After an incredibly difficult beginning, I way dying and was involved in a medical experiment hoping to keep me alive. The experiment became illegal to humans just 4 months because the side effects included birth defects including malformed bones and muscles, dwarfism, sterility and 100% mortality by 20. Add to that Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis at age 6 causing me chronic pain that increased with age. Being the smallest kid in the school, being the target of bullying till 12th grade, not being able to do any sports made me feel like I had to hide my pain trying to fit in.

Graduating at 16 I started college on a disability scholarship and lasted 3 semesters of me trying to be "normal" and having a nervous breakdown. The college arraigned to freeze my scholarship and allowed me to leave without penalization. What I thought they were saying was "You are a failure, a loser and a disgrace" which spun my pain driven depression to new depths. My friends thought I needed to relax and took me to a bar and month of that involvement ended up with me being able to drink all my friends under the table. I had inherited my mother's alcoholism and added drugs to self-medicate and began sinking faster. The pain increased till it seemed the only escape to my pain driven, drinking and now behavior only had one way out. I met a girl who brought me to church where I found out that Jesus was real. Once I surrendered myself to Christ, He delivered me from drinking and drugs, demon possession, a hemorrhaging ulcer and once I was surrendered, He then called me to preach in a audible voice. Once I received Jesus's love I was mentored on how to live for Christ.

As time went on, I came to realize that I was 20 years old and had no clue who Jesus is. What if I had been told when I was a child, what kind of life would He have done in me? I married a woman with the same vision and heart and had 3 children doctors said could never happen. That opened me to figure out how to reach kids and families introducing them to the love of God. That motivated me to be excellent at what we do therefore I would seek professional magicians, storytellers, puppeteers and ventriloquists and then I became trained by Ringling Brothers professional clowns to become a Master Clown. From that I created The Kid's-Celebration Circus which I took internationally sharing the good ness of God's love. We toured for 12 years full time 48 weeks a year and 20 shows per week. Eventually medically, I had to leave the road and began starting churches successfully. I taught seminars I wrote, 8 manuals/Seminars and trained in uncountable seminars and classes. I toured 48 weeks of churches, youth camps and school shows across America and was featured on TV, radio, magazines and podcasts.

In the Salvation Army where I serve as an Officer/pastor, one location the need required me to become trained in disaster response including being certified in Critical Incident Stress Management and Grief, Trauma and Loss by the highly respected author, trainer and responder, H. Norman Wright who then mentored me for 6 years. After all that training I then became an internationally dispatched trainer in all these topics empowering hundreds so they also could train lives in crisis. I also ended up serving as Chaplain for Fire Departments, Police, Salvation Army disaster responses and hospital and institutional locations. After serving for over 50 years, we retired and I began doing award winning photography and wrote my first internationally published book: "When the Doctors say NO! God says YES!!!" I would be honored to serve in any way that would help people know that their lives can grow.

My mission is to help people with "Renew and Restore, Rebuild and "Be Re-inspired". If you think I would fit in your program I'd be honored to be considered.

Email: [email protected]

View my NEW website: www.davidwebel.com

Welcome to 12-Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, His creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, Pastor David.

Would they say Pastor Evil or do they call you David?

I've had different titles in different chapters of my life.

As a Salvation Army officer, I'm Major David, but I've been Reverend, I've been Pastor, I've been Evangelist.

So as long as God calls me, I don't care what they call me.

I like that.

Even Master Clown as well, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That was 12 years on the road.

Well, actually 25 years of clowning.

Wow.

When I got saved, I saw that nobody had reached me for 20 years.

Nobody had told me about the love of God.

And it just broke my heart that I could have had such a better growing up had I known Jesus.

And so it stirred me that I wanted to reach kids.

And I looked around with my background in high school and college and theater and saw that the excellence level of what we were offering children in the name of God was lackluster.

It was heartbreaking.

It was leftovers and, you know, cardboard pictures of Jesus falling off a flannel board and, you know, songs that hadn't been practiced.

It was just heartbreaking.

And I knew that God wanted better than that.

So God spoke to me and said, God didn't send his second cousin, Louis, to the cross.

He sent his best.

How dare we offer less?

So that became my challenge.

And I went and found professionals, top-flying ministry and performing people in storytelling and gospel magic.

That's where you take gadgets that anybody could buy and make them into object lessons, you know, basically parables, living parables.

Then I did puppetry and ventriloquism and storytelling, and then found a professional clown.

And he taught me how to do it right.

And after much striving and practice, I got to the point where I actually took it on the road for 12 years.

We had 49 states and 20 countries.

And one people to Jesus, boys and girls, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, every culture, every background, every previous faith.

I know that we led people who were Sikh and Hindu and Buddhist to the Lord, along with rabbis and everybody else, because we never said, join my building.

We said, let me introduce you to my best friend.

And we made the decision to want that same best friend and to pursue that best friend and find out who he was and how to please him.

And then my job was done.

I was the mailman delivering the message.

And it didn't matter what the envelope looked like as long as the message was pure and clear and unencumbered so that the goodness of God would get to the listener with the least amount of confusion.

