Finding Your Faith In God: Food For Orphans With Gary VanDyke
The average American eats three meals a day, and sometimes, they don't even finish it. Orphans wish they had at least one meal a day. If you can just drop one meal, which is 35 cents, you could feed a lot of orphans. This is why Gary VanDyke founded the program, Food For Orphans. Gary discovered how blessed he was when he flew to a third-world country. Ever since then, he has followed the path that God gave him to care for these children with no families. Join Gary as he sits down with Chad Burmeister to talk about his life journey and finding God. Learn how to give to those in need. Let your faith move you today!
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Finding Your Faith In God: Food For Orphans With Gary VanDyke
I've met my match when it comes to changing the world because God told me that I needed to change the world in the last couple of years. Now we're talking to Gary VanDyke who has changed the world for a long time. Gary is the Founder of Food for Orphans. He's done a lot of work for them. He left a successful career in radio and TV. We're going to dig into some of that. Gary, I’m glad to have you on the show. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for the invitation, Chad. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
It's fun to talk to the people that you get to talk to. I'm on about the number 40 conversation in 2021 on the show. What almost everybody has in common is that something happens in the middle of their life that feels like the biggest gut-punch you could get. You told me you had a burn on your hand when you leaned on a grill at a restaurant trying to catch yourself. I'm sure that was one of those little bumps in the road along the way that was hard to get through at the time. It’s great to have you here. You're in Colorado Springs. I've been fishing there a lot. I've been to Garden of the Gods. My grandparents went there with me. How are the Springs? Is it warm? Are you having a good day down there?
Colorado Springs is right outside the gates of heaven. Our weather is perfect. Everything is perfect. We're at about 7,000 feet high. It's always good weather here.
They're building a new overlook on the top of Pikes Peak.
It’s a new visitor center.
That'll be neat. Let's rewind the tape a little bit and go back to when you're a youngster. What I've found in talking to people is that we're all created in God's image. When we're children, that's the closest to who we're meant to be because there have been no filters put on. There are no teachers. You've barely started to understand language and whatnot. When you were a kid, what were you passionate about? When you woke up in the morning, were you in Colorado Springs? Where were you? What floated your boat when you were a kid?
You confused me there because you said let's go back to our childhood. I haven't left my childhood.
Me too. I'm still stuck there as well.
I was born in Kentucky and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I went to high school up in New York State. I've been on the eastern side of the United States for a long time. In the past twenty years or so, I've been out here in West in Colorado. When I was a child, I was raised in a house that always worships God. My father was called to be a pastor when he was older. He was in his late 30s when he first went to college. Around 40, he became a pastor. I spent all of my childhood and my teenage years until I left home as the son of a preacher man. I'm troubled, to begin with, because of that.
Half people stray far to one side and the other half stay on the straight and narrow. Did you stray at all after those days?
Absolutely. I'm not proud of it but I'm acknowledging it. As soon as I left home when I was twenty, I immediately turned my back on God. I believed in God but it wasn't something that was an important part of my journey. God was not part of my GPS, shall we say. I decided to go my own way and do my own thing for several years until I made a decision to either follow God full-heartedly or reject Him altogether and call Him a liar and fake. I realized that I believe in God. I wanted to pursue Him. I wanted to follow His path. I decided to drop everything else and follow Him. I did it on my own. Nobody pressured me. Since then, it's been great. Life has been tough. I've had some challenges. There's no doubt that the fact that I'm following Christ is an important part of my destiny and I'm glad about it.
I visited Kentucky and stayed an extra day because there were some flight delays out of this small place called Lexington. I went and saw the Noah's Ark Encounter. It was incredible.
I'm hoping to get there someday.
I would highly encourage it. When I went to watch the first twenty-minute opener, somehow the app was named 77 Pray that we're launching. One time, I presented my idea of the app and a guy in the audience said, “You should call it 7:7.” I was like, “What for?” He goes, “Because Matthew 7:7 says, ‘Ask and you shall receive.’” I was like, “That's a cool one. I like that.” I told my wife, “Maybe we'll call it 77.” She goes, “77 has no meaning. You have to put something behind it.” I was like, “77 Pray, how's that?” She said, “That'll work.” That's how 77 Pray was named.
