a week after I told God that my lawyer called me out of the blue after we've already decided there's nothing could be done and says, yes, I got you 20 grand. So this time, did you stick to the promise that you made with God? Never sold drugs again in my life? Wow. Ever. Never sold anything illegal, never did anything. That was it. So, Jim, God has protected you so many times in your life. I know you had many other times in your life where you thought you were going to die. I know you said you had a gun that was held to your head once. Yeah, that sucked. That was over a drug deal. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't be surprised. I bought a bunch of pot from this guy, and it was a real quick switch. And then I took it home. I looked at it and the pot was full of seeds, and I was ticked. And so I take the pot back to his house. I go up and I storm and knock on the door, storm into the room, said, you got to take this back and give you my money back. And he put a loaded clip into his pistol and he put it to my head. He says, what do you think now? I said, Never mind. Well, God saved you through all these times because God had a plan for your life. And I'd love to talk about that. But I suppose before we do, I do want to have a conversation with you about your son and what you went through with your son, which could be a real help for other parents out there. That may be going through the same difficulties that you did. Well, my son, when he was eleven years old, of course, we were not going to Church. We were not doing any of this. But my son would go to Church with Grandma, right? Every once in a while. And so one day, I'm standing there, my bedroom door. He's standing by the fireplace in the living room, the house I'm in right now. And he says, dad, we don't go to Church that much. I said, no, we don't go to Church that much. He says, we should start going to Church. And I said, yeah, we probably should start going to Church. And I thought to myself, because that was the age when I started to become a teenager where I was pulling away from Church. I was trying to do my own thing. And for this young man to want to go to Church. And I thought to myself, Boy, Jim, if you don't take him up on this, you're going to kick yourself in the butt. I mean, you're going to really hate yourself. And that's when I realized as I look back how selfish drugs and alcohol is when you drink, when you get drunk, when you get stoned, you're not doing it for anybody else. You're doing it for yourself. There's nobody that gets anything good out of you getting high, not one person. And to me, it's a very selfish way to live. And that's what I was. I was too self centered to stop what I was doing and take my kid to Church because I knew I did not want to be a hypocrite. And I knew that if I took my kid to Church, I'd stopped getting high. I couldn't do both. I couldn't say yes, God, I love you, but I'm going to go get stoned. It just wasn't going to work that way. So we didn't go to Church four years later. The same boy is not coming home at night. I mean, I remember my wife and I waking up in the morning saying, Did our son make it home last night? He's 1415 years old, right? And he's not coming home all night long. And we punished him. We grounded him. We took his phone away. We took the door off his room. I mean, that don't work. I read somewhere that would work. It didn't work. And we tried everything we could. But he just kept doing what he was doing, and he didn't do just a little bit of drugs. He didn't try a little pot and a little alcohol. I mean, really, he did a lot, not just a little. That boy was just when he did something, he did it right. I'm telling you what he was doing. Coke and meth and ecstasy and alcohol, and just lots of it just tied it around his ankle and jumped, oh, I'm telling you. And so he comes home one night and his eyes are all bugged out and he's all highest can beat. He's yelling at his mom, he's yelling at me, and he goes into his bedroom, and I've had it by then. I mean, I've tried everything and nothing's worked, and I had it. So I went in and I opened the door and I picked him up by a shirt collar and put him against the wall and said, you can't do this anymore. And he looked at me and he starts slamming his own head against the wall. I mean, slamming his own head against the wall and it's like I was stuck. It's like, what do you do? And I didn't hit my kids, but I spanked them when they were little. But what can you do even if I wanted to beating them up wasn't going to work. He was beating himself up harder than I did every hit him. And so I just put him down. And it was one of the worst days of my life. I put him down, and I realized that was helpless. And Aaron, that is the biggest thing. And I think that's the biggest thing that everybody has a hard time with accepting God. Because the thing when you accept God, when you fully give your life to God, what you're doing is you're admitting that you're helpless, that you can't do it on your own, because we can't. I mean, Satan is so much bigger and smarter and more experienced than we will ever be. And there's absolutely no way we can save ourselves. There's no way we can do it on our own. And it took that to make me realize that I was a helpless piece of crap and that there was no way I was going to do it on my own. And I fell to my knees later on. And I told God I said, hey, if you'll save my son, I will do whatever you want me to do. I will go anywhere. I will say anything. I will do whatever you want me to do. Wow. What an incredible burden was lifted off of me at that point. Just incredible. God took me up on it. If you tell God that you're ready to go to work for him, you better have