This is the Truth Network. Now, The Devil's Nightmare.
Welcome back to another episode of It's Time to Man Up. Once the rest of the nightmare, now The Devil's Nightmare, Bunkie. What do you think of when I say Bunkie? Do you think it's somebody's name?
I'm just curious. Don't go anywhere today, because with me today is Bunkie Griffith. Welcome to The Man Up Show, Bunkie. Well, I'm so glad to be a part of it.
Thank you for the offer. Well, great to have you here and, you know, I was trying to tee up the interview with trying to pique someone's curiosity. They're like, yeah, what does Bunkie mean anyway?
Well, let me think about that. But I know you and I have talked in the past and some people are probably even asking the proverbial question right now. Is that his real name? But the reality is, I kind of got a little inside scoop here because you actually told me the story that wasn't your birth name, but you got that nickname.
How? I was the first grandchild and my grandfather's name is Milton. And that's who they named me after. But when they brought me home, his nickname was Bunk. So they called me Bunkie and that's what he called me. And he passed away when I was two years old. But I've heard so much about him that I think that I knew him. But in reality, you didn't.
So it is just stuck. And next month I'll be 70 years old. So I've kept it. And if anybody calls me and asks for Milton, I tell them that, you know, we fired him or I don't know him or anything like that. Because I know that they don't know me. They're like, I think you got the wrong number, right?
Thanks for calling. And there's some relatability there, too. We're about five years apart in age, roughly.
But at the same time, and I'm going to keep my listeners kind of guessing here. Like some will research it and figure it out on their own. But I, like you, was named after a grandfather and did not appreciate my first name, my birth name growing up, my first name. I went by my middle name, actually. And everyone's going to want me to say what that is. But that's where I'm going to leave them hanging.
Monkey, they're either going to have to go buy the book, download it on audio now, or just go Google it and research it. But all that said, went by my middle name until, of course, I legally changed my name in the mid-80s for this little career called wrestling. Or as we say here in the south, wrasslin', right? Right. So 70 years old, you've had quite a journey and, of course, we're calling you today from the great state of Delaware, is that right?
Correct. So tell our listeners about where you live and just tell us a little bit about your family. And I want to talk a little bit, too, about what you've done for the last 70 years. Give us a little back story.
Okay. I live in a town called Seaford, Delaware. And that was the first nylon plant that was ever in the United States. And so I live there. It's probably about 30 miles south of Dover, Delaware.
Delaware is not a big state anyway. I met my wife when I was eight years old. She used to come from up here from Petersburg, Virginia, and used to spend the summer with her aunt and uncle. And we were next door neighbors.
And her mother told her that when I was eight years old that I was going to marry her daughter. Come on, for real. Come on.
Yes. Yes, for real. One of those stories. I hear you hear these stories, but I'm like, ah, that cannot be real. But come on, keep going.
Wow. So, you know, it was a, I tell everybody she's a mail order bride because, you know, she was four hours from me. And my parents wouldn't let me make long distance phone calls on their telephone. So I had to save up money and go use the pay telephone.
Come on. And, yeah, and did that. And we wrote letters back and forth. And she says she still has them.
I'm still looking for them because I'm sure that we both could say some corny stuff. Yeah, right. So when we were 18 years old, we got married. Now, in Maryland, at that particular time, a female could get married without their parent's signature.
But a man had to be 21 years old. So my mom had to sign for me to get married. Co-sign.
My mom had to co-sign at age 18. Come on. Yes, yes. And we got married because we wanted to, not because we had to. Ah, great story. And February the 3rd of this coming year, we'll be married 52 years.
That's amazing. Okay, hold on now, hold on now. Okay. Okay. 52 years, but hold on.
So, because I just want to, I don't want to bury the lead here. So, eight years old. Okay, so eight years old, her, so they said to her that you're going to marry, who said to who that you were going to marry, that you guys were going to get married? Her mother said, I told her when I was eight years old, I was going to marry her daughter. Her mom said, that's going to be your husband one day.
Is that, is that, I understand that right? So, age eight, so fast forward 10 years, you get married. So, but at what point between eight and 18 did you guys figure out, okay, not because we have to, but because we want to, like at, so about what age were you when you're like, okay, this is going to really happen, we're going to get married? What would you say? Well, I would say that probably when we were about 17. Okay. You know, I went ahead and proposed to her and went to get a diamond and I tease her, I said that the diamond that we got, I'm not sure if it'll cut glass or even plastic, but you know.
But it's functional, it's functional. And so, and then when, of course, I asked her father if I could marry his daughter and you know, went through the old things that we all used to go through, but seem to strayed so far from it, but it has worked out all these years. 52 years later, congratulations on that.
That is truly a milestone in today's day and time. And so, so let me ask one more question about those early years. So, so I know she came up there in the summertime, so was that like, like clockwork, like every summer that you'd at least get to spend some time with her and see her outside of letters and long distance phone calls?
