Food for Faith: How Roger is Changing Lives in Zambia

Keith Haney: 00:00:00

Roger Wheeler has been a real estate broker by trade for 28 years and a founding board member of Shoulder to Shoulder. He has become an advocate for those less fortunate in the country of Zambia. We welcome Roger to the podcast. Well, Roger, welcome to the podcast.

How are you doing today?

Roger Wheeler: 00:00:19

Thank you. I'm doing fabulous. It's a thrill to be with you.

Keith Haney: 00:00:23

It's a pleasure to be with you, too. I'm going to ask you my favorite question that no guest can avoid answering. And that is what's the best piece of advice for you've ever received?

Roger Wheeler: 00:00:34

Yeah, so that's a bit of a challenge, but I. You're going to find as we chat that I'm a Bible guy. I highly value the Bible.

And When I was 21, 22 years old, I led my first small group Bible study with a young marrieds group. And at the end of that study, one of my friends came up to me and said, wow, you're really good at that.

You'd be dangerous if you knew anything about the Bible. And I kind of took that personally because I'd been raised in the Bible, but that, that it wasn't really advice, it was more of a challenge.

And so I've been on a bit of a journey ever since then. And actually I'll follow that up.

About 15 years ago, a pastor of mine did a New Year's Eve sermon and he challenged everybody in the sanctuary to write out the Bible, to transcribe the Bible. And I said, wow, I never thought of anything like that. I was kind of a read through the Bible type guy. And I said, okay, I'll give that a shot.

And so I started. And six and a half years later, I had transcribed the entire Bible, going about an hour a day. And so I.

Those are probably the two best pieces of advice I've ever got.

Keith Haney: 00:01:56

That is interesting. I never thought of that. Those are really interesting. I love those. Both. Those are really good. I can take those.

And after, after a couple years, say, as Keith always says.

Roger Wheeler: 00:02:06

Yeah.

Keith Haney: 00:02:09

So I'm curious, Roger, as you think about your life and people who have been important to you, who are some people that served as a mentor or inspiration for you, here's a chance for you to kind of give them a shout out and thank them for being such an important, vital part of your life.

Roger Wheeler: 00:02:23

Yeah, well, so I don't have a lot of those. When I was 18, my father had a major stroke, massive stroke, and lived as an Invalid the last 8 last 18 years of his life.

And so I've kind of thought over the decades, if I had had an active father in my life in my 20s and my 30s, I think it would have made a difference for me. But I didn't really, and I didn't really have anybody step in and kind of take that spot. I was always kind of active with peer groups my own age.

I do. I, I feel like I have a relationship with the Holy Spirit that's a little bit of a mentoring type of thing in a, in a unique way.

And I don't want to over spiritualize anything. But if I were to name a human being, I would say Tom Nesbit, who was a pastor at Grand Avenue Baptist Church in, in Ames, Iowa.

He's the guy who challenged me to transcribe the Bible. And I did serve and, and worship under him for a number of years. And he, he stands kind of large in my life.

Keith Haney: 00:03:34

Oh, that's so cool. So, Roger, I'm curious about your journey. You've been a real estate agent for nearly three decades. What drew you to that profession?

Roger Wheeler: 00:03:45

Excuse me. Yeah, so right out of college at Drake, I graduated from Drake University. We can talk Iowa, since there you go.

Keith Haney: 00:03:53

Go Drake.

Roger Wheeler: 00:03:53

We're both in Iowa right now. I graduated from Drake and I got into the technology sector and found myself in sales. And I, I can talk and communicate pretty well.

And so I had some success at sales. I ended up selling a technology product that had me flying around the world most of the time.

Eastern half of the U.S. caribbean, South America, Australia. And then I had three little children and really decided that wasn't a great way to raise children.

And so I was looking for something that would allow me to use what I'd learned in the, in the field of sales but not have to travel very much. And you know as well as I do in Iowa, we don't have a ton of stuff. And so really the, the big ticket items are when people are buying homes.

Keith Haney: 00:04:41

Right.

Roger Wheeler: 00:04:41

Buying real, buying real estate. So, yeah, I actually had a friend who was just starting in the building, in the construction field, said, hey, I'll build.

