Mike Nawrocki: We lost everything, so it was a really tough time. For me, from a personal and spiritual standpoint, it really made it clear to me how much I needed God in my life. My only security can be found in my relationship with Jesus. That’s’ really the only truly secure thing that there is in this world.  

Finding Your Footing in the Face of Uncertainty: Mike Nawrocki and Jennie Smythe – Episode #463

Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. This week, we’re joined by Mike Nawrocki, best known for his work in co-creating the beloved children’s series VeggieTales, and voice of Larry the Cucumber. Mike shares the leap of faith he took with college friend and VeggieTales co-creator Phil Vischer, the setbacks and devastating losses they faced along the way to create what would become an iconic staple for families all over, and how simple stories told by talking vegetables helped people understand just how much God loves them. 

Later, we’ll hear from Jennie Smythe, the CEO of Girlilla Marketing. Through the tragic cancer diagnosis that Jennie helped her father walk through, to her own battle with breast cancer, Jennie shares how life’s challenges have shown her that her security and identity rests in Jesus alone.

Let’s begin with Mike’s story. 

Mike Nawrocki: My name is Mike Nawrocki. Most folks may know me better as the voice of Larry the Cucumber. I’m the co-creator of VeggieTales, the creator of the new Dead Sea Squirrels book and animated series, and also a professor at Lipscomb University. 

I grew up in a military family. I am an Air Force brat born in Ohio on Wright-Patterson Air Force base, home of the Wright brothers and the birth of flight. My dad was career Air Force. We moved around every three or four years, like most military families. I got to see a lot of the country, a lot of the world—lived in Japan for four years, Southern California, Colorado, and Washington DC.  

In my middle school years, we were living in Colorado. My dad was reassigned to the Pentagon. We couldn’t sell our house, and he ended up moving in with his commanding officer who is a really strong Christian. And so, my dad moved out. He was gone for quite a while because we couldn’t sell our house. When we finally sold our house and rejoined him in Washington, DC, we had a brand new dad. He was completely different. He was, if you can imagine, the military kind of officer—very stringent type of person and workaholic—but [it was] like a 180. We all noticed it, and it all felt like something was totally different. Over the course of the next year, we found that he had come to accept Christ and in a really personal and meaningful way. And it had an effect on the whole family. Within a year, we were all Christians. 

We started to go to this little church that his commanding officer recommended to him in Franconia, Virginia—a little Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. I fell in love with a youth group there. That was a time in my life when I really started to come alive with [realizing that] I just love entertaining people, I love music, I love singing, I love writing—but all as a hobby. They were all hobbies to me. I didn’t know that’s what one could do for a living, much less a ministry, until later. 

College, Puppets, and Meeting Phil Vischer

When I went to college, my thought was, Well, I would go to this denominational college of the C&MA [Christian and Missionary Alliance] for a year or two and get some Bible classes out of the way. [Since] they didn’t have a pre-med program there, [I would then] transfer to a place with a pre-med program. So, that’s what I did. I went to Crown College. 

Every student was required to do a student ministry. I had done some puppetry growing up [as I] was a big Jim Henson fan. Plus, everybody knows that puppets are chick magnets. Who could resist? I went out for the puppet team, and lo and behold, met a guy named Phil Vischer, who would later become the voice of Bob the Tomato. We just started writing and performing, and as we like to say, “Roaming around the Minnesota countryside, scaring the Baptists with our puppets.” We shared a similar sense of humor, and just had a really great time. He wanted to go to film school, and I wanted to go to medical school eventually. They didn’t have a film program at this college either, so we were very aligned in terms of [the fact that] we were only going to go there for about a year or two. We both ended up there three semesters, a year and a half.  

So I went back to Colorado where I was from and he went back to Chicago where he was from to regroup, and then we were going to move out to California to be roommates—he would go to film school and I would go to pre-med. He ended up landing a job—he did an internship, and they offered him a job in Chicago, and he took that. So, all of a sudden I was roommate-less in my quest to go out to California, I’d gotten into a couple of schools out there already. But I just felt like, Okay, I don’t want to go out there by myself. There’s plenty of places to do pre-med in Chicago. I packed up everything that I owned in my 1980 red Ford Fiesta, drove out to Chicago, and just started working on jobs. I wanted to get residency in Illinois to afford tuition at the University of Illinois, Chicago, which is where I ended up going. 

