Humble Beginnings #2
Complete Surrender (July 17, 2023)
It all started from a place of complete surrender.
At the age of 43, after years of “wandering around the desert” struggling with addiction and identity, I found myself in yet another unhealthy marriage where failure had to be acknowledged. I knew that every time something failed in my life, I was the common denominator. I knew that I had to make a major change but didn’t know where to turn. From past experiences in religion, I knew there was no help for me at church.
So, I decided to go to an AA meeting. When my feet hit the steps of that first meeting I fell apart. God showed up on the front porch of the AA that day in the hearts of the two guys sitting there waiting for the meeting to start. The compassion and grace I felt from those guys that day can only be described as a God encounter.
Instantly, God lifted years of addiction and confusion off me and showed me that from a position of surrender, He would give me everything I need. Wow, what a relief it was to not be in charge anymore.
At that point I decided to stop paying attention to anything worldly, I even shot my TV in a Facebook post, and concentrated on changing my heart, then changing my community. As Grace would have it, I’ve been blessed with a Kingdom minded mother who had been leaving me a trail of breadcrumbs from which to find truth and light in Jesus.
As God took me through a season of pruning, there were some very painful things that needed to be cut off, that in hindsight was in order to make room for the growth He had planned for me. Over the next year I asked God for just enough light to see the next step in front of me and focused on where I felt He was leading me. Born again in Christ Jesus, I completely changed the things I consumed to things leading me to hope and joy in Jesus bringing new truth and revelation in life, things that even explained so much of what I saw but struggled to understand in my life as the old man.
A little over a year into my gift of sobriety and Sonship, my mother and closest spiritual advisor, brought to my attention a group called Kingdom Warriors. This group was involved in arts and entertainment, with a mission of taking ground for God in this mountain by producing Kingdom content. Being a construction and real estate guy, I really didn’t understand this world of entertainment and NFT’s, but I understood their mission and knew we had a huge need for good content as I could see the evil in most entertainment and media. Feeling led to help, I invested in the mission of Kingdom Warriors, changing the course of my life forever.
As God would have it, I met a woman named Chané, from South Africa, who was the virtual assistant for Kingdom Warriors that helped me with the onboarding process. Coming into this group I had no idea what to expect. All of the sudden, I was participating in a Facebook challenge that connected me with people all over the world. These people were Kingdom minded truth seekers speaking life and blessing into each other and now into me. Wow! I had been praying for a community of Kingdom people to plug into, but I didn’t picture it like this. I had been church hopping in my area only to find stale atmospheres of spiritually starving people. I never expected to plug into such a community through the internet.
My communication with Chané started to become more personal as we started to talk with one another outside of the challenge and business of Kingdom Warriors. We even discussed that we had no idea what was going on here as we lived 8500 miles away from each other, or about 13,700 kilometers in Chané’s distance measurement. The thing we both felt was that God was at work here and we decided to just take it one day at a time and see what God had for us.
For a couple of years prior to this, I had been involuntarily calling a particular style of shoes Yo Dads. For the life of me I could never get it right, and when I saw the shoes, Yo Dads would just come out of my mouth without thinking.
By the time I got involved with Kingdom Warriors, I had rebranded these shoes as Yo Dads with the people closest to me in life. Right after becoming involved with Kingdom Warriors, I was walking out of church with my mom and two nieces wearing a pair of the shoes we all now called Yo Dads, when my niece Kasyn spoke out what I can only see as prophesy straight from God at this point:
“Uncle Ryan, you should start Yo Dads! People would buy them for sure!” Kasyn said as we were walking out of church that day. It was like those words hit me right in the heart and woke something up. I thought to myself, wow this kid might be right!
Soon after this, I was on a Zoom meeting where Eric Skeldon, founder of Kingdom Warriors, told us to all pay attention because God was imparting business ideas on his people as marketplace solutions or even products. This made me immediately think of the Yo Dads idea.
After the meeting I had about 45 minutes until another meeting I wanted to participate in. So, I just sat with God and prayed. I said, Lord I see this idea and I see it’s not mine, if You want me to do something with it, You’re going to have to show me what. Because I don’t have any idea how to design a shoe, or manufacture a shoe, heck I can’t even draw a shoe, so you’ll have to line me up with someone who can.
