Halfway There: Pursue Who God Wants You To Be With Eric Nevins
Learn to discover your gifts and find out who you are. The show’s guest in this episode is Eric Nevins, host of the Halfway There podcast. Eric talks with Chad Burmeister about his spiritual journey. Eric loved building Legos and climbing trees as a child. The sense of creativity and adventure he learned from that helped him become who God wants him to be. Although he had to work at a financial company far from his dream job, he didn’t stop pursuing the life he always wanted. And that’s to serve God! Tune in and keep building your dream life!
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Halfway There: Pursue Who God Wants You To Be With Eric Nevins
I'm with another podcaster, Eric Nevins. His website is EricNevins.com. His podcast is called Halfway There. I'm happy to have Eric here. On his website, it says, “Halfway There is packed with years of experience working with God and features people in a variety of stages of life and Christian maturity. You will find a graceful gem in each episode that will help you live more faithfully.” I'm excited to dig in. Thanks so much for investing some time, Eric.
Thanks for having me, Chad. I'm excited to be here.
You've talked to a lot of people. Some musicians, the one that you shared with me that was pretty wild is that somebody was doing cocaine and they came to Christ during that episode. I don't recommend that to our readers, but it can be found anywhere.
You have to listen to the episode. That's a friend of mine named John Swanger. He had a crazy story as a bank robber. One person who was faithful in his life shared the Bible with him. He didn't judge him for his habits and for the fact he was living with a stripper and working as a bouncer at a strip mall and strip clubs. He loved him and cared for him. He gave him a Bible and he read it. God can show up anywhere and I love that fact. It's one of the stories that remind me that when it seems like God's not around, he is always working.
My good friend Arjun Sen who moved from Denver to Houston, is the CEO of ZenMango. He's been a major CMO at major companies that you would have heard of and he's been experiencing God all over. He said, “God is everywhere.” He's had some interesting challenges that we'll leave to him, but he sees things in a different way. It's everywhere. I also talked to another person whose goal in life is to end racism. He's talking how, “It's unconscious and it's all about loving through it and seeing people.” He has a six-episode training thing for corporations apparently. I'm eager to dig in because he talks about how, “That person who's on cocaine living under a bridge, that is a person, too, and you've got to see that person as God's child.”
I remember even Robert White tells the story of a guy named Art. They do these training courses and he was under the bridge. They brought him into their training course and he became the number one trainer in their entire organization. It's amazing what happens when you take that extra moment to look out for people. I would like to rewind the tape first and go back to your childhood. Are you from Colorado your whole life? Where'd you grow up? The second part of the question is, what did you love to do? What was your passion when you were younger?
I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. That's my hometown, I just got back from a week there. We vacation in Iowa, which sounds a little contradictory. I grew up there on the East side. My wife and I lived about two miles apart growing up. We’re a Christian family, grew up going to church. Eventually, we ended up going to college in Chicago and we ended up in Denver finishing up seminary here in Denver Seminary, which is how we got here. We never left because Colorado is beautiful. The thing that stands out to me as a kid, there were two things. One is I love to climb trees. I love to see this beautiful old mulberry tree in our backyard. Mulberries are everywhere, but it was so fun to climb up in because it was such a sturdy, beautiful tree. The other thing was creating with Lego. That was my favorite thing, Lego blocks. Building something and I was into spaceship stuff. Back then, I had that space series, if you remember that.
My son was big into Legos and they've gone up in price. What you used to be able to buy a whole drum for $99 and now it's a little kit.
I never had the big ones. I always wanted the Death Star or the space shuttle or something. There were times like Christmas I might get a larger set, but mostly it was the smaller more affordable medium-sized ones that I would get. That was okay. It worked.
Thinking about the tie between building Legos and climbing in the mulberry tree, which is adventure if one’s creative, is there a tie that you can think of then to now? How does that relate to what it is you're doing now?
They're similar. On the one hand, creativity with Legos, for me, it was always building something. It’s building a spaceship and trying to figure out how this would work, what do I like about it, and creating a story around what was happening and playing with them. When it came to climbing trees, it maybe was an adventure, but it was just getting a perspective on the world. Being up and trying something a little bit new, going out on a branch, I don't normally go out. Also, I had spots where I could sit comfortably for a long time and I would take a book up in the tree.
