Former Sporting News Radio and Fox Sports Radio host David Stein was culturally Jewish, an atheist, and had a substance abuse problem. That is until Jesus got hold of him. Now David is a campus pastor of a church in Atlanta. His amazing testimony is the focus of this week's show. It was also the interview on the weekly sports/faith show. Check it out!
The Dan Scott Show Podcast
Dan Scott Show, Radio Episode 97 - David Stein (11-17-24)
The following program is a presentation of Grand Slam Ministries. Hi again, everybody, and welcome to this week's Dan Scott Show. It is episode 97, 97. Can you believe that? I still think we're brand new. That's the way I feel about it. Still kind of in our infancy as we close in our second year. It's hard to believe, really, but here we are. It's good to have you with us. We are brought to you, as always, by our 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Grand Slam Ministries. Hope you're doing well. Hope you've had a great week and looking forward to spending the next hour with you on all of our affiliates, whether you're listening on Saturday or Sunday or listening to the archive online. Thank you for tuning in. We just ask that you tell other people about the program. Help us grow. We want more listeners. We want these stories that we're telling to touch more lives because God is, man, He's faithful, opening doors for interview, after interview, after interview. This week we have, I don't want to call it a greatest hit, although I suppose in a way it is, but for many of you, you've never heard this interview before because it was done in the early stages of the show when we only had a handful of affiliates. Now, of course, we have 39 affiliates and we are, that's over the air, plus our internet only affiliates, nationally and internationally. But I wanted to bring this one back because there's a timeliness to it to a certain degree, especially for those who are college football fans, and perhaps if you're a sports talk radio fan, you may remember the name David Stein. Years ago, David was the overnight guy on what was then known as Sporting News Radio, and prior to that, he had been with Fox Sports Radio. He is a cultural Jew. He was an atheist and just an amalgamation of circumstances that only God could direct brought David to a saving faith in Christ. And at one juncture, it ended up with him in the fetal position in his closet. This is an incredible story. You're really going to enjoy this. David Stein is our guest this week. We'll take a quick break so you can hear something about grand slam ministries and come back and get right into the show. Every day there are children who leave school on Friday and eat little and sometimes nothing until they come back to school on Monday. It happens in every community, including yours. Many of these children live in circumstances that deprive them of basic needs necessary for a quality life. At Grand Slam Ministries, we want to change that. We want to invest in our children, giving them hope for the future. That investment includes necessities such as food, clothing, school supplies, and a safe environment to play, to study, to live. Please visit our website, grand slamministries.org, to find out more about our ministry and how you can help. We're just getting started. Will you come alongside us for the children's sake? Again, that's grand slamministries.org. Want to see a listing of our affiliates? Check out videos or listen to past shows and explore our archives. It's all available at our website, danscotchow.org, and now back to the show. Episode 97 of the Dan Scott Show, it is great to have you with us. Thank you so much for continuing to tune in and supporting what we do. Just a reminder as we try to do it some juncture in the show that you can find out more about us, more about Grand Slam Ministries. By going to the website, danscotchow.org, grand slamministries.org is a page there. You can get there by going to either site. You'll find my bio there. You'll find archived information at the affiliates and archives page, including some bonus sound cloud material. All of our affiliates are listed there, so you can find out when the show airs live in one of your markets perhaps or again, the archives are there for you. Contact information is there, social media. It's a one-stop shop for everything that we do, danscotchow.org. Check it out today and again, please share the website, share the show information and help us continue to grow. David Stein is one of the nicest human beings in the world. There's no other way to describe him. He is a guy who battled some personal demons, and his Jewish upbringing did not lead him to any faith in God. He was an atheist for a long time, but his work in sports talk radio got him connected with the Clemson University fan base, and well, you're just going to hear that what he was doing on his talk show played a role in God getting hold of his life. This is a remarkable interview. Now he is a pastor, campus pastor at a church in Atlanta. Here's the conversation with David Stein opening up by talking about what he's doing now. Well, first of all, Dan, this is