In this episode of The Book More Show, I spoke with Nic Williams, pastor of South Shore Community Church in Sarasota, Florida. We discussed his journey from youth pastor in Georgia to leading a congregation that grew from 140 to over 1,100 members. Nic shared insights about Florida's unique church culture and the challenges of maintaining personal connections while leading a growing community.
Nic opened up about creating "Be Free," an initiative inspired by personal tragedy after losing a friend to an overdose. This experience drove his commitment to support recovery and mental health in his community. His approach focuses on helping people overcome emotional burdens through practical steps and community support.
The conversation turned to Nic's new book project and his strategies for reaching diverse audiences through multiple platforms. We explored how celebrating small victories and shifting from negative to positive thinking can transform lives.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
I discussed the journey of Pastor Nic Williams, from his beginnings as a youth pastor in Georgia to leading South Shore Community Church in Sarasota, Florida. We explored the growth of his congregation from 140 to over 1,100 members.
Nic shared the inspiration behind his "Be Free" initiative, which aims to support recovery and transformation in the community, spurred by personal experiences with addiction and mental health.
We delved into the process of writing Nic's new book, focusing on selecting relatable stories that highlight personal freedom and overcoming burdens, including anecdotes like cluttered spaces and unread emails.
In our discussion, we emphasized the significance of celebrating small victories in personal growth, with examples such as overcoming credit card debt and staying sober for 31 days.
Nic reflected on the broader impact of personal transformation and community support, illustrated by stories like a stroke survivor who inspires others despite his challenges.
We explored various strategies for promoting Nic's book project, including engaging with audiences through podcasts, recovery meetings, and diverse media formats to reach a wider audience.
The episode concluded with a discussion on the importance of revisiting projects to assess their impact, highlighting the interconnectedness of a book and a course in spreading a unified message.
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Bookmore Show. It's Stuart Bell here again, and today joined by Nic Williams. Nic, how's it going, buddy?
Nic: Doing great. A little chilly here in Florida, but doing good.
Stuart: I was just talking to Lillian in the office earlier today and she was saying that she was having to put socks on with her slippers as she ran her granddaughter to school this morning and it was mid-40s in Windhaven there and up in pennsylvania here, I think we're like 40 and feels like minus two with the wind. So oh, I was. Yeah, it takes a bit of acclimatizer. I'm still not used to it.
Nic: Florida, though you expect to be just perfect paradise all the time I, I hope it would be paradise all the time, but every january it hits hard right catches you off guard.
Stuart: It makes you feel alive, though. Um, thanks for jumping on a call. Always excited to share these podcasts and I really like the ones with clients that we've worked with, obviously because we've got a bit of the background story and know some of the behind the scenes. Why don't we start by sharing with the audience a bit about you and what it is that you do? Give people a bit of a background on the Nic Williams story?
Nic: Yeah, so I'm actually. I live in Sarasota, florida. I'm a pastor here of a church called South Shore Community Church, but I've been in Florida for about 15 years now maybe a little longer than that and married for 18 years next week and then I have two kids, aubrey and Noah. They are 13 and 14 and play travel sports. So our life is extremely busy but fun, and in Florida I mean sports never stop, because it doesn't really get cold, except for today. It's always warm enough to go outside and play.
Stuart: Yeah Well, congratulations on the anniversary so. I have to ask I didn't realize this, but boy, girl, boy Aubrey or girl Aubrey.
Nic: Girl Aubrey.
Stuart: Okay, so we've got a boy, aubrey oh too fun, 15. Yeah, so similar. He's the youngest of our four, so the older ones are all kind of driving themselves and out living by themselves, so we don't have to run them around. So we're on the tail end of that. Travel basketball and tennis, and the older ones played soccer. So, yeah, there's light at the end of the tunnel, like 13, 14 kind of yeah.
Nic: Yeah, we're right in the middle of it I don't see the light at the end do they at least play the same sport, or you're having to go in like two different directions at the same time no one plays travel baseball, one plays soccer and then they both are trying out for pickleball, which is all the rage these days. So they've got a pickleball team at their school. So they actually try out next week and that'll be a new addition to the schedule yeah, yeah, yeah, it's always additive, isn't it's?