Yes. Every summer she used to come up here. Of course, I invited her to go to my Christmas dance and she did, but I had to go two hours to go get her and her parents came two hours and we met there. And it was the same way with our prom. And, uh, so it was a lot of traveling back and forth, but you know, you would do what you want to and what you need to for the one that you love.
Now, man, what a great, what a great story. And so did, so you get married at 18. At what point did you just start to start to grow a family at some point? Well, we got married February the third and it, uh, February the 14th. Uh, she had to have her appendix taken out. And, uh, so that stopped a lot of stuff right there as far as marriage relations. Okay. And, uh, then she got pregnant and our first child was born January the 26th of the following year.
Wow. So we were kids raising kids. And then our second one was born two years after that. So by the time I was 21, we had two children, two children. And by the time you were 21 and what, what about grandkids? Do you guys have grandkids?
Yeah, we have four grown grandchildren and then we have, uh, three great grandchildren. Wow. Okay.
Okay. Then they live in the Delaware or where are they kind of spread out? Where do they, where do they live?
Well, our oldest daughter, uh, Tiffany, which is 50 years old, she, uh, lives in East new market, Maryland with her husband and, uh, her children there. And then Tangee lives in council Bluffs, Iowa. Council lives out there with, yeah, it's right on the line of Omaha, Nebraska.
You know what? I probably was not far from her. Uh, I was down in the Southwest corner of Iowa. I did a man up conference and preach there, uh, just, just a while back, just not, not, not too long ago. Um, and so I probably was not far from there.
And, uh, Waterloo, Iowa, there's a museum, a rescue museum in Waterloo, Iowa, um, which I've been to in the past and they have a 25 year, uh, reunion here in 2024. And, uh, they, they want, want, want me to be a part of that. So we'll see what happens with that, but, uh, all that to say, so, okay.
So, so you, you get married, start racing a family, your kids racing kids. Uh, I mean, are you working at this point? Are you a marketplace guy?
What, what, what are you doing to support this family? Oh, yeah. I went to work for Dupont and, uh, secret Delaware. And, uh, at that particular time, they said they would call me. And so what I did is I was persistent every Monday. And every Friday I would call them to see if they were hiring. And eventually they brought me in and hired me. And I started out, I will never forget it. It was like $4 an hour, but to me, that was big money back in the seventies, you know, so I get a kick of it. And I worked there for 20 years and, uh, I decided to take the early retirement. And when I left, I was making like 17, 70 something an hour. And, uh, so I left there to go into the ministry and, uh, I went to Virginia beach and took all my training.
And then I was sent to the Ukraine. Oh, wow. Okay. Yes. I had never been on a plane, a train or out of the country in my entire life.
I felt like the Beverly hillbillies going to the city. So, okay. So, so let's pause right there for a second though. Okay. So let's pause. I was a Beverly hillbillies fan of Jen, by the way, uh, from the ground, come on, bubble and brew. Come on. Jethro.
I felt more like Jethro though, that I did like Jed for the record. But anyway, Ellie Mae, but we're going back. We're showing our age here, bunkies.
Some of our, our younger listeners are going to be like, what? Like what? Hey, go Google that.
Go Google, go Google it. Um, anyway, so hold on. So, so, okay. So I'm doing, I'm doing the math on this. So 20 years at, at DuPont. And so, so, so you're, you're, you retire after 20 years. Now you're in your, I'm doing the math. You're in your forties then. Right. When you retire from DuPont. So you're in your forties.
Okay. So a 20 year career there out in the marketplace. You're listening to the truth network and truthnetwork.com. When your eyesight is at stake, it pays to travel to one of the world's leading eye surgeons. Dr. Johnny Gaten is an author, speaker, Christian leader, and a committed family man. He is also a pioneering cataract and glaucoma surgeon. That's why I chose him for my eye surgery.
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You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. So two questions, I guess maybe a two-part question. At what point did a relationship with Jesus become real for you? Let's just, let me add part one and then part two. At what point did you feel like, was it the retirement that you felt led into ministry or did you feel led into ministry before you retired and then the retirement just kind of opened that door?
So two-part question. First part, so at what point did a relationship with Jesus become real to you? Did you grow up in the church or just give us a little back story on that? No, I didn't grow up in the church at all.
My parents were very good people but they weren't church goers. Okay. But there was an elder couple that stopped at our house and asked if they could take us to Sunday school and it was, and of course, you know, we wanted to do anything to get out of the house. So we decided to go, my brother and I. Okay.
And I had two other brothers, but they weren't born yet. And so we went there, I probably went three or four times and it was, it was where they had the old wooden pews and they had the potbelly stove to heat the place. Wow. Okay.
