In Darkness

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.”

I was born into a loving family, but not a believing family. My Dad having been raised Methodist, and my Mom having been raised Roman Catholic both fell away from the churches they were raised in. While I was baptized as an infant by my great-grandfather, who was a Methidost Minister, I was not raised in the church. The only time I remember attending a service on Sunday was on the rare occasion I was spending time with my grandparents.

While I was raised to not lie, cheat, or steal. I was not given a biblical foundation, which allowed me to be heavily influenced by the values of the world. In high school, I played in a metal band and toured the local circuit. I didn’t play sports, but did like to party and womanize, and so did the people I hung out with. A year after high school I started talking to recruiters about joining the military and set out for Air Force basic training in the early 2000s. Before I left, two friends of mine gave me a Bible.

The Bible stayed in its box for several years, while my pastime of working hard and playing hard continued in the military. However, God was working on me, even if I thought I was ignoring Him. In a series of events, I was faced with experiences in life that God used to bring me closer to Him. The first was my deployment to Iraq, where I was doing outside-the-wire patrols and conveys with an Army unit. During this time, I had to face the reality of my mortality.

The next big moment that God used was marriage and children. After I had proposed to my future wife, we went to the military chaplain, who after a few short questions refused to marry us unless I became Catholic. So, we decided to have a nice ceremony at the historic county courthouse. A year later our daughter was on the way, and facing the miracle of a new life challenged me in ways that were similar to facing my mortality. I had to ask, where did we come from and where are we going?

This questioning opened the door for my bride and I as a couple to start seeking God. First, we started with the Catholic church, attending Mass, and even having our daughter baptized. Next, we attended a United Methodist Church, both of us exploring the roots of our family’s faith. But I still did not have a grasp of the gospel or of my own need for a savior.

We eventually stopped attending church altogether, and after several years we were increasingly fighting. God used this to lead me to the Bible I had yet to read. The same Bible my friends had given me years before, and this time I started in Matthew, not Genesis.

For the first time in my life, I encountered Jesus in the Gospels and He convicted me of my sin. It’s at this point that I repented and gave my life to Christ.

To Light

God has been sanctifying me ever since, which has not always been easy.

“Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away.”

Shortly after Christ changed my heart, I deployed to Africa to support counterterrorism operations. Several things challenged me during this period as an immature believer. First, I wasn’t a member of a church, and I didn’t have anyone overseas to disciple me. When I came across passages that told me “love my enemy” and to “pray for them,” I was at a loss of how to love terrorists. This was also the same year that the Supreme Court imposed gay “marriage” onto the country, which I was conflicted with, as I had grown up with several “gay” friends. This took my faith which had grown rapidly, and it started to wilt.

“Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.”

By the time I came home, I had stopped reading my Bible and I still had not joined a church. It was also during this time that my wife and I started to seek fertility help, as we wanted another child but couldn’t get pregnant. As immature Christians we were still trusting in the world and not God. During this period, we did start attending a conservative Nazarene Church and I began to irregularly read my Bible, but I was still not connected to other believers and even though we had become regular attenders we had not committed to Church membership.

During this time, I was also researching secular psychology, and what I now understand as Hindu practices that have been repackaged as “mental health,” which is commonly promoted in the Air Force as resiliency. I was researching this because of the nature of the work I was involved in, as well as the tension fertility treatment had brought into my marriage. I had not learned that the Bible is sufficient.

But God was getting ready to teach me a lesson, to trust Him. After months and a hefty out-of-pocket expense, the fertility treatment had failed. We were devastated, but God used this pain for His glory. You see, we were exhausted, and through this exhaustion we lifted our desire to have another child to God and placed it in His hands.

“Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

The amazing part of this story is that after all the doctors had told us we would never again have children naturally, we did! God revealed it to us on December 24th, yes, we found out we were pregnant on Christmas Eve!

Again, God had used the miracle of life to bring me closer to Him. Not long after my son was born our family moved and we started looking for another church. After attending several churches, we started regularly attending an Evangelical church near our home. It was at this church we started to really mature in our faith. We joined as members and started attending events outside of service.

It was this church that shepherded us through a year-long deployment, COVID, and several other life events. During this period, I started seminary which helped me to correct several of the syncretistic errors I had accumulated through my study of “resiliency.” It also led me to really seek out my calling from God and a strong desire to get baptized as a believer.

Now, I’m on mission for Christ. Seeking to glorify Him with however many years He blesses me with.