your work boots handy because he's going to line you up with something. Yeah, well, let's talk about that, Jim. Let's talk about how God is using you in your life today. You are the President and the founder of an organization by the name of Ultimate Mission. You started out with a different name, though, didn't you? Yeah. We started out with the name of Caleb Corps. And because what we originally thought is that we were on the borders of the Promised Land, just like the children of Israel. And God wanted us to finish the work so he could take us home. We were on the borders of the promised Land, and Caleb and Joshua were the ones that said, let's go over. Let's not worry about the Giants. Let's not worry about the walled cities. It doesn't matter. God is going to lead us, and God will take care of things. And so we felt the same calling. And so we call it Caleb Corps. But then the problem was that when we told somebody we were Caleb Core, they were like, what's that? Who's Caleb? Yeah, the marketing aspect of it was really tough. And it's still our parent name. We have a DBA doing business as Ultimate Mission because Ultimate Mission. When you say Ultimate Mission, people know pretty much you're working overseas. Now you're doing some incredible work. What brought you to the point to take this overseas? Well, first of all, I know that ultimate mission is so much more than going overseas. You guys do a lot of work here in the United States. Talk a little bit about your mission here. Well, we've done a lot of things here. We work with the Oregon conference to do a Bible worker training program for lay people and just kind of teaching them how to connect with people in their neighborhoods. We've worked with several different conferences on connecting with your neighbors. A neighborhood connection program where we put together a book where you get your neighbors together and you talk about disasters. And then everybody gets each other's names, address, phone number, email, kids names, pets, names, special skills. So basically, it's a book that helps you build a relationship with your neighbors without pushing your religion on them. Because one of the first things I believe that you need to do in order to introduce somebody to Jesus is they got to trust you. They've got to believe that you're in it for the right reason. You're not out there to put notches on your Bible, to try to see how many people you can bring into your Church. You're there because you love people. You truly have to care for people. You got to. If you don't truly care for people, go do something else. Yeah. You shouldn't be in this game. And I call it a game. I've used that word lightly. You shouldn't be out here trying to represent God. If you've got a hook, got an agenda. I mean, if you got an agenda, go sell used cars. But if you really love people and you want them to know who Jesus is, then there's a lot of different ways you can do it. And that's what we try to do. We have a program that we have exclusive deal through Kroger Foods and Fred Meyerstors, where we put different groups of Christian medical people together that go out into Fred Meyer stores and do blood pressure checks, health risk assessments. Of course, during the coronavirus, that's all been shut down. So much has been shut down. And one of our newest projects right now is planting the Church in Oregon City. And so that's a pretty cool deal. And so the ultimate mission board is behind this Church plant. And part of this Church plant. We planted churches in India, as you know. And so we're trying to do it here in the US and trying to come up with a different model. That is this model of loving people into a relationship with God. It's not about rules and regulations and doing it a certain way. It's about accepting people the way they are loving them and introducing them to Jesus, starting a Church plan. That's a huge job. That's a huge undertaking. It is. Have you guys officially launched yet? Well, our official launch is 911 2021, and that's when we were supposed to fish and launch. Of course, the Coronavirus happened and all the churches shut down. So we started building a core group and meeting outside at a home. So we try to stay Corona by our safe. We stay outside and we meet out at a home. And then on Zoom. And we just started having people come to our service that stopped going to a traditional Church. But they're coming to our little thing. And you saw the opportunity the Coronavirus gave you to start the Church and to bring people in through Zoom, people who have fallen away from the Church. Yes, people are looking. People are wondering, hey, what's going on throughout all this garbage, where I know you from the most and where I have spent most of my time with you is overseas, specifically in India. How in the world did you go from starting an organization in the United States and doing all of these things that you do here within the United States? How did you go from that to taking your idea over to India and talk me through that? How did that happen? Well, Delan, Bonnie Horser, a friend of both of ours, and Del and Bonnie Horse, they're the ones that got you over there, too. But that's true. They offered to take me to. They talked about what they were doing in India and said I should go with them. And I wanted to go on a mission trip. I thought it'd be great, but it came right down to actually going and Del was calling me and I was going, I don't know if I have the vacation time. I don't know if I have the money I need. And then we're emailing back and forth and Dale emails me, says, Well, Bonnie and I believe that if you step out there, God will give you the money you need and the time you need to do it. And I thought