He said, I'll build houses if you sell them. And that kind of got me into it.

Keith Haney: 00:04:52

Also in Iowa, we don't like to travel because there's no good way to get out of Iowa. And the plane.

Roger Wheeler: 00:04:57

Yeah. 6:00am Des Moines Airport flights are. Yeah.

Keith Haney: 00:05:02

Are killers. So you don't want.

Roger Wheeler: 00:05:04

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Keith Haney: 00:05:06

Oh, so it's so funny, you know. So tell us about what your journey led you to, from real estate to your humanitarian work in Zambia.

Roger Wheeler: 00:05:16

Yeah.

So there really isn't much connection between real estate and humanitarian work other than having a career as a Realtor gives the flexibility to do kind of anything you want to do.

I say, you know, every once in a while, a young realtor will kind of complain to me about the difficulty of their job, and I will just try to take them back a step and say, look, almost anybody in the world would trade places with you. You have the best gig. We have a lot of freedom. We can make a pretty good income.

And so that leaves us with opportunities to do what we want with our time. I actually didn't start in Africa. I started up in South Dakota on a Native American reservation.

Because I was, as I was transcribing the Bible, I was noticing that poverty was a big theme. Seems like God cares about people who are impoverished.

Keith Haney: 00:06:16

Yes.

Roger Wheeler: 00:06:16

And that's honestly not that easy to find in Iowa. Iowa is a pretty well off state.

I don't, I don't want to be little because there are people who struggle, but it's different when you go to other spots of the world. So on Rosebud Indian reservation, I was able to see kind of an American version of poverty.

And then I ended up in Ghana to see more of a, kind of a world vision of poverty. I was, my, my family was doing orphan care and education there.

And then my, my brother and I decided, you know, it seemed like Jesus really liked to feed hungry people. And so we started thinking about what it might look like to feed people.

And we discovered Zambia is one of the hungriest places on the face of the earth. It's also very Christian that 98% of the people in, in Zambia are reportedly Christian.

And so it, it was a place where we could travel safely to, to see brothers and sisters in Christ who were at the other end of the economic spectrum and say, hey, let's do this thing together.

Keith Haney: 00:07:19

So tell us about Shoulder to Shoulder.

Roger Wheeler: 00:07:23

oulder to shoulder started in: 2020

My brother was a big fan and I do thank Eugene Peterson now because he did some great stuff. But in Second Corinthians, chapter 8, Paul is talking about this thing called the Collection for the Saints.

It's a thread that I think a lot of people don't recognize Biblically. When I say I transcribed the Bible, it caused me to get into some nooks and crannies that I lot of people don't see.

And if I ask almost anybody what was the Apostle Paul doing on his missionary journeys, they say, well, he was evangelizing for sure, and he was church planning. And most people would limit it to those three things. Well, there actually are those two things. There actually was a third leg to that.

And he was collecting money because there were people starving in Jerusalem. And so everywhere that Paul went, he was picking up money from the churches and he was finding a way to get it back to Jerusalem.

He called that the collection for the saints. And it's referenced maybe a dozen times, times throughout the New testament.

But in 2nd Corinthians 8 and 9, he gives kind of his treatise on that project. And in chapter 8, verse 13, Paul says to the Corinthian church, he says, so here's what I think.

The best thing you can do right now is to finish what you started last year and not let those good intentions grow stale. Your heart's been in the right place all along. You've got to. You've got what it takes to finish up. So get to it.

Once the commitment is clear, you do what you can, not what you can't, then listen to this. This isn't so others can take it easy while you sweat it out. No, your shoulder to shoulder with them all the way.

Your surplus matching their deficit, Their surplus matching your deficit. And my brother and I fell in love with that passage. It describes a trade. It took us a while to figure it out, but the trade is food for faith.

In our case, we have lots of food in Iowa. In fact, when I go to Zambia, I have to confess that my relationship with food is I try not to eat too much. That's the challenge, right? But that is.

That's kind of insulting in Zambia because the people I'm spending time with there are trying to figure out how to get enough to eat, right? So I have. I have a surplus, they have a deficit. It took me a while to figure out what they have in surplus that I have in deficit.

Because Paul clearly states it as a trade here.

