My Christian Testimony
I was born in the Pennsylvania “Coal Region,” and raised by a single mom. We were part of a “Ukrainian Catholic” / Eastern Orthodox church, and went through all of the typical rituals and song and dance that you might expect: Sunday school, “CCD,” served as an altar boy, you name it. But as you might imagine, there was nothing of the Gospel, nothing of sin and repentance, nothing of regeneration, and really nothing of Christ except for the baby in the manger at Christmas, and the man on the cross around Easter. Otherwise, it was the same empty experience, week after week.
As I hit my teenage years, I drifted away from the church for various reasons, including the anger of not having my dad in my life and the general hypocrisy I saw in the “church” and especially among the “Catholics” I knew (ritualistic Catholicism dominated the area in which I grew up, which had very few Christian churches). And of course most importantly, I did not have any meaningful relationship with God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, or the Holy Spirit, nor did I know (or really even know of) the Gospel. All of this came to a head when my mom was diagnosed with cancer while I was in college, and then ultimately died near the beginning of my Senior year of college, only three weeks after my 22nd birthday. At this point, I was all alone (other than my friends, and some extended family that didn’t care much) and left to fend for myself in the world (at least from my perspective). I was also bitter and angry, and couldn’t understand why, if God was real, why He would take away my mom and make me suffer like that.
This experience led me further away from God. In fact, as I moved through the rest of my 20’s, I lived my life under the increasing belief that “I don’t know if there’s a God, and neither do you.” As you might imagine, I lived my life accordingly. While I went to law school and was doing well professionally (by the world’s standards), the rest of my life was predominately centered around partying as much as I could and chasing whatever women I wanted to chase.
Fast forward to my 30’s, which is when I moved to Austin. In a sense, I hit a “high” and a “low” in my life around this time, in my early 30’s: A “high” socially, because I had everything I ever wanted as far as a social life was concerned (short of a wife; I’ve never been married), but also a “low” professionally because I hated my job and all of the stress and pressure and time commitments that came with it.
As a result of the latter, I was considering quitting my job as a big firm attorney to start a sports bar with my friend. However, “something” was starting to tug at me that, before making any move of that magnitude, I should resolve the question of “Is God real?” (or “Is Jesus real?,” as I’m sure it varied from thought to thought). This was around Spring 2010. For the previous Christmas, the mother of two of my good friends had bought me a “Daily Walk” Bible (where you read the whole thing in one year, with study notes), and I had promised her that I’d read it (or at least try to do so). And I did try to read it earlier that year, but I got through maybe the first three chapters of Genesis, and thought that it was the dumbest thing ever. But, at least I had it.
During this same general period, I also knew many professing (i.e., cultural) “Christians,” especially once I moved to Texas, but most of them were living their lives the same way I was, at least in the main. By the grace of God, however, there was one Christian in my life who at least seemed to be genuine in her faith, to truly be walking the walk instead of simply paying lip service to the talk. Her name was Rachel, and she was originally from Oklahoma. We got to know each other for about a year while playing on the same softball team, and then eventually went on a few dates. After one of those dates, we were sitting at my place when she asked me the question that God used to change my world:
“Are you a Christian?”
Now of course, the answer to this question was “no,” at least in any meaningful sense of the word. But keeping in mind that I liked the girl, and that I was/am an attorney, I did what any self-respecting attorney would do in that situation – I asked her to define the term:
“Well, what do you mean by ‘Christian’?”
Her response was,
“Well, I guess there are two kinds of Christians: Believers, and Followers.”
Keeping in mind that at this point that I was still of the opinion that “I don’t know if there’s a God, and neither do you,” I immediately “thought,” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would you believe in Jesus, and not follow Him?” (“Thought” is in quotations, because I retrospect I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking to me, or at least prompting my thoughts on the matter; it was almost like she didn’t finish her answer, and that thought was already and instantaneously in my mind.)