about it for, like, I don't know, 10 seconds. And I emailed him back and said, all right, I'm going. I went over there with Dylan body and what an incredible trip that was. They built. I think what, 73 churches over there in India with their own money. They're an incredible couple. Just incredible. They've done a lot of work in India and traveling with Dell, and Bonnie is just a hoot. Bonnie is so funny. She's just hilarious to travel with. And so we're traveling throughout India, trains, planes and automobiles. I mean, we're just going from one place to another. The funny thing with Dell and Bonnie, too, is they are so frugal with the money that they do have. They are over there for an organization because they're now working with an organization. And yet they are trying to save every Penny that they can. And so if you can save money and stay in a small house in a village somewhere instead of staying in a hotel, you will definitely be staying in the village. Yes. You're roughing it with Dell and Bonnie. Yeah, you are. You're not where you come from. I went over there with them. I've seen a few churches that have been abandoned over there, and it was really making me scratch my head and people had gone, but they weren't going there anymore. And so I come back from that trip and I'm thinking to myself, Boy, I really want to do something in India, but building churches, I don't think that's it. I mean, that's what Delan Bonnie did. And that's great. But I don't have that kind of money. And I'm seeing churches that are being abandoned. So then I talked to Jim Rennie from Asian Aid, which is now Child Impact. Bonnie gave me his number, and I talked to him. And so I went over and I visited all the schools or a lot of the schools that Asian Aid had sponsored children in. And that was a wonderful Ministry. I mean, there's another incredible gospel outreach we work with is an incredible Ministry. And Child Impact is another incredible Ministry. And going around and seeing what these different schools did and how it impacted the kids. And then the kids would go back and impact the village they lived in. It was one of the most wonderful ministries in the world. And I'm sitting there with Jim Rennie one night and I'm telling them I've got this nonprofit organization, I want to do something in India. And Jim Rennie is pretty much the one that made me start thinking a lot harder about where I wanted to go in India. He goes, Jim, he goes, what are you doing right now that nobody else is doing? What are you doing? That's unique. He says, Everybody, there's a lot of us out here sponsoring children. There's a lot of people out here doing evangelism series. There's a lot of people out here doing different things. What are you doing? That is unique. Jim Rennie is a great businessman. And so I went back thinking about that. And then the next year, I went back with Jim again. Except I was going to do an evangelism series for Asian Aid. They were going to sponsor me to do an Evangelism series. So I put all the sermons together. I even did an evangelism series here in the States to kind of prep myself for it. And I was going to tweak the sermons for India, right? But I did the evangelism series. We were getting the 10th. I mean, rented and the lorries rented and everything we needed. And it's about a month away from going about a month and a half. And Jim Rennie calls me up. He says, Well, the government's really cracking down on evangelists. We have these orphanages and these schools. We can't afford to have you go over there and mess this up for us so we can't do an Evangelism series. And so I thought, Well, because remember, I'm doing this health program here in the United States with the Fred Meyer stores. And so I've got all these nurses and docs that work with me. I said, Well, what if we did a health series? And so Jim says, that'd probably work. And so one of the things that we did, we came over, we did child evaluations in the slum school, in the orphanages, in the villages. But one of the things that also just came out of the blue was that they had 30 gospel outreach workers in this one conference that they wanted us to do a bobble worker training program. And I thought, Well, since we're bringing docs and nurses over with us, let's just do a program on health. And we brought the book where there is no doctor, and we trained them out of the book where there is no doctor, these 30 gospel outreach workers. And then after we left, these guys all took these books back that we gave them and this training we gave them and they gave them to their wives. And we started getting incredible stories about their wives doing medical missionary work all on their own. And so that's how all of a sudden the idea hit us. And the light bulb turned on. And our next trip over hiring or we're training and stipending Bible worker wives to do medical missionary work. At the time, we had absolutely no idea how big this was. Just so people are aware about who Gospel Outreach is. Gospel Outreach is an organization that trains and supports Bible workers around the world, specifically within the 1040 window to do work in remote villages. And they've been doing this. I don't know. When did Gospel outreach start? 