a little surreal because we go back many, many years to the beginning of my time on the Tiger tailgate show at Clemson and hosting that show from an empty Wild Wings Cafe in Spartanburg. Yes. I do remember those days playing paper football, field goal kicking contests. Yes. Why we were there? Yes. We did that. There is nothing like paper football on the radio to bring in a compelling audience. So I'm honored to participate in your show. I've always loved you and admired you, and yeah, so I am a campus pastor at a church called Revolution Church in Canton, Georgia, and it was a church that my wife and I just started going to eight and a half years ago. Being a pastor never crossed my mind. At the time, I was doing a Christian radio show, I was hosting the Tiger tailgate show, and going to church was my only objective at the time gathering as the body of the church. And one thing led to another, and they eventually gave me the keys to the place, which maybe they're not the smartest folks, I don't know. But I can't imagine doing anything else. And the role of a campus pastor at the fairly good sized church is everything from potholes in the parking lot to occasionally preaching and everything in between. But I think everything in my life, in my secular life, has led to this life in ministry. And of course, you know, Dan, when you trust in Jesus, you are in ministry. So everyone who has trusted in Christ is in ministry. Yeah, we are all called to a purpose. And one of the things that I do when I'm asked to speak at certain places now, especially if it's a men's group, that's one of the things that I like to share is finding your purpose. And it's easier said than done, especially for men because we like to control our own destiny sometimes, especially those of us of a certain generation who've been ingrained. It's been ingrained in us that, you know, you work for everything you get. You do all of these things. Sometimes the old phrase, letting go and letting God is not as easy to do as it is to say. And yeah, you know, there's so many verses in the Old Testament that actually do speak to that word, even even the word Rafa, which is many know as Jehovah Rafa, the healer that word literally means, Hey, give it to me. Let it go. Stop striving and trust that I am God. So in Psalm 46, be still and know that I am God, that that stillness is that letting it go. I want to go back to when you and I first met because I was on the air doing a daily talk show at Clemson and you were doing overnights for what was then known as Sporting News Radio. Right. And you were doing it out of your home in Atlanta. Am I correct on that? I was actually at the studio of 790 ZONE when they were in existence in Buckhead and I had moved here from California to do the exact same show because we had picked up 790 as an affiliate and would go to Buckhead at, you know, midnight and start the show at 2am and drive home at 6am and it was an incredible time in my life and, you know, in the year previous to that, before moving to Atlanta, had connected with Ben Milstead at the Roar and we became friends through the Ray Ray McElrathby story. And the show that you were doing was such the antithesis of anything that was on radio at the time and especially is on radio now, where talk radio has gone now and the sports talk genre is so far off the rails in my estimation. But you were doing a show that was kind of a celebration of life. Tell me good things that have happened in your life. I can't remember the exact phrasing, but you can fill that in. It was a different kind of radio show and the fact that you were allowed to do that on a national network, I always thought was amazing. Well it was a very strange time. I was not a believer at the time when I started that show. 2004, I got what would have been called the big break. I was working at Fox Sports Radio and was offered the morning show spot at Fox Sports Radio nationally. So I stepped into a chair with Andrew Siciliano as my co-host from the NFL Network, Crystal Fernandez from Fox Sports. And I began this journey for about a year of my boss, who was a brilliant radio guy. And he was an encourager, but they really wanted me to quarterback a show that was about controversy. And they wanted me to argue with Andrew about things I didn't care about. And they wanted me to really make fun of Crystal. And I don't know why, but I just thought this doesn't sound right. Again, I'm not a believer, I'm a Jewish atheist at the time. And I went to my boss in the fall of 2007, I'm sorry, fall of 2005, yeah fall of 2005. And I said, I don't think I should be doing this job. And he said, what do you mean? I said, I just don't think I'm the right person for this, because you want me to argue about things that I don't really care to argue about. I don't want to argue about anything. And so I got on the phone and I called, I called supporting news, because I had been talking to sporting news radio for a little while before I took the job at Fox. And I said to Matt Nahigian at the time, is there anything for me at sporting news? And he said, not to compare with what you have, we're not going to