And I Will Give Him a White Stone...

This is Robbie Dilmore from The Christian Car Guy and Kingdom Pursuit, where we hear how God takes your passion and uses it to build a kingdom. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it and share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

It's the Russian nightmare, now the devil's worst nightmare, and your tag team partner, Nikita Kolob. It's time to man up. Coming up today on It's Time to Man Up, a story from just a regular marketplace guy. I mean, a guy who's out there day by day just grinding it in the marketplace.

But man, is this guy full of Jesus. Stay tuned today. Coming up, Mike Short, man in the marketplace. What a pleasure, what a privilege to have in studio with me today, Mike Short. Short, born with two T's, by the way, two T's.

We'll talk about that. Born and raised in Southwestern, the Southwestern part of Virginia, where he began a business, a career in finance in the late 1980s. 2004, he and his partner opened up a privately held vehicle finance company, Whitestone Financial, 17 years in operation, headquartered in Winston-Salem.

Business in four different states. And welcome to the show. Pleasure, my pleasure to be here.

Well, it's just great to have you here. And I love having guys on, you know, who are out there in the marketplace, Mike, because in my view, you know, and I'm an evangelist. I was an interim pastor for a few months at a church in Kannapolis, North Carolina. I've done plenty of missionary work and all of that. But I love having guys like yourself in because in my view, even though I do what I do and I feel it is 100% of my calling at this juncture of life, that a great ministry field, or if you want to say where a real harvest can happen, is out in the marketplace. I mean, that to me is the ultimate missionary field. Absolutely, absolutely. Because, I mean, and my pastor has said it before, you know, he'll get 30, 40 minutes on a Sunday morning as far as a captured audience. Whereas someone like yourself, you might spend 40, 50, 60 hours with co-workers, employees, customers, and so there's the real chance to be salt and light, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's become more evident to me as a believer, even in my latter years here. I'm 52 years old and I make fun.

We get to host a small life group at our home during these weird times. And I was picking at them one night and I said, I feel like I was kind of born a Christian because I was raised in the church, right? But as I've gotten older, it's so cool how looking in the marketplace, in the workplace has sharpened our focus on the ability to witness and to be missionaries to not just our customers and the people that we service, but to the people that we employ. Right.

And so it makes such a difference, I think. You remind me of a friend of mine who jokes and says he was Baptist before he was born, right? He grew up in it, but then at some point he had to make a decision of his own.

He couldn't live off the laurels of his family and his mom and dad. And there came a point in time when he had to make his own personal decision. And when did that happen for you? Yeah, I was really young. I was 10 years old.

Okay. And again, because I was brought up in the church up until that point, I just thought, well, okay, I'm a Christian, right? But I had never made that public going forward or that heart conversation with God. And I was at a revival service. And you mentioned I grew up in Southwest Virginia. This was backwater, right? I mean, the town size that we grew up in, a thousand people at the most.

Okay. And that would go up and down depending on, you know, multiple things. And so we were out in the country, a little country church, a little river running beside of it. And there was a revival service that was going on there. And the speaker that night was just delivering this very fervent, convicting message. Well, I had walked outside to go to use the restroom or something, and we didn't have restrooms inside the church.

No indoor plumbing. No, you had to go out to the, you know, the moon was on the door. Wow. And I walked back toward the entrance of that church and stood there for a minute as the speaker continued to preach. And something just came over me. I mean, I was, chill bumps popped up on my animal at the time. I didn't know why.

And I just kind of started shaking, and I just felt this overwhelming conviction come over me in that I need to go to that altar and kneel down and actually give my heart and life to God. Again, I'm young, I'm 10 years old. And that's what I did.

Wow. You know, it forever changed my outlook on life as a kid and as an adult. I can relate to it. Now, it wasn't 10 for me.

It was 34, age 34. But when I made that decision to go to the altar, get on my knees, surrender my life to the Lord, like you just mentioned, life's never been the same. My perspective, my vision on life. And it's been a journey, as I'm sure with you and with any of us who make that decision, there's still a journey involved in a process of growing and maturing in our faith and the building of our faith. And I'm reminded, it's funny, because you went to an altar, I went to an altar. And that's not to say for our listeners out there that you have to go to an altar.

But I will say, and I've really been diving into a lot of Billy Graham classics, the Reverend Billy Graham. And every time I watch one of those, I marvel honestly at the response. In fact, I was watching one recently, he was in England and he was talking about 60,000 people a night show up and driving rainstorms for however long. And then on the very last night, the temperature dropped and 90,000 people showed up on the very final evening.

And he goes, so we've just been having the greatest time in the freezing cold and rain here in England. But the droves of people, and he always made a point, he'd always quote the scripture, if you can't acknowledge me before men, I'm not gonna acknowledge you before my father. Which is why he always pointed them or encouraged them and invited them to come publicly before man and God and give their heart to Jesus. And again, it's not that that's the only way you can give your life to Christ, but at some point, and maybe you would agree, we can't hide our light under a bushel. At some point we gotta make others know that decision that we made.