Stuart: It's never replaces, it always adds to.
Nic: Always, always.
Stuart: Okay, well, so the move down to Florida. Were you a pastor previously, or was that after you moved down to Sarasota?
Nic: No, I started as a youth pastor up in Georgia, where I'm from, and then came down here, so I've been in ministry for probably 25, 26 years at this point.
Stuart: Okay, yeah, it's always interesting moving areas and taking the same career with you. We've done a handful of books with pastors over the years and that idea of the kind of your individual approach but bringing that to a new group of people, that transition, it always seems as a lay lay outsider. It always seems like a interesting way of coming into a community with a particular approach, more so when you've got, when the I'm struggling with words, what's the correct word? I want to say audience. I get stuck too much in a marketing team, but the congregation, sorry yeah the congregation were.
They was an existing church that you moved into, or was it a new one that you set up from the start?
Nic: yeah, so the church that I met now. So this is my first lead pastor position. I've been youth pastor, worship pastor at other churches, but this church is had already been around. They're about 30 years old at this point and I've been here eight years and the church had just gone through a major split. When I got here they were down to about 140 people and they're trying to figure out if they could survive or not. They laid off some staff and budget was going down quickly and my wife and I had come from a hard church previous to this and so we were kind of hurting and healing from that and didn't know if we were the right people to help them while they were hurting. But it ended up being a beautiful marriage between us and them and it's been an incredible ride. We went from 140. We're running a little over 1,100 right now.
Three services on Sunday morning and it's gotten insane. That's a lot of people to connect with. That's probably the biggest challenge I run into in ministry is I'm a people person, so I want to talk to everybody, and it's almost impossible to have real conversations with that many people on a Sunday.
Stuart: Yeah, so of those 1100, the average congregation on a Sunday is that in the high mid-hundreds, high hundreds. How many people are you having to connect with in person?
Nic: yeah, so the people that come on campus were like last Sunday we were right at a thousand and five people, and so the majority of them come. And then it's Florida. If it's too sunny or too cold, people stay home and watch from home. It's just part of the Florida life. I mean, I'm four minutes from Siesta Key Beach, one of the best beaches in the world, and so it's tempting for people to go and hang out there yeah, I mean dialing into the service from the beach.
Stuart: It gives a different take on the it does well at least.
I suppose it's opportunity. Those people in worse climates might just stay at home, so at least you get a chance to stay connected in that way. Yeah, the book. Let's switch gear a little bit to the book then. I know you've got a lot of work already from all of the sermons and the pieces you've written in the past. Share with the audience a little bit the idea of bringing that together or bringing the book together, and how much it was helped by stuff you've already created in the past, if not directly the same stuff, but just the idea of, as a pastor, the written word is something you deal with quite a lot in terms of all of the sermons anyway. So was it a straightforward bridge into the idea of a book or was it something you've been thinking about for a long time that that now was the right time?
Nic: yeah, so it was a process that I was, uh, processing for a long time. Honestly, I wrote my first book back in 2016 about a plane crash that I'd seen and how it affected my life, and after I wrote that book, I thought, man, I really want to speak to my audience and what they're going through. We have a recovery ministry here at the church. We have about 200 addicts that come on Sunday nights and they're walking hard roads through things that they're dealing with currently and, again, like I was saying earlier, it's hard to have honest, intense conversations with everybody you meet, and so I kept kind of feeling that burden of man. I wish I could help everybody, just sit down and unpack what they were going through, and so that's kind of where this idea of Be Free came from. Trying to get to a place where I could share some of that insight.
I've got a guy his name was Taylor, and Taylor was an incredible guy. He had come off the streets with heroin and just had a rough go of it, had gotten arrested, was trying to get his life together, and that's when I met him and we started walking this road together and, man, he was finding freedom, he was healing. He met someone. She got pregnant, they had a kid, and about three, three weeks later I saw a message on Facebook, somebody just posting RIP Taylor.