I'm sitting in Lexington, Kentucky or outside of it at the Noah's Ark Encounter, and in the first twenty minutes, they go, “Based on Genesis 7:7, when Noah and his family entered the ark.” I got goosebumps because I've been seeing Noah's Ark everywhere I can be. There was a pastor at a cigar bar once and I said, “Humor me. Would you flip to a random verse?” He gets to the Noah’s Ark verse. Another time I'm in Florida in Sarasota and I go, “Humor me. Would you flip to a verse?” He goes, “No.” I was like, “That means we're not going to hit the Noah verse.”
He opens it up, “Our chapter today is about Noah.” He talked about it. I'm like, “God, I get it. You want me to understand.” There's a flood that's coming is the message I've been feeling. It's not water but it's information flood. You need to choose the right door and that's what 77 Pray is going to be about. Get rid of Facebook. Let's get people that are like-minded that seek the kingdom and coalesce around something better than all that other fake stuff.
Food For Orphans: Everyone has seen American poverty, but that's nothing compared to third-world country poverty, where people are suffering and dying just because they can't get a piece of bread.
The story of Noah's Ark is a story of renewal and starting over. That goes right along with a lot of what you're talking about.
You don't have to wait until you die to start over. You can make the decision today to say, “Clean slate. Let's go.” Thinking back to when you were 6, 10, 12, or your childhood that you were the pastor's son, how does that now tie into the work that you're doing now and the work you did through your career?
It helped me and taught me how to listen to God, and how to ask God questions. That’s what my childhood taught me. It was praying with a conversation attitude and not a liturgical attitude. Having a conversation with God opens up a whole lot of information that he'll download to me. If it wasn't for my relationship of seeking God, I probably would never have had the opportunity to start Food for Orphans and impact the lives of thousands of orphans around the world.
We've been to sixteen different countries. We've fed thousands of orphans. We've provided over eight million meals, close to nine million, to orphans around the world. When I left home and turn my back on the church and God, if it wasn't for my childhood, I wouldn’t have had a place to come back to. I would not have known to have come back to God. I would have been out there bouncing around from stupidity to stupidity if it wasn't for the fact that my mom and dad laid the groundwork for me and gave me the points on the GPS to return to.
There's another Coloradoan who lives near Evergreen or probably somewhere near there, Dr. Jim Wilder, who's a neurotheologist. I was introduced to him and two days later, he said, “I'll come down to your firepit.” Every Thursday or so, we have a group of 5 or 10 people come to the firepit. It started at the beginning of COVID and it grew from two people to twelve. Jim Wilder shows up one day and it was an amazing conversation. His parents were missionaries and so were his wife's. It’s a similar story. He said, “I don't know. This is either one big fake thing or it's real.”
He gets invited by three girls to a church and he's asked to pray at midnight. He goes, “I'll do the prayer.” Now he's like, “Now I'm going to either be damned because I'm faking it or I just don’t know.” He meets this other kid that night who said, “Let's pray every night for a month and compare notes, and see what the download is and how comparable it is." He goes, "You would not believe me. For 30 days in a row, we compared notes and it was the same message. It's almost word for word." He's like, "At that point, I realized that there is there. Now I've committed my whole life to learn about the theology and the neuro side of connection and understanding God."
That's fascinating.
It’s cool. He said that there are 613 laws in the Old Testament. I said, “I'm thinking of writing a book on making good choices, a kid's book.” He's like, “Good luck with that. In the Old Testament, there are 613 simultaneous laws. When there are two options, it's 2 to the power of 613 when you’re trying to consider all of those 613 variations. You know how much that is, Chad.” I go, “Yes. It's like every piece of sand on the beach in California.” He goes, “No. It's every known neuron in the entire universe times 2 times 3.14.” I'm like, “I recognize 3.14. That's infinity. There's no way anybody could make a valid decision analytically." The right way is what will God do and how would I optimize for the history of time.
He's like, “You've got to optimize for what would God do because it's way above our pay grade and how do you optimize for the history of time.” I was like, “I better get to work. If I'm optimizing for the history of time, I got a lot of action that I need to take.” I love these conversations. They're fascinating. There are a lot that people have inside them that they don't realize. When they hear about someone like you that's fed eight million meals and thousands of people around the world, that's commendable. It can't always have been that easy. You've had a career, some health stuff, and some challenges along the way. What's something that you're comfortable sharing that was that gut-punch that now looking back was a good thing but at the time felt like it was hard to go through?
Do you want me to be honest with you?
Honest and transparent, that’s what we’re looking for on the show.