Well about 10 minutes after that thought left my head for the ears of God, I entered a Zoom meeting where Chané was also present. Right off the bat, the host, Timothy Morgan, asked Chané to share a little bit about her story. She introduced herself as a “textile designer”, then went on to tell about her journey with Kingdom Warriors. To this point, I had only known of Chané as a virtual assistant, social media, graphic arts person. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even really know what that meant.
However, when I heard the words “textile designer” come out of her mouth, I instantly thought that sounds like exactly the person who would know about designing and making a shoe and God had already connected us! He had already answered my prayer and I didn’t even know it!
Of course, right after that meeting, I had to get Chané on the phone and tell her about Yo Dads. Turns out she knew quite a lot about the whole design and manufacturing process of this kind of thing. Just another glimpse at how God has been at work in my life and so Chané and I started developing the idea of Yo Dads as a real workable idea.
Soon after this, and many phone calls and chats later, Chané and I were talking on the phone, and I was almost falling asleep when the words “I love you” just came right out of my mouth. I woke right up because it wasn’t that I didn’t feel it, but I sure didn’t mean to say it right then. To which she said, “whoa…what…wait…I love you too!” Well, that escalated quickly LOL! I thought to myself.
In the next couple months, I found myself on a plane to South Africa to meet Chané and her family in person and spent several weeks there. What a beautiful place this is! However, life is not easy there and the divide between the wealthy and the impoverished is heart breaking. What I witnessed over the next few weeks was both amazing wealth and heartbreaking lack nestled together in a beautiful landscape.
We had the opportunity to attend a diner at the home of a local missionary. The mission field isn’t new to me as my earthly father, who passed about 12 years ago, had been involved with many mission trips to Africa and I had been able to go with him to Kenya in my mid-twenties. However, what was highlighted to me in this fellowship was how so much of the mission becomes continuing to raise funds and constantly working from a position of lack.
Another thing that was highlighted to me on this trip was the need for people with skills. There were lots of people in need of skilled labor but not many people that needed work had the kind of skills people could utilize, neither did they have self-confidence nor the ability to provide for themselves and their families.
Later in the trip we were in a beautiful area with many beautiful holiday homes near the sea all overlooked by a large area of very impoverished people living in tin shacks and makeshift houses. Being a guy interested in real estate with a background in rehabbing properties, I noticed a beautiful property in this area that was for sale. It is the most run down property in a couple of blocks boasting new development with thriving shops and restaurants at the center of this vacation destination area.
So, we called the realtor and scheduled a time to look at the property. Although the property needs work, so much of which I can easily do myself, this place was awesome and really got my wheels turning and thinking of what a real estate investment might look like in a foreign country. The property has 6 rentable units with a larger building, a bunkhouse style loft, multiple bathrooms and large living area all in the middle of a vacation town.
Being a dreamer, this was only something I was dreaming about and not something I truly thought was feasible for me. A couple of mornings later, I woke up with a much different idea of what this property might look like that could be a solution to some challenges in the community. A self-sustained mission teaching Kingdom principles by which to live: such as sowing and reaping, money management, tithing, community service, and civic duty with an internship for teaching service-related skills like groundskeeping, maintenance, hospitality, culinary, and management.
All of this built around holiday rental units as the start and the later addition of a restaurant and venue that could actually be income for the mission that took on young people from the community for a time and taught them skills that would be marketable in the area. So, I wrote the vision of this self-sustaining mission idea in my journal and continued with my visit.
When I returned home, I shared this vision with Eric Skeldon of Kingdom Warriors from whom I received encouragement to develop the idea and talk with other members of the community as well. I was able to book some time with a guy named Timothy Morgan of Giver Marketing. In this meeting I told Timothy of the two ideas that were weighing on my heart and circling around my mind. Timothy gave me some advice that really clicked in my head. He said, “I always tell people to either focus on an idea that makes a million dollars or focus on an idea that affects a million people. Sounds to me like you have an idea that could make a million dollars you should focus on in order to fund your idea that affects a million people.”
Wow, so there it is, we focus on building a shoe company to sell a product from which a large portion of the profits go to building opportunities to spread the gospel and build the Kingdom through empowering and discipling God’s people. From that point forward we have focused on designing and making a comfortable shoe, which is something we all buy anyway, in order to fund missions designed to teach the people to fish and become self-sufficient.
~ Ryan Null
Fast forward to 2025 and a lot has happened, along with many changes in our life’s journey. We hope you’ll follow along as we share all God has done in our lives in the posts to come.
Ryan & Chané
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