 Hey Weirdos, I've had a couple of people who have noticed that I have been forthcoming with the fact that I'm born again Christian, they've asked for my testimony. Now, if you're not familiar with the term testimony, essentially, it means they're asking me to tell my story of how I found Jesus, and just kind of the story behind that and where it's taken me. So rather than try to type this whole thing out, I thought I'd just do sort of a stream of consciousness thing with it and see where it takes me, all right. So to get back, I'll start from the very, very, very beginning in my life. When I was, even in grade school, I was an entertainer. I've always been an entertainer in some way, shape, or form. In grade school, I used to lip sync to Elvis, I was a huge Elvis fan, and I actually did that for talent shows in elementary school, thinking that it would be cool. But then in junior high, I actually discovered I had a decent singing voice at the time, so that's actually what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a professional singer, you know, I wanted to be a rock star. So throughout junior high and high school, I concentrated a lot on music. However, I did spend a lot of time in theater as well. I enjoyed being on stage and acting as well. Well, after high school, I tried college for a short while and it just didn't take. Now, throughout this entire time, I was born and raised Catholic, but I left the Catholic Church probably around the age of 12 or 13. It's there was there's I can't remember the term for it right off hand. But there's a there's a sort of a ceremony or tradition of the Catholic Church, where you're kind of initiated in as an adult. For affirmation type of thing. And I just for some reason, I don't know why, but at the time I just decided this is not for me. I don't want to do this. And I really, I seriously have no idea why. But I left I didn't leave the Catholic Church at that point. I just didn't want to move on with, you know, the ceremony of it. So later on, I did leave the Catholic Church, but for different reasons. But once I got into college, that I took about three years of college and got maybe half a half a semester worth of credits. I was with college was not my best subject. We'll just put it that way, school in general. But at that point, I got a job working at a bank. They fired me because I had too much personality. That's their words, not mine. I ended up working for a credit union for a while and then I discovered radio in 1990. And I've been in radio since then in some way, shape, or form ever since. A little before that, though, my dating life is kind of really what brought me to God. When I was still in junior high, a friend of mine asked me to go to this what was called, I think, a rock seminar at the time. And essentially what it was is a whole bunch of teenagers came into into a church and they gave a speech about how evil rock music was. Essentially, that's that's what it was. And I at the time, I don't know why, but I bought into it. And that lasted about a whole week until I realized I could no longer listen to Journey or Huey Lewis in the news and decided, well, maybe I don't want to don't want this whole Christian thing. They were completely off base when it came to Christianity, by the way. So. But still, that's what that was the day that I actually quote unquote gave my life to Christ. At least that was my I think that's my first step into it. There was an altar call. I went up there and, you know, I got prayed for. But really, I think we're really stuck is when I was probably around 20, 21, I was dating a girl and a completely different girl. And we were at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City. It's a it's an amusement park similar to like six flags, but it's in Kansas City. And every year in Kansas City, they used to, I doubt they do it anymore, but they used to have a Christian family day where they would bring in all of these Christian music artists to perform and just make a big, you know, hey, they all these concerts would take place all day long with Christian artists. So they'd have several stages to around the park. Well, my girlfriend at the time, excuse me, was a real fan of Brian Duncan. Brian Duncan was a solo artist and he was incredible voice. But I just didn't really understand it at the time. I didn't understand the the appeal of Christian music in general, because I thought it was all kind of cruddy. So we went to this concert. And before the concert, we were we were just kind of joking around. Kind of doing some people watching more than anything else. And coming in, a guy came up on the stage. He was wearing, if I remember this correctly, lime green biker shorts, a tie dyed t-shirt. And I think it was a white ball cap that was that he wore backwards on his head. He's wearing sunglasses and and tennis shoes. Well, that guy did a mic check. And he just made made sure that all the mics were working that the keyboard was working. And then later on, they said, ladies and gentlemen, Brian Duncan. And that was him. That's the way this Christian artist dressed. And he was a wild man. And there was a song called Holy Roland that he got into that actually had sort of a black gospel church feel to it. And I got into it and I thought, wow, all right, you know, if Christians can be like this, maybe they're not so bad after all. And