Follow Him: A Come, Follow Me Podcast - Blind Faith on Everest • followHIM Favorites • June 15-21 • Come, Follow Me

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Welcome to Follow Him favorites. John and I share a single story to go with each week's Come Follow Me lesson. Are you ready for a modern David and Goliath story, John? Oh, I'm braced. Go. You are going to love this. Eric Wyenmayer. That's just a great last name. When he was in elementary school, found out that he had a degenerative eye disease. And sadly, tragically, he is going to be blind in the next few years. Sure enough, by the time he entered.

high school. He was completely blind. But he had worked really hard. His mother had helped him. He was able to stay in a mainstream school. He was able to continue his life because they had worked hard practicing for this. He didn't love that, by the way. He didn't love practicing to be blind, but his mom was really set that he could fight through this and keep going and have a wonderful, successful life. Sadly, John, even more tragically, after he goes blind, his mother is killed in an accident. He has had some really, really hard times. A few months after that, he was reading a newsletter in Braille about a group of blind students who were going to begin to rock climb, kind of an intro to rock climbing class.

He said, this sounds insane. Who would be dumb enough to take blind kids rock climbing? So he signed up. What is there for a teenage boy, right? Besides, hey, that sounds insane. What follows John defies explanation? Eric Weinmere, blind since age 14, becomes the first and only blind person to ever summit Mount Everest. The biggest rock available to climb. I'd like to rock climb. How about that rock?

Not only that, John, he has kayaked 277 miles of the Colorado River. He says the fear of climbing blind comes when I'm reaching out into the darkness when I don't know what I am going to find. Every single move, every handhold, every step up the mountain was to go further into darkness with no guarantee what was there. This is not a disability. This is faith. David going in front of Goliath with great faith says this can happen. The Lord that that delivered me out of the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine. It goes forward and does it. Do you know Eric Weinmayer calls this his

inner vision? Is that interesting? Yeah. Faith is an inner vision. I love it. His life motto, what's within you is stronger than what is in your way. Nice. Don't you love it? Here we have the Army of Israel looking at Goliath going, run away. We don't have a guy this big. And here comes a small shepherd boy who says, who's that guy? He needs to go down. He is, what does he say, he's mocking the God of Israel? This is, I can't stand for this. I'm going to go out there and take care of him. And Goliath says, am I a dog? Yeah, that you would come out me with this little boy with his sticks. Second Corinthians, John, I think it says, we walk by faith, not by sight. And he did that. He did that. We hope you'll join us on our full podcast. It's called Follow Him. You can get it wherever you get your

podcast. We are with brother Mike Madsen this week. John, we didn't know Mike very well before, but wow, what a teacher. Yeah, it was awesome. We hope you'll join us there. And then come back next week. We'll do another follow-in favorites.