One thing led to another, and that weekend I began reading the New Testament. I read the entire New Testament (other than Revelation, which I purposely wanted to save for the end) in three weeks (and a few minutes). Somewhere in the middle of that, I realized that my problem all along was with Christians/Catholics, not Christianity. I realized that I never doubted that Jesus walked this Earth, but that I was somehow separating Jesus from God, and was angry at God (but not at Jesus) for a lot of things that had happened in my life (my father wasn't in my life growing up, my mom died from cancer three weeks after I turned 22, and then my grandfather who helped raise me and a few other friends died within about 3 years after that, etc.). I then realized that it was one of the most well-documented facts of history that Jesus Christ walked this Earth, at least CLAIMED TO BE God / the Son of God, was arrested by the Jews, crucified by the Romans, died on the cross and put in a tomb covered by an enormous stone and guarded by the Roman army.
Then it really hit me: Who moved the Stone? If the body was still there, the Jews could have killed Christianity in the cradle by simply taking the body out of the tomb and parading it down the streets of Jerusalem for all to see. The body certainly must have been gone, and there was no other way for it to have "disappeared" other than by the Resurrection!
Somewhere during this three week period, I came to faith in Christ. (I didn’t “write the date down” because I didn’t know you were supposed to do such things. J ) I remember realizing that I too was a sinner, although I certainly didn’t understand the depth of my sin at that early time, although I did realize that I was a sinner. I also reading the passages about counting the cost, and thinking through sincerely if I was willing to do that. The answer was a clear, “yes.” And I remember getting to the passage in Romans chapter 10 that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will be saved. And I paused and pondered those things sincerely – did I really believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, and the answer by this point was a clear “yes”; and then I remember doing just what the Bible said, and saying that verse out loud. Now to be clear, I don’t believe that that “action” saved me in and of itself, but those are some of the things I remember about that time period of when I came to faith and committed to following Jesus with all I had, even as I had no idea where that would take me.
The day I finished reading the New Testament, I started going to the Austin Stone, which is a local megachurch here in Austin. I don’t remember exactly what the sermon was about in the main, but I do remember Matt Carter (the lead pastor) giving a little aside about prayer. Specifically, not only should you pray daily and sometimes share deeper things with the Lord, but that at least once in a while you should take a good hour or two just to have a "heart to heart" with the Lord. I had never heard of that before, but it was the perfect message for me at that time! (I eventually came to realize that the Stone scripts their sermons out in advance and does not deviate from them, and that this “aside” about prayer was not part of the scripted sermon, but rather the Providence of God working in the moment to say something that I believe that I specifically needed to hear.)
Following the service, I went to brunch with a few friends that I had just met that day. I was talking to them about my dilemma with my job – I hated what I did, and couldn’t think of any other alternative other than starting the aforementioned sports bar, but now that I was a Christian, that no longer seemed right, particularly as a lifestyle choice. So at this point, I had no idea what else I could do professionally. A friend suggested that I do exactly what the pastor had suggested in that aside about prayer – have a heart to heart conversation with God about what to do. The very next day, I had a long heart-to-heart with God. Starting the very next morning, God began answering big prayers and working in my life in a very power way. I could spend another 20 minutes or so just talking about what God did in my life in that first month, but for the sake of space, suffice it to say that God’s responses to my prayers took my faith in God from something that was primarily intellectual (based on the discussion above) to something that was real and active.