And I'm like, what do you mean, rip Taylor? I just talked to him yesterday and so I got in my car, drove to his house and nobody was there. I called every number that I had and finally got his girlfriend on the phone and she let me know that he'd overdosed and and it just broke me. I mean, it was one of those moments that I didn't know how to process that when you're trying to help somebody and their addiction takes them down, and so that kind of fueled me a little bit more to say, all right, I need to be a part of the solution. So we enhanced some of the things we do here around the church with recovery and I dove deeper into some people's stories that I'm just personally connected to.
Stuart: But that kind of really gave me more catalyst to sit down and start writing this book yeah, that idea of and again, this is talking about someone who's been in a very fortunate position of not having to deal with it directly and the mental health issues of the people who I know and I'm close to are very and not as as deep and don't haven't impacted everyone in the same way as they do for people where it really hits hard.
So even at that, um again, struggling for words, I don't want to say superficial level, but the the least traumatic end of that spectrum, it's still the people who are left behind. Dealing with all of the what could you have done and how could you have done different and personally not really struggling with that, not having those problems as a as an individual yourself, it's difficult to apply logic to an illogical situation or whether logic is very different from the we're dealing with. So I can imagine that it's been that close to it and that close to a person that was affected and then seeing what was left, the people who were left behind, yeah, really gives it a different, a different take than a book on marketing or a book on financial planning or something that doesn't quite have the same hit.
Nic: Yeah, I wish I could say that story was unique, but unfortunately, in the recovery world it's a common story, especially when we hit 2020 and the pandemic and all the meetings across the world shut down. All these AA meetings and AA meetings celebrate recovery. I mean, all of a sudden, the people that were dependent upon meetings to keep them clean could no longer go to meetings right, and so we saw an uptick in that. But the book's not just for that. I know it's an extreme case, extreme story. I just began to look at my own story, my own life, and how much baggage I have from my past whether it's guilt or emotional burdens or even the church is bad about putting spiritual burdens on people and all of a sudden, you've got that and you're bringing that into your marriage and into your parenting and I realized, man, I'm not living in the freedom that the bible talks about, because I'm holding on to all these things from my past, the baggage of my past yeah, actually that's a great point, isn't it?
Stuart: the idea that the we often and I think this is in part like the internetification or the social medification of the world the kind of clickbaity, shorter attention span. It's the extremes of the spectrum that get a lot of the heat and attention, but actually similar symptoms all the way down. So when you think about which stories to include and which approaches to talk about and the audience that would be receiving this and the audience that would be receiving this, driven by that kind of critical event at the beginning, but thinking about the wider audience that affects, how did you decide what pieces to include and what pieces to exclude? I'm always interested it's a question I ask a lot of people whether it's just a financial planning book or a book on finance, on being free and getting rid of the baggage, the idea of what to include and what not to include, because once you start it's very difficult to know where the edges are and where to stop. So how did you find that for this one?
Nic: Yeah, that's always a challenge, right when you're writing. You've got more stories and more information to share than you can really share. Part of it for me is I'm a storyteller and so I went through my illustrations and my stories and tried to figure out which ones can I paint the best in imagery for someone reading, and then which ones have more commonality. So a story about heroin addiction is probably not one that most people are going to connect with, unless they're in recovery, but a story about my closet being just. I have a closet over here that I can see right now and I write about it in the book and it is my. I grew up in a house where we had a drawer that was the clutter drawer. Everything just didn't have a home. That's what in there. I've got a closet like that and it's very embarrassing.
I don't go in it. Often I find a new thing without a home. It gets thrown in there. I need to go through it. It's bad and people can connect with that, because we all have places that we store stuff that we probably should get rid of, but for some reason we convinced ourselves just to hold on to it. So I tried to find stories that were relatable, things that we all have, this commonality. Another story I put in there was about my wife. If you look at her cell phone, she has like 56,000 unread emails and that drives me insane. I don't know, is yours like that?