I then landed a job that came open at the post-house that Phil was working at as a graveyard shift VHS tape duplicator. On the night shift, I would just hit record on a two hour VHS cassette and then stop it, so I had a lot of time in between to read manuals, and I was kind of a techie computer guy.

Phil and I were having so much fun creating. We felt like with all of this new technology emerging, particularly computer animation which was just coming out, if we could create characters, really simple characters to tell stories—kind of like what we did with puppets—that there could be a big need for that. And so we created a promo for what would become VeggieTales.

Meanwhile, I graduated. I applied with the Peace Corps, and got in with the Peace Corps. The same month, Phil came back and said, “Hey, we’ve got funding for the first show.” I was going to go to Africa for two years to teach biology and then come back and go to medical school. That was the big plan. I knew at that moment the decision that I made would really affect the rest of my life. It was clear as a bell to me. It’s like, Okay, I ship out and go to Africa, or I stay here and work on VeggieTales. That was the big moment for me where I needed to pray about it and ask the people in my life who knew me best about what I should do. People told me they felt like I had a gift for this, and here was a great opportunity. And so, I turned down Peace Corps and we got to work on “Where’s God When I’m S-Scared?” which is our very first episode of VeggieTales. 

VeggieTales Catches On

VeggieTales was the very first computer-animated series to come out. We sold the show by taking out ads in Christian parenting magazines to advertise these VHS tapes. We got about 500 orders and sent those out. I think we raised about $60,000 to make the first show. 500 orders at fifteen dollars a pop—if you do the math, it doesn’t come out to $60,000. It comes out to quite less. But one of the orders came from Word Records. Word was launching a new kids label called Everland Entertainment.

By February of the next year, we signed a distribution deal with Word. We would get advances on distribution and make the shows. I remember when we finished the first show, it was such a Herculean effort to get it out the door and get it to people in the mail by Christmas. We almost all died doing it because it was just so much work, so many technical things to jump over. But seeing that we had completed a half an hour of computer animation was like, Wow, we did it! 

When we started to hear stories from college students having VeggieTales dorm-watching parties and that’s when [we were] like, Okay, well, maybe there’s something going on here. It was sort of spreading around by word of mouth, so 1993 through 1996, those were all very lean years, but by 1997, it really started to catch on. I was able to stop doing freelance and come over full-time on VeggieTales. We never knew that, obviously, it would get as big as it did. 

Even with the silly songs, it helped the kids fall in love with Larry and the other characters to the point where they’re just singing a silly song. They love this character, they trust this character, and they care what the character has to say about God making them special and loving them very much. It’s just incredible to see how God used that in ways that we could have never imagined before. 

“The silly songs helped the kids fall in love with Larry and the other characters to the point where they love this character, they trust this character, and they care what the character has to say about God making them special and loving them very much.” – Mike Nawrocki

Challenging Times for VeggieTales

And so, VeggieTales was getting big. We launched another series called 3-2-1 Penguins. That was also doing well. I remember I had started to write Jonah as a direct-to-video episode. I was working on it and I took it to Phil—it was already getting really long, too long for a direct-to-video episode. At that point, we made the decision that this should be our first feature film. We were kind of on the up slope to be able to do that. 

It was so new. We were one of the only studios that did 3D animation. We didn’t have the infrastructure to do both a feature film and continue with our direct-to-videos with VeggieTales—both from the creative pipeline of just getting the stories done, but then also the technical pipeline of getting it all animated. It ended up putting us in a pickle, so to speak, with our finances. So when the movie came out, it did well, but it didn’t do as well as it needed to. We had all this money flowing out to finance the film and to launch 3-2-1 Penguins. We were also in a distribution lawsuit. It was a lawsuit that was later overturned, but we lost that lawsuit initially. So, all of those things came together and put us in bankruptcy, basically. Phil was the majority owner of the company, but I owned a sizable chunk as well. We lost everything, and [were] in danger of not just the stock, but we could have lost our houses and all that sort of thing. So it was a really, really tough time. 

For me, from a kind of a personal and spiritual standpoint, it really made it clear to me how much I needed God in my life. I was just saddened by the loss of the community of people, because people were really excited to work on the show. When we had to do that big round of layoffs, it was just heartbreaking—to see people who kind of [viewed] it as very missional for them. They were doing great work. It was reaching people. So that was really heartbreaking more than anything else for me. 