22, 23 years ago? I believe something like that. Yeah. So just so people are aware that's who Gospel Outreach is, you're training Gospel outreach worker wives to do health work? Yeah. To do basic public health work. So as we're there in India with the doctors and the nurses and we're looking around at what's going on, the biggest thing that affected me. Well, two things is one I'd seen the abandoned churches and we had in this time we were there. One of our projects was to open a Church that had been abandoned. And we opened this Church with a one week health series. And Saturday Sabbath morning, we had a full Church of people from the village that came in. And then we're like, okay, we've got a full Church. We opened this Church. We're talking to the President of the Union and says, okay, Where's the pastor? He says, Well, we don't have pastors. I go, what do you mean, we don't have pastors? He says, Well, we just don't pay them enough money. And so they end up going to get other jobs as taxi drivers or working in the field or something. And so we can't keep them around. And so that was one thing we're like, okay, the pastors need more money. If we hire the women, then the women will supplement the income of the pastors. And the churches can stay open. But we found out that 60% of the children that we checked were malnourished and undernourished. So what happened? And this is where I was going in one of the villages I was in. We were doing this health camp. And these two young boys came up to me about 1011 years old, and both of them were saying, they told me, do you have any food? And I said, no. And I've been playing around with these boys all evening. I mean, taking their picture and messing around here and there. We're having a good time. At the end of the evening, they said, do you have any food? And I didn't have any food with me. I had a pocket full of rupees, but I have 300 people around me. I can't really start handing out rupees. And I said, I'm sorry. They said, we're really hungry. Do you have any food? And I said, no, I don't have any food. And I left those boys hungry. And I asked our doctors and I said, what can we do? We can't feed all the children in India. And that's when the idea started coming because they were saying, if you could teach them to drink clean water and wash their hands, you'd make a huge difference, because a lot of the nutrition that they do get is going to fight off disease. So they live in the hygiene there. As you know, you have open sewers, you have defecation all over the place from animals and humans. It's just a really filthy environment. And then you're eating with your hands. And then you're eating with your hands. And they're not washing their hands and their water they're drinking is bad. And so when we hire these pastor's wives, what we didn't realize is at first it was just to try to get the pastor's household more money. But what we started to realize is the women Cook the food, the women carry the water, the women take care of the children, the women have the babies. So when we train women to do health work and over there, you don't have a man that's going to tell a woman a lot about personal hygiene and health. I mean, that just doesn't work. Some guy isn't coming in and talking to your wife about this stuff. But a woman ministering to a woman is very powerful, very powerful. And women are treated like property in India sometimes a lot of times. And so the women, when we give them a job, we give them a stipend and we give them a skill. Their self worth just goes through the roof. And the way that they're treated, they've changed. They're being respected because they have a skill that nobody else in the village has. Yes, absolutely. All the good things that happened from training gospel outreach worker wives to be medical missionaries. It's a good thing there's no way that we were smart enough to come up with all the incredible things that would happen when you teach a woman a medical skill. There's just no way. And there's so many studies I didn't know at the time, but I found out since that if you educate a woman, the health of the whole village rises. And it's amazing what God has done with this Ministry. It's so incredibly exciting. So, Jim, help me with the timeline a little bit. What was the first year that you went to India? That was with Dela Bonnie Orchard. Yeah, but what year was that? Do you remember 2010? That was 2010. Okay. When did you start training health workers? 20, 14, 20, 14. Okay. 2013 was the Gospel outreach workers. Our first health missionary project was in 2013. Okay. That's what I thought. I had a number 2014 in my head. Okay, so now you're going over there. You're training these health workers. You're training the Bible workers wives. You're going there every single year. You're having these health camps in which you bring the women in, and you use it as almost like a retreat for the women. And you train them to do health work, right? Basic health work. And you give them the tools that they need. You give them a book called Where There Is No Doctor, and they can use that book to help guide them and to help give them the tools that they need to help people in these remote villages. Education is huge in India. The lack of education, just educating somebody on how to stay, to eat properly and to keep your hands clean. Just that alone will save so many lives. Right. What is the mortality rate on the children again? Well around, depending on where you're looking. But I've seen things from the World Health Organization up to 4000 a day. The children are dying under the age of five. I figure it's probably I don't know. And that was a few years ago. But if you Google it and you look it up, it's at least 3000 children a day. But what the World Health Organization also says, and I believe it. And I bet you will, too, is that if you could teach kids to drink clean water and wash their hands, you cut that number in half 100%. I totally agree with that. When you go to these environments, when you go and spend time with these people, there is no way that that would be inaccurate. And you wonder. Okay, well, you got 1.4 billion people. How are you going to do this? Well, the thing is, you'd have to have