give you the morning show. And I was like, I'll take whatever you got. He said, I've got overnight, which is, you know, we're talk show hosts go to die. And I said, can I do whatever I want? And he said, yeah, yeah, we want you here, but you can do whatever you want. I said, okay, no guy talk, no arguing. I just want to talk to people, especially guys in the middle of the night and see what's going on in their lives, because there was something stirring in my heart at that time. It's 2005. I'll back up to the beginning of 2004, right before I got the job at Fox. I had an immediate deliverance from drugs and alcohol. So on the night that my first marriage ended in February of 2004, I was laying on the floor of a half empty closet in a fetal position, wondering how did I get here? Because I was drunk, I was stoned and my drug of choice was pot. Never went further than that. And I was not the kind of person to just get up and pull up my bootstraps and move on. But I felt a presence in that closet in the beginning of 2004 kind of lift me up off the floor. And when I stood up, I was stoned called sober Dan. And that's 18 years ago, is it 18? Yeah, 19, whatever that is, do the math. And I haven't had a drink since, I haven't gotten high since, haven't had a desire to do either one. But I thought I did that on my own strength. So here I am living in Los Angeles. I start going to self help classes and where it's all about me, it's all about me. Okay, let's talk about you. What do you think about me? Right, right, right. That's that mindset. So I go into this job at Fox, a little, a little strange because what had been such a huge part of my life partying was no longer a part of my life. So I think God was working at that time. So I get the sporting news and I start this show in November of 2005 called the celebration of life through sports where every caller had to tell me something good going on in their lives. And things started to happen, Dan, on that show that I could not explain. I remember a guy by the name of Darryl listening on an affiliate in North Carolina and he was telling me about that. I think the topic that night was literally horror stories because it wasn't about breaking down games and it wasn't about arguing about the bad call in the game or who the coach should be next season. It was really situational. So when an athlete would get in trouble at DUI shooting, something like that, I wouldn't talk about that and tear down the athlete. I would say, hey, how has a DUI affected your life? Call me up if you've been shot. What's that like? And so it became this very cathartic, almost therapy session for four hours in the middle of the night. And this guy, Darryl, calls up and tells us this literally football horror story, midget football horror story. And he said he broke his cousin's leg accidentally and I said, what happened after that? And he goes, oh, my mom and her sister haven't talked since. I said, how long has this been? He said, 20 years. And then he goes on to continue the story. Whoa, whoa, whoa, 20 years your family hasn't talked because you accidentally broke your cousin's leg in a football game and a Peewee football game. And he said, yeah, I said, we got to fix that. He calls up the next night crying. Turns out his cousin was listening in another city on another affiliate and heard who he thought was his cousin Darryl tell this story and the family reconciled. So this kind of stuff was happening all the time. Guys were becoming accountability partners, just like they would be in AA with each other in different cities. So I started wondering at the end of 2006, having done this show for a year, is there a God and could he possibly have anything to do with my life? All right, let's pause right there. Yeah. And you know, this is hopefully some media savvy. We're going to leave that hanging for just a minute. Oh, that's good, Dan. That's good. And I want to go back even further because you referenced where I was going to go next. Who was David Stein prior to knowing God, knowing Christ as his savior? And you just referenced it. You were Jewish, you were an atheist, you were an addict, tell me who David Stein was and how you got to where you were before we get to where you are. That's a great question. And I certainly don't want to glorify my past, but it's part of, but it's part of your testimony. And it absolutely is part of my testimony. So I grew up in the Philadelphia area. And I'm so proud of all of my three teams that lost in the championships this year. And I grew up in a Jewish family. We were the only, one of only three Jewish families in our whole town. And it was the doctor, the doctor, the dentist and the podiatrist. It's not the start of a bad joke. It's actually true. Well, you know what? In my little hometown of West Virginia, the two Jewish families won on the newspaper, won on the radio station. So yeah, and of course coming out of, you know, most, most Eastern United States, whether it was the Northeast or West Virginia, the South, most Jewish people who came from Eastern Europe, whether it was before World War I, after World War I, or after World