Halfway There: Learn how to ask a question, be quiet, and wait for someone to answer.
As far as connections to now, certainly, I do both. I'm a big picture person. I have some challenging visions for where I want to go with my company and with what I'm doing with Christian Podcasters Association and I enjoy the process of building all the things. We're putting together a course right now and I'm enjoying doing that. I have thoughts about how to do it and I was like, “That's going to take so much longer. I don't know if I can do that.” I enjoy tinkering with it, figuring things out, taking this piece off, and putting that piece on. That's what I love to do and it's funny how that comes out throughout your whole life.
My day job is at a company called ScaleX and we help companies with data and prospecting. Now that I'm in the lane of helping some nonprofits and launching Living a Better Story and doing the show, all of that skillset applies to reaching out and getting people to attend and getting guests. You may be one degree away from living the exact life you're meant to live, yet you stay in a lane. The car driving right next to you is the car you should be in. It's amazing. I've always prayed from the time I was a kid, like you, I grow up in a Christian family, but not to a level where I pray in the morning and at night book-ending my day. I can hear music in the day, I'll hear a song from the Christian radio and it's not even playing.
It's fun when you tune into this different frequency in life and try to say, “God, what lane should I be in and where can I make the biggest impact for you?” It sounds like you're on a very similar path. There's always a challenge that people face in their life and that's why the Living a Better Story has pictures of mountains in the background because when I'm driving home in Colorado and you see all those mountains, you're like, “Those are big.” What's something that you're comfortable sharing that was a big mountain that you had to face and how did you overcome that mountain?
People who don't live in Colorado don't experience this as often as we do, but when you and I look at Mount Evans, which is the one that's up towering over Denver, we know that if we drive there, we're going to go up, but it's not a straight path. We're going to go up and we're going to go down and we're going to go up again. We're going to drive around a little bit and do those little hairpin turns and all that. It's not a straight path. My journey to hear is like that. I use that metaphor when I left my job in 2018. One of my biggest challenges was being in that job.
I crammed a three-year degree into nine years and got it done. We came out to Denver to go to seminary, finish up that degree, took me about four years here. I worked full time at a financial firm and I went to school full time and I tried to do some ministry on the side, trying to get some experience, and I had a young family. That was hard, but I graduated in the middle of the downturn. A lot of churches weren't hiring yahoos who graduated from seminary, because they could hire anybody or if those positions were eliminated, there were a lot of things that happened. I ended up spending the next eight years in the financial world, in a place that I didn't want to be.
That took a lot of different forms. For a long time, I was getting yelled at for ten hours a day, doing customer service. For a while, I was a check bouncer, so I bounce people's checks or block people's cards, ruining people's day for a living. All those kinds of things were not my heart. They weren't creative and spiritual at all. It was just show up, get into your 6X6 cell, and do the thing that somebody told you to do. I discovered podcasting. I love podcasting. One time I remember a customer I was working overtime to try to pay off those loans for the degree that I couldn't use and a customer said to me, “You should be on the radio. Have you thought about doing that?”
I said, “No, thanks. That's great. I like radio, but I wouldn't even know what to do.” I planted the seed in me so that when I discovered podcasting, I was like, “I need to do this. This is something I can do and I want to do it.” I started a podcast. It took me two years to do it and it took me two more years to figure out how to get the money to leave my job and figure out what to do. It was a huge challenge trying to find my way from what I thought my life was going to be like to where it is that God was leading me.
I remember Pastor Hale at our church in Southern California, when we were on premarital counseling, he said this phrase, “You can do anything for any amount of time as long as you know why.” I still repeat that every once in a while, when I’m like, “This stinks right now, but I can do it for another six months or 3, 2 years,” whatever that may be to get to the other side of what God's leading you towards.
What's funny is you never know what you're learning that you're going to take with you. I look back at those customer service years, I learned a lot of things. I learned how to ask a question, be quiet, and wait for someone to answer. That's not a highly valued common skill, but that's something that you have to do if you're a podcaster. I learned how to ask good questions and how to ask questions that get at what people mean, not what they're telling you, because there's a different thing there. I also learned how to network to the right part of the company, which later came into play with networking as a podcast.