Stuart: Mine's like that. My wife is like yours. My wife is like an inbox zero person and I declared bankruptcy years ago and have, like, I think, 137,000 unread messages in one of five mailboxes. So I'm the other end, I'm your wife's end of the spectrum and beyond.
Nic: That's funny and so I talk about that in the book, that we all have those emails we need to read, and obviously she has 56,000 of them. I try to get mine down to zero. It doesn't always get that close, but it's definitely not over a hundred, but we all have that. And so I just try to find stories that honestly, were relatable, that would connect with people, that would help them see the reality of the things that we hold on to and live in the baggage. And there is one chapter on recovery. The whole book's not technically on recovery, although it does apply to it and there's one chapter specifically on celebrate recovery and how to walk in freedom if you're in a heavy addiction.
Stuart: Yeah, the idea of freedom, though it does span the spectrum of freedom from distractions of cell phones and freedom to enjoy a meal with family, and, right at the other end of the spectrum, the recovery and addiction piece. What's the aim of the book? If you had to have one ideal target outcome from someone who was reading it, what would be the, what was the hope in writing it that someone would get from it? Was it a specific set of actions or just a kind of a thought technology to a different way of approaching something?
Nic: yeah. So each chapter kind of builds on each other. There's reflection questions at the end, and I think my first step really is to help people acknowledge their baggage. If you don't name something, it's hard to overcome it. If you don't know what it is that's holding you back, then how do you get rid of it? And so one of the first or two chapters is about acknowledging it, and then the rest of the book really just gives you step-by-step principles on how do you actually get rid of the things that are holding you back. How do you take those and not let them be these things keeping you from living in the freedom that we all want to live in?
The Bible says we should live in, but for some reason we just don't do it, and that even I mean it touches on habits, it touches on things your parents said to you, but it also touches on the importance of forgiving others or forgiving ourselves. I think that's one of the biggest baggages I talk with people on is they made a mistake in life and for some reason that mistake was so important to them that it is the thing that they'll never let go of. They can't forgive themselves, and so I try to put handles on those things, to give them tools to walk forward. And taking the next step and I think that's the big key for me is we all want to get to the end where everything's perfect, but there are a lot of steps in between there and sometimes we get paralyzed by how many steps it's going to take to find that freedom, to get over our past. And so the importance of just taking that next step and celebrating that step you took.
Stuart: Right. Actually that's a great point, isn't it? Because there's so much the again. I mean social media doesn't help this in many ways. The idea that there is a perfect position to get to in the end and the journey between where we are and that perfect outcome can seem very long, but celebrating each step in between Do you get feedback from people, not necessarily from the book directly, but from the people who you talk to in this way about a realization that they can celebrate those small steps?
Look for me just to share a personal story, the idea of I can remember years and years ago the grain of summer beard kind of gives away their age. But years and years ago ran up out of college like credit card debt and kind of was living kind of paycheck to paycheck and most of the paycheck was going to pay those kind of bills. And talking to someone then about the idea of having even like a thousand dollars of savings or a thousand pounds, as it was back in the UK, and in that conversation I go forward like burst out laughing a little bit, just the ridiculousness of that small baby step or small step to turn something around so that as a light bulb changing to think, okay, this isn't talking about every time and plan of having half a million dollar pension. This is just that first small step and that was a real eye opener. So do you get similar feedback from people as it's a light switch, saying that there is a way to celebrate a small step?
Nic: yeah, I think. Uh, in the book I actually I think there's four different chapters I talk about this one idea of celebrating, and I kind of poke fun at it that you probably read this in the last chapter. I'm repeating it because, for some reason, we don't celebrate things. We celebrate birthdays. We celebrate holidays, we celebrate big things, but we don't celebrate the small steps we take towards things. For example, if you're trying to lose weight, right, we want to celebrate the 40 pounds that we lost, but maybe we should celebrate the two pounds we lost. Like, every step of progress is progress, and so I will say that has been the most surprising thing to me how much I've gotten a little bit of pushback from people on. Are we allowed to celebrate that? Should we celebrate that?