War II, they had to make a name for themselves, they had to work hard, they had to get education. And especially my parents who grew up during World War II, knowing that our ancestors were being slaughtered and they were the scientists, they were the doctors, they were the physicists that were being slaughtered. So education was really important in my family. So they were very proud when I flunked out of school. So I grew up Jewish. We didn't do anything strange. It wasn't like, you know, we were anti-God. We just didn't talk about God. And I never really picked up on that because we did go to synagogue. We did go spend, you know, a few years learning Hebrews so I could get bar mitzvah at the age of 13. So I got bar mitzvah at the age of 13 and never walked into a synagogue since. And it was, it was strange because I didn't realize until much later in life that my parents never believed in God. They both had traumatic family things happen to them early on in life. My dad's mom died at the age of nine. My mom had a tragedy in her family. So they gave up on God. They figured, Hey, if there is a God, he would not have let this happen. So bad theology and but that's how that's how it played out. So they were they were Jewish by by ritual. Yes, yes, very secular. As many Jewish people are in the United States, they will continue to do the ritualistic things, the bar mitzvahs celebrating Yom Kippur, Russia, Shana, Hanukkah, things like that to keep the Jewish line in the family, but no connection to a creator, a very humanistic in their thinking. So I just kind of went about my life doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Had some minor successes in business and radio and some some big failures in school and business. When my grade point average in college at Franklin Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania party and with the Amish, when my when my grade point average and my blood alcohol level met, that was a good time to leave school. Right. Yep. So got my first job in radio and when I was 26 1986 and got married at 32 and and really never never changed. I just kind of did what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Really start drinking till my mid thirties when I bought a restaurant and the restaurant business is a marriage killer. Owned a comedy club at the same time. That was a lot of fun. So I was always around alcohol, but none of my friends would have known, and this will get to the answer to your question. Who was David Stein? None of my friends would have known that I was an alcoholic. I might have had a beer or a glass of wine with them while we were out or after a show or at the restaurant, but my inside life was miserable. So I would go home and finish off that bottle of wine. I would go home and drink three, four more beers. I would go home and smoke a joint and I would self medicate. As I look back, it was more self-medicating than David Stein, life at the party kind of thing. You're searching as I share in my testimony and we went about it in different ways and sometimes in similar ways, but you're searching for something to fill that hole. That's right. In here. That's right. There's something that's not satisfying the inner David Stein and you can't figure out what it is. That's exactly right then. Yes. And I would just drink and get high until I fell asleep and I'd get up and I would be fully functional the next day and run the business, do my radio show, whatever that was at the time and just continue on in my life. 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I would say the way big wake up call was February 2004 when I just I just never saw any of the signstand I kind of ignored a lot of it and when my marriage ended pretty abruptly. That's a pretty big wake up call. And that was the moment that I believe I got freedom from from my addictions. Visiting with David Stein, who is a longtime friend of mine, he was smart enough at some juncture to get out of the radio business. And now is a campus pastor of a revolution church down in Canton, Georgia. And we're sharing sharing his story as we do on this show of God working in the lives of people. So you didn't know Christ at that time, but it's obvious there was something supernatural that happened to you as far as the freedom from the addiction. So when do you start thinking, Hmm, maybe there is somebody up there. That's a great question. It was about a year into that sporting news show when things were just happening on the show that had nothing to do with me. It was, you know, people connecting with each other from different cities. Just being reconciled, guys calling up saying, Hey, you know, I want to stop drinking too. And I'm like, I've got, I've got nothing to do. I'm just turning on a microphone in the middle of the night. And I began to wonder, is there a God? And could he have had anything to do with my life? So I did what, you know, anybody would normally do call their therapist. But if I can say so without getting myself in trouble, it sounds like a very Jewish thing to do, right? A lot of people have their, yes, they do, yes, they do as a, as a pastor, and