I interviewed a guy named Jeff Brown, he has the Read to Lead podcast. He's been podcasting since 2013. I was listening to his show when I was working at the bank and now, he's been on my show. That's cool. That blows me away. That networking thing is something that I learned how to do on the phones and trying to figure out how to solve problems for other people.
I'm learning that this community of Christians is a pretty small community and people know each other. When we started talking, we talked about Michelle, we talked about a few other people and it was like, “You mean Michelle from Kansas City?” “Yes, that's the Michelle.” It's neat when there are people that are on the path to eternity and how do we do what God wants us to be doing. It's neat to know people that are on a similar march. If you were to talk about your passion now, obviously, you're doing podcast, you're in the lane you want to be in. What gets you up in the morning? What are you excited about?
Halfway There: We all need grace.
Podcasting is a means to an end. I love podcasting and the industry. In two weeks, I'm going to be in Nashville for Podcast Movement, which is the biggest podcasting conference. A lot of the industry is going to be there. The reason I went to school is because I was trying to answer this question about, how do we grow in Christ? What is that like? There are these stages of the spiritual journey. They're not linear like they are with your physical development, but they do come in waves. There's a stage of the journey that I call finding yourself in Christ. Podcasting fits into that because you learn to use your voice, you had to speak up, you learn to discover your gifts, and find out who you are.
In and doing so, I go back to Ephesians 2:10, “We are his poetry, his workmanship, created to do good works that he has given us from before at the beginning of the world.” I believe podcasting is that thing. Even though I'm teaching people to podcast, we have a membership at the Christian Podcasters Association. People can join, I'm about to launch a course. I do that because I'm passionate about helping people become better followers of Jesus. Podcasting is one way that they can do it. The reality is most churches aren't going to be able to teach them to do that or give them those opportunities to use their voice.
I met with a gentleman named Pastor Travis Hall out of Atlanta. He talked about the cycle of grace and embracing grace. When I met with the CEO of On Purpose, he's been doing that for many years. He had me fill out a form, ONPURPOSE.me. It's an app that puts competing purposes against each other until you finally get to the last two words. For me, it was embracing grace and I was like, “That's it.” Nobody can be perfect. Works versus grace. One of the people that was on the call closed his video out for about ten minutes because it teared him up. He chased and got the prize. He had a house, an airplane, and a driver, but it was never enough, so he kept chasing the circle. Starting from the place of grace gives you such a different foundation. What are your thoughts on grace? Have you dug into that topic very much?
We all need grace. The thing that I'm always continually astounded at is that we as Christians, evangelicals especially, we think, “Grace is how we get in the door. You have to admit your sin, you need it, but then you still need it.” We forget to talk about that part, we put on a metaphorical mask after 2020 and pretend like we don't need grace. A big part of it is learning to be comfortable and being who we are even if that has some rough edges to it. That's the way that Jesus led to me. Jesus was perfect, I'm not going to say that, but he had some rough edges. If you read closely, you'll find places where it says Jesus was indignant.
In Mark 1, there's a passage where he says Jesus was indignant because this guy asked him the question, you can read it on Mark 1:40. He turns over tables or something, but Jesus was comfortable being who he was and being that person who is filled with righteous anger. That's not always accepted. I don't know if I want to turn over the doughnut tables at my church if that would happen.
I went to an arcade room. Apparently, there are 6 or 7 of these in Denver now that are arcade games from the 80s,70s, and 90s, it was so cool. I played Tron, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, and all of it. What was wild to me is when I went into Tron, and I haven't played that game in many years, everything came rushing back. Do you remember the little bars that come down? I don't know about you, for me, I always moved the whole thing over to the right. Most people fired at the bars on the left, but the learning was you're supposed to go to the right because they move left to right. There's a whole strategy in my mind around how to do it. We, as people, get into the way we do things like hitting those bars down on Tron and they become the rough edges in our life. They're part of it. It's like, “That's okay. Now, it's good to take a step back and look from 30,000 feet sometimes and say, ‘Now, that's a rough edge you should smooth out.’” It’s amazing.