There’s so much more that I could say here about all that God has done, both during this initial period and in the 8+ years since, but for the sake of space I will fast forward to May 2012, approximately 1.5 years after I first came to faith. That’s when the big EF-5 tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma. The Stone sent out an email asking for volunteers to go up there, and the Lord was leading me to go, and so I went. As you may recall from the above, Rachel – the girl who God used to say the right thing at the right time – was from Oklahoma. But as far as I knew, she was from Oklahoma City, not Moore. In fact, although I had some other friends from Oklahoma by this point, I had never even heard of Moore until the tornado. And so anyway, things came together under the Lord’s provision, and off I went to Moore. I spent the first day helping with manual labor cleanup, but after that first day, the leadership of “Serve Moore” (the organization overseeing the cleanup) asked myself and a few others from The Stone to lead cleanup zones the next day. So I then spent the second and third days of that Memorial Day weekend leading one, and then another, of the ten “cleanup zones” into which the damaged portion of the city was divided at that point. I came back up the next weekend and once again helped lead cleanup zones at first, but by the end of the weekend had been asked to help out at the Serve Moore headquarters itself. I then came back again the third weekend after the tornado, and once again helped out at the Serve Moore headquarters. Then, during the next week, the guy who was leading the whole Serve Moore organization called me in Austin and asked me, and apparently only me, if I’d be willing to come up and lead the whole cleanup process for the 17 days when he was going to be taking his church youth group on a trip to Pennsylvania (where I was born and raised), of all places. I couldn’t do all 17 days at the time, but ended up going back up three weekends in a row to serve in various leadership roles at the Serve Moore headquarters, including leading the whole cleanup effort (at least from the human perspective) at various points over those three weekends. This was clearly the plan of God, as there were many other highly qualified people in Moore who could have done the same thing, but yet God put me in that position. I do not say that to brag in the least, but only to confirm that it was God who had called me to Moore, and to set up what I’m about to say next:
When I came back to Austin (where I live now) following that first weekend, I posted my pictures online on Facebook. Rachel had moved to Chicago by this time, and she generally doesn’t spend much time on Facebook to begin with. But she saw my pictures, and said something that shook me to the core (in a good way), and really blew me away:
As I hit my teenage years, I drifted away from the church for various reasons, including the anger of not having my dad in my life and the general hypocrisy I saw in the “church” and especially among the “Catholics” I knew (ritualistic Catholicism dominated the area in which I grew up, which had very few Christian churches). And of course most importantly, I did not have any meaningful relationship with God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, or the Holy Spirit, nor did I know (or really even know of) the Gospel. All of this came to a head when my mom was diagnosed with cancer while I was in college, and then ultimately died near the beginning of my Senior year of college, only three weeks after my 22nd birthday. At this point, I was all alone (other than my friends, and some extended family that didn’t care much) and left to fend for myself in the world (at least from my perspective). I was also bitter and angry, and couldn’t understand why, if God was real, why He would take away my mom and make me suffer like that.
This experience led me further away from God. In fact, as I moved through the rest of my 20’s, I lived my life under the increasing belief that “I don’t know if there’s a God, and neither do you.” As you might imagine, I lived my life accordingly. While I went to law school and was doing well professionally (by the world’s standards), the rest of my life was predominately centered around partying as much as I could and chasing whatever women I wanted to chase.
Fast forward to my 30’s, which is when I moved to Austin. In a sense, I hit a “high” and a “low” in my life around this time, in my early 30’s: A “high” socially, because I had everything I ever wanted as far as a social life was concerned (short of a wife; I’ve never been married), but also a “low” professionally because I hated my job and all of the stress and pressure and time commitments that came with it.
As a result of the latter, I was considering quitting my job as a big firm attorney to start a sports bar with my friend. However, “something” was starting to tug at me that, before making any move of that magnitude, I should resolve the question of “Is God real?” (or “Is Jesus real?,” as I’m sure it varied from thought to thought). This was around Spring 2010. For the previous Christmas, the mother of two of my good friends had bought me a “Daily Walk” Bible (where you read the whole thing in one year, with study notes), and I had promised her that I’d read it (or at least try to do so). And I did try to read it earlier that year, but I got through maybe the first three chapters of Genesis, and thought that it was the dumbest thing ever. But, at least I had it.
During this same general period, I also knew many professing (i.e., cultural) “Christians,” especially once I moved to Texas, but most of them were living their lives the same way I was, at least in the main. By the grace of God, however, there was one Christian in my life who at least seemed to be genuine in her faith, to truly be walking the walk instead of simply paying lip service to the talk. Her name was Rachel, and she was originally from Oklahoma. We got to know each other for about a year while playing on the same softball team, and then eventually went on a few dates. After one of those dates, we were sitting at my place when she asked me the question that God used to change my world:
“Are you a Christian?”
Now of course, the answer to this question was “no,” at least in any meaningful sense of the word. But keeping in mind that I liked the girl, and that I was/am an attorney, I did what any self-respecting attorney would do in that situation – I asked her to define the term:
“Well, what do you mean by ‘Christian’?”
Her response was,
“Well, I guess there are two kinds of Christians: Believers, and Followers.”