In 1991, I had been married for over twenty years, and I thought everything was going well. My wife came to me and said, “I'm leaving. I'm going to move in with my boyfriend.” I didn't even know she had. I went through a divorce that just about killed me. I stopped eating and lost about 60 pounds in two months. I had a rough time with it. I had five children. I went to a counselor and he said, “What you're feeling is extremely similar to what a man would feel if his wife was killed in a car wreck and all their children died also. It's a normal thing but it is severe.” It was for me. It took me ten years to get over. It took me ten years to not be in a suffering mode where I felt a tremendous loss.
Because of that, there was an opportunity I had in 1999 to go visit some children's projects for Compassion International. I went to Lima, Peru, South America. While I was there, I saw what I believe is poverty for the first time in my life. I'd seen American poverty but that's nothing compared to third world country poverty where people are suffering and dying because they can't get a piece of bread. When I left Lima, Peru, I knew that my life was changed forever. I knew that it was not going to be the same for me. I could not turn my back.
I couldn't go home and go to my refrigerator, my pantry, the fast-food restaurant, and the grocery store without thinking about all those kids that I saw. Thinking about all those kids that are suffering needlessly while I enjoyed my life and I enjoyed eating three meals a day while they are hoping to eat one meal a day, even a partial meal. I came home and I said, “I'm going to do something about it.” The pain of losing my children in a divorce was what made me super sensitive when I met these kids. The ones that touched me the most were the orphans because they were like my kids. They had lost at least one of their parents. My kids lost me. I identified with these orphans and I said, “If there's something that I can do, I'll do it.” I said, “God, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.”
God directed me to think about what their needs were. I felt that God was talking to me and saying, “What do they need?” I said, “They need everything like books, backpacks, beds, beanie babies and blankets.” He said, “What do they need the most?” I said, “According to the statistics, 70% of them don't have enough food to make it through a day and don't have a clue where foods coming tomorrow or if there is food tomorrow.” He said, “Feed them.” I thought, “God, that's great. How do I do that?” He said, “Get other people to work with you. Get them involved. Give other people the opportunity to join you. You live in America. It's typically three meals a day. I bet you can find somebody who's wanting to cut back $0.35 a day.” That's what we can feed an orphan for, $0.35 a day.
If we can get some people to help us then maybe we could feed some. Here we are, almost nine million meals later. We have impacted a lot of orphans, thousands and thousands of them. For every orphan that grows up and becomes an adult and leaves the orphan project, there are probably ten more that are following in their footsteps that are being born. There are a lot of orphans out there that are orphan for no fault of their own. I decided that it was time for me to do something. I said, “I'm stupid. I can do something.” Even though my people say, “You're fighting an uphill battle.” I couldn't see the uphill battle part. All I saw was an opportunity so I took it. Here we are, we're talking to Chad about Food for Orphans.
It makes me think of Make-A-Wish Foundation. I met the founder a couple of years ago in New York City at an event. Another friend of mine in Arizona was supposed to do a made-for-TV series and he passed away, Frank. I saw the movie about how Frank’s situation came about. He didn't have the best upbringing. His dad wasn't a pastor. The mom and dad had some issues and challenges, to say the least. It led to Make-A-Wish. Now they've impacted 450,000 people. In my mind, “How do I impact a million people?” I've had some people tell me, “Why set an upper limit quota? You're being stupid.” I've got to a point where whether it's 1, 10, 100, 1 million or 1 billion, whatever God needs it to be is what He'll enable.
The 77 Pray app, everybody I show it to is going, “That's going to be amazing. Sign me up.” We could have 47 subscribers but I don't think that will be the case. It's going to enable us to help do things like feed people, help the Kenya girls school at the Daraja Academy, and people that I run across that need help. I'm the vessel. It's all on loan to me. I need to be able to pass it through to people who are in more need than I am. Let me ask you a question. What would you like to accomplish that would change everything for you? I have a feeling I know what the answer would be but let it rip.
Food For Orphans: For every orphan that grows up and leaves the orphan project, there are probably ten more that are just being born.
I plan on spending the rest of my life feeding orphans. The answer to your question is going to be framed within Food for Orphans. What I'd like to be able to accomplish is to find people that can introduce us to corporations, and the corporations would be willing to sit down and have a talk about how they’ll support Food for Orphans in multiple different ways. It’s not necessarily just writing a check but there are other ways that can help these orphans. In doing so, they can reap the benefits of great PR, a great way of using what they do, letting people know about it and advertising it. Let people know that they have a heart. The corporations right now need that because there's so much competition in the business world. This would help them a lot. I'd like to be able to see that happen where we have corporations who are partners with Food for Orphans. I would like to be able to sit down and talk to some people about that.