“We lost everything, so it was a really, really tough time. For me, from a kind of a personal and spiritual standpoint, it really made it clear to me how much I needed God in my life. It’s like my only security can be found in my relationship with Jesus. That’s really the only truly secure thing that there is in this world.” – Mike Nawrocki

For me at that point, it’s like my only security can be found in my relationship with Jesus. That’s really the only truly secure thing that there is in this world. So that was a very clear lesson for me at that time. And God was really gracious and good to me and my family. 

“My only security can be found in my relationship with Jesus. That’s really the only truly secure thing that there is in this world.” – Mike Nawrocki

My dad was an avid reader of the Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, so that’s the one that’s been on my nightstand for a long time. Obviously, Jesus Calling has had a tremendous reach, and I think it’s really important to have those resources, those reflections. You’re not leaving it all up to yourself. You get that challenge from another Godly person to say, “Hey, have you thought about this? Can you reflect on this?” As that relates to God’s Word, I think it’s a beautiful thing. 

We went through that bankruptcy, but we were bought out of bankruptcy by a company who wanted to see us continue to do what we did. And so we ended up moving to Nashville to start the company kind of under a new business model where we would do all the creative development and then outsource the animation, which was really expensive to maintain an animation studio. We did that, and I was able to rebuild my life and continue doing a very similar thing to what I did pre-bankruptcy. I continued to do that for a number of years until 2016. We were able to raise our kids and continue to make shows. It was a great thing despite the hardships.

Mike’s New Project: The Dead Sea Squirrels

For many years, I was trying to think of what it would be like to come up with a show idea to be able to tell more New Testament stories, more gospel stories in a way that is really fun and relevant for kids of today. And so, the general concept was Encino Man meets the Dead Sea Scrolls. What if you brought two characters from the first century into the modern day? And then, the bad pun—Dead Sea Squirrels—obviously, was right there. 

It ended up getting a six book deal out of it. The six book deal turned into a twelve book deal as the book started doing well. In the meantime, I had coffee with my good friend Steve Taylor, who we had worked on a couple of VeggieTales movies, The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything and Jonah. He had written a couple songs for those. Steve was a filmmaker in his own right, and he had started a film school at Lipscomb University. Steve asked me if I had ever considered teaching, and I was a little unsure of how to do that. But he said, “Tell you what, why don’t you come over? You can be our artist in residence and actually go through our MFA program in film as well.” And so that’s what I did.  

I graduated in 2019, and started teaching full-time. I have a B.S. in Biology, a B.A. in History, and then the MFA. Sometimes my students call me Dr. Nawrocki. I’m not a doctor, but I don’t stop them from calling me that. Whatever you want to say. 

So I was teaching over there, writing the books, and then Steve and I just started to think, Well, what would it look like to create a pilot for the first book? Could we get the money for that? Steve was actually able to raise some money for a pilot that we produced using the school partially as a production unit. That ended up being a perfect thing to carve out for a student animation team to do, and we partnered with an animation studio out of New Zealand to do the rest of the show. 

We had worked with Matthew West on a silly song before, and I called Matthew and said, “Hey, Matthew, you want to be our singing Jesus?” And he’s like, “Sure I do.” He’s great. He does a number of songs. Mac Powell is in there as John the Baptist, and Ellie Holcomb is in the show. It’s just really neat to see the caliber of talent that’s come alongside to be in this with us. It’s really neat to see kind of everything coming together and really the heart of the show and my wanting to do this in the first place was to share more of the gospel story, tell more New Testament stories, and share the gospel message with kids. And that’s what we’ve been able to do. 

“It’s really neat to see kind of everything coming together and really the heart of the show and my wanting to do this in the first place was to share more of the gospel story, tell more New Testament stories, and share the gospel message with kids.” – Mike Nawrocki

I run into young adults all the time now, and the line that I’ll get from them is, “VeggieTales was my childhood.” That is just such a powerful thing to hear that the stories we told affected them so much and that it was so much a part of how they grew up, which is just really humbling to see that. 

Narrator: To learn more about Mike and his work, please visit www.mikenawrocki.com, and be sure to check out The Dead Sea Squirrels show on www.gominno.com.  

Stay tuned to Jennie Smythe’s story after a brief message. 

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The Jesus Calling Commemorative Edition

For over twenty years, readers have discovered the joy of spending time in the presence of the Savior with the much-loved daily devotions in Jesus Calling. 

