MY TESTIMONY

My path to Jesus started with some powerful seeds as a child but went through confusing and eccentric turns right up until I got saved in college.

In the beginning…
My parents had decided to raise me Lutheran before I was born. My mother had been part of the Lutheran church all her life having been raised in the farm town of Emblem, Wyoming. My dad was raised Catholic in Nogales, Arizona, but he and his family didn't hold it as a priority. When it came time to choose what denomination my sister and I would be raised in, they both decided that my mom would take us to Lutheran church and teach us accordingly. A few weeks after I was born in Tucson, I was dedicated and baptized.

Faith like a child…
As I remember being a child (and with some help from old photos), I was very into Sunday School and stories in the Bible. One specific picture shows my sister and I sitting together in a couch as I read to her out of a coloring book about how "Jesus loves you." I was an avid singer of songs like "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "Yes, Jesus Loves Me." My enthusiasm in Sunday School helped me to absorb a lot of info about the Bible stories they'd tell us and I'd be the first one in the group to shout out the answer to any kind of Bible trivia. Little did I know that even in an innocent place and time as that, I was already building up a level of pride and mind idolatry that would later consume my life. I believe that in my childhood I did have "faith like a child," a faith that pleased the Lord, but never did I hear a call to give and live my life for Jesus. I don't remember a lesson or sermon about having to be born-again to enter the Kingdom of God by making the single and life-changing decision. It was a decision that had to be made on my own, between God and me, of my own will, once for the first time and everyday for the rest of my life. I never made that decision as a child, and I grew up without that spiritual foundation in God that I needed (that everyone needs) to really live out the call of God on my life. However, I know now that even though I wasn't a part of God's family, he had a very specific plan for me that would bring me into it later on.

-mind idolatry
1: the worship of a physical object (mind or knowledge) as a god
2: immoderate attachment or devotion to the mind and knowledge

The In-between Years…
Starting in my late elementary school years and peaking during mid-high school, my drive to know and understand more brought me out of a state of child-like faith and into a state of religious wandering and secular humanism. I started not wanting to go to church anymore. My parents wanted me to go to church all the time and I just didn't want to go. I faithfully attended my confirmation group even though I didn't want to. During church and the group meetings, I generally hung out with my friends to be cynical and judging over everything. It was more of an issue to make a wisecrack at the right time than to pay attention and be interested in the Biblical Truths we were being taught. Of course, at the time I didn't care about Biblical Truths so I never thought anything of it. My beliefs had become whatever I felt was true based on my observations of the world and what I could see and understand. My motto was if I could see, it touch it, and understand it, then I would believe in it. Anything other than that was close-mindedness. That's why I put so much stock in science and knowledge. Science is the art of understanding the world with the mind, by believing in what you see.

I devoted myself to acquiring knowledge in class, TV, internet, and magazines. I read books about relativity, quantum theory, and the latest cutting edge theoretical physics. The only thing I cared about was absorbing knowledge and science. It also drove me to be a perfectionist when it came to grades. The pride, self-reliance, and idolatry that all came from needing to understand the world on my own set me on the path away from God. What I truly didn't understand was faith, and setting your trust and hope in what is not seen. As Paul wrote "For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes in what he already sees?" My "hope" or trust was in what I could see, not what I couldn't see, namely Jesus Christ.

In my sophomore and junior years in high school, I didn't have to go to church anymore if I didn't want to. I was more than willing to stay at home on Sunday mornings. From that point through my sophomore year in college at the University of Arizona in Tucson, I was always looking to understand the world and universe in which I lived in my own strength and comprehension. My "beliefs" changed as frequently as I changed my socks. I touched all the bases from agnostic, Judaism, and a bunch of pseudo-scientifically founded beliefs. It all came down to me being completely indulged in secular humanism. My issue was how could God, if He loved everyone, let some people go to hell and others heaven? Especially if some of the people hadn't heard the Gospel or lived their lives as really good people. Why did God let good people go to hell? Who is to say one faith is right and the other is wrong? If one faith is right and people are raised and become decent human beings in another, why do they have to go to hell?

-secular humanism
1: humanistic philosophy viewed as a nontheistic religion antagonistic to traditional religion
2: a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially : a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason

God's persistence and gift of faith…
The Lord was calling me to the U of A from elementary school. It's pretty clear to me now. My best friend in school was from a family of U of A graduates and he always teased me about how UA was better than Arizona State University (ASU). That persistent pestering planted a seed in me about that school. Later on in my late high school career, I wanted to double major in Physics and Astronomy which could only be done (at least in state) at the UA. One of my friends from CompUSA where I had worked for 2 years went down to Tucson for physics also. He went down a year before and encouraged me to join him. After hearing all the praise and seeing the campus for myself, I decided that UA was where I would go to college.