It took a couple years and we finally realized when you wake up in the morning and you don't know how you're going to feed your children that day, there's really only one thing you have, and that is faith. And so there is a level of faith that my Zambian friends have that I'm never going to get to. I have a deficit in that area.

But as I share with them, I find myself growing in that area. So we do a food for faith trade. That's what shoulder to Shoulder is all about.

Keith Haney: 00:10:23

So tell us more about it because I'm fascinated by that. Tell me a little bit more about Zambia for those of us who've not visited it.

Kind of give us kind of a snapshot of what you would experience if you landed on the shores or the streets of Zambia.

Roger Wheeler: 00:10:36

Well, I will land in Zambia August 9, so in a couple of weeks with my wife. And we will fly. It will be in the air for 24 hours. It's miserable travel to get there. We'll live in the. Arrive in the capital city of Lusaka.

It's a large developing world type of city. But then very quickly, we will move out into some regions where we do work mostly in the villages.

And when you drive out into that village, I want to be careful not to say anything that feels insulting at all. But it's almost like you're in a time machine and you drive back two or 300 years. We actually have been doing some training on farming techniques.

We've connected with some agriculture guys from Iowa State University, and the training that we're doing is moving these village farmers from what you would say is maybe an 18th century farming technique to a 20th. Maybe 19th century. 20th century farming technique.

And so you just, you just see a different world, a different time, and you see people very unconcerned with all of the modern amenities and challenges that we experience here in the United States. You people, you see people concerned with the basics of life. How do I. How do I protect my children from the elements? How do I feed them? Each day?

It's just very different.

Keith Haney: 00:12:11

How do you balance. Because you're coming from a different culture altogether. How do you balance not going to a place and doing harm?

Because I know some people, some missionaries or missionary work goes over. And you're intending to do good.

Because I just talked to a person I want to go from, From Haiti, and he says when people come to Haiti, what they end up doing is they bring clothes to the people in Haiti which they can never wear. So how do you. How do you make sure that what you're doing is. Is actually providing.

Roger Wheeler: 00:12:42

Yeah.

Keith Haney: 00:12:43

Stuff that they.

Roger Wheeler: 00:12:43

So, yeah, there's a. There's a book out that a lot of people know called When Helping Hurts.

Keith Haney: 00:12:48

Yes.

Roger Wheeler: 00:12:48

And people reference that with me a lot. My son actually says I should write a sequel to that called When Helping Helps.

The reality is, if you have no food in your home and you're just trying to figure out how to eat and feed your family. There really isn't any way to harm that person by giving them food.

Keith Haney: 00:13:10

Right.

Roger Wheeler: 00:13:11

So we're. What we've done is we've established a distribution network through the church in Zambia.

So everything we do is, Even though we're a 501C3 as a parachurch here in. In the United States, we operate through the church in Zambia. So we have 124 churches currently. We distribute corn to each of those churches monthly.

All of those churches have. Have given us kind of a snapshot of their membership. They may have 300 members, and maybe they identify 40 of those members as vulnerable.

That's the term we use. Their food insecure. For the most part, these people are eating two to three meals per week. And when I use the word meal, I'm using it loosely.

It's basically a ball of cornmeal, they call it in Shima, and they're eating two or three of those a week. So these people are living sometimes on 400 to 600 calories per week.

And so our program works with the churches to provide bags of mealy meal which they cook, they boil into in Shima so that that household is able to consume two meals per day. And so we're taking them to somewhere around 3,000 calories a week. Still not nothing at all by American standards.

But our goal is that we're elevating that caloric intake to the point where they now can become functioning members of the Kingdom of God. They don't have to spend all day, every day, worrying about how they're going to find their next meal.

Keith Haney: 00:14:47

How did you end up working in that field and finding this particular community? I'm just curious.

Roger Wheeler: 00:14:54

Social media is a great thing. When we were doing work in Ghana, we were working. We built an orphanage and a school there.

And there were some connections where we brought in a farmer from Zambia who was doing farm training there. He came into our orphanage in Ghana and helped them set up a farm. And we just got to know him over a couple of years.

And so when we decided, uh, it's kind of odd, but even though we were doing relief work in Ghana, we decided there really weren't that many hungry people there. Uh, if you look at the World Hunger Index, you kind of get an idea of where the hungriest spots on the globe are.