Yeah. And the Sunday school room was one big room and your Sunday school class was a table and everybody was in there. And so like I said, I only went three or four times, but when I was working at Dupont, uh, I was working shift work and Renee, that's my wife, said that there was a bus ministry that came around the trailer park because that's where we lived up. And she said, she told him that they could come pick up the kids to go to Sunday school and she told me where it was and I said, you said what? And I said, uh, had, do you know about this church? I said, because I've heard this church is where, um, they run up and down the aisle and they swing on the chandeliers and peeking tongues and all this kind of stuff. I said, I've got to go check this church out. Yeah. And so I went ahead and made an appointment with a pastor and my grandmother was, uh, uh, affiliated with Oral Roberts and Billy Graham and she had given me stuff, you know, from Oral Roberts that if you, uh, he's prayed over this cloth and you put it on your body, you know, that the Lord will heal you.
Right. And I went in and I talked, I talked to the pastor and he was sitting behind his desk and this was on a Friday. I'll never forget it. He was sitting behind his desk and a suit and I asked him questions and he never answered a question. He always said, I would ask another question and he would say, and he let me get it all out of my system because I said, I can't believe somebody would go ahead and send somebody this handkerchief and Lord's going to heal them.
I said, this doesn't make any sense to me. And he, and then all of a sudden he got up from around his desk and came around and sat in the floor and I said, Oh, this is where they're going to start. This word gets weird. Come on. Yeah. I'm getting ready. I'm getting ready. So he said, how about sitting down here with me? I said, sure. And, uh, he went ahead and he just opened up his Bible and I know now what was happening, but then I didn't, he just took me through the plan of salvation.
Romans road. Right. Yeah. And, uh, you know, and then at the end of it, he says, well, what do you think? And I told him what I thought. And then he asked me if I wanted to accept Jesus into my heart.
And I said, what most definitely. So that's where I got saved in March of 1979. Wow. So I, and then that Sunday we went to the church and I have never been to anything like that. Uh, they told me that they were in a revival and they had the special speaker up there. And now remember, I'm not used to any of this. And they said the Holy Spirit took over and this person in front of me, it started a shaking all over and head bobbing up and down. And I grabbed the pew behind me and held on.
And I peeked around to make sure that she wasn't going to hit her head. And I told my wife, if we live long enough to get out of this place, I'll never come back. Right. And we ended up staying there 12 years. Come on, God got ahold of you and 12 years there. And that's amazing. What an amazing story. And so, you know, your family has this incredible, you have an incredible encounter.
Your family, uh, it sounds like they had an incredible encounter. So we fast forward, Bunky into your retirement and then you're, you're, you're led into ministry. I know you, you, you then became, I know you said you went to the Ukraine, went overseas, which we can, I guess, kind of pick up from there. Um, you know, the, the, the, the Beverly hillbillies, you know, meets, you know, you, you leave Delaware and hit Ukraine. And, and then at some point you, you get, you become a pastor, right?
Correct. Uh, before that I was, I was licensed and then they ordained me through the local church and then sent me over there. And when I landed into, uh, Kiev, they met us, this is right after the wall came down. So everything was fresh. They met us out on the tarmac with their Uzi's and I'm thinking, what have I got myself into?
So is myself and the pastor went over there. Then we went through customs and they didn't have the luggage like we do at the airports. Now there was one great big pile and you got your luggage and then we had to get on a train. Well, the train was one of those dark green, green trains that you see in World War II movies. Uh, and, uh, it, we got on it and it was a 17 hour train ride from Kiev to Avon or Frankie's, which was by the Carpathian mountains. It was the coldest train ride I've ever in my life been in because this was late October. And to give you an example of the way it was, you could only go to the bathroom when the train was moving. So that told you where everything was going. So we got to, got there to Avon or Frankie's unloaded, got settled and we went down to their square. And the interpreter that we hired, uh, she, she was speaking Russian and not Ukrainian.
And in the square, there was one of the gentlemen there that had his Ukrainian outfit on and he had a little bit too much vodka. So the first night that we were there, he drew a sword on us and I'm thinking, oh no, they're going to leave me here and I'm going to be here and it's hard to tell what I'll be like. But it was, they were the most friendliest, loving people I have ever in my life met.
I learned more about me than I did about them. They have the same type of problems that we do. It's just in a different language. Right. Right. It's kind of universal, right? I mean, people are people, you know, face the same issues and problems all over the world.
Right. Just, just a different culture and a different. So, so let me, let me, let me, let me kind of fast forward, condense the story here.