Now, in the Jesus Calling commemorative edition, you’ll feel comforted by words of hope and encouragement, and be reassured of Jesus’ unending love through author Sarah Young’s words of gentle guidance that are rooted in Scripture. 

In this deluxe edition, you’ll find samples of Sarah’s original handwritten devotionals, twelve new devotions she penned before her passing, letters from Sarah to readers for each month of the year, and a touching tribute from Sarah’s daughter. 

Experience a deeper relationship with Jesus as you savor the presence of the One who understands you perfectly and loves you forever. Find the Jesus Calling commemorative edition today at your favorite retailer or get 30% off your purchase at www.faithgateway.com.

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Our next guest is Jennie Smythe. Jennie is the CEO of Girlilla Marketing, a Nashville-based digital marketing agency. After walking through the painful loss of her father to pancreatic cancer, a pivotal question her father asked in his final days reshaped her life’s purpose. Years later, while battling breast cancer as a young mother and entrepreneur, Jennie leaned on her community and rediscovered her faith in new and profound ways.

Jennie Smythe: My name is Jennie Smythe, and I am a digital marketing CEO of a company called Girlilla Marketing based in Nashville, Tennessee. I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado in the late seventies. My father was an oil company executive, and by nature, we moved around quite a bit. So, I was lucky enough to live in several cities in the United States including Denver, Phoenix, Tulsa, and then later in Los Angeles.

Grace and Strength to Endure

My father unfortunately suffered from pancreatic cancer. A couple of nights before he passed, I was in his apartment and I was all by myself surrounded by his stuff. We had a complicated relationship at best. I was actually angry that I had to be there towards the end of his life, because I always thought that maybe he would not have me and then that would make him regret some of the decisions that he made. But I was there. I did the right thing.

I found myself on the floor of his apartment, crying my eyes out, thinking, How much more can I take? Every single day, it was something—he was not going to live, we were fighting with the insurance companies, he had crashed a car on the way to getting a prescription, he was not sick enough for hospice, but not sick enough to stay in a hospital. I just kept saying, “I can’t take one more thing. I can’t take one more thing.” And then, one more thing would happen. 

That night in his apartment, I spoke to God. I said, “You have to help me. I can’t do this.” And what I meant by asking for help was for Him to change the situation. But what happened is He just made me strong enough to get through it. While there’s nothing great to talk about in terms of pancreatic cancer and losing your father, what was amazing about that situation is that he gave me forgiveness. I was able to speak to my father and come to a state of understanding and love with him, which looking back was a huge gift.

“While there’s nothing great to talk about in terms of pancreatic cancer and losing your father, what was amazing about that situation is that he gave me forgiveness.” – Jennie Smythe

One day in the hospital, my dad was having moments of lucidity, and he kind of propped up out of bed and out of the blue asked me what I would do if I knew my life was half over. And I remember distinctly reeling back from that question, because it was very unlike him to ask a deep question like that. We spent a lot of time talking about the Denver Broncos, talking about the weather—just sort of surface level—so to get that kind of question from my dad stopped me in my tracks. And while I initially wanted to just brush it off as something that he was experiencing because of his medication or where he was in his cancer journey, I stopped and I really answered that question. Up until that point, like most human beings, I had dreams and a list of things that I wanted to accomplish. But like most of us, we think that they’re too lofty or it’s not the right time or perhaps I have to get to this place to get to this place, you know, you make a lot of excuses. 

I am really proud to say that I have done the things that I laid out to my dad, and I am happy to say [things] have worked out and have been a huge part of my life. I can’t help but think that my dad speaking to me at that time was a little bit of a divine intervention, and I am forever grateful for that. So when my dad passed, we had love, and that just changed my life in one moment.

“I can’t help but think that my dad speaking to me at that time was a little bit of a divine intervention, and I am forever grateful for that.” – Jennie Smythe

Jennie Faces Her Own Health Challenge 

Then later on, I was fighting my own battle. Being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, I also had two small children, one of which was still in diapers. And so, for the first time, I really thought to myself, Do I have what it takes to get through this and to carry on? I have to be honest with you, I was very angry at God, and I felt abandoned. And I had felt that way for years. 

I remember even being a child, I didn’t have good experiences with organized churches or some of the human beings that I had been exposed to when I was little were not what they said they were, so I rejected a lot of opportunities to continue to learn because I was intimidated by it. I didn’t understand the Bible. I didn’t understand how the church system worked. I felt like an outsider. However, I always had that feeling in me that there was something bigger and more important.