And we found that Zambia was much Hungrier. There's about 5 million people that are starving right now in Zambia. And so we connected with this gentleman when he went back to Zambia.

We ended up in his church network. Once you're on Facebook, connected to one Zambian pastor, it's not very long. You're connected to 100 Zambian pastors.

And my brother, my brother, Rob Wheeler, we're partners in this. He loves to be on social media, connecting with the pastors and the people in Zambia.

Keith Haney: 00:16:07

So what were some of the. You talked about? Just the food insecurity. What are some of the other challenges you've. You've run across and you're doing this humanitarian work?

Roger Wheeler: 00:16:16

Well, we. We're not providing. Providing relief work for food is our basic. That's our basic goal. We also drill boreholes.

Fresh water is a pretty massive problem throughout Zambia.

We actually have a group that went with my brother last year from Denver and Colorado Springs area, and they are now drilling one or two boreholes every month through this year. So we've done something like 25 or 30 wells, which. That's. That's an interesting thing that we need to balance because by.

By sending money to feed hungry people, we're definitely affecting a family. And right now we're serving food monthly to about 3,500 families. Maybe 25, 20, 25,000 people are eating.

But if we take $2,000 out of that feeding budget and we dig a borehole, then that literally changes an entire community. And not just for this, this month, but for in. Into this foreseeable future.

And so we're always trying to balance those, but both of those, we think, are really kind of relief work. We have moved into the development side more where we are doing farm training. We provide every fall here, we provide inputs.

So November, December time frame, we provide food, I'm sorry, seed and fertilizer to some of our farmers in some of our churches that we work with, those that have been trained. And then every spring in the April, May time frame, we buy their harvest. And so we then take that harvest.

So we just sent over roughly $145,000 to buy bags of corn. That corn has been stored now in our 124 churches.

So when my wife and I are over there next month, we will travel around to the regions that we're doing work in.

And all of those churches will be so excited to show us the stores corn that they have, because they right now have enough bags of corn to feed the vulnerable people in their church for the next 12 months. And then each. Each month, they kind of dole that out to those that are most hungry, those that are most needy.

Keith Haney: 00:18:29

That is such a neat ministry. I'm just. That's I'm very excited to hear that.

I had a podcast years ago about someone who did the wells and how they were digging wells around the country to try to provide some of that in Africa, too. So I'm just. I love what you're doing.

Roger Wheeler: 00:18:46

Yeah. The beauty of distributing through the church is that we have no American overhead. So when I do fundraising, I literally can look you.

Look you in the eyes and say, look, you give me $5,000. I'm going to buy seed and fertilizer this fall, and every penny of that is going to Zambia to buy seed and fertilizer. We have no American employees.

We have no marketing budget. We have no buildings. And so it's just using God's network, which he has naturally established through his kingdom in the churches.

It just allows us not to have to duplicate anything. And so it's. Yeah, it's just. It's refreshing because fundraising is not a fun thing. I don't like asking my friends for $5,000.

I. I pick that amount because we do have a number of friends who have. Who understand the vision of what we're doing. And so every fall, they write a check for 5,000, and every spring, they write a check for 5,000.

So they make a $10,000 annual donation, and that puts them right in the middle of the development world within God's kingdom. It's really fun.

Keith Haney: 00:19:55

So I'm glad you mentioned that.

So if somebody hears this and says, I want to be a part of this ministry, how can they get involved if they want to maybe go with you to do this work or donate? Where can they do that?

Roger Wheeler: 00:20:07

Yeah. So the best place to start would be to go to our web website. I don't know if you have a way to share that, but our website is.

It's shoulder-the numeral2-shoulder.org so shoulder-two-stander.org and there's obviously a donate button there. We love to take donations. We have two types of donors. The one that I just described, that.

That are kind of our larger donors that give every fall and every spring. We're trying to raise large amounts of money those two times each year.

But then we also have monthly donors because we do have a staff of five, actually six now, individuals in Zambia. They're overseeing all the work that is done every month. They go out and they check the inventories.

They make sure there's no theft, they make sure there's no spoilage. They're making. Making certain that all of these. All of these funds are going where they're supposed to go.

