Heading North

To meet a friend

The Yearly Trek

I'm hitting the road today for a 9 hour round trip to visit someone who's become a good friend over the past 5 years.

I'll be making the long drive north to Lloydminster, Alberta to meet up with Shaun Newman of the ever popular Shaun Newman Podcast.

It's become somewhat of a yearly tradition to sit down with Shaun when I'm back in the maple north. We were two voices within the maelstrom of pandemic Canada who stuck our necks out, giving air to the unspeakable, during a time where such moves were likely to add your name to government lists.

Throughout that span, we've watched each other change and grow in both experiences and character.

Faith out of Chaos

It was actually on an episode of the SNP where Shaun asked me a question that neither of us expected.

You see, I had originally heard of Shaun's podcast while on my first year driving south, unironically fleeing my country into the US with my family.

It was early February of 2022.

The winter was cold, but the Canadian heart burned all the hotter.

Shaun, on a whim, decided to join the freedom convoy of Canadian dissidents who set out from the west, driving the long winter roads east to the capital in protest of pandemic mandates and vaccine segregation.

Upon that journey, he would record daily podcast updates that became me and my wife's window into what was happening up in our country while we drove through the southern states.

I remember a particular episode that brought both of us, unexpectedly, to tears while navigating the French district of Charleston, South Carolina. It featured a momma bear he spoke with in the convoy who was making a call to all Canadian parents to stand up for your rights and speak out without fear.

It was not long after that when I had my first appearance on the SNP, calling in remote from my GMC Yukon on a sketchy camp wifi signal on the sand of Myrtle Beach.

But, shortly after the trucker convoy was forcefully broken up by the para-military implementation of the Emergencies Act by Justin Trudeau… Shaun disappeared.

After the podcast updates stopped coming in, we began to worry for his safety.

Was he arrested?

Silenced?

What happened to Shaun??

And then… A short podcast update was released.

Without much for an explanation, he simply told the listeners he was okay, but would be taking an indefinite ferlow from the show.

And it lasted months.

Then, out of nowhere, he returned!

It wasn't until I got to sit down across from him in person for the first time that I managed to get any sort of response about what happened to him in Ottawa.

And I would keep pressing that question each returning trip I made to Lloydminstery to try and make sense of a story he was still quite reticent to unpack.

But now, it's finally been made clear (and he has shared many times publicly on his show), that he had run head long into a spiritual war in Ottawa that he had never expected.

The Photo

Being a typical non-theistic (I don't know if he would have considered himself atheistic or simply agnostic) 30-something Canadian, Shaun had absolutely nothing to based his experiences in Ottawa on.

Experiences that shook him to the point of near insanity.

That literally brought him to his knees infront of the capital building, praying to a God he didn't know out of fear and desperation.

This picture was taken, unbeknownst to Shaun at the time, by a professional photographer who was documenting the protests.

It now hangs on his studio wall as a visceral reminder of the darkest day in his life.

A day where he, for the first time, understood the terrifying reality of spiritual warfare.

He would come home from the convoy, only days before the February 14th invocation of Trudeau's unconstitutional Emergencies Act, a broken man.

A man his wife didn't recognize.

Someone who had to convince himself, against his own better judgement, that he hadn't gone insane.

Yet, from the ashes of that psychological disaster, rose a new hope.

Through the help of many of his good friends, and a personal journey into the writings of the Bible, Shaun became changed.

A new believer.

A man of God.

And it was shortly after his transformation that he asked me that question. The one that blindsided me while sitting across from him on his show.

“Drew, do you believe in God?”

It's something you don't speak about in Canada.

And even for two guys who'd made a name for themselves from speaking boldly about unspeakable things, it caused me to stutter.

I managed some sort of clumsy response after a one word reply that even I wasn't expecting:

“Yes.”

To understand why that was confusing coming from my mouth, you'd have to know that I, myself, had grown up Christian. Yet, in my early 30s, had quietly lost my faith. So quietly, that not even my wife knew.

It was a secret that I was ashamed to admit out loud.

And one that I had been quietly reconsidering over the pandemic years.

And though it took me another year and a couple of books later, his uncomfortable question wound up leading me back to the faith of my childhood.

Through chaos and turmoil, came the most surprising redemption.

Passing the Torch

And so, I write this early on a Monday, about to hit the road north again to see my friend.

A friend who started me on a similar journey to his own, who is about to start a similar journey to mine!

In less than a week, Shaun is uprooting his family from their Lloydminster house and taking them on a year long expedition on the road!

He plans to cross Canada, the eastern states, and even fly them all to Central America and Australia!

All the while, podcasting along the way.

The thought of it harkens me back to the sound of a sketchy audio recording coming through the stock speakers of our 2001 Yukon. Listening to an Albertan man interview Canadians on the road while on the road myself, far away.

God works in mysterious ways.

~ Drew Weatherhead

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