health training centers all over India. And here's the beauty we do. They're called Adventist churches. Yes. And this is where it gets into something that I wanted to ask you. There was a point in training these women where you said God, by a certain time, you wanted to have 1000 health worker women trained. Is that correct? Yeah. We set a ten year goal to try to have 1000. And that was, I think, four years ago. And now you have about over 100 women, correct. Yes. And so the question has been asked, how are you going to reach how is God going to make this happen, right? It's almost an unattainable goal. If we don't add God into the equation to train 1000 women, it's completely unattainable. If you don't add God into the equation. And at least for us, one of the things with making a goal like that is it makes you look at things differently. So we made that goal. And okay, now we've got to try to get on three ABN. We got to try to get on Better Life television. We've got to go to all the different camp meetings. We've got to try to get to more churches. So when you make a goal like that, it makes you look bigger. It just changes the way that you operate your organization when you have a big goal. But God has really put something in front of us, though, hasn't he? Yes, he has. What happened a couple of months ago, Jim? Well, a couple of months ago, we officially became partners with Gospel Outreach. Now, Gospel Outreach has over 1500 workers in India, and they would like us to train all the wives. Now, this isn't going to happen overnight because, of course, it takes funding and everything else. But with the help of Gospel Outreach, I think we're going to be making that ten year goal. I really do. And I think we're probably going to exceed that ten year goal. I think so. I think you are. It's amazing. And when I've traveled over to India five times now, most of those times I have run into you while you were over there or I've also gone over there just with you once as well. But when you go over there and you see the difference between a village that has a health worker and a village that does not, it is just huge. A husband and a wife working together in the village and going house to house, helping people with their health needs and then teaching them about God, absolutely amazing. And you see the difference in the Church. You see the difference in the people. You see the difference in how clean the village is. You can visually see the difference in the village. Absolutely. Yeah. It's an incredible thing that you're doing, Jim. And what's even more exciting is this is just in India, Gospel Outreach has workers all over the world in different countries. And as ultimate mission grows with Gospel Outreach and you start to train more and more women, this is going to not only be in India, this is going to be in different countries around the world. I'm really hoping so. I really want to get into Afghanistan. And Gospel Outreach has a couple of Bible workers in Afghanistan. Two months ago, we were at Gospel outreach headquarters in Wallawala, and Jim walks up to me and he goes, hey, Aaron, you want to go to Afghanistan? And I said, yeah, no, absolutely. Let's go. The reason I want to go to Afghanistan is because Afghanistan has the worst infant mortality rate in the world. And when babies are dying, very simple things are not being done. And where our program works best is where the infant mortality rate is high because really breastfeeding, clean water, just trying to keep women from being anemic through their pregnancy and afterwards keeping children fed. All that is actually really simple stuff. It's not very complex to wash your hands and drink clean water, right? No, it's not that complex. And breastfeeding is not that. I mean, it can be complex, but it's natural, but there's just so many people out there that don't do it and cut it short. And there's a lot of very simple things that can be done that will help. And it's just amazing how that helps people find Jesus. Because there's a reason Jesus healed people. If you have a broken arm, you're not really thinking about going and worshiping you're not thinking about I need to read my Bible. You're thinking I got to fix my arm. Right. And so if people are very miserable and if their children are dying and to get them to try to take that next step, to believe and to understand and to have a relationship with a God that can change their life and make it so much better, is there's a reason Jesus did healed? There's a reason he healed? Absolutely. Show people that he loved them, that he cared about them first. And once people know you care about them, that's when good things really start to happen. You received so many amazing stories from your health workers about the work that they are doing and miracles that God is performing through them. But is there just, like, one specific story that you could share from a health worker about something that they did about a life that they saved, that otherwise would not have been saved if they were not there? Well, there is this one story that I got just a few weeks ago from Sunita and Sunita was visiting his mother, who's just would not gain weight. I think the child was 20 days old and it had lost half of its weight. And as a child coming from delivery, that child should be gaining weight all the time, gaining weight. It had lost half of its weight. And so they took the child to the hospital, and the hospital couldn't find nothing wrong with the child and sent the child back and sunithe with what's up? She told me what was going on with the child. And I said, and then she said, Well, we're taking her to another hospital. So they took the child to another hospital, and the hospital