My freshman year, I became a part of a leadership organization called Blue Chips. Similar to National Honor Society, it helped students get knit into the college family quickly with people who were motivated in becoming leaders on campus. My impressions of the club were similar to those I had of high school student council: lots of small shallow talk where nothing really got done (my view of student council may have been a bad impression, who knows). However, I felt it might be worth it in the end so I stuck with it. On September 23rd, 2000, my Blue Chips group had a team building Ropes Course where we would all learn how to work together. During one of the preliminary games we played where it boiled down to a bunch of people chasing each other, I ran after someone and in the process stepped on her foot while we were both running. My ankle immediately gave way and we both fell to and slid on the ground. I got up and tried to walk but my right ankle was in a lot of pain. I resorted to just icing it and keeping off it.

As the day went on, I found how bad an idea that was but everything turned out exactly as it should have. That evening my ankle swelled up to 3 times its size and was immovable and extremely painful. I called my friend from CompUSA who lived in the residence hall next to me. I asked him if he had a car and could take me to the Urgent Care at the University Medical Center. He didn't but a guy named Jason Kluge, who was hanging out in their room at the time (who I didn't know) offered to take me down there and stay with me while the doctors checked me out. He came and got me and we went down to Urgent Care as the doctors checked out my ankle and determined what to do with it. They determined I had only sprained it but it was very severe; I would have been better off breaking it. They decided to put a soft cast on me for about a month as it healed.

During the entire process of examination and casting, which lasted about 2 hours, Jason and I talked a lot. I learned that he was a minister on campus and did Bible studies with students. I wasn't a fan of "Bible-thumpers" or evangelicals because I saw them as pushy and close-minded, but Jason was very respectful about it. We discussed religious subjects in movies like my 2 favorite at the time: The Matrix and Dogma. I was very interested to hear what he believed and even more interested to tell him what I thought I believed. He asked me if I'd be interested in doing a Bible study sometime or get together and just talk about either of those 2 movies and discuss any questions I might have. I half-heartedly agreed to talk about the movies since I wasn't really interested in getting into a Jason-teaches-me-the-Bible relationship, but I loved talking about those movies.

Over the rest of the fall semester and the beginning of the spring of 2001, we met occasionally, watched parts of The Matrix, the whole of Dogma, and he showed me in the Bible answers to the questions that were bothering me about Christianity. I was amazed that for every question I had, there was an answer in the Bible, and it wasn't something that Jason made up but actually came from the book. What he read to me intrigued me but didn't budge my unbelieving stance. I just didn't understand how the Bible could be the Word of God if it was written by imperfect men. It did however plant more seeds.

In April, Jason left Tucson for Colorado to start a new church up there. That's when I met another campus minister from the same church as Jason named Kirk Walker. I met him through my friend from CompUSA since Kirk knew him also. He was a persistent and energetic guy, similar to myself, but our persistence was focused on different things. He'd call my room weekly from the lobby just to see what I was up to. He was always interesting to talk to but I usually felt obligated to let him in the dorm and hang out with him for a little bit simply because he was already in the lobby. We'd talk a lot about a little and never got into a Bible study or in-depth discussions about Christianity.

As the story goes, Kirk was walking towards my dorm in the morning for no other reason than that's the way he was headed and he prayed to God "Lord, whoever you want me to start a Bible study with today, I pray that they are the first person I see." As he continued walking next to the library, he saw me walking towards him. I didn't know it was him since I usually face the ground when it's still the morning. As soon as he saw me the Lord told him "Ask him about The Matrix." So we greeted each other, asked me where I was going, and said "So if you were in the Matrix, would you take the red pill or the blue pill?" In the movie, the main character Neo has to make a choice between a red pill, which leads to the truth of reality, and a blue pill, which leads to blind ignorance about reality. I answered that I would take the red pill. I wanted to know the truth.

We parted ways and he continued to call me and meet with me with more of a mission. Still no real Bible studies came of it immediately and he never forced beliefs on me or disrespected me in anyway, which was interesting considering my view of evangelists. I did seem to develop a feeling that he was near, like on campus or when he'd come to visit my apartment. I still respectfully tried to avoid him but the Lord had other plans. In late February into March 2002, Kirk would visit me at my apartment pretty often, usually bringing one other guy that would hang out with him for the night, meeting people Kirk met with. The topics of discussion ranged from the behind-the-scenes dirt on the new Star Wars to how I felt the universe was organized. One of the guys he brought, Jeremy Gilby, had graduated with an astrophysics degree and was very capable of carrying on bizarre scientific conversations with me.

March 27th, 2002 came along and Kirk and I had planned to meet at the student union for a half-hour or so, no different from other meetings we had when we talked about Star Wars. Most of the details of this night I don't remember since this 30 minute meeting when on for 2 hours and ended in the prayer of my life, the one I never knew to pray as a child. When we sat down in the union and started to talk about what I was doing for the Easter weekend. I told him I'd probably go to home to Phoenix and go to church on Sunday where my friend and I would sit in the back and make fun of the pastor because he looked and talked like William Shatner of Star Trek fame. After a laughing acknowledgement, he flipped to 2 Kings 2:23-24 in the Bible. It was a 2-verse story about 42 kids on a hill making fun of one of the prophets of God because he was bald and God sending 2 female bears to kill the kids.