I say this all the time, all of the pastors at our church, we have counselors that we see. And I don't know how pastors do it without a counselor. So I called mine and set up a very unorthodox phone session in 2006, long before Zoom calls. We get on the phone and I'm sitting in my apartment in Glendale, California, and it's about two o'clock in the afternoon. And I asked the question before we get into this therapy session, is there a God? And could he have had anything to do with my life? And she paused and said, I've been waiting a long time for this. And she took off her, took off her therapy hat, she put under Christian hat and she shared the gospel full on. She told me who Jesus is, she told me what he did on my behalf. She walked me through the fact that we're all sinners. We all fall short of the glory of God. She walked me through the fact that there's a penalty to sin and it's death, it's eternal separation from God. She told me about God's plan to restore and reconcile. And I immediately knew I needed a savior. I immediately knew that Jesus' death on the cross, which I had mocked for 45 years. I mean, literally made fun of on the radio for 45 years. It was true that he did die for my sins, he paid a penalty that I deserve on that cross. Died was buried three days later. God raised him from the dead to declare victory over death. And I knew I needed a savior and I fell to my knees on the phone. The room lit up. I trusted in Jesus. She walked me through what that looked like. And I flashed back to that closet in 2004 and I knew who had picked me up off that floor. And that was 16 years ago. For those who don't know we're doing this via Zoom, I think we may have referenced it earlier. And David, as you're talking, I can see the emotion in your face. It is as real now as it was 16 years ago, isn't it? It is, Dan, because I should be dead. I'm sure that my life was on a path that was destructive. And I'm not trying to be hyper spiritual. I was on a path of destruction because we all are when we're not in Christ. But I was on a path of definite destruction, not caring about anything. And I was given a second chance and I can't imagine my life without Jesus. And I think we need to circle back here. When you made the appointment with that counselor, you didn't know she was a Christian, did you? No, no. I knew she was a little crazy, but I didn't know she was a Christian. It's just, it's an incredible story. And I've heard it before, but it's been eight or nine years since I've heard you tell this. And I'm getting goosebumps all over again, because, and we have this advantage of being able to see things in hindsight that you can't see when you're in the middle of something. Right. And in my story, in your story, when we look back on it, we can see God's hand moving in our lives and putting these pieces in place, when we had no idea what was going on, even before we had submitted our lives to Christ, he is putting all of these pieces of the puzzle together to bring us to that moment. And when I share my testimony, one of the things that I say is I get to that moment where I finally surrendered, I say, aren't, aren't you glad? And I ask you this, David, aren't you glad we have a God who pursues us? So I look back, Dan, and I see the seeds that were planted. When I was at Fox, a guy by the name of Tony Dungy was our guest every Monday for a year. And I look back and I go, I don't remember anything he said, but I'm sure he planted seeds. I had a best friend who worked for a radio network across the hall from Fox Sports Radio. And we were on in the middle of the night together on separate networks, and he would always have a Bible under his arm. And he never told me about Jesus, but I wonder if he planted seeds. I called him the day I got saved. And I said, how come you never told me about Jesus? And he said, I didn't think he would listen. And I have made it my mission, or the Lord has put on my heart to have this mission of not saying no for anybody, you know, saved to 45, I'm 61 now, I don't know how much time I have left. I don't want to play church. I tell this at our membership class, hey, this may not be the church for you. If you're looking for a cruise ship to sit back, this might not be the church for you. If you're looking for a battleship, because we've got a real enemy and eight out of every 10 people you encountered, don't know Jesus. Come on, let's go. Game on. You know, you and I got saved at the same age, by the way, 45. Wow. How about that? That's wild. What did your family think? What did your friends think when you go from this, this secular Jewish atheist addict to Christ follower and just that amazing transition, how do people react poorly? My mom didn't want to talk to me. I thought it was a betrayal. And I was not mature enough to talk to her from the point of view of a Jewish believer. I had a radical transformation. So in my mind, I'm a Christian. I'm using Christian words. I'm using the words Jesus Christ, even though the day before I was saved, I was making fun of Jesus. And I had forgotten that even the words Jesus Christ to somebody who is Jewish is