couldn't figure it out. And they sent the child back. So here's a baby that continues to lose weight. And here's our health worker over there trying to figure out what in the world. She's asking me for advice. I'm asking our doctors for advice, and nobody's there with the child. So they're giving this advice and that advice. But they really can't figure out what's going on without seeing the baby without doing tests and doing blood tests and all that. And our docs told Sanita, you got to get this baby to another doctor. We don't know what we can do from here from halfway around the world. And so sunatha goes out and takes that mother and that baby and goes to the next town and goes to a children's hospital, finally gets that baby into a children's hospital. And the next picture I'm being sent is of this baby with tubes coming out of it, and they're doing an operation on the baby. And the baby is now. Okay. Wow. So this kind of stuff happens all the time. I mean, I had another woman that there was a delivery. No, the woman was pregnant. She needed to have the delivery. And she goes to the hospital. The hospital says this is going to be a complicated birth. It looks like the baby is breached. They said, do you have any rupees, any money that you can pay for this delivery? And the lady said, no, I don't have any money to pay for the delivery. And the hospital sent her home. And so she calls our health worker again. The health worker says we'll go to another hospital. So she went to the other hospital, and the same thing happened. They said, Well, the baby's breached, and this is going to be a complicated delivery. Do you have the money to pay for this? She said no, and they sent her away. So she comes back home. She calls our lady again, and the lady comes over and the baby came. There was no more time. And so our lady delivered the baby right there a breached child and praised God, she was able to make it happen. But these kinds of things happen all the time. Maybe you ask for one story. I could sit here and tell you story after story of people that have snake bites and Scorpion bites and strokes. And, I mean, there's just all kinds of things where our ladies are making a huge difference in these villages. Yeah. It's amazing. These women are warriors, and they are changing these villages from within. Oh, yeah. And the coronavirus, you got people getting the coronavirus and nobody there. These people are supposed to stay in their houses. And so our ladies are bringing their food and bringing their water and making sure that they have what they need to try to get through. And so, yeah, especially right now with the coronavirus, because the doctors have all been taken to the big hospitals that are full of coronavirus patients. And there's nobody to take care of people out in the villages. And so our ladies are ended up giving injections, doing IVs, doing all kinds of things that really you wouldn't be able to do here in the United States, but some of them have the training to be able to do it and doing stuff that the doctors would normally do. And you think about what's going on with the coronavirus. And one of the biggest things that we've been treating that we have been teaching people to do is to wash your hands. Right. Well, one of the biggest things you can do to keep from getting the coronavirus is to wash your hands. What we've been teaching this whole time is having a difference, making a difference. Yeah. I get these stories, and I get 5600 pictures and stories every week. Matter of fact, I got 600 stories I got to go through as soon as I'm done with this podcast. And you pass some of those stories along, and they end up on social media for the donors to see for people to see, because some of these stories are just so incredibly unbelievable and we can't even wrap our minds around it being in the Western world, it's so hard for us to even wrap our minds around what's going on over there and how these women are impacting the villages. But I've got a random question for you, Jim, and that question is, you have a prosthetic leg. What is it like to travel in India and work in a place like India with a prosthetic leg? It's a pain when you got to take it off to take a shower. Yeah. What happened a few years ago is a lot of the showers in India have marble floors, marble floors and water, and 1ft just really doesn't work out too well. I fell in the shower in India, and I dislocated my shoulder. So that's kind of a pain. But for the most part, I'm 55. When you get to this age, everybody's got some sort of disability, their back, their shoulders, their back, their hips, their knees. Everybody's got something. And I got a prosthetic leg. It's like pushing a wheelbarrow around with a broken handle. You do it and it works. You do a lot of wandering around villages with the women. So a lot of walking around in India. Yeah. Well, you know, what one thing a prosthetic leg does for me is people really are enamored by it. They look at it and go, wow, that's neat. Or that's cool, because I got a pretty updated one. I mean, it's a sea leg. It's computerized in that it has a stumble recovery program in it. And so if I step on an even ground, I normally don't fall down. Sometimes I do. But normally I don't. And it's really not a big deal to tell you the truth. Well, you've had so many years with it 37 odd years now. It's like another. We were spending a night in a hotel in India. You and I were sharing a room, and I will never forget, there was a young man who was working at the hotel, and he had just a trashy prosthetic leg, which in India, to have a prosthetic period is a privilege. It is a luxury. You see people crawling around all the time with no legs or no arms or the things that