Yes, absolutely. And it's interesting you say that because I was thinking about our time together today and one of the things that kind of popped into my head, and it does every time this year, you know, we're at church, and of course church is different now than it's been in a while, our home group, whatever that might be. And this time of year, it always reminds me, you mentioned the light and hiding under the bushel. And each year, you know, for years, one of my favorite scripture verses for the Christmas season coming up, it was back in Isaiah 9-2, and it's repeated again over in Matthew 4-18, I think. Where, and I'll paraphrase the verse here because I do a terrible job of repeating it, but you know, into the land of darkness, where people were walking in the valley of the shadow of death, there came a great light, right? And that light, Christ, that came in, Isaiah prophesied this, and again was repeated over in Matthew when Jesus was first seeking out Andrew and Peter. That verse is repeated there, and so it is so much about that light in darkness and what that does to change the component. We're the light, right? So we have to let that out.

We can't hide it under that bushel. Well, and Jesus, I mean, you bring up good, but Jesus, I mean, Matthew, you know, follow me. James, John, follow me.

I mean, publicly, right? He called them out publicly and said, come, follow me, right? And so, just as an encouragement to our listeners out there, you know, if you're a Christ follower, if you're a believer, if you've made that decision, whether you went to an altar or not, but you've had that life-changing transformation and experienced that, you know, be determined to be salt and light to our world. If you're listening today and you're not a follower of Jesus, I would encourage you to make a decision to surrender your life to the Lord. There's nothing like serving Jesus, I'm just telling you right now. I'll put my wrestling career and everything I achieved there from world championship belts and worldwide travel and all the accolades that came with it pale in comparison to 17 October 1993 when I went to the altar and gave my life to Jesus. If you feel you're receiving value from this show, it's time to man up and you'd like to support the show along with Koloff for Christ Ministries, go to koloff.org, koloff.org, and make a donation of any amount, a note, you want my latest book, and you'll receive a personalized copy of Nikita, A Tale of the Ring and Redemption. At what point, Mike, so you continue on with your journey past age 10, but at what point did you realize, okay, I'm a marketplace guy here.

Can you remember back that day? Yeah, it's interesting, again, growing up in the mountains, kind of in the backwoods there, there was that as I went through my teenage years and on into high school trying to figure out what is it that I want to do. And my wife and I, I was 19 years old when we got married, and so we got married very young, but after my high school days there, we're trying to figure out what is it that I want to do. And I was looking at some colleges and then at career, and it was interesting, I went to a little town, it's about an hour away over in the Bristol, Virginia area, and I went to an employment agency to kind of see what was going on.

And long story short, they kind of hooked me up with this little finance company interview, and the company doesn't exist anymore, but back then it was called Kentucky Finance, and we had about 36 offices in and around the mid-Atlantic. And so I went and interviewed for that position, never thinking that that was anything that I would have ever wanted to do, but I went because I wanted to get married. And so, you know, in order to get married, I needed a job, and I thought, well, you know, we'll do that, and then maybe go on to the college thing later, and my wife was in school to be a schoolteacher, my fiancé then. And so went interviewed, and they offered me the job, and wasn't a lot of pay, but enough to scrape by at the time. But I took that job and found that there was something that appealed to me about it.

There was a little knack there, if you will. So that was in 1987, and so I have, since that point in time, I've been involved in finance or financial services since that point. And again, I remember going back to my church, my local church, it was a Wednesday night after accepting that job, and we were doing testimony, and I stood up and I said, you know, I've been praying for the Lord to lead me into the position that He would want me to have, and I got that today.

And I said, I would have never guessed that this would be the direction, and again, that was over 30 years ago, and so that's kind of how that whole thing happened. That door of opportunity opened up, and again, as we were mentioning earlier, the marketplace to me is the biggest mission field, in my view. So how would you say, so you're in this line of work of financial assistance, financing specifically for you at this point, vehicles, right? And how do you merge your walk of faith, how do you merge that into the marketplace? In other words, how are you light and salt in that world to those coming in that are wanting to purchase or buy a car? I appreciate that question. I'm always happy to answer that one, too.

It's where the name of our company came from, which is Whitestone. And as a quick background, when I was growing up as a teenager, my family and I, we played music and sang and things in church. And so in the 80s, mid to late 80s, contemporary Christian music was just kind of catching on there. Like Keith Green. Keith Green, the Imperials. Rich Mullins. Those old trailblazers. For real.

For real. And so it's like, you know, so we're playing music and this kind of this new genre comes up. And so we're sitting around us and some guys one day and, you know, we would play in the garage or play at church and, you know, just kind of do the jam sessions. And we were trying to say, well, you know, we really need to form this band. And, you know, as a teenager, everybody wants to be in a band, right?