So we have travel budget there, we have salaries there. And so, so we do have monthly needs as well. And so we have a, we actually have 130 donors at this point.

So we just, in May we sent over our one millionth dollar. So we've been doing this for five years. We've sent just over a million dollars. All of it goes to Zambia.

So you can click on that donate button, it'll ask do you want to be a one time donor or a monthly donor? We love monthly donors. $25 to $200. That just helps to cover the overhead that we do have in Zambia.

My, my brother also does a blog each week, sometimes more frequently that he kind of updates everybody on what's going on in Zambia. That's, that's available on, on the website. In terms of going there. Yeah, we're leaving August 8th to go.

This will be my third trip in the last five years. My wife and I are going. We also have a couple from Oregon who is joining us there. They' that we've had. They want to see what's going on in Zambia.

And just beautifully, we're taking another agronomist from Iowa State who's kind of a world renowned animal guy. So to this point, all of our farming efforts have been about growing corn.

We're taking a guy with us this time who's going to help us try to figure out how can we add protein to these diets. It's one thing to give them calories, but can we also provide protein? And so I can't wait to see what this, this guy is great at his job.

He does development around the world and I'm anxious to see what he recommends we try to do to get started with protein there in Zambia.

Keith Haney: 00:22:45

That's fascinating. I love to keep us up to date on how that works out. I'm curious about that.

Roger Wheeler: 00:22:50

Yeah, yeah, thanks.

Keith Haney: 00:22:52

So I'm curious. This just, I'm sure you grew a lot from this work. What did you learn as a leader in doing this humanitarian work?

Roger Wheeler: 00:23:04

Well, the thing that I'm constantly learning is what it means to be faithful. Both my brother and I, when we started the work in Ghana, we said, okay, we'll go there, we'll do what we need to do.

We're happy to help, we're happy to donate. The one thing I won't do is fundraising.

And it's generally not a great idea to tell God there's one thing you won't do because I'm almost a professional fundraiser now you've already heard that out of my voice. And so just learning to be faithful in everything that he asks us to do.

We were, we were sending over a few hundred dollars every month for the first couple years. And we don't have a budget, we don't have a plan, we don't have a strategic idea. We're just trying to each month do what God asks us to do.

And so when my brother came to me that first month and said, we're going to buy corn this year and store it, he said, I'm going to need $50,000. Well, that just sounded absolutely ridiculous to me.

We were sending over a few hundred dollars a month, but we started praying about it and we started talking to our friends about it. Lo and behold, we had. We had $50,000. Now that next spring, that next spring, we, we had to buy harvest for, for about a hundred thousand dollars.

And again, I actually traveled around the country in Zambia letting them know, hey, you guys, pray for us. We need a hundred thousand dollars in the next 30 days, and I have no idea where it's going to come from.

Again, we put the word out and we sent over more than a hundred thousand dollars.

So just the main growth that I've seen is just seeing how God is faithful when I'm willing to do what he asked me to do, even when I don't want to do it, I love it.

Keith Haney: 00:24:51

So what's next for you?

Roger Wheeler: 00:24:54

Well, next certainly is the trip. And I'm anxious to see that. This is a hardship. This is not easy travel.

The last time my wife went with me two years ago, she got sick on the plane on the way over, they lost her luggage. She got sick on the flight back and ended up in the er.

Once we got back to Iowa, about a week later with something in her stomach that shouldn't have been in her stomach, she announced to me at that time she would never go again. Through a series of events too long for me to tell the story. But she is getting on the airplane and going this year.

So certainly that's the next big adventure. To see how God will care for her, how our travel will be managed, what he will do through this trip. I'm super excited. You know, Paul, I don't know.

I think it's Paul who wrote Hebrews. People will argue with me about that. But the author of Hebrews said, hey, it's not good for men to live on milk. They also need meat.

They need protein. That is the theme of this trip is how do we grow this thing? We feel God telling us, thanks for giving my people corn. Now it's time to give them meat.

And I just can't wait to see because I don't have the vision. I can't see it. I don't see any way that it's going to work. But I believe he does. He can and he, he probably will.

And I just can't, can't wait to see that.