you see in India is incredible. And so having a prosthetic leg, no matter how trashy it may be, is a privilege. But he saw that you had a prosthetic, and the connection that he had with you was amazing. And he wanted to come up to the room. He wanted to see your prosthetic. He wanted to show you his it was just a really cool connection that happened there. And I don't know if you did you ever become friends with that young man at all? We never followed through with any Facebook or anything like that. So no, I didn't. Unfortunately, it was just really cool because you can connect with a certain kind of people that some just cannot. Well. And I can connect with a lot of people that are in misery because most people, although we all have a handicap at this age, in one way or another, you can't see it, but you can see mine, right? We're all in the same boat. I get people that are hurting or whatever, and they see me and they realize that we're kindred spirits. We've all got a problem. I'm not this perfect American, this rich, perfect American. I'm just another person that has a problem like they do. And it's kind of like nonchristians seeing Christians that are these perfect people and we're not. We're all sinners. We all got big, big problems. And when people can understand that you're just like them, that does. I mean, it's an advantage for me, actually. And I've got to say, a prosthetic is an advantage for me in life because people remember me. They may not remember me if I didn't have a fake leg, but they all have one legged guy over there. So whether they remembered me for the right thing or not, I don't know. But at least I stand out in the crowd. We've heard your story today. We've heard about the work that you're doing around the world. God has used you in a mighty way, and he continues to use you all the time. The name of this podcast is the Simply Overcoming Podcast. It's about people overcoming things in their lives, and we've all overcome things in our lives. And so that's what's great about this podcast is I could literally have a conversation with anybody because hopefully everybody has overcome something, right? Oh, yeah. Nobody writes for three. Yeah. And I could ask you a question about what you're doing over in India or something of that nature. For your final comments, your final thoughts. But I almost feel like for final thoughts from you, maybe you could speak to a parent out there who is dealing with a young person in their life that they're maybe struggling with addiction or something of that nature. What final words do you have? Maybe you want to go in a completely different direction with your final words. But what can you say to motivate people? Maybe in a situation like that, trust you've got to trust God to take care of your kids. And when you trust God to not just take care of your life, but take care of your children's lives, it frees you up. And it puts you in a place where you don't feel like you've got to Badger your children. You've got to act a certain way, you've got to invite them to certain things or whatever that your human impulse is telling you to do. If you trust God to take care of your kids. And I also want to speak to those of you out there that may have an addiction. Addictions are not what God has planned for our lives. The problem with any type of drug, whether it's pot or alcohol, even if it's a little bit. The thing is, God speaks to us through our minds, and at least with most of us, he doesn't come down, sit in front of us and say, hey, Jim, God speaks to us through impressions, through reading the Bible and through our minds. And if we block God out by being high, we lose that connection with the Holy Spirit that we need. And for all of us, whether it's parents or any of us that have addictive problems. That connection with the Holy Spirit is what gets us through life makes us have a wonderful, incredible life and ultimately is going to save us. And I will tell you that this side of sobriety that my life after I left the secular world, after I devoted myself to trying to help other people find Jesus has been the most incredible life I could have ever imagined. God has given me a life that is beyond belief and is more enjoyable and fulfilling than anything I could have ever dreamed. And so if that's something you want, let God take you to where he needs you to go. And it doesn't mean you have to go where I went or where Aaron goes. It just means that you got to let God take you where God wants you to go and you will have the most incredible life you could have ever dreamed of. I think that's all I got. Amazing. Jim, thank you for being on the podcast. Where can people find you on the socials? Maybe your website? Where can people follow along ultimatemission. Net? That's ultimatemission. Net. You can always contact me through there or the Ultimate Mission Facebook page that Aaron manages for me and he's a great added. So if you want something managed talk to Aaron if he's got time, don't take up so much of a time that he leaves me. So my ultimate mission. And then YouTube. They can find me on the ultimate mission. Or it's the Christian Life Empowerment YouTube page. Correct? Christian Life Empowerment yeah, we had to change it from Ultimate Mission because nobody could find it because there were too many other things called Ultimate Mission. And then, of course, the Christian Life Empowerment podcast that you can find on Google Play or Apple. Yeah, I'm easy to find if you know where to look. Jim, you're a busy man. Well, you've got a lot of things going on. Well, we'll have everything down in the show notes and thank you for being on the podcast, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you for inviting me. Bye.