cringe-worthy. So I made that mistake with my family to not speak to them in their language, not that they were speaking Hebrew or Yiddish all the time, but later on, I began to speak to them about the Messiah. Right. I began to speak to them about Yeshua, a Hebrew name for Jesus. I began to speak to them from the point of view of a Jewish believer as opposed to a Christian. And I spent years, 12 years talking to my dad about Jesus. And he got very sick in 2020. And he had gone from he didn't want to hear about Jesus, to he was interested in this Jesus, to watching my sermons, to asking me what I was going to preach on. And the last few months of his life, and I was the only person flying in 2020, I was going back and forth on an empty plane to California. And I would just sit there and I would read Isaiah 53 to him while he was in his bed. And on his deathbed, a couple days before he passed away, I was on the phone with him. And I said, Dad, you don't have to fight it anymore. It's okay to say yes to Jesus. And I had shared the gospel with him many times, had prayed at his bedside many times. And at that point, he wasn't able to communicate. So I say to him, it's okay to say yes to Jesus. There's a long pause. And the next thing I know, my mom picks up the phone, she says, I don't know what you just said to your father. But he smiled for the first time in weeks. He nodded his head and put his hand up in the air. Wow. So I believe, Dan, that we have a merciful God who reconciled my dad on his last moments. And I sometimes forget that I'm going to see him again. That's amazing to me. My mom is still pretty hostile toward God. She'll let me pray for her now. So that's a breakthrough. She's 91. My brother doesn't want anything to do with Jesus. But it's something that I'm going to pursue. And I'm praying that God brings people into their lives to share the gospel with them, to plant more seeds, to water the seeds that I have planted. My friends, I stopped hanging out with my friends. I didn't know if I was strong enough to hang out with the guys that I was partying with. So for a few years, I really didn't see anybody. And that was hard. And then later on, I reconnected with them and told them about my journey. And they, they all said, hey, you know, they respect that. And I'm friends with some of these guys today. Going to visit with David Stein as we kind of start heading down the home stretch here. It's just, it's such an incredible story to sit and listen to. And one of the things that's hard for us, I think, and, and, and, and I appreciate the phrase that you use a minute ago, maybe God will put somebody in their lives, you know, maybe you're not the one that's going to get the chance to, to see the, the fruit of, of your labor because the Bible tells us some, so in some reap, maybe you're, maybe you're the sower with your mom. Maybe you're the sower with some of your friends and maybe somebody else will, will do the reaping. But the bottom line is you have to be obedient and do what God tells you to do and, and you've done that. Well, I see God working in my family. And I really don't want to say anything right now because I don't want to manipulate that in case they do, in case they do listen to this, and, but God is doing a mighty work in my family in a way that it's really God saying, David, just get out of my way, right? Get out of my way. It's not on your shoulders. You're not the one that's going to fly to California and lead them to salvation. Somebody else will. And so that's pretty cool to see. But you're a guy, but you're a guy, David guys. We want to fix things, right? We do want to fix things. And I'll tell you, Dan, it was, it was March 7th, 2007. I'll never forget this. I'm a brand new believer. I've been saved like a day and a half. It was actually like five months, but it was a day and a half. And I get invited to some guy's church to hear some guy preach. And it was the shepherds conference at John MacArthur's church in California, say what you say about John MacArthur, whatever, but I did, I just got invited to this. So turns out I'm there with 3000 pastors thinking to myself, I'll never be one of these guys. And John Piper's father had passed away that day. So another guy preached and he preached on Isaiah 66. And it was the first time that I understood the sovereignty of God, his omnipotence and my position of submission to him. And that's what, that's what I bank on now when I'm like, God said, when I hear guys saying, get out of my way, you don't have to fix it, be still and know that I am God. See, see, there's a radio thing, we brought a full circle, brought all those callbacks. So he's preaching on Isaiah 66 and he says, thus says the Lord, heaven is my throne. The earth is my footstool. And I was like, are you kidding me? That's how big you are. And he goes on to say, but this is the one to whom I will look. The one who is humble and can try in spirit. And I have fought that for 16 years, but always reminded that he opposes the proud that gives grace to the humble. It is something and I share this all the time. When I was doing the Clemson baseball games years