afterwards, I ended up going forward and again, giving my life to Christ. And this time it stuck. I was on fire. Ended up going to church a lot, Bible studies. And like I said, and that's eventually what led me into Christian radio in 1990. Because I had a couple of my friends who were actually friends of my girlfriend at the time. They had ended up they were had a Christian band that they were doing. And they asked me to be a singer in it. And they also worked at this little radio station. And I mean, nobody listened to this place. But it was all it was on an AM station dial. And they were doing they were doing their own little radio show late, late, late at night on AM 1380, KC and W. And I thought, hey, that sounds pretty cool. So I went in one day and asked if they had any openings. And the program director said no. So I said, somehow came out of my mouth. I'll work for free. And then he said, okay, great. So I started coming in early in the mornings and helped out the morning guy until I went to my real job at the bank that I told you about just a second ago. Well, eventually I went from part time help in the morning guy, ended up going into the weekends shift. And then eventually a nighttime position came up full time. And that's when I was able to walk away from the bank and do radio full time. And I've been doing it full time ever since. But I've been doing a lot of other stuff on the side as well. Like I said, I wanted to be a rock star girl and up. Well, this is really where things started to take off for me when it came to music. When I became a born again Christian, I started singing and songwriting Christian music. And if I wasn't performing with a band, I was performing as a solo act. And I'd go all around the Kansas City area and perform at churches, mostly for youth groups more than anything else. I did go to Nashville and recorded a couple of songs that were not Christian just to kind of get my foot in the door. And if you are a YouTube subscriber, then you'll be able to actually hear one of the songs that I recorded. It's called Little Criti. You can find it on my YouTube channel though. If you want to check that out, just look for Marlar House on YouTube or type in Little Criti, C-R-I-T-T-Y. And you can hear that song. But after a while, I kind of started, I won't say I was actually backsliding, you know, like slipping away from God, but I wasn't as on fire as I should be. And I actually started to get a little bit full of myself and the phone stopped ringing for the music gigs, which in the long run, even though I was upset about it at the time, it makes sense. God obviously had something else for me, which is why you're hearing me now, rather than buying CDs or MP3s of my music. But so I kind of lost that. I also destroyed my voice at the same time. I was trying to sing songs from people that I should not have been trying to emulate. Like I was a big fan, like I said, of Journey. And I mean, you just can't sing Stephen Perry's songs if you are a baritone. It just doesn't work. I was hitting the notes, but it was not doing me any favors. And eventually I ended up pretty much destroying my singing voice. I have a decent voice now if I stay within a certain range. But you know, I used to have like a three octave range now I have like maybe one and a half. So, you know, it just, I just, I was very, very irresponsible with what God had given me there. So, but I stayed in radio. And in 2004, we decided to leave Kansas City because I had an opportunity to go to an FM station in Rockford, Illinois, which is where we are now. I'm not still not not with the station anymore, but we moved here in 2004 to WQFL FM, which doesn't exist anymore. But it was a Christian CHR like pop station with some rock mixed in. It was a fun station actually. And at that time, I also decided to try out a stand up comedy. Well, being a Christian, it's all clean comedy. And so I was doing most of my comedy at churches and corporate events. But I was also performing for, you know, in bars and stuff like that, which was really kind of cool, because I was able to tell all these people a few jokes, get them to laugh and say, Hey, by the way, listen to me tomorrow morning at such and such radio station. And if they tuned in, they'd say, Hey, this is a Christian station, sort of like a sort of sort of a silent but deadly bomb thrown into the audience there. And I did that for about 10 years. But just kind of kind of got burned out on the stand up comedy. But I continued in radio continued with voiceovers, because it was about that same time I started doing voiceovers for other people, not just radio stations, just kind of fell into it. And I really enjoyed doing that. So that brings us to about 2010, 2011. I spent about six months working for a tiny little AM station in Beloit, Wisconsin, just long enough just to just to try to get a little bit of money into the house, because I lost my job from the FM station that was sold. And but eventually I landed at a station in Chicago, W Y L L, which is still on the air. It's AM 1160 AM, excuse me, AM 1160 hope for your life in Chicago, 1160 hope.com. If you want to listen to them online, it's it's a block teaching program show. So you'll hear pastors talk for maybe half an hour, then I'll come in, just do a couple of announcements, then it's on to the next pastor. So it's not like a personality