I've got a guy in particular I'm walking with right now. He's an alcoholic he's probably 35 that he's been drinking since he's 15 years old and he's never been sober more than 30 days, and so it's been a lifelong challenge for him. And so when we got to 31 days sober, I called him. I was like dude, let's go celebrate somewhere. He's like what do you mean? And I was like you've never done this before. You've never had 31 days clean. Why shouldn't we celebrate that? And he's like I guess you're right, we should celebrate. I said, yes, we should. But I think in celebrating that, that gives us a win and that gives us something to look forward to the next milestone, the next step. Man, I'm going to celebrate again when I have this happen or that happen.
Stuart: Yeah, it's so strange, isn't it? The baggage and the stories we tell ourselves and kind of say to the kids a little bit, or if, talking with other people, this idea that everything's kind of equally true and false at the same time, and it's the story that you tell yourself, reinforces whichever perspective you want. It can be the best of times or the worst of times, and a lot of it just comes down to the interpretation. And it's interesting that a lot of the interpretation picks up on the negative rather than the positive.
Yeah, I don't know what it is about society and I've been in the US for eight years permanently and five or six years in and out before that, but grew up in the UK and the UK and the US aren't that different, but they're still. I mean, they're not. It's not like the US and Canada. There's some degree of separation, but still that mentality. There's a commonality there that people think about things in the same, often think about things in the same negative first way, when you think about the wins that people have had and their own stories of moving from carrying all of this baggage around with them through to being freer, does that come through in the ministry? Do you get a chance to share some of those stories with other people and kind of illustrate or demonstrate to people I don't want to say a better way of thinking, but a different way of thinking that might be put them in a better position. Are people happy for their stories to be shared?
Nic: Most people are. Most people are. It's funny when I tell their story to them, it's a different perspective, right, like I've seen them from a different perspective than they have seen themselves and they have felt. And so when I sit down with somebody and say, hey, I want to share your story, they're like, why would you want to share that? And then I shared what I experienced watching them find freedom, overcoming their baggage, living a different life than they were living before. It's almost like a new light bulb goes off in their mind and they realize man, I really did do that, Even though they went through the process and they felt that now they see it in a new way and so they do get excited.
I've got a gentleman, maybe not in the baggage arena right now, but he had a stroke recently and he is just very depressed over the situation. He's found himself in Verbally. He can't talk anymore. We're working on walking and different things. And it's about three months ago this happened and Sunday he came to church and there were 15 people from the nursing staff and families that came to church because he came and I talked to him.
I said do you realize, like you just brought 15 people to church and you didn't ever say a word to them. They were just around you and experienced your joy and who you are, and that led them to want to see man. Why do you love this church so much? And I mean, of course, I tell him my perspective of what I'm seeing and he starts crying, gets very emotional, but is, I think sometimes it's like anything else. We can't see it the way other people see it, and so to be able to speak that into people's lives and then share it is a big part of ministry and helping people, both that aren't living that story but the ones that actually live.
Stuart: I think for the individual, like you say, because it's all incremental change, you live in it day to day you really don't see the start and end position. It can be quite surprising to kind of look back and see how far you've come. I think it's why I enjoyed doing the. I mean, it's why I enjoyed the business as a whole. But why I enjoyed doing the podcast particularly is because you get to give people opportunity to share the passion for their own business, whether it's something broadly life-changing or something in a smaller niche. I mean, I don't want to throw financial advisors under the bus, but you kind of think about that as being more of a um. Again, I don't want to say transactional, but more of a, a numbers-based business. But oftentimes when we're talking to them on the podcast the numbers are kind of secondary. The numbers just take care of themselves. If they've been in business for any amount of time, then they know how to take care of the numbers. But it's the change they make to people's lives and not treating everyone like a cookie cutter, like not everyone who comes in wants to retire. Not everyone's going to be retiring as a couple. Not everyone's going to have kids. They want to leave a legacy for. But their ability to kind of see through to the people. And what you do obviously is very people focused all of the time. But still, that difference between not just superficially broadcasting a message from a pulpit but actually dealing with the individuals and what's important to them and helping them make the most of their situation, regardless of what that situation is, yeah, it's really brings back the humanity to it all.