Keeping in mind that at this point that I was still of the opinion that “I don’t know if there’s a God, and neither do you,” I immediately “thought,” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would you believe in Jesus, and not follow Him?” (“Thought” is in quotations, because I retrospect I believe that was the Holy Spirit speaking to me, or at least prompting my thoughts on the matter; it was almost like she didn’t finish her answer, and that thought was already and instantaneously in my mind.)
One thing led to another, and that weekend I began reading the New Testament. I read the entire New Testament (other than Revelation, which I purposely wanted to save for the end) in three weeks (and a few minutes). Somewhere in the middle of that, I realized that my problem all along was with Christians/Catholics, not Christianity. I realized that I never doubted that Jesus walked this Earth, but that I was somehow separating Jesus from God, and was angry at God (but not at Jesus) for a lot of things that had happened in my life (my father wasn't in my life growing up, my mom died from cancer three weeks after I turned 22, and then my grandfather who helped raise me and a few other friends died within about 3 years after that, etc.). I then realized that it was one of the most well-documented facts of history that Jesus Christ walked this Earth, at least CLAIMED TO BE God / the Son of God, was arrested by the Jews, crucified by the Romans, died on the cross and put in a tomb covered by an enormous stone and guarded by the Roman army.
Then it really hit me: Who moved the Stone? If the body was still there, the Jews could have killed Christianity in the cradle by simply taking the body out of the tomb and parading it down the streets of Jerusalem for all to see. The body certainly must have been gone, and there was no other way for it to have "disappeared" other than by the Resurrection!
Somewhere during this three week period, I came to faith in Christ. (I didn’t “write the date down” because I didn’t know you were supposed to do such things. J ) I remember realizing that I too was a sinner, although I certainly didn’t understand the depth of my sin at that early time, although I did realize that I was a sinner. I also reading the passages about counting the cost, and thinking through sincerely if I was willing to do that. The answer was a clear, “yes.” And I remember getting to the passage in Romans chapter 10 that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will be saved. And I paused and pondered those things sincerely – did I really believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, and the answer by this point was a clear “yes”; and then I remember doing just what the Bible said, and saying that verse out loud. Now to be clear, I don’t believe that that “action” saved me in and of itself, but those are some of the things I remember about that time period of when I came to faith and committed to following Jesus with all I had, even as I had no idea where that would take me.
The day I finished reading the New Testament, I started going to the Austin Stone, which is a local megachurch here in Austin. I don’t remember exactly what the sermon was about in the main, but I do remember Matt Carter (the lead pastor) giving a little aside about prayer. Specifically, not only should you pray daily and sometimes share deeper things with the Lord, but that at least once in a while you should take a good hour or two just to have a "heart to heart" with the Lord. I had never heard of that before, but it was the perfect message for me at that time! (I eventually came to realize that the Stone scripts their sermons out in advance and does not deviate from them, and that this “aside” about prayer was not part of the scripted sermon, but rather the Providence of God working in the moment to say something that I believe that I specifically needed to hear.)
Following the service, I went to brunch with a few friends that I had just met that day. I was talking to them about my dilemma with my job – I hated what I did, and couldn’t think of any other alternative other than starting the aforementioned sports bar, but now that I was a Christian, that no longer seemed right, particularly as a lifestyle choice. So at this point, I had no idea what else I could do professionally. A friend suggested that I do exactly what the pastor had suggested in that aside about prayer – have a heart to heart conversation with God about what to do. The very next day, I had a long heart-to-heart with God. Starting the very next morning, God began answering big prayers and working in my life in a very power way. I could spend another 20 minutes or so just talking about what God did in my life in that first month, but for the sake of space, suffice it to say that God’s responses to my prayers took my faith in God from something that was primarily intellectual (based on the discussion above) to something that was real and active.
There’s so much more that I could say here about all that God has done, both during this initial period and in the 8+ years since, but for the sake of space I will fast forward to May 2012, approximately 1.5 years after I first came to faith. That’s when the big EF-5 tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma. The Stone sent out an email asking for volunteers to go up there, and the Lord was leading me to go, and so I went. As you may recall from the above, Rachel – the girl who God used to say the right thing at the right time – was from Oklahoma. But as far as I knew, she was from Oklahoma City, not Moore. In fact, although I had some other friