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Well, good morning, everybody. This thing is not as loud as I was expecting it to be. I'll probably bump you up a little bit.

Well, good morning, and welcome to Faith Stories. Hey, kids in the back, we're starting now. Hey, kids in the back, we're starting now.

Good morning. Welcome to Faith Stories. If you haven't done this before, what we do is all summer long, we have a different guest each week.

Well, almost all summer long. Next weekend, we're not doing this, because there's something else going on. But most of the weeks, this is what we do.

And the objective is have somebody come up and share something about their life. We get to know them a little bit better in a way that we wouldn't organically get to do. So this has been a blessing to my family over the years.

And usually, Anne-Marie Shambaugh is up here doing this. But when she's out of town or busy, she asks a few of us to pinch hit and introduce the speakers. So that's why I'm up here.

My name is Matt. And I'm here to introduce Dan Buis. He's attended Faith Church for 13 years.

And he's been married just a little bit longer than that. Right? Yep. They have a son.

He's eight years old. His name is Ephraim. I got it right the first time.

Dan works in software. And in his spare time, he enjoys playing miniature war games. He can be found at Gen Con some years, right? Every year.

All right. Well, I'll pray. And then, Nan, you can come on up.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for Dan. We pray that you would just bless our time with him this morning. Thank you that we can get to know him better and just ask your blessing on this time.

In Jesus' name, amen. Give it up for Dan. All right.

Well, Matt is getting the slideshow started. When I look back on my life, I tend to look at it as a collection of people or decisions that it turns out actually changed the course of my life or things that God put in my life to make things turn out and make me who I am now. I really like the illustration of an Ebenezer.

That's a word from Come Thou Fount. Here I raise my Ebenezer. Hither by thy help I am come.

That's from Samuel. They crossed the river. They were like, this is super cool.

God was super helpful and made this happen. We are going to make a thing so we always remember it. And it's a pile of stones.

So you can point at it and say, this happened. Here's a tangible reminder. We can now talk about what happened 10 years from now when we start forgetting about it or kids can remember it because the stories are passed down.

So today, I am going to talk about the stones in my own personal Ebenezer. Generally, what I'm going to be talking about for the people, these are going to be not peers, so not my friends, my cohorts. Not to say those people weren't important or impactful, but I only have 30 minutes, so we are going to talk about the people who really changed the course of my life or who were super important to me when I go and look back as opposed to today, the people I hang out with.

Matt, next slide. So a good pile of stones, a good Ebenezer, it needs a good foundation, which today is going to be my family. This is the best picture that I could find from when I was really young.

I'm the kid in the blue sweater. This is at my grandma Vanderwaal's house in Michigan. So obviously, family is important, and we're going to talk about all the people in this picture and one person who's not in this picture.

But that's mostly to give context for the rest of the story because there's a couple threads that we're going to be following. I am the oldest child. There are three kids in my family.

My sister Jenny is the extra small kid. She is about two years younger than me. When we were younger, the two of us were basically inseparable.

I have fond memories of playing dollhouse with her. She had a really big dollhouse that my grandfather built for her, and she had little six-inch tall figurines in a van and everything. And then I would take like 25 Lego men, and we'd pile in the backseat of the dollhouse minivan, and they'd go have adventures in the dollhouse, and it was great.

So Jenny and I were inseparable. I have a younger brother, Tom. He is not in this picture.

It was difficult to get pictures of him just in general. Matt, go to the next slide because we do have one picture of my brother, Tom. Ooh, he's apparently in the next, next slide, so we'll come back to that.

This was apparently the Jenny and I are inseparable slide. So we did stuff together when we were grownups. We went on a lighthouse scene adventure in Michigan.

And Jenny's also making a stack of rocks, and that's where the cover photo came from earlier. But Tom, Tom is my younger brother, and he was on the, well, he is on the autism spectrum. But 30 years ago, we didn't have words for that, and he was a very high-maintenance child, lots of crying and fussing because sensory issues are real, and we didn't understand it back then.

And so mom ended up spending a huge amount of time just taking care of Tom. And so the photo record of my childhood gets very, very spotty, which is why it was appropriate that there wasn't a Tom in the childhood photo. But mom was just super focused on taking care of him, which is appropriate, and that is what led to Jenny and I being very, very tight and inseparable.

Let's go to the next slide, because then we can actually see we have Tom in his porch swing, and that was his favorite place to be as a kid, because something about the swinging motion helped him regulate his brain, and he could actually start giggling and being happy, which is nice. Mom was great. She was, as I said, busy taking care of Tom, and she still managed to do all kinds of everything for child Dan.

And I still regularly call her up or send her a text message saying, hey, thanks for doing blank when I was a kid, because I'm doing that stuff for my kid now, and I didn't really appreciate how much work it was because I was a kid. Things like packing my lunch every day, or sitting down and doing spelling bee words, or folding laundry, boring stuff that has to happen all the time, but as a kid, you're oblivious. My dad, growing up, was fairly disconnected and remote.

That's not to say he wasn't present. He was around for a lot of things, but as I got older, he had a tendency to remove himself from what was going on, either by not showing up, or going to go take a nap, or whatever. It is what it is.

I'm not grumpy about it. We're gonna come back to that, though. I have some extended family in Michigan.

I didn't see them very often. They're not gonna be part of the story, but they exist. Growing up, we were pretty active in our local church.

I did all the things. Going through my photo album, I found photos of me doing some sort of ridiculous-looking gymnastics routine that was, I think, for some sort of Christmas celebration. I don't know.

Did church choir, did the handbells, did Sunday school. I did all the stuff that was there. It was a big deal, a big part of our life.

Next slide. In this picture, this is a man by the name of Tom O'Dell. Tom O'Dell was a guy from church.

I don't remember how we got connected, but I do remember that by the time I was in fourth grade, I liked him enough to say, hey, it's grandparents' day. Will you pretend to be my grandparent for the day? Because remember, my extended family was in Michigan, and they didn't come down this way. He said yes, and Tom O'Dell was a, he was a big deal for child Dan.

He was super into fishing. Next slide. He and a couple other people from our church had a cabin in Canada, and every other year, they would take a couple of father-son pairs from church up to this cabin for a week, and it was super cool for young Dan.

We drove all the way up to Minnesota, and looking back, I think this was probably at the Boundary Waters, but I didn't have words for that. Drive up to Minnesota, we would take a boat, hike, take a second boat to the cabin, and it was in the middle of nowhere, and it was great. We got to just hang out and do some fishing, and there were some other little side quests we did.

We went to see an old abandoned gold mine, which was, it was kind of cool. The rocks were super sparkly. I don't actually like fishing.

I don't think I liked it back then. I don't like touching the fish, and it's gross, and it's slimy, and if I go fishing, I might accidentally catch something, but I really liked Tom O'Dell. He was great, and he was really good for young Dan.

Another person from my church who was really impactful in my life would be a man by the name of Dave Tyler. I don't have a picture for him, so we're good. So my church had a program called Discipleship Groups.

It's where you would take the entire youth group, and you'd divide it by gender, and by age, and so you end up with four or five kids who are all in the same little cluster, and you pair them up with two adults, and that's just a group that would meet every Sunday evening from seventh grade until high school graduation, and my Discipleship Group leader, one of them was Dave Tyler, and so I got to hang out with him as a kid every week for like six years, and about 2 3rds of the way through, he was diagnosed with some sort of muscular disease of some sort that grown up Dan doesn't remember the name of, but grown up Dan does remember that when I was in 10th grade or so, I had to go to the hospital for, I think it was an EKG. It was one of those tests where they poke you with needles, and they run some electricity through it, and they get numbers back that tell them something, and young Dan was very scared about it, and so mom had us call Dave Tyler because Mr. Tyler had done this before, and looking back, I now realize this was 100% prearranged. This was not a surprise because Dave Tyler says, you know what, Dan, it's not bad.

You'll be fine. You won't feel a thing. It's not gonna hurt.

He lied. It hurt. I was very uncomfortable about it.

I called him afterward, and I said, that really hurt, and he's like, yeah, I know, but I had to make you brave. When I was in college, I was offered the chance to be on the other side of the Discipleship Group thing, so I got to lead a group of four boys for six years, and I was paired up with another guy about my age, and that was one of the coolest things I've gotten to do. I'm still in touch with them, even though they have finished college and have big boy jobs and everything, and turns out one of them lives about a mile south of me, so I get to hang out with him about once a month.

Another one lives in Muncie, and I get to hang out with him about as frequently, and I get ridiculous pictures from him because he works for the Emergency Services Department in Muncie, so I get pictures of storm damage or ridiculous Ebola training that they have to do. The other day, I got a picture where he was in some sort of plastic giant bag with an uncomfortable number of those glove inserts through the wall so they can manipulate the patient. DGroups was really good for me.

