When did it kind of formalize on the nonprofit side?

Yeah, yeah.

So we started raising, figured out we had this way to start raising money for getting people to do tough things.

And we've done really crazy like hike across Death Valley in the summer.

We just had some folks do seven marathons in seven days in seven continents.

So they started in Cape Town, flew over to Antarctica, flew over to Perth and flew overnight and then run another marathon.

So just wild things.

my gosh

I'd love to hear a little bit of the beginning stages, the grassroots campaign that started it at all, if you will.

Yeah, man.

So Venture started as a dorm dream.

It was just one of those crazy college ideas.

I was just out of college and my friend was still in college and he said, man, let's bike across the country to raise money for hurting kids.

And I went, I had no idea you're a cyclist.

And he said, oh, I'm not.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm

... like, the prayer culture of leaders in America, like, that changes everything.

And, and so we ended up doing 100 hours of interviews with leaders around the world and f- everywhere, like from a, a, a Texas oil billionaire to a person who's grown up in a war refugee camp in a war zone in the middle of the jungle, so, like, that type of a, a spread.

And we thought, "Man, their prayer lives are gonna be all over the map, from pastors to business leaders to, you know, uh, nonprofit workers in min- in ministry." And instead, what blew us away was how similar their prayer lives were.

And, and so you got a guy, you know, New York financier, downtown New York, and then Francis Chan and a guy that's planting churches in the Himalayas, and their prayer lives were similar, not different.

It seems that the Holy Spirit, any person that wants to really lean into prayer practices, the Holy Spirit leads them to the same prayer practices.

So that's where the chapters of the book, uh, Lead With Prayer came from, were these commonalities, these common prayer practices that were, were common a- across the board, across the world.

Hmm.

... and we're like, "What, are we not gonna pray for the person?"

Yeah.

And in Nepal, I mean, it's so normal that the local leaders are like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, let's just grab him, and we know what to do," you know? [laughs] Like, it's wild to describe how normal it is.

We look at it as supernatural.

They're like, "Oh, it's pretty normal." And they're just like, "And this is what you do." And I was like, "Oh." And so my, my first experience was in Africa, where we're doing this type of open air type of sharing the gospel in these places, and it was late at night, and we were trying to tear down the stage, and a guy came up to me and put his arm around me, and I look up.

I didn't see his eyeballs.

I just saw the whites of his eyes 'cause his eyes were rolled back, but he was still walking and moving as if somebody who could see.

... and leading us into the wrong thing, but it's dressed as the right thing.