Have you been down to the outdoor arcade down there in Manitou Springs?
No.
It's astounding. You got to go. I was there one time, this guy works there and told me a story. He was watching people play and making sure everything was working and an elderly gentleman was standing there, staring at this machine crying. He goes, “Sir, are you okay?” The old man goes, “I'm crying because that machine has not moved in 70 years.” He said after World War II finishing out his term, he was stationed in Colorado Springs and he worked there part-time and that machine had been there the entire time. Isn't that crazy? That thing goes back so far. It's like this open-air thing.
Let’s dig into your business a little bit. I want to go three years from now because someone reading this might say, “This Eric's an interesting person. Maybe I could work with him and help him.” Think about three years out. You're looking back, you're back on the show, “Chad, I had the most amazing three years that I could have ever dreamed.” What happened in those three years?
I help a group called Christian Podcasters Association. I envisioned it as a group that helps people start their podcast go from beginning no nothing podcaster to pro-level podcaster where they're making their full-time income doing ministry if that's what they want. Not everybody wants that, but some people do. I want to fill in all those gaps. I would love to have learned how to do a great course launch, how to roll those things out, how to know my audience, and how to help people build those skills. I would love to be a much better coach than I am. I love coaching and helping people see those things that are holding them back. I got a few of those myself, I have a coach, too, that I'm trying to figure those out.
Halfway There: Even though you're scared to do it, go ahead and show up.
I would love to say that in building the business, I overcame my own fears. That's what it's about. It's as much about who you're becoming as what you're building. When I look back three years, I would love to say, “Not only did I build a business that's sustainable and going to help a lot of people and feeds and takes care of my family really well, but also, I became the person that God wants me to be.”
If you went back to when you were younger, maybe twenty years old, is there something you would tap yourself on the shoulder and say, “Remember this one thing?”
I would tell myself this, “Say yes and do it scared.” I'm the religion and spirituality director for Podcast Magazine. I interviewed Father Mike Schmitz, who is The Bible in a Year podcast. It was the number one podcast in all of iTunes for parts of 2021. I got to do that because I said yes to an opportunity I had a few years ago. Even though you're scared to do it, go ahead, show up, do your best, you'll make some mistakes, and it's okay. You'll open so many doors if you say yes. Figure it out is a key to success. There are some times I can look back. Early on, if I hadn't done that in my 20s, I might be on a whole different career path and place. Who knows? That's something I wish I would've learned to do.
That's so valuable. This app that we're building came out of the retreat. I was like, “It wasn't an app,” but I was like, “Why couldn't it be an app?” I've never built a mobile app. Some person randomly hits you like they do on LinkedIn every day, “We do offshore development, would you like some help?” I was like, “Send me a few sites you've done.” It was amazing. I'm like, “You're the one. You happened to hit me on the right day.” It happens and now, I'm looking at it going, “It's about to launch any day.” People are emailing me going, “That looks clean and elegant. Nice work.” It's because I went into an uncomfortable zone.
You have to go into that then figure it out. I grew up thinking that adults had it figured out. Maybe we all do that like, “They know what they’re doing.” I told my twenty-year-old self, “Nobody knows what they're doing. They're all making it up. Do what you want to do. It's okay.” Everybody's doing that. There are personalities that project more confidence than others, but even those people have insecurity. That's the thing that everybody has. Knowing that would have helped me out a lot.
The last question, we've touched on it already, but what role does faith play in your journey and in your life?
Faith is my whole life. I went to a Bible college, I got a degree in Biblical Studies and a Master of Divinity because I wanted to be a pastor and I cared about the spiritual journey. That's been my whole thing. It's interesting that we all hit these bumps in the road, so at the moment, I 100% believe, but I'm not happy with the evangelical church at the moment. I'm trying to figure that out. Some of the forms I'm like, “We've got to change that.” I've got a lot of things to say about that. My faith in the Lord has never wavered. It’s fine, but it's a huge part of who I am.