I went to chemotherapy, I was in the infusion clinic. A nurse who did not know me walked up to me and gave me the little brown copy of the Sarah Young devotional. And I thought, Wow, that’s so crazy that somebody would do that. I think she did it for every single patient in there, but it felt very personal to me that she saw me, and in that moment, put something in my hands. I went home and started reading that every day. Sometimes I read the same passage ten times. I had tried to read the Bible several different ways and found it incredibly intimidating, whereas Sarah’s [Jesus Calling] devotional broke down the barrier of entry. Certain passages or certain paragraphs would really speak to me, and I was able to kind of research from there. 

And then another friend of mine, Lisa Lee, who passed away, sent me the same book—like maybe three weeks later, unrelated—she had no idea that I had had that experience at Vanderbilt. She sent me that book. Now, I have one at my desk at work and one on my nightstand. Reading those devotionals set the tone for the day. Sometimes, I would wake up on days and I did not know how I was gonna make it through the day. And those little devotionals did it. 

As a business owner, as a boss, as an entrepreneur, I did doubt and think, Am I going to pull back? My community in Nashville, and specifically in the music business, did not allow me to do that. I was uplifted by my staff, I was uplifted by my clients, and in fact, some of my clients gave me more work. Everybody in the building and everybody who was adjacent to us in one way or another really rallied with me. 

I was compelled to tell that story because I feel like so many times if you hear something like, “You have cancer,” or any huge challenge like that, your instinct is to retreat, and I really wanted to have a love letter to my community and thank them for everything that they did for me. I had a year of active treatment and surgeries, but now five years later, I’m still employed by a lot of those clients, and I think we’re stronger together because of it. 

Thanking Those Who Helped Along the Way

I think it’s a transition, because as I was able to get better physically, I was also able to recognize all of the amazing things that I had. You appreciate so much more when you’ve been faced with adversity like that. And so after about 2019, I just decided I wouldn’t have any bad days. I might have bad moments. I certainly still get angry and emotional, say the wrong things, don’t do the right thing by being a parent or a boss, or, you know, normal human behavior. But [I’d approach life] more from a place of appreciating that I woke up that day and I have the opportunity to make it the best day of my life.

“I think it’s a transition, because as I was able to get better physically, I was also able to recognize all of the amazing things that I had. I just decided I wouldn’t have any bad days. I might have bad moments. I certainly still get angry and emotional, say the wrong things, don’t do the right thing by being a parent or a boss, or, you know, normal human behavior. But [I’d approach life] more from a place of appreciating that I woke up that day and I have the opportunity to make it the best day of my life.” – Jennie Smythe 

Be brave to share your story, no matter how embarrassing. Or, if you have shame or if you are really proud of yourself and you just want to celebrate your wins, that’s okay too. Give thanks during those periods of time as well. It’s such a beautiful gift to be able to listen to people and learn from them and be inspired by their stories. It’s really important to show up when you are vulnerable and when you’re struggling, because you can really help people. 

“It’s really important to show up when you are vulnerable and when you’re struggling, because you can really help people.” – Jennie Smythe 

I’m reading from Sarah Young’s Jesus Listens, January 2nd:

Beloved Jesus,

Trying to depend only on You sometimes feels like walking on a tightrope. Yet I don’t need to be afraid of falling because Your everlasting arms are a safety net underneath me.

Please help me to keep looking ahead to You, Jesus. I know that You’re always before me, beckoning me on—one step at a time. As I spend quiet time with You, I can almost hear You whispering, “Follow Me, beloved.“

In Your precious Name, 

Amen

Narrator: To learn more about Jennie Smythe, you may visit www.girlillamarketing.com, and please be sure to check out her new book, Becoming Girlilla: My Journey To Unleashing Good In Real Life, Online, And In Others, at your favorite retailer.

If you’d like to hear more stories about rooting our security in Jesus, check out our interview with Brandi Rhodes.

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Next week: Becky Murray

Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from the founder and CEO of One By One, Becky Murray. Becky shares how a desire to fight injustice led to a career on the frontlines of global humanitarian work and how small acts of kindness can change the world. 

Becky Murray: I think as long as our eyes are constantly fixed on Him, that makes all the difference because it takes your eyes off the mountain and puts them on the One who can move those mountains.