ago, before I was saved and just started, people started telling me how good I was at it. And it didn't take me long to believe him. And I went from being thankful to have a job to being an ego driven jerk. So you can make that jump very quickly. So it's an ongoing thing. You do, you do have to remind yourself to be humble and you don't want to pat yourself on the back for being humble because that defeats the purpose, but you do have to remind yourself of just what you said. Yeah, it's a daily practice of preaching the gospel to yourself, looking up at the cross and recognizing it's it's and my wife came up with this on the radio. It's really tough to be on your high horse when you're looking up at the cross. I like that. I'm going to steal that by the way. So please do, please do, you can always quote LJ Stein and God's sovereignty is another thing to bank on. I just preached on the attributes of God and his sovereignty and who he is and his immutability that he never changes. And the fact that he knows everything, nothing has ever occurred to him. D.A. Carson said, has it ever occurred to you that nothing has ever occurred to God? He knew before Betsy King played golf at Furman, that Furman would be in the NC2A tournament. Some people at Furman would have liked to have known that a few years ago, but that's another story for another time. We could just keep going and going. We've got about five minutes left and we haven't even gotten to how you met Leanne. We haven't even gotten really to the genesis of the radio show and and all those other things. But in the cliff notes version, God put an amazing woman in your life. Yes, we met at a Starbucks in Woodstock, Georgia. I wasn't looking. She wasn't looking. She had just come back from a year in China teaching three-year-olds English in a Christian underground church and she came back at the age of 28. I don't need, I don't need a man, God, it's just you and me, God. I was 50 and had been divorced for many years and was not looking. I was just at Starbucks because they had the free internet back then. It's 2010 and I'm sitting next to her 60 days later. We got engaged 60 days after that. We got married. And it's been from what I can tell an incredible partnership ever since. It has, I was doing this Christian radio show and she stopped by the studio. I don't know how many years, well, if we've been off radio for three years, so about 12 years ago, and we've been married 12 years, so she stops by the studio to show me some ugly chairs that she had bought off a Craigslist and I did what any good husband would do in radio. I shoved a microphone in front of my wife and she knocked it out of the park two weeks later. We were the new morning show. We did that for eight years and it was called Rise and Stein. A lot of, a lot of husbands and wives working together would be a disaster, but especially newlyweds. Right. But, but obviously for you, it was, it was wonderful. It was, it was wonderful. She was more than happy to become a Clemson fan. So it was an easy transition, like a month into our dating life, which was only four weeks before I asked her to marry me. I asked her if she had ever been to a college football game and she said, no. And I said, well, I do this thing up at Clemson. It's kind of fun. Would you like to go to a football game? So I didn't tell her any details and so I took her up to Clemson on Friday and we went over to the stadium and we got in the elevator. She goes, where are we going? I said, I'm not going to tell you and knocked on Coach Sweeney's office because a year earlier, and this is, we can wrap this up with this a year earlier, I'm interviewing Coach Sweeney and we didn't even talk about football. We're in his office for an hour and a half. We're talking about Jesus. We're talking about our testimonies. We're both crying and he said, do you think you'll ever get married again? I said, I don't know, Coach, but I'm tired. And he comes up to me in that Coach Sweeney way that he has and I think if I had a helmet on, he would grab me by the face mask and he said, do not grow weary of doing good for in the end, you'll reap a harvest if you do not give up. So he's given me Galatians six, nine. And then he backs away and he has that big Coach Sweeney smile and he goes, now go find yourself a girl from Alabama. Well, turns out, Leanna's from Dothan, Alabama. So I bring her to Coach Sweeney's office a year later and I said, you told me to, here she is. That's fantastic. And then we got married a month later. Wonderful. Yeah, David, it's an incredible story and I know there's a lot more depth we could have gone into, but 40 minutes or so passes by so quickly. I appreciate you being willing to do this on such short notice. I hate the fact that we haven't been able to connect in a while, but it's always great to catch up with you and I'm, when God opened the doors for me to do this radio show and Grand Slam Ministries and I sat down and I started doing a list of people that I wanted to get on the show. You were on that list because your story, your testimony is so powerful and I think it's, it's things. It's something that