Sure. And so we, we were saying, well, what could we name the band? And I had remembered reading something in the Bible that, that said, uh, why a Whitestone?

And so I'm thinking, well, you know, there's, there's White Snake and there's White Lion and there's White Heart. And I said, Whitestone would make a great name for a band, right? Well, the band never got off, never materialized, never got off the ground. But however, in 2003, when we, when we got ready to open up this, this company, it, it, it came rushing back to me.

I said, okay, it probably not, you know, the band didn't happen. This would make a great name for, for a company and for, and for the type of company that we were opening up. And if you go to Revelation 2 and 17, uh, it talks about those who overcome and their, their name being written, a new name being written on a Whitestone. Right. Absolutely.

And, and our purpose at Whitestone, uh, and you know, we're not ashamed to say that we're a for-profit company, but, but more than that, it's, it's a service to, uh, a genre of customer that otherwise, uh, might really have struggled in obtaining financing and transportation. Gotcha. Okay.

It's a real niche you have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So you have a real niche market and that's amazing. And, and so, so now in addition to that, do you have a, a sister company? Yep. Winston-Salem Motors. Right.

And, and I'm just reading it formed in, in, in 2014. Um, and I think I read where you, you, you averaged about, about a hundred and say 180 sales a year, plus or minus somewhere in that area. And so is that just something that, so as you saw a way of helping people get financing that might not otherwise be able to attain that, you thought, well, you know, why don't we, if we're going to do that, let's, let's, let's also, you know, potentially provide a vehicle for them, or is that how kind of that came about? That is, that is how that came about. And the truth of the matter in the, in the auto finance world, when you're financing vehicles, there are those times for various and sundry reasons that a vehicle comes back, right? A person gets to a point where they are not able to afford it. They've lost a job.

Think, you know, life happens sometimes. And so it kind of initially started out, okay, well, we can, instead of taking those cars and kind of disposing of them or dumping them at the auctions and things like that is, is we'll, we'll kind of bring them back in here, refurbish them and make them available to the type of customer that we're servicing. That's, that's trying to get transportation affordably, uh, and, and, but be able to get the financing team. So we, we kind of just became another outlet, uh, of the, of the same, uh, uh, business model that of the dealers that we service now. So we became another dealer.

And so it has worked out really well, uh, for us. And I think our customer, uh, because it's kind of turned into a one-stop shop kind of thing. So we can come and shop for the car. It's not buy here, pay here necessarily. And, and I'm a, I'm a fan of buy here, pay here. And those guys that do that out there, this is kind of a reverse buy here, pay here. So they, they come, they can look at the car, they can apply for the financing.

And then at Whitestone, we can, we can provide the, the credit for them onsite, uh, as they're buying the car and we'll report to the credit bureaus and things like help them get their credit restarted, reestablished. Awesome. Would you have a, uh, a, uh, say a short, uh, God story in terms of, wow, God, you really showed up and, and, um, I imagine you may have more than one, but is there one that quickly comes to mind in relation to, to a customer that has come in that, that something that comes to mind?

Yeah. And there's, there have been lots of those over the years, uh, where, where folks would come back to us and, uh, and we'd get those cool letters, those cool stories that said, you know, just appreciate you guys helping us. You know, we're at a point where nobody else would help us. You took a chance on us. You kind of got us going back in the right direction again, but I was talking to the customer.

It's funny. You asked me that I was talking to a customer, a previous customer, just the other day. And, uh, we hadn't had a loan with him probably for six or seven years. And something came up where our paths crossed again. Um, he, uh, he came over to him and he said, you know, he said, you sat me down and talked to me about the condition of, of, of my credit and about the condition of my life. And you helped me when nobody else was able to, to help me. He took a chance.

And again, there's nothing special that I did or we did. You know, we just sat down and had an honest conversation about where he was at, uh, at the time. And, and, you know, I truly believe as, as a believer in the marketplace of spirit bears witness.

Right. And so there was something about that, that gentleman that said this, the guys he's sincere, he's, he's needing help. He was a, he was a tree, uh, uh, service person.

And, uh, you'd go and cut down the trees and haul them off and he needed a truck, uh, to get back and forth to work. And, and, and he was starting a business and those are always, you know, tricky. You know, cause you don't know if his business is going to make it or, you know, so, but anyway, we, we did it. And so anyway, it came up the other day and we, we crossed paths again and he, he pulled me over to the side and he said, he said, he said, I want you to look out here at these trucks that I have, that, that I use in my business. He said, all of that came from you being able to do that one thing for me six or seven years ago. And he said, you all made the difference in my life and in my business. And so again, it's just one of, of, of many stories that we've heard about. And, uh, again, we'll give, we'll give God glory for that.