Keith Haney: 00:26:21

So what I'm curious, as you think about that challenge, what is the challenge of meat in Zambia? Is it, is it because of the crops or is there some other issues that you have to overcome?

Roger Wheeler: 00:26:32

Oh, yeah, there are. There are other issues. So my favorite place in Zambia is Mamwe.

Mamwe is probably the most economically challenged region that we will go to after this 24 hours of flying. We'll then get on a bus and we'll take a 12 hour bus ride that'll take us to Chapada.

We'll do some stuff there, and then we'll take a two or three hour bus ride to Monbwe. And we are literally in the heart of Africa at that point. This is one of the most economically challenged places on the globe.

And we've said to them, hey, we were planting corn. We're providing seed and fertilizer. The chiefs in those places will give them land. They have plenty of land.

So if they get the land, we give them the seed and fertilizer, they can grow corn. Corn. They shake their heads and they say, we can't. If we grow corn, the elephants will come and trample our village.

Because Mambway happens to be right next door to where the country of Zambia decided they were going to put their Federal Game Reserve. And so we said, okay, no problem. How about fruit? Why don't we do orchards with oranges and apples?

And they said, yeah, no, that'll bring, that'll bring the monkeys in. How about if we do chickens and goats? Because we see all kinds of chickens and goats around the country. Absolutely not.

That brings the lions and we're in big trouble. I mean, just you don't even think about that. Nobody in Iowa is worried about whether the elephants are going to come and trample the corn or not.

It's just so unique, seeing the different challenges that we've seen. But I, I firmly believe God has an answer to that. And I think we're gonna see, we're gonna see those things overcome.

Keith Haney: 00:28:16

Yeah. My biggest problem is the deer in my backyard.

Roger Wheeler: 00:28:19

Yeah. Yeah. Well, every once in a while they'll announce a mountain lion. Is roaming about in Iowa. Every decade or so that comes on the news.

And we're all intrigued by that. Literally, not too long ago, one of our deacons in one of our churches was trampled to death by an elephant. He was out working in his field.

hat's like, but that. This is: 2025

Keith Haney: 00:28:48

Wow, that's. That's amazing. So what one thing would you like? One hope you want the audience to know about the work you're doing in Zambia.

Roger Wheeler: 00:28:58

So, so here is my biggest challenge. Jesus said, I come to preach good news to the poor. The people in Zambia love us when we show up.

We're bringing food, we're bringing hope, we're bringing good news to the poor. Jesus also said it's harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

This food for faith sharing, it's much more exciting to share with a guy who doesn't have enough food than with a guy who doesn't have enough faith. Because frankly, in the United States, we all think we have more faith, right?

We all, we all, we all think we're the, we think we're the king of faith.

And so, yeah, the biggest challenge is just to get people in America who love Jesus to recognize that the American dream is not equal to the kingdom of God.

And that if you can step out of that dream a little bit and, and go more deeply into the kingdom of God, you'll find that there's this upside down world where wealthy people are working to try to figure out how to share food with people on the other side of the world. And those people are then automatically sharing faith back with us. And it's this beautiful exchange that, that God has designed within his church.

It's a worldwide exchange. It's really. I'm just being honest with you. It's a tough sell here in, here in the United States, Even here in Iowa.

In Iowa, our slogan is we feed the world.

Keith Haney: 00:30:33

Right?

Roger Wheeler: 00:30:33

But it's, but it's awfully difficult for me to find very many people who want to feed Zambians.

Keith Haney: 00:30:38

Yeah, that's great. So I love to ask my guest this question to what do you want your legacy to be?

Roger Wheeler: 00:30:48

I actually had a question asked similar to this a few years ago in a Bible study that was part of. I don't think in terms of legacy, but I thought I was thinking about my funeral. So sometimes I little. I don't know, I don't know if that's.

I don't know what that is. But I was thinking about my funeral. And here's, here's my vision. My vision is that one day I will die and there will be a funeral.

And there will be people from every corner of the state of Iowa, every corner of the United States, every corner of, of the world who say, oh, man, we're gonna miss that guy.

And it'll probably, hopefully be a bunch of people who were underprivileged in this life who met me because I was trying to find some way to make things just a little bit easier. I have, I have three foster daughters that are now grown, that graduated high school in my home. And, man, I love to watch them grow and flourish.