people need to hear and now I'm actually on a situation where people are going to hear it. Unlike maybe previous times, people actually listen to this show, David. That's a good thing. Right? That's awesome. That is awesome. I'm just so honored to be on the show and to reconnect with you, always a dear friend. You were always such an encourager and I just want to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and do not grow weary or you will reap a harvest in the end. And you know, as I listen back to that portion of the interview, David called me an encourager. That's his motive operation, man. He is so encouraging and I got to be honest with you. I needed to hear those words because if I'm being totally transparent right now, been in a little bit of a funk on a number of fronts and sometimes you wonder if what you're doing is having an impact. Sometimes you wonder if you're doing the right things, sometimes you're so encompassed by other duties, job responsibilities, family responsibilities, things of the world, that you wonder if you're giving the right priority, the right time to the right things. That was a, that was a word for me as much as it was for anybody else today. And that's just the kind of person that David Stein is. I appreciate David's willingness to, to share his vulnerability and I hope you enjoyed that conversation. We'll be back to put a wrap on this week's edition of the show in just a moment. Here at Grand Slam Ministries, our goal is to share the love of Jesus Christ through multiple platforms while at the same time executing our core missions of mentorship and helping children in need. The primary way we can effectively do all of those things is through the Dan Scott show. Our weekly Christian radio show that airs in multiple markets around the nation and the world. We are asking you to partner with us to not only sustain what we are currently doing, but to grow both our on air, online presence and our ability to fund those core missions. Can you spare as little as $25 per month? How about $10 per month? If we can get 200 partners to join us at each of those small sustainable levels, we can begin to accomplish everything we believe God has called us to do. So can you help us today with a donation of either $25 or $10 per month? Please go to www.grand slamministries.org for your donation to get more information or to ask questions that's grand slamministries.org and thank you for supporting the Dan Scott show and Grand Slam Ministries. Follow us on social media, search "Grand Slam Ministries" on Facebook and "Grand Slam for God" on Twitter. And don't forget Dan's personal and public figure sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You're listening to the Dan Scott show presented by Grand Slam Ministries. Final segment of this week's show. Our thanks again to David Stein for being our guest. Got a couple of really good ones coming up over the course of the next few weeks. If all goes according to plan this week, I will have by the time this airs, interviewed a man by the name of Joe Newerberg. He and his wife are from Kansas City and took it on themselves to build a school and do missionary work in Africa, just the two of them. It's an amazing story. We're going to talk about that. And then also later this month, we'll be interviewing Greg Dietrich, who is a board member of Chip Ingram's board, former CEO of Kentucky Fried Chicken, who has left the corporate world because of conviction of his faith and now has a nonprofit organization for pastors to provide them with a little bit of a getaway. It's a really, really cool story about how Greg was doing all of the church things, but he was doing it more out of obligation and what it did with his marriage. You'll love this story. That'll be coming up in a couple of weeks as well. Listen, as we get to the end here, I want to thank you for your continued support. I just prayerfully ask that you continue making a monetary gift to what we are doing here, especially that we're heading into the Christmas season because as we did last year, we're going to try to find a family in need that we can help this Christmas season. Last year, remember, we found a family with eight kids and you responded in such an incredible family, we were able to do through you just amazing work to give that family a Christmas that otherwise it wouldn't have had. So keep that in mind. Keep our overall ministry in mind. And we would love to have you come on board, dancescottshow.org. You can go there. There's a donate tab there and all the information you need. You can always email me if you have any questions, Dan@dancescottshow.org. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you again next week. I'm Dan. God bless you and so long, everybody. Thank you for listening to this week's Dan Scott Show. To hear it again, catch up on past shows or find out more about Grand Slam Ministries, please visit our website, Danscottshow.org. And while there, prayerfully consider making a gift to help us in our mission to share the love of Jesus Christ. That's thedancescottshow.org. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]