Yeah, over the years. So eight years at this church, obviously that's quite a dramatic eight years as well, because COVID was in the middle of it and how people kind of interacted with other people and with themselves is quite dramatic. This idea of bringing the stories together in a book to help people we're well, we're now beginning of 25, so pandemic stuff is starting now. We haven't ruined that situation. Now, that weird situation, I have to think back to how it was in in those times but, like you were saying, with the meetings and the addiction and the ability of people to interact with other people, we're maybe not thinking about it in the same way that we were pre-pandemic. So anyway, long way of saying the timing around bringing the book together now. Do you see this as an opportunity to jump start those conversations and remind people that there is a switch that they can make into thinking about things in a different way. Does the timing of the book, the fact that it's coming together now, is of a significance to that?
Nic: yes. So, as I said, I this book started as an idea eight years ago, and so I was sitting on this book and then ministry got so busy, my kids got so busy that, you know, things just get put to the side and I'd say it was about a year and a half ago that I sat down and thought, man, I still need to write this, and the needs seem like they're getting bigger in my world. We're obviously not in the pandemic anymore, but we're in the next pandemic, if you will like, the next. There's always something that everybody's getting up in arms about. Right, this month it'll be political on both sides. Next month it'll be something else, and there's always something that we're allowing our emotions to get taken over by.
And I think, man, I don't want to live like that. I don't want my emotions and my daily quality of life to be run by whatever society is yelling about and celebrating today. I want it to be led by what God's called me to, but I want to celebrate what I'm doing and where I'm at in life, and I think there's just too many people that are wrapped up in media and all the things happening, and so for me, it is a very freeing time, to bring this message and say, hey, stop that. Like. Those are things that hold us back too. Those are things that fracture relationships, those are things that are hurting people constantly. Let go of those things too. Like, live in freedom, like, have some fun. We live in Florida, and Florida is a very free state, as they say, and Sarasota is paradise. It is a beautiful place to live, and so I can't imagine living here but being upset about things all the time, and so for me, that's part of the timing of the message, right right.
Stuart: There is an element of we're not worried about getting eaten by mountain lions or needing to light a fire in order to make sure that we don't die by this cold weather.
So, therefore, the lizard part of our brain that's looking for something to be outraged by is filled by things that necessarily don't affect you on the doorstep, like the manufactured third party outrage that there's a lot more of now.
It's, yeah, unnecessary, I think, is a great way of describing it, and it's interesting for to. It's interesting why people think, or what it is in their brain that kind of anchors on that. Because on the surface, if you kind of slow down for a minute and wrote down that I'm in sarasota, I can go to the beach later today, I need need to get groceries, I need to go to church on Sunday, but if something can happen in tens of thousands of miles away that actually doesn't affect me by five orders of separation. Okay, which am I going to pay more attention to? And the amount of people that seem to spend a lot of time getting bent out of shape about things that aren't necessarily directly affecting them and almost at the expense of some things that do directly affect them. Like I said, the impact on relationships or the neglecting the five miles of influence that they could have.
Nic: It's yeah, it's very where you live in interesting times, as they say we do, and and social media and news drives that, and I'm shocked at the state of our world, how many people have allowed those things to drive their emotions and how free they feel. But it is a very common story. Yeah, the the story that is five degrees of separation away is what's biggest in their mind and it's mind-blowing yeah, it's very interesting.
Stuart: I always remember years and years ago, someone saying or a book, I mean relatively standard advice, so I can't remember where exactly I read it, but it was if you're struggling internally, then do something external, and I mean very glibly things like might get better, so something like volunteering or going and doing some community work, like just taking it away from the first degree of your own mind to something outside. When we grew up, we were myself and brother and sisters were all air cadets. That was like the thing that we did, and I was navy reserve in the uk for a few years. But that idea of of service, if not making it about you, of making it about the mission, I guess to a certain degree that's the, that's the non-religious element of the church. I mean there's a mission there that crosses over with the religion, but still it's thinking outside of yourself. Do you ever see what's the best way to describe it? I mean so.