For the first time in my adult life, I felt the fear of the Lord come on me, and for no real natural reason. I'd had be doing it for years with no problems or feelings of remorse but suddenly I felt that what I had been doing and was planning on doing was wrong. Even though most of me didn't want to believe that the Bible could be and might be and is true, a small part of me though what if this is true? After more in-depth discussion on why it's bad to mock servants of God, we got into honoring your parents and how to treat them as God wants. Somehow, this led into a very long discussion about the founding of the United States and the Biblical principals upon which it was founded. As a history-lover, I was very interested in this conversation. Eventually, the question every secular humanist has came up. I asked Kirk, "What about everyone else in the world who doesn't believe that the Bible is the truth? Why can't whatever they believe be right for them and what I believe be right for me? Would God really send those people to hell who faithfully followed their own beliefs which were not that of the Bible?" The answers came in Romans 1:20 "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse" and John 14:6 "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me'". It is an act of grace and faith, both of which are gifts from God, to believe the Bible as the truth. And by doing that, the Scripture itself shows that no one has an excuse. By simply being alive, that is testimony enough of the existance of God. And Jesus, being the Son of God, testifies that only through active faith and belief in Him can someone enter Heaven. All the other "faiths", being bloodless in nature, do not have the Truth of Jesus or His blood through which God's plan for redemption is possible.

At a lull in the lengthy discussion, Kirk flipped to John 3:16, the most famous verse in the New Testament, if not the entire Bible. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." I asked Kirk what it meant to really believe in Jesus, beyond just believing that He existed or even that He was the Son of God. He explained to me that to completely believe in Jesus in the literal and actual sense of the word, it meant putting all your trust and hope in Him. To trust explicitly in Jesus was to stop living for myself and my plans and to stop trusting in my own ability to get through life, or ultimately get to heaven. This was something that needed some more explaining and time to sink in. I was getting my first exposure to true faith and I wasn't able to understand it. To put all my trust, that part of my being that allows me to count on other people and expect them to do things, into someone that I couldn't see, hear, touch, and feel was a completely foreign thing to me.

My mind had hit a wall and couldn't go any farther in understanding. I began to realize how futile it was to believe and live in a way that how I lived my life apart from God, good and honorable or bad and disgraceful, is what would get me into heaven. That kind of do-gooder-goes-to-heaven mentality wasn't the Truth at all. It was simply to put all trust in Jesus and the work He did when He died on the cross and rose from the dead. I came to the conclusion that faith isn't something that can be understood with the mind, which is why it is the only thing that pleases God. It completely takes imperfect human-ability out of the picture and relies solely and utterly on the unseen God. That trust and faith in God has to come in all aspects of life from the smallest issues in life to the big issues like jobs and marriage.

After going through a booklet that spelled out exactly what it took to become a part of God's family, to trust in Jesus' perfect sacrifice for my sins, and his boundless gift of repentance and forgiveness, Kirk asked me if I would like to make the decision to give my life to Jesus right then. This hit me hard and I wasn't sure what to do-this was the "once for the first time and everyday for a lifetime" decision. Here was all this Biblical Truth that had just flooded my mind with conviction but moments earlier I didn't care if Jesus existed at all. I still didn't even have completely faith and trust that the source, the Bible, was true. I just had a feeling that what I had just been shown in the Bible was real and true. I had to make a decision based on this, if I would continue to live my life for myself in my own will and in my own strength or if I would die to that life lived in my own strength and start to live my life as God had always wanted me to. I looked around the busy union as I weighed the decision in my mind. One part of me thought do I really think all this stuff could be true? Are all these people around here just watching me and thinking 'What is that guy doing? What is he about to do?' Do I really want to pray out loud in front of all these people? Why can't I just keep going in my life the way I have been? Another part of me thought if I don't pray now, then Kirk and his other guys here will think I'm a fool or weak. I don't even really know these guys.

Thankfully, a trait that God had instilled in me during high school which I used for other reasons--the trait that I really shouldn't and don't care what people think about me and I need to do what I feel is right--surfaced and I felt that taking this "leap of faith" into the unknown and placing my life and trust at Jesus' feet was the right thing to do. I prayed a prayer confessing that I'm a sinner and have lived my whole life apart from God and that I didn't want to do that anymore, I wanted to repent for that and follow what God wanted me to do. I wanted to put my faith in Jesus Christ and make him the Lord of my life.

After I said amen, I wasn't sure what to think or feel or say. I just looked at Kirk, and the other guys there, Matt Maynard and Rudy Stadelman, with a stupefied and wiped out stare without saying a thing. After I said I didn't know what to say or feel but I need to go think, we all said bye and I went off to think about what I had just done. After repeating the simple truth of putting faith in Jesus and live for him, I began to feel very at ease and secure. That was the start of my new life. I was 10 minutes old.

My walk with Jesus…
Since the day I got saved, I've continued to grow in my relationship with Christ. I've learned that Jesus didn't just want us to go to church on Sunday and get on with the rest of our lives every other day; but to come under authority in the church, to be discipled, to make disciples, serve each other and the Lord, and most of all to live my life according to how God tells me to in His Word the Bible and by His word which He specifically speaks to me. Nothing pleases God more than walking by faith, not by sight. It's a very simple matter, but a very difficult thing to walk out. But as Jesus keeps telling me, I'll never be alone on that walk.