driven type of thing. I did try doing a syndicated show for a short while after the FM station in Rockford went defunct, but it just didn't really work out. I really wanted it to and it was fun, but you know, it just it just couldn't pay the bills. There wasn't any money coming in with that. But I did continue doing by Daily Dose of Weird News after the station shut down. It was part of a show prep service that I had. And I was actually writing comedy and gathering stuff to talk about and distributed it to other radio stations around the country and eventually around the world, which was kind of fun, very time consuming, but it made a little bit of money as well. But you know, since I was already gathering all that information, I decided I'll go ahead and continue on with the Daily Dose of Weird News, which is what where many people found me originally in the podcast and on YouTube with the Daily Dose of Weird News. Well, then I would say, what was it, three years ago? Yeah, three years ago, I was listening to a YouTube channel, Haunting Stories. Great guy, by the way, over there. If you want to check his stuff out on YouTube, look for Haunting Stories. And I started listening. I said, you know, this is kind of cool. It's on YouTube, but it's not a video. It's just audio. It's just a podcast type of thing, but he does it on YouTube instead. And I thought, you know, with all the voiceovers that I do and the storytelling that I like to try, and I've always kind of had this little dark edge to me. I always enjoyed as a kid stories about Bigfoot and UFOs and ghosts and stuff like that. Halloween was always a big thing for me because my birthday is the day after Halloween, November 1, which is, by the way, the day of the dead, if you're in Mexico. In the States, though, if you are, you know, Christian, it's just all Saints Day, which isn't near as fun as day of the dead to say, but it's still the same thing. But my grandpa's birthday was Halloween. So we actually kind of celebrated the two of us together quite often. So Halloween has some great memories for me. So that's probably why I'm so drawn to a lot of the dark stuff, the Halloween kind of stuff. So I guess I shouldn't have had too much of a surprise that I ended up trying to do some ghost stories kind of thing. And that started on YouTube and I called it Weird Darkness because I wanted the weird aspect from Daily Dose of Weird News. It was sort of a branding thing because I also started doing some other stuff like weird facts that I started thinking about doing and a weird game show where you played true or false questions with it. But Daily Dose of Weird News stuck and so did Weird Darkness. But it was so much time that it took up that I just couldn't handle doing it anymore. There was no income really coming in from YouTube and all the time it was sucking away that I should have been using for something that would make money. So I decided to go ahead and move Weird Darkness to just a podcast because at the time Weird Darkness and Daily Dose of Weird News I was actually creating actual videos. I was looking for photos that I could use within the videos and do the fades in and out of the photos and putting text up there. It was a daunting process. So I started doing just audio, just doing the podcast version of Daily Dose of Weird News and Weird Darkness. Eventually I dropped the Daily Dose of Weird News. I just didn't have time for anything. And that's when things really kind of exploded. Because even though I started Weird Darkness in October of 2015, it was October of 2017, that I went to just the podcast. And that's when it blew up. And that brings us to where we are now. As of recording this, it's now September 1, 2018. So we're actually almost coming up on one full year of Weird Darkness being a podcast. Now a lot of people though, when they came to me they asked, well, how do you balance being a born-again Christian and then also doing this really dark, dark, dark stuff? And honestly, I have struggled with that myself. I have, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with God and myself asking, you know, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? Because it doesn't feel Christian, you know? It doesn't feel like anything that church stuff or church people would do. Although I don't really consider myself a church person. I'll get into that here just a second. But I have had a lot of people ask. And there are a couple of things that I've realized. One, people in the New Testament did believe in ghosts. Now whether or not they should have is a different question. But I know that they did believe in ghosts because in the scene where Jesus is walking on the water, Peter yells out from the boat thinking that he's seeing a ghost, not seeing Jesus on the water. Well, if he's thinking that he's seeing a ghost, then obviously they believed in ghosts. Also, when it comes to the dark stuff, I'm not endorsing anything. The Bible specifically says not to go to mediums, necromancers, stuff like that to look into the future or to speak to the dead. Specifically speaking to the dead. It definitely warrants against that. And I don't endorse any of that when I'm telling the stories. I'm simply telling the stories that people send to me or that I find online or that authors give me permission to use that I find are interesting. But at no time will you hear