Personally, I'm not that religious. We didn't grow up as a framework, and in the UK it's very different from the US just in how pervasive isn't the right word either. This is the first podcast after Christmas, I think so clearly I'm struggling with words, so I need to get back in the flavor, but but the the breadth of it is is nowhere the same. But the idea of doing something for someone other than yourself, whether that's under religious context or another service context, there's still lots of opportunities for that. So do you see the same thing? People will come to the church and be brought to the church and then have that realization that the world is bigger than just them, and whether that's from the religious sense or whether it's from a service sense, they that relieves some of the pressure and helps this idea of being free, because it takes them outside of themselves yeah, I think so.
Nic: I think I think, deep down, everybody wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be a part of a movement, if you will, or something that's making a difference and a change. And while we all have that inner desire, some people just don't know how to do it. I'm a very introverted person and so I don't know how to do it on my own, but through the church I know how to do it right, and so you become part of a community whether it's the church or different organizations and you find that thing that helps you move forward, and I think there is freedom found in that. There's freedom found in that, because you're helping other people, you're seeing other people find freedom, you're spending your time, energy, resources, mind on something different than the things that were taking it up before, and all of a sudden, things are just different.
My wife and I, for example, we come from very different backgrounds. My parents are still married, middle-class family Growing up. My dad was in the Army for 27 years and my wife's family was very poor and they split when she was three years old. By the time she was 12, she wasn't living with them anymore. Some cousins had taken her in and so she just had a really hard upbringing.
And through the church, we have a ministry called Care Portal that was put out by the governor and it allows us to step into families that are poor and hurting and have actual needs. They need a bed, they need a mattress, they need tangible physical things. And the state actually calls us and says, hey, I know this family, they don't go to church, they're not a part of a religious community. We're not wanting you guys to go proselytize to them, but they need help and will you be willing to help? And we stepped in and said we'll help anybody that needs help. And so we started physically meeting those needs and my wife took over that ministry, that project, if you will, and it was freeing for her because it was all of a sudden walking into rooms with little kids that are five and six, where she remembers not having anything, looking and seeing they don't have anything, but now being able to be that person that can give them something.
Stuart: And so through through that serving, as you were talking about, through that opportunity, she begins to find freedom, just by reliving some of her past but changing somebody else's future freedom just by reliving some of her past but changing somebody else's future, yeah, and that connection that she's got to that project is completely different from someone coming into it who doesn't have that experience, who might have all of the the caring and want the same outcome. But the perspective that she brings to it I mean for the people on the other side of that equation, that must be pretty special. Whether she's makes comment to an explicit reference to it or whether it's just this subtle ways that she's dealing with it I mean really pretty special and a great full circle opportunity to close the loop and rewrite some things yeah, it's always interesting because when we walk into some of those situations, her perspective and mine are different and, like you said, we both want the same outcome.
Nic: But she's noticing things in the room, she's noticing the way the kids act and picking up on things that I'm not picking up on because she's lived it, and so we'll get back in the car and we'll kind of debrief on how amazing it was to help somebody and how we'll pray for them and hope that we can help them in the future. And then she'll say did you notice this, though? And I'll be like what do you mean? And she begins to unpack a whole situation that I was a little oblivious to, because I've just not lived that that story yeah, that's the great thing about opportunities, that kind of cross borders and bring in all different perspectives.
Stuart: So the religious perspective again brings all sorts of different people to it. The service military service brings all sorts of different people to it. The local communities bring different people, or maybe a smaller footprint but different people. But that opportunity and I think maybe, like you were saying before, with the, the outrage cycles in the news, everyone gets so kind of myopic on that one kind of outrage focus. But the ability of the other things to have broader perspectives and the people acting within those being open to other perspectives and almost seeking out other perspectives to get a more rounded view, that is, there's an element of that which creates a bigger, bigger outcome than if it was just one person doing it with one perspective. It's, yeah, a real benefit to spreading the message wider and involving more people in it.