You're talking to probably the top 25 people in America that know how to do outreach to corporations at scale and that's why the company's called ScaleX. Whenever I uncover opportunities to help such as this, of course. We helped the Daraja Academy double its best year of donations. We're sure we'll be able to help Food For Orphans. We're not here by accident. That's for sure.
Apparently not.
Let's say you could go back to your twenty-year-old self and say, “Gary, you’ve got to keep this one thing in mind.” What would be the one thing that you would tell your twenty-year-old self?
It would have to be, “Don't believe everything that the world tells you. Be wise and smart. This thing about God is legit. God is real. He's there. He's watching. He wants to be your friend. He wants to clear the path for you if you give Him a chance.” That would be the biggest thing that would help me when I was twenty. I would like to say to him to just keep on looking for God and being partners with him. That makes all the difference in the world to me. There have been challenges. You and I talked that I've gone through some medical challenges and I’m going through some medical challenges now. It doesn't bother me to go through a medical challenge if I've got God on my side and that doesn't mean he's going to heal me. He will, eventually. I'll either get healed or go to heaven. There's no disease in heaven. There is something about being able to say, “It's okay. I'm going to be alright. I will be okay because I'm having a blast.”
I played Euchre with my aunt and uncle in Charlotte, North Carolina. Skip-Bo was their other favorite game. Did you play Euchre at all?
No.
There's this thing you can do where you say, “Go at it alone,” and it's not recommended because you have a partner. You play in partners. Me, Gary and Sandra, and the guy from next door. One time I said, “I'm going to go to this one alone,” and it didn't end well. I definitely got a sweeping on that one. A lot of us tend to go it alone in life all the time. When you can recognize that you've got someone in your corner that's cheering you on, you can truly ask. The best prayer that I always use is, “Your will be done.” When I go to bed at night, “Your will be done. Whatever you want me to do tomorrow next year, next ten years. What is it?”
When I go on that philosophy, it's magical. I gave that prayer to a guy a few years ago who was about to lose his family and three kids. He called me back two years later and said, “Chad, you gave me that prayer and you told me to do it for 30 days in a row and I did. I was on drugs, now I'm not. I have two people who work for me. I saved my house and my family.” I was like, “That level of high-five feels better for me when someone else can be impacted.” There's nothing better than that. It's a lot of fun. Last question. I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway because it's question ten. What role does faith play in your life? We've touched on it a lot but what would you say about faith?
Without a doubt, it is the center rail for me. It's where I figure out, “Am I off base? Am I off course?” My faith and my belief in God is how I find whether or not I'm close to the edge of the cliff or not. If it wasn't for me pursuing God and having conversations with God, I don't think I would know where the edges were. I don't think I'd know where the cliff was. I'm not willing to risk it. Maybe when I was twenty, I would have risked it, but now that I've gotten a little wiser and a little older and I've realized some of the mistakes when you stub your toe, it hurts sometimes. You hit that nerve that you’re like, “I didn't even know that nerve was there.”
That's what life is like sometimes. We have a tendency to go maybe a little bit too close to the edge we didn't mean to. Maybe the path we're on is littered with nails and glass and we didn't know it. There have been times when I've been so glad that God says, “Look down. Look at your feet. Look at the path you're on and the direction you're headed. This is not going to end good so why don't you get off this path?” That’s what faith has meant for me and if it wasn't for that, I don't know where I'd be right now. I can be anywhere and not necessarily in a good place. I'm glad to be where I'm at. I'm glad to be letting God handle the reins.
My good friend who's part of the show is one of the experts in the world on mindset. He's figured out with decades of practice and help other trainers how to go inside your mind and almost defragment like in Windows 95. Do you remember Windows when you'd click the defrag button? He has gotten so good at going it alone and helping other people to figure out how to go out alone. Yet there's a missing piece to his life. He had a multi gazillion dollar mansion in Aspen. He had a jet plane and he's best friends with John Denver, and a lot of that evaporated. He's been successful traveling all over the world meeting all kinds of people but his number one stated goal is to grow closer to God. I'm excited to see him move down that path. I'm optimistic that him listening to conversations like this one and spending time at the firepit with Jim Wilder that night.