Next slide. In second grade, my mom says to me, hey, Dan, do you want to do Cub Scouts? And I said, what's Cub Scouts? I don't remember what her answer was, but she said that my friend Tim was doing it, and Zach from church. I like them, and Tim's mom was in charge of the group, so I said yes.

It is impossible for me to overstate how impactful that decision actually ended up being in my life. I was in Boy Scouts from second grade until I moved to Indianapolis in 2013-ish. It's about 15 years that I was involved, heavily involved, doing that stuff, and it has had an absurd impact on things like my self-confidence, what I'm interested in.

The best friend I've had for the last 22 years, my first job, the job I have right now today is a direct through line from that decision in second grade. The Boy Scouts of America has been instrumental in shaping who I am today as I stand before you, so it gets a really big stone in the pile. I did pretty much everything that is available in Scouts.

I did Cub Scouts, which is for the little kids. You get a couple kids together and a couple grownups, and you do fun stuff all the time. I did Boy Scouts, where the kids actually start running the show with adult support.

I participated as an adult, helping the kids do the magic. I went backpacking in New Mexico and canoeing in boundary waters for a week. I earned my Eagle Scout.

I went to various trainings. That's 13-year-old Dan there on the left with the ridiculous droopy sock, and my mom loves that photo. On the right-hand side, I am doing a program called COPE at summer camp.

That's Challenging Outdoor Personal Experience. It's a lot of climbing and team building, and then a capstone on a high-ropes course. I am very much afraid of heights, and Dan was not excited to be 30 feet up in the air, but afterward, Dan said, that was really cool, and I'm happy I did that, and I don't want to do it again.

I've done Fire Crafter, so that's a program at summer camp where you do a lot of outdoor skills. It's things like building fires and doing some leadership things, service projects, identifying plants, animals, next slide, and fire by friction. Those pictures on the left, I started with a pile of sticks and some string, and I made things move fast and got a very tiny ember out of smooshing soot together, and we put it in some, what we call a bird's nest, a little pile of sisal rope threads.

You blow on it gently, and it gets really smoky, and it's in your face, and eventually, it catches on fire, and you put sticks on it. I got to do that, and that was super cool. I worked at that summer camp that I had attended as a kid.

I got to work there as an adult for three summers. I worked in the scout craft area, so that's teaching outdoor skills. We had merit badges like camping and first aid and wilderness survival, emergency preparedness.

My favorite was pioneering. Pioneering is not churning butter. It is tying knots and building things with rope and logs.

If you want to talk about knots later, I would be very happy. I like knots, and then my last summer there, we also added signaling as a special merit badge, because it was the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America, and signaling was one of those classic merit badges, so we were doing Morse code and semaphores and wigwag flags, so semaphores are those things where you make letters by sticking the flags like this, and wigwag is basically Morse code, but with flag wiggles. Let's see.

During my time in scouts, I met a lot of really cool people, and a lot of adults had a really big impact on me, things like helping develop my sense of humor, because some of them were really good at wordplay, and it turns out I ended up picking up that knack, because puns happen for like five minutes straight, and you just pick things up sometimes. One of those leaders that I'm gonna talk about is Dave Largent. Dave Largent is, he kind of looks like a hippie.

He is very long, wavy hair, he dresses in a bow tie, he is very mellow, and his emotions tend to be pretty mild, but then when he's unhappy, you know about it, and you feel really bad, and he doesn't feel good, he doesn't have to yell, he tends to give very cryptic answers, so he's very good at, Mr. Largent, why is this? Well, what do you think? And he'll just keep nudging you, and he doesn't actually give you the answer, but eventually you figure it out. I don't entirely know why I really liked him, but I did, and I invited him and his family to my wedding, because he had been a part of my life since I was 11, and I, at that point, had known him for 18 years or something. I like Mr. Largent.

It feels weird to call him Dave, I can't do that. He's still Mr. Largent, even though I am 37. But broadly speaking, the adult leaders were incredibly positive role models, which young Dan needed, because, as you remember, dad was a little absent.

He was around for a lot of the scout stuff. He was probably four feet out of frame in most of these pictures here on the left. So he was around, but not necessarily super involved with Dan's heart.

And so that's where these people like Mr. Largent, Dave Tyler, Tom O'Dell, really became important to adult Dan. Young Dan didn't have the words for that, but it turns out that was really good. And I think that is one reason why Boy Scouts ended up being so important to adult Dan.

