This is Ashley Stone and you're listening to the Comeback Podcast.

Okay. Okay, yes, so Ben, starting this off, I, it's just really cool to have you on because we just had Don on the podcast and he just raved about you and how awesome you are and it was interesting how it worked out because we were going to do Don's episode later and then we kind of had a mix up and so we ended up

posting it like the day after he recorded it and then I was just chatting with you about it and I just thought you know what it would be really cool to have been on the podcast because or Bishop Banks is Don refers to us.

So, I'm still Ben, we're good.

So you have been in the Times magazine you've been tell us all the places that your story has been published.

Oh gosh I mean so New York Times magazine, Time magazine actually rang the bell for the NASDAQ stock market to close the stock market on World AIDS Day, the President of the United States when he was giving a speech for releasing

like a new policy invited my wife and I to the White House for that.

Oh my gosh.

I've traveled to colleges from like Stanford and Berkeley and UCLA to you know to Texas in Chicago and Chicago and oh gosh I mean you know Ivy League schools like Columbia and

you know I've spoke at Rutgers and even locally know, colleges in DC like George Washington

University, my mama mater, James Madison University is where you know my wife and

I went to school, uh, VC. in Richmond, University of Richmond.

So it's been classroom settings, it's been different groups and everything.

So yeah, I mean, it's been out there, like student newspapers, it's been in like local newspapers been radio

TV different things so and like it said I'm still just bad. Yeah, yeah, right, but your story,

I mean, it's super important because I think,

I mean, well, we'll get into it,

but that would be like life obviously just really challenging to be able to grapple with

what you've been through as you know just getting through that and so I'm really

I'm really curious to hear how that affected your your spiritual growth and you know where your testimony was that during those times and

You know so yeah, let's let's just jump into it and start from the beginning from the beginning but yeah so really it's it my my first thought is to thank you for this this platform because I think it's really important like you say I mean as as Satan uses his

deception and he uses you know like his like your partial partial truths and in kind of deceiving people I think that that there's so much out there that is negative in the world and we need this to be a positive impact and a positive influence and

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