Cause I want to be able to have you to share a thought on this as well. Um, and there's so much more to your story. Uh, I guess we just have to have you back sometime, Bunky, but so, so you've all the ministry you and I met up last year at a men's conference up in Delaware and, um, and, uh, you know, just felt a real connection with you. And of course you inquired, you'd, you'd heard a little bit about, about man camp and, and inquired and, and felt seems like almost immediately like there was something that you were supposed to do. And, and you did now you were our, uh, our oldest camper at the time at 69, getting ready to turn 70. Uh, and, uh, but yet you felt prompted to come and compelled to come and, uh, you know, in our last few couple of minutes here, share, share why you decided to come to camp at, you know, at age 69 and then a quick takeaway of from camp for our listeners. If you would. Okay. You showed a video and there was something in that video that I can't remember, but I knew as soon as I saw it, I was going to go. I didn't care how much it costs. I was going to go because I needed something.
There was a song years ago that I am, I'm tired of being stirred, but never being changed. So I needed that. And so I made the arrangements and you and I connected and, and moving fast forward, I ended up going down to Royston, Georgia, absolutely loved it. Uh, the 16 guys, none of us knew each other, at least I didn't know anybody. And uh, the staff, everything was so wonderful, but it was a great time just to be alone with God and allow him to minister to you. And I don't know if you remember the first night I shared that I've been so involved in ministry doing things and that I even put that before God. And I just woke up one morning and I said, where's God?
And I knew the answer. I had my priorities way out of whack. You know, I was putting everything before my relationship with him and even the relationship with my wife and my family, you know, it was the ministry and uh, it took me a while to realize that.
And I really, I mean, I repented of that, uh, confessed it, repented and had a heart change and it was just absolutely awesome. I would recommend anybody to go and age, don't let that stop you whatsoever. You know, if we stop, if we stop learning, what's the use of living? You know, I want to, I want to be the best plus one. They said, well, what's that mean?
Well, I think if you're the best, you think you've arrived, but if you put the plus one on it, you're continuously wanting to grow. Wow, I'm, I'm making notes as you're talking bunkhead, others will be driving down the road and not going to be able to, but you, you said some real nuggets right there. And, and, and I appreciate that. I mean, you know, regardless of your age, cause you know, even at 69, really there wasn't anything, any activity or anything we did that you weren't able to be, you know, a participant in. And in fact, uh, uh, I've talked recently, one of your fellow campers was legally blind from birth. Right.
And Phillip Murph Jr. he came and was a part of it. But for our listeners out there, here, here's a couple, couple takeaways. I want you to consider, you know, even as we're, you're hearing some of monkey story, you know, and there's, there's so much more to the story where we're going to have him back sometime, uh, talk more about the story. But I wrote down, I'm tired of being stirred, but never changed. I wrote that down and then, man, you said something key there.
We stop learning what's the use of living. Wow. And then busy doing things, which kind of reminds me of Martha, right? The Martha and Mary story. Martha was busy being busy, uh, you know, we can even be busy doing godly things. But at the same time, we've never stood on long enough to be married and sit and receive from the, from the Lord.
Right. Uh, what's, what's the point of living. And so, uh, I, I appreciate you, Bunky, man, I appreciate that, that testimony. And for those out there listening, if you, if you want to learn more about man camp, uh, go to mancamp.info, go to mancamp.info and, uh, Bunky said, man, I don't care what it costs. I'm going, man.
He, he drove, he drove from Delaware down to Virginia and met up with some of my staff and some of his fellow campers, and then made the, made the nine plus hour drive from Virginia down to Royston, Georgia. And so don't let anything stop you. If God's stirring your heart, I love it. I'm tired of being stirred, but never changed, man. If you want to be changed, uh, Bunky, could I say this in our, our last minute here? Would, would this be a true statement? If you want to be changed to make a serious consideration, if you're a lady out there listening, you got a special man in your life, just encourage them, don't push them or prod them.
Just say, you have my blessing. Go to that camp that Nikita is talking about, would this be a true statement, Bunky? If you want to, if you want to experience something life-changing, go to man camp. Would that be a true statement? Most definitely, uh, 100%. And when I came home, uh, I didn't tell my wife, I want you to see the change. Uh, this has changed. I'm going to allow her to see it because I want it to smell like the presence of Jesus. Come on.
So that's a key takeaway. You know, don't go home and tell them what you're going to do. Just show them.
Let them see it. Uh, Bunky Griffith, Delaware from all the way up in Delaware. We thank you for being a part of the Man Up show today and, uh, thank you. Uh, I'm glad the Lord connected us together at that conference and then through man camp and look forward to having you back to, to serve, uh, uh, in the future as well.
And, uh, me too, it's been such an honor and I can't wait to see you again. And for all of you out there in listening land, here's my challenge to you. I hope you were inspired by Bunky's story today.
Go out and live a God-filled, God-blessed day. This podcast is made possible by the grace of God and your faithful prayers, support and generous gifts. May God bless you for your continual contributions. Go to Kolob.net and donate today. If you are enjoying the Man Up show, would you help us spread the word? Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your neighbors to download, subscribe and leave a comment.
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