When you hear over and over again how grown men and women have spent their lives straining, coming back and figuring out that that's what it is all about, I'm optimistic that these conversations with God, maybe we should be branding that because they are. I appreciate you sharing your journey, the bumps in the road, and your mission with Food for Orphans with our audience. I look to form a friendship with you over the years because I can help your mission. God willing, we can move the ball down the field.
That would be interesting. How much time do we have?
We have all the time in the world.
I want to add to that question that you gave me about what I would tell that twenty-year-old. I would tell the twenty-year-old, “Someday, you're going to be traveling to the Central African Republic. When you do, take extra food with you.” Here's the reason why. We had a big dinner. We were feeding about 500 orphans in the Central African Republic. My wife and I went over there to check on the project and we wanted to make sure everything was the way it's supposed to be, make sure the donors' donations were being spent the way that they anticipated it and they would approve. We had 500 of these orphans we were feeding and we were in a walled-in compound with a gate and everything else for the safety of the children. We got to the end of the meal because we had fed all of the 500 kids that were there. We told them, “That's the last of it. We hope everybody enjoyed it.”
We looked over at the gates of the compound and there were two boys standing there with their arms around each other. They were about 3, 5 or maybe 6 years old. They’re very young. It turns out they were orphaned and they had just arrived, but they arrived after all the food was gone. They saw all of the other orphans leaving. They were standing there crying because they didn't get any food to eat and they had been looking forward to this. They just couldn't get there in time to get in line to get the food and we didn't have anything.
Food For Orphans: Don't believe everything that the world tells you. God's real. He's there. He's watching. He wants to be your friend. He wants to clear the path for you if you just give him a chance.
All we had were some emergency protein bars and that was it. We gave them all we had. We made arrangements to get them some food, check on their situation, and where they were living. We took care of all that but I can't get over the look of those boys crying because they missed out on the food. When I came home, I realized I never want to be in that situation again where there are children who are hungry and I don't do something. My purpose for being with you is to let people know that they can do something because there are kids out there who need us to be adults.
We don't need to be children. We need to be adults and step up. We need to stand in the gap for these kids who can't stand in the gap themselves. Chad, I can't tell you how many nine-year-old heads of households I've met. Think about that for a second. It means mom and dad have died. There are five children and the oldest is nine years old. That nine-year-old has got to find food for the other four. I have met these kids. They're out there and we can do something about this. They don't have to starve and suffer. We can do something about this. If I have to miss a meal one meal a day, we're talking about $0.35. We're not talking about a lot.
It's one cake cup a day, to be transparent. That's a third of a cake cup probably.
That's $11 a month. That’s all it takes to provide one meal a day to an orphan. There are things that people can do. I asked people to don't let these kids go hungry when they don't have to.
Visit FoodForOrphans.org. What would they click on? I'm sure it's easy to find.
There's a Donate button on the upper right side of the page.
It’s $11 a month. I feel like I need to talk to you about where I need to travel and when because I like to travel and I'd like to bring some extra food while I'm there so I make sure I have enough.
You'll want to make sure you got something in the backpack.
God does amazing things. I'm glad he asked me to show up here and have a great conversation with you, Gary. FoodForOrphans.org, let's follow up and get some outbound going to some corporations. We helped a lady named Danielle set $10 million in masks at the start of COVID by dropping a voicemail to 1,400 chief procurement officers. She called and said, “Chad, you're creative. Everybody else is doing email blasts and Facebook ads. What do you recommend?” I said, let me give you the tips on how to do a 45-second voice greeting and we'll see what happens. She literally sold $10 million worth of masks. If we can do that, I'm sure we can feed some people.
That’s great. That'd be good. I'm looking forward to that, Chad. Thank you for inviting me. I had a good time.
Gary, thanks for being on the show. I wish you the best with your health and I'll be praying for you. I booked to meet you at some point here in the near future. Instead of two-dimensional, we'll go for three-dimensional.
Let's do that.
Everybody, thanks for joining. Gary VanDyke, what an awesome conversation. We all wish we could have an impact like Gary's had, and we can. All we have to do is follow the Lord. Amen. Thank you.
Important Links:
About Gary VanDyke
Seeking partners to help feed orphans.
In 2007, I started Food for Orphans to feed hungry orphans around the world.
I want to be known as Magnanimous (it means Generous and Noble.) I am a Magnanimal!
Food for Orphans is a 501(c)3 charity and all donations are tax-deductible.
You can feed ONE orphan ... every single day ... for only 37¢ a day.