What was the biggest challenge of actually making this happen?

Of course, when you're saying it, it sounds easy, right?

Like I got the best to teach me, and then I learned, and then I hit the road.

So what was the biggest challenge?

My body.

I have 21 birth defects, and I have rheumatoid arthritis starting at six.

So I've lived in chronic pain.

So there are days that were good.

And there were days when I'd get up and I just could, I was in tears.

And I still had to get up and go.

I couldn't, I had to give God everything.

So regardless of how I felt, regardless of what else was going on, I had to keep pushing because I couldn't give him less.

What helped though?

Was God always the answer, or were you depending on something within the world to help you get through this?

No, it wasn't the world.

I'm not saying there weren't beautiful people in the world, but my hope was, when I gave my life to Jesus, I had already gone through five suicide attempts.

I was three days from the fifth one.

And I knew that this world had nothing to offer that I wanted.

And when I gave my life to Jesus, he spoke to me audibly and told me he'd called me, he healed me from birth defects, he had a hemorrhaging ulcer, delivered me from demons, did all these miraculous things, and called me to preach in an audible voice all in one night.

And I had no theology to even understand it.

But over the period of the next year, I not only understood it, but I applied it.

And I did it with the determination that of a drowning man who knows the only way out is that life preserver right in front of him.

I hung on to that life preserver and did everything I could to know how to make sure I could do it, that I did it well, that I didn't give it the compromise, that the best message got through.

So tell me where you're calling from in terms of you're talking from after visiting 49.

What was 49 state?

Was it Alaska or Hawaii?

Which one of them?

No, actually, the one I didn't get was South Dakota.

Oh, South Dakota.

Okay, that's intriguing.

The reasoning being is I went where I was invited.

And for whatever collection of reasons, I never got an invitation.

So otherwise, we did hit 50.

What made you settle in California?

Or should I even ask if you're settled in California first?

No, it's 74.

I'm settled.

My body isn't running anymore.

So we live in a small, double wide mobile home.

And my wife and I are both disabled.

So it's just enough for us to manage, but not not an inch more.

And, you know, we just, we just do what we do.

Our daughter lives in the next town to us.

So we have some family to keep an eye on us.

The other two are our sons.

One lives out of state and the other one lives on the other end of California.

So it takes about a seven hour drive to get to it.

All right, now take me back to your wife.

So where was she in the midst of everything that's going on when you're 12 years on the road?

Well, when we got married, she had been called by God to ministry when she was 14.

And she would, and she had gone through, her father was verbally abusive and her mom spent her time keeping my wife from getting the full flack of her father.

So on her 18th birthday, she crawled out her bedroom window and ran away and joined Teen Challenge, even though she'd never been drunk, never been high, never did any of the things they're famous for.

She needed to find out that Jesus actually loved her and she had something of value to give him.

And during the, she graduated the 12 month program in six months and went to Detroit Teen Challenge to be the secretary.

And I was being interviewed on their, the Teen Challenge radio program about my profound conversion.

And we met in February.

I took her to church in March and married her June 8th.

Today is our 52nd anniversary.

Congratulations.

Say her name.

Come on.

Say her name, David.

Her name is Diane.

Double D's, David and Diane.

That's amazing.

Well, when you're listening to this, happy anniversary in the future.

That's amazing.

Wow.

They're two powerful numbers, right?

June, which is the sixth month and then eighth, which is also very two powerful biblical numbers.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

There's, in my opinion, that God owns all the numbers.

It's just what we do with them.

A hundred percent.

Yeah, I agree tremendously.

Yeah, definitely.

So you got married, which is in itself a very storybook, like, like it's amazing, right?

That you would, it's your, you're in total turnaround mode, right?

Everything is changing.

The pages are turning.

Well, she, she would not have, she would have not looked at me had I been who I was before I got saved.

I was such a profoundly different person in that one year.

And I was a, I was a one-year baby.

I mean, I still only had one year of Jesus when I married her.

But yet, from our, it was amazing though.

From our first date.

Yeah.

Because from our first date, it was all ministry.

Yeah.

Because again, with the speed of which you all got married and then to look back 50 something years, you said after it meant that the thing that she saw in you, which was you, was a good thing.

She saw Jesus shining through and she didn't want to date a guy that wasn't burning bright.

She, she knew in her heart that if she did, if she, she didn't pick someone who loved Jesus more than her, that there was no use getting married.

This has been a great honor.

Five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

What's a message you'd leave for future you, David?

Serve until you wake, wake up in heaven.

Be grateful for every day.

Love the people around you.

Don't just tolerate them, but find a reason to love them and love them with the love that God gives you.

Be an encouragement, be an exhorter, and invest in the people around you because your greatest gifts are the ones you give away.

Hmm.

I look forward to speaking with you in the future.

Again, congratulations to both you and your wife, Diane.

God bless your mission.

In closing, is there anything else you'd like to share?

I would also invite people.

I am a photographer and I win awards.

So my website is DavidWEvil.com.

Wonderful.

And of course we have that in the show notes.

David, a pleasure.

I treasure.

Thank you for being on what is inspired by 12 and the Converse.