Not, not, uh, sure, sure. But, but it's rewarding to know that your efforts led to, you know, helping this guy get one truck that's led now to a fleet of trucks and, and, uh, it sounds like a thriving, successful business. And it's the best customer we, we have is the one that doesn't come back to us.

Right. The thing that we do is we get them, we want to get them in a place where that they establish that credit, they pay, they get reported, and then they don't have to come back to us again. They can go on to the next level, whether it be a bank or a, or a credit union and, and for, you know, it works awesome. Have you, have you, uh, and, and, or some of them, I know I've met, uh, at least one of the guys you work with. Have you guys had opportunities, uh, there've been opportunities to, uh, to lead others to, to, to the Lord, like literally like on the spot, kind of like somebody said, have you had opportunities to do that? Yeah, I think as witnesses, and I'm trying to think back, certainly have had many witnessing, uh, opportunities, which we, we have. And I think it has been more of a, of a, of a soul, you know, talks about sowing water and then reaping. And I think we've, we've had the great opportunity to sow and do some watering. Um, I do think there, I can think of a couple of occasions though, where there have been folks, I think because of the, of the, the seeding and the watering that it has planted something.

And we have heard stories come back about hearing about this person having made a decision, made a decision. And scripture says that, right? It's scripture says, you know, some, some water, some, so, you know, God gets the increase, right? He gets all the credit, all the glory and gets the increase. Well, you know, it's, uh, man, it's just a, again, I really enjoy having guys like yourself in, you know, in the studio, on the show who are out there, you know, in the grind every day.

You know, some might call it, you know, out there in the marketplace and making a difference, helping other people. And as if, if our listeners haven't already picked up on, um, you know, you're very active member, you got the Bible study at the house, you're an active member in your church and, and, and in your community. And, you know, Susan, your wife, and I know you're, you're a father of three, right?

Uh, Brannon, Logan and Riley. And, uh, so you got, got the three children. How can, uh, Mike, how can people find you, uh, if they wanted to come stop, whether to stop by or go online or how can they find you? They can come by our location. Uh, we're there from, uh, nine to five 30 every day. It's at 1796 Silas Creek Parkway in Winston.

Okay. Uh, just up the road from Bob King, uh, Mazda. Most folks know where that is. And just down the road from Forsyth Tech college. Um, we're also on the, on the web, of course, Whitestone fin short for financial whitestone fin.com.

Uh, you can read a little bit about us. There's a place for folks to actually fill out an application online if they're, if they're looking for credit. Uh, and then our, uh, our car lot, uh, is, uh, Winston-Salem motor cars, but the web address is Winston-Salem and then MC for motor cars. I'm working on trying to get that a little easier. WinstonSalemMC.com. We keep our inventory on there.

You can also apply to purchase and finance a car from that side as well. And, uh, and if nothing else, we just, we like the community coming in and, and sometimes it's just saying, Hey, and shaking hands and you don't do a deal. The first time it might be the third time.

Yeah. Second or third time they come around. Well, and, and, and I kind of liken it to even as we're talking, telling stories, sharing stories and hearing more of your story. Um, you know, as an evangelist, you know, I go into a church one time, you know, preach the gospel. I may never go back to that church again, although they might invite, you know, I may be invited back, I guess, if I did a good enough job, you know, maybe. But, um, but that said, the majority of the time, I never hear any of any of the followup stories.

Occasionally I'll hear one, I'll get an email. I'll get a, you know, uh, a message somehow, some way, you know, on how this, this certain person's life was changed, touched, transformed by my being there. And then the same in the wrestling world, as I go out and do autograph signings and, and, and travel around and meet the fans there as well. And that's my marketplace, if you will. You know, when I go to the autograph signings, that's my marketplace to be able to be salt and light in that world. And now I'm getting more and more stories and I'm believing you will to get more and more stories of people that come and utilize your services and, or bought a car from you.

And it made a difference in their life. I appreciate what you do. I, uh, you know, I grew up watching you, you and uncle Ivan, and, and, uh, of course we're not that far in part and age, but, uh, appreciate what you do and what you stand for and the standard that you're bearing as well.

Well, uh, I appreciate you. And for those of you listening out there today, we're just grateful to have Mike Short in studio and go by and check him out if, if you're needing some financing or needing a car. And if you don't know Jesus as your Lord and savior today would be a great day to make that decision. Thanks for tuning into it's time to man up. Men, I would like to challenge each of you to consider spending five days with Lex Luger and I at Man Camp, pursuing the heart of God. Ladies, if you're listening, we'll send your men home better equipped to be men of God, godly husbands, and godly fathers.

That appeals to you. Give them your blessing and encourage them to sign up today at mancamp.info. Pastors, if you would like to bring Koloff for Christ Ministries and Man Up Conference to your community, go to koloff.org and email me.

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