me endorsing trying to speak to the dead, trying to look into the future by going to sorcerers or people like that. And I'm not going to tell you that they're wrong, that they that they don't exist. I personally believe they do exist. I believe that now technically witches do exist because they're they're ones of the Wiccan faith. But I believe like that Wiccans have magic. I do believe that actually is true. I believe that you could possibly use Oesia Board and end up speaking to something. But I don't think it's some but I don't think it's a dead relative you're speaking to. I think it is a demonic entity that you are speaking to. So I'm of the opinion you just avoid all of that stuff because it opens you up to demonic influence. But that's my opinion. And that's also one reason why I end my podcast with a Bible verse, because I have a feeling a lot of people who are listening to Weird Darkness are naturally drawn to dark stuff, which would make sense. Otherwise they wouldn't be listening to the podcast, right? Well, those people, I'm also thinking they're probably more inclined to suffer from depression. They may have suicidal tendencies or thoughts. They might just be doubting, you know, what's the purpose of life at all. And I want to be able to give them a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. You know, so I mean it when I say when we're coming out of the darkness and then throw a Bible verse in there because I want them to come out of the darkness. It's one thing to enjoy stuff like this and enjoy horror movies and ghost stories and stuff like that. But I don't want your life to be that way, right? I mean this should be an escape. This should not be your life. This should be just an escape for a couple of hours and then you go back to your day and be a productive person, a bright person, someone who's bringing joy to others in society. And hopefully I'm bringing joy to you in this podcast. So I have had, just to let you know, I've actually had people contact me after listening to Weird Darkness saying that the podcast itself has brought them back to God, which is incredible to me. It's leaving me speechless obviously because I really can't come up with the words to describe how I feel about that. I would never have expected that a podcast like this would bring somebody back to God. It just, it floors me. But I had somebody contact me saying that they listened to an earlier episode and something just kind of hit them just right. And they decided to look something up in the Bible and that got them thinking that they needed to do an online Bible study, just kind of check that out. And then they ended up going to a church and they're now going to church regularly and it all started because they were listening to Weird Darkness. So it's stuff like that that makes me think that, yeah, apparently God does have a purpose for this. I'm not sure where he's taking it. I'm not sure how long it will stay. I'm enjoying it. I'm not saying that I don't want it to continue. I'd love for this to continue as long as I'm alive. But God, everything has a season, as the Bible says. So whether or not God has this going for decades to come or just days to come, that'll be completely up to him. But it's great that he is using it. He's using something that I would never have guessed would be used for eternal value. So I hope that answers some of the questions about my walk with God, why Weird Darkness is the way it is. If you have other questions for me, you're more than welcome to send them my way. I'm trying to think if there's anything else here that you might need to know, but I don't think so. But I do have a home church, by the way, here in the Rockford area that I'm very, very happy at. It's State Line Church. If you want to find them online, it's stateline.church. If you want to give them a shot, you can actually watch some of their videos and listen to audio on there. I think it's on the website. I know it's in the app, which is what I use. But if you just want to kind of see what's going into my head, what am I being fed with, well, you can check that out. And believe it or not, what I make here on Weird Darkness, which isn't a lot right now, but what I make here does get tithed to my church. So 10% of everything that, you know, like the t-shirts that you guys buy, you know, stuff from the Weird Darkness store or the ads that you hear, you know, 10% of that, actually closer to 15% of that, it goes directly right back to my church. So you feel you can feel like you're actually doing some good in the world by buying a Weird Darkness t-shirt. Hint, hint, hint. Okay. Anyway, I hope that answers your questions. Thank you very much, everybody, for being a huge fan of Weird Darkness, continuing to listen, sharing the podcast with others on Twitter and Facebook, stuff like that, leaving the reviews. It all makes a really big difference. And it also really inspires me when I see that feedback. This is one of those mediums where you don't get instant feedback, unlike when I was doing stand-up comedy. If I threw a joke out there and it bombed, I knew immediately if it bombed. But here, I don't get that immediate feedback. So it's really great to get the letters, the reviews, stuff like that. I really do appreciate that. So I love you all very much. Thank you. Thank you for being a part of the Weirdo family and God bless.