At this point, I am a den leader for Ephraim's Cub Scout Den. So that's the adult that's actually organizing the stuff for the kiddos. So Ephraim's den has six kids in it last year, and he doesn't love it, and that's okay.

I know Cub Scouts was good for me, and I want him to have a good experience. And then when he's 11 and it's time to move to Boy Scouts, he can decide what he wants to do. But I have really enjoyed getting to provide these opportunities for the next generation.

Hey Matt, can you tell how many slides are left? Perfect, don't go to it yet. So about eight years ago, my parents ended up divorcing, which was not surprising to adult Dan. This was a thing that I had suspected was coming, and it probably needed to happen.

But it was a really good thing for my dad, because he actually started getting involved with a church and attending it regularly. And he was afraid that he would lose his kid in that. Now I was an adult, I can make my own decisions.

But he was afraid that he would no longer be able to be in contact with us. So he actually started putting in effort. And at this point, my relationship with my dad is much better today and now than it was when I was a kid or in college or as a young adult.

Because he is clearly demonstrating that he cares and wants to be involved. And I've actually heard, Dan, I'm proud of you. And child, Dan didn't get that.

So silver lining, I guess. But dad and I are doing great now. Tom, brother Tom, he is also doing great.

He has a stable job, he has a house, he's a normal functioning person. Tom and I are actually closer now than Jenny and I are. Tom also enjoys the miniature games.

We play together somewhat regularly. We enjoy a lot of the same jokes and all that stuff. Jenny has become business Jenny.

She got her MBA and she is a little less warm and fuzzy than she used to be. Because, I don't know, business Jenny. So I try to bring a little bit of levity to her life, even if she doesn't want it.

This weekend we are going to her house for 4th of July and I am bringing baked beans that are flavored like rocket pop popsicles. So we'll see how that goes over. The last stone on my Ebenezer that I'm gonna talk about, which is gonna be our last slide, is going to be my wife, Greta.

And I really like telling this story and I like to remember it. And so it's a really nice one to end on today. Greta and I were in the same field of study at Ball State.

We both studied landscape architecture. Neither of us uses it now and that's fine. But the way Ball State does landscape architecture, there is a very prescribed sequence of classes that you take every year.

And so that meant we were in a lot of classes together. It's a five year program. We met each other on year two because that's when you actually start doing the proper landscape architecture class.

Because the first year is all introductory everything and then you make a decision. So we had a lot of classes together. We were adjacent but not talking.

Every year the architecture department empties out for field trip week roundabouts October. So every class for every of the three majors goes somewhere for a field trip. And so we went to places like Chicago and San Francisco and Denver and Seattle and fifth one that I can't remember right now.

Greta and I ended up in the same friend group on year two. I don't remember why. I think she forgot a ticket for the Seattle Space Needle or something and so someone else spotted her a ticket and then our friend groups just kind of merged.

Whatever. We were in the same friend group for many, many years. I liked her.

I like liked her. But I didn't say anything. And eventually my other friend in studio, in the architecture sequence, my other friend from our major and our friend group, Doug, said to me one time during our field trip to Denver, Dan, I really like Greta.

I am going to ask her out. I was not thrilled about that, but I said, okay, that's fine, go ahead. And I was not comfortable about it.

I was grumpy. I ended up writing him about a two page letter that said basically, if you're gonna do this, you gotta take care of her. All these ridiculous things that you would see in a rom-com movie, but it ended up happening in real life and not my proudest moment, but it is what it is.

And it's part of the story now, so you get to hear it. I gave him that letter. I ended up mailing my sister a copy.

I don't remember why. Doug asked Greta out. Greta said no.

Greta knew this was coming and invited a friend along to try to head things off at the pass and that did not work. He went for it anyway. Okay, cool.

About a year and a half later, I got up the courage and asked her out and she said no, quite emphatically. And we stayed friends because that's what you do when you're a young adult. You don't want to ruin friendships.

So we stayed together as friends and our friend group kept on going on and later I started to get some indication from her that things, her opinions may have changed, but of course she didn't actually use any of those words because it's awkward and uncomfortable and I eventually said, hey, these things are making me weird and uncomfortable. Did you change your mind? I didn't say it like that because that is weird. I don't remember what I said, but eventually I got around to it and she said, yes.

So then we were an item. It was the last semester of our five years in college. I was really surprised that her opinions changed because the first no was really quite emphatic.

And about two months later, we had gone to an event together and she was clearly out of sorts afterward and we talked about it and it turns out that she had, she was worried that I was going to hurt her emotionally in some capacity.

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