Um, I always get to this point in the podcast and look up at the clock on the computer and realize that time is flying by. What's the? What's the next step for the book? And the book is a project and the opportunity to for it, to start conversations with other people, to have ideas in the moment on how you're ideally going to use it and what the next step is for getting it out there and allowing it to start conversations yeah, I mean several different avenues.
Nic: Obviously one being like with you doing a podcast and just getting that message out there. I've got scheduled several recovery meetings around the area to speak at and just kind of dive into that. I'm in the process of developing a. In doing this, they can read the book or they can have a conversation with me, and each is going to show you different things. Each is we're all different learners on different levels, and so some people, reading is what they need. Other people, they need to have that video driven or that conversation, and so, trying to, I just feel like I've put so much energy into this. I want to try to find every avenue to help people that I can, and so that's the newest one that I'm working through, trying to see if it will help.
Stuart: Yeah, and, like you said, people consume in different ways. So providing all of the opportunities for all of the different ways that it could be consumed, both in terms of the delivery mechanism, so audio or video or written but also like the chunking down and the bite-sized nature of it Not everyone's got time to go from start to finish but to provide the pieces for them so that it matches up with whenever they're ready and whatever way that they're ready. It's just that opportunity to crack the door open and then lead down a path towards all of the other pieces.
Nic: Yeah, I found it interesting. I don't know how you are with this, but so I've changed, like, my diet this month, doing something new in january, and I decided I need to do some research on it. And I got on youtube first and all the videos are like 10 to 15 minutes and my attention span has just gotten shorter in life. And so I got off youtube and got on TikTok and thought, man, I like this, like I'm getting one minute clips of ideas and thoughts, and if I like any of them then I can kind of deep dive into that and find more on that. And so I find the same with stuff like this.
Some people, again, books are a big deal. I mean, I showed you at my library I have tons of books and so I love reading. But for some people the short attention span is a niche that we've got to make sure that if we've got a message we want to get to people, we have to get it out there in multiple avenues, and one of those ways is niching it down to some short clips to just draw people in.
Stuart: Yeah, and the same with the book. I mean the idea of the call to action in the next step and beyond the book, giving people what paths to go. The same with those video things if someone's only got two minutes to look at something, but the thing that they look at starts them on a journey that maybe immediately, or maybe the following week or month or year, reminds them that okay, there is more to this that I can drill in when I've got time, but if the big piece was the only option that they had, then that's going to be a restriction to certain people where they just don't have that. It just doesn't marry up with their life in that moment. So, yeah, I completely agree. All of the touch points in all the places, but all leading to the other things where people can go deeper and learn more yeah, definitely yeah, I talk about going deeper and learning more.
What's a great place? Want to make sure that people have got opportunity to follow along with what you're doing. So what's a great place for people to go to if they want to dive in and find out some more?
Nic: Yeah, I mean the best place to go is you can go to my website. It's nic-williamscom, that's Nic-williamscom, but Nic without a K, and you'll find all the things I've written on there my first book, this book, and then some other eBooks that I've written. Or southshorechurchcom is my church. You can jump on there and listen to the messages. I've got a podcast as well, which is on the website, and there are several different areas to kind of touch people through that.
Stuart: Fantastic. Well, as always, I'll make sure that I put links directly to those in the show notes, on the podcast players and on the website where we host the video as well, so just one click and people can get straight through, um Nic, absolute pleasure. Time goes too fast, as always. So it'd be great to circle back later in the year actually and see what, get some of the feedback from the book and the course as well, and just thinking about that holistic approach to all of it, how the book's playing a role, but also how the message is getting out there. So yeah, if you, if you've got time later in the year, it'd be great to circle back and do a check-in and give everyone an update.
Nic: I would love it and I appreciate your time today, Stuart. It's been fun.
Stuart: Perfect mate, real pleasure. Thanks for starting off the year in this way, and hopefully it's warmer from now on.
Nic: I hope so All right.