And I want them to celebrate my life at my funeral because God connected me with them. I want people from Ghana to, to remember me as the guy who helped them with their education, their orphan needs.

And I want, I want there to be a bunch of people in Zambia who say, gosh, I wish that guy didn't die because he was, he was bringing us food. I, I just, I just. That's how I think about it. I don't know if that's legacy or not, but I think about my funeral.

Keith Haney: 00:32:12

I love that. So here's something new.

In season six of the podcast, I asked my guest to pick a number, and they get a secret question that you did not get ahead of time. So pick a number.

Roger Wheeler: 00:32:23

I got to be number one. Let's go with number one.

Keith Haney: 00:32:28

Oh, here we go. If you had a personal mascot, what would it be?

Roger Wheeler: 00:32:38

Oh, my goodness. A personal mascot. I. You know what? I think I'm gonna go with the camel.

Keith Haney: 00:32:50

Okay.

Roger Wheeler: 00:32:50

You know, you know, I, I talked about this. This. You know, Jesus insulted us when he said, you guys are a bunch of camels.

Keith Haney: 00:32:57

Right?

Roger Wheeler: 00:32:58

But I, I live out that reality. I'm not, I'm, I'm not preaching to everybody else. I'm talking to myself. I want to fit through the eye of that needle.

In order to do that, I got to go from being a big fat camel down to a little tiny, you know, think, honey, I shrunk the kid type thing, right? Yeah. I want my mascot to be a, to be a camel. I think that's as honest as I can be.

Keith Haney: 00:33:20

That's so cool. Beast of burden who brings. Who can.

Roger Wheeler: 00:33:24

I love it. I love it. Yeah. A loaded down camel with bags of corn. That's a beautiful picture. That's beautiful.

Keith Haney: 00:33:33

So, Rob, can you tell us where people can connect with you and on social media and Shoulder to Shoulder if they want to be part of this ministry you're doing.

Roger Wheeler: 00:33:42

Yeah, well, shoulder-two-stander.org is our website. That's a great spot. We also have Shoulder to Shoulder on Instagram.

I think if you, if you search for Shoulder to Shoulder Zambia, that's probably how you fight. Find us. The same thing is true on Facebook. I do have a real estate page.

If you, if you search for Roger Wheeler, realtor in Iowa, you'll probably find me. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of new at this, so I don't know how available I am, but I hope people can find me.

And I do believe that there are some camels out there that are listening to me that are saying, hey, I've never really heard anything like this. We think God is building this unique community called Shoulder to Shoulder. People all around the world that I think are going to join in.

It'll be a really fun thing of just experiencing God's kingdom in a really special way.

Keith Haney: 00:34:36

Well, Roger, thanks so much for sharing today and really kind of inspiring us with the work that God has placed on your heart to do and, and may you be an amazing camel for him and the work.

Roger Wheeler: 00:34:47

Amen. I'm gonna be praying that with you, brother. Thank you very much. Maybe I'll see you up in Fort Dodge someday.

Keith Haney: 00:34:51

You never know. Yeah, we got it. We got a taco Tico up here, so you can come.

Roger Wheeler: 00:34:56

There we go. There we go. Actually, I'm an elder at Friendship Baptist Church in Ames, Iowa. That is National Baptist NBC Church.

And I will be preaching on Sunday, August 3rd. I'm going to deliver to my church a preview of the message I'm going to be taking with me to Zambia.

So if you, if you get the itch, come on down to ames in about 10 days.

Keith Haney: 00:35:19

Well, sure. And we'll be praying for your work there and that your wife gets. Get there and back getting sick and.

Roger Wheeler: 00:35:25

Please.

Keith Haney: 00:35:26

And losing any luggage.

Roger Wheeler: 00:35:27

Please. I'd like to report back, have me on again after we get back sometime this fall. I'd love to report.

Keith Haney: 00:35:32

I would love to have you back because I'm dying to hear what you find out from the meat thing. So. Protein thing. So if you, you figure that out.

Roger Wheeler: 00:35:38

Me too.

Keith Haney: 00:35:38

Come back on, we'll talk about it.

Roger Wheeler: 00:35:40

Okay. Thank you, brother.