A friend who's very intelligent and has helped a million people with mindsets work going, “Deep inside, clear your path, tell the truth about your current reality, live a better story.” He's a believer and yet he looks at it and says, “My specialty is not in faith. Who am I to share with a group of people coming through my courses about faith? I'm not Eric Nevins. I didn't graduate. I can't quote Ephesians 2:13.” He has that challenge. You've been through the courses and I bet you've talked to a lot of people who also witness who haven't been through the courses. What are your thoughts on being learned in the Christian faith versus being yourself in the Christian faith and showing who you are and who God made you be like? How do you rationalize that?
What I care about most is whether or not we are pursuing what I call spiritual Christian maturity. There are certain phases that people go through. I don't care where you are, whether you're a professional Christian or not, you have an obligation to pursue Christ and becoming who God wants you to be. That involves a lot of things and it goes beyond the read your Bible and pray things that are the spiritual disciplines of the evangelical world. There’s a lot more to that. It's not just disciplines or things and activities that you can do either. It's shedding the identities that you've taken on because you think that's who you're supposed to be and letting God tell you who you are. When you do that, there's freedom and joy in it, but it's also painful. There's some pain in going through the spiritual dark night or the spiritual desert. I have a friend who once said sometimes the desert can be beautiful because there's even beauty there even though it can be a painful experience.
We meet people along the way where you know they need to go through that desert and I feel like there's not just one desert. I went through a desert at one point at a conference, a four-day workshop and I walked out of it and I was like, “I'm changed. I understand.” Another five years passes and you go, “I see a new desert.”
I've had at least two big ones. I took a break from seminary that ended up being three years, two kids, and one dark night of the soul. I had to go through some stuff and wrestle with, “This isn't what I was promised. Everything's falling apart, why?” When I went back to finish up, I did that, but the whole thing with not going where I thought I would go and I was like, “What are you doing? This was not my plan.” I had to wrestle with calling again in that way. The funny thing is everything else that I've done with podcasting and finding my calling has all been not an accident, but happened stance in many ways, so I was like, “I'll trust that.”
Halfway There: Pursue who God wants you to be.
It is amazing how that works. We've been talking with Eric Nevins. Eric, thank you so much for joining the show. To subscribe to his podcast, EricNevins.com, Halfway There. I'm sure it's on all of the podcast channels because you teach people how to be professional podcasters.
Everywhere that you can get podcasts, you can find Halfway There. It's one part hat tip to Bon Jovi, one part saying, “We're going to be on the journey forever. We're always only halfway there.”
Eric, thank you so much. Have a blessed day and I appreciate your time.
Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Thank you. We'll catch you on the next episode.
Important Links:
Episode - John Swanger Shares Light in Dark Places
About Eric Nevins
I live in the greater Denver area with my wife Jodi and four kids. Jodi and I both grew up in Des Moines, Iowa in evangelical churches. Seriously, we were the family that was there every time the doors were open. After we married in 1997, we moved to Chicago to attend Trinity where I received a degree in Biblical Studies.
Like all good Biblical Studies students I went to seminary, also at Trinity. But that was when I started to feel something missing in my life. We had tremendous upheaval in both of our families from health problems to divorce, relational issues to the exhaustion after our first child’s birth. In it all, I wondered where was God? Why was I not experiencing the abundant life Scripture promised?
God is never far and always working even if we can’t see him. Jodi and I began to develop relationships with some people who were into this thing called “spiritual formation” which sounded nebulous and strange to us. Really, though, they were teaching us the ancient ways of interacting with God that millions of Christians in centuries past used. We learned that you could know a lot about God and not know Him at at all.
After a short hiatus (three years and two kids!) we moved to Denver to finish my Master of Divinity, with an emphasis in spiritual formation.
I wish I could tell you that was the best time of my life but seminary was far more challenging than that. Not the schoolwork. I loved that part. The lifework of making money, trying to raise a small family, and keep a marriage in tact nearly sunk my ship and when it was over we had a number of holes to patch up. It turns out that navigating the rocky parts of the path is also part of spiritual growth. We had to choose whether we would settle for less, give up, or keep pressing into what God promised whether we felt like it or not.
And that’s where my story meets today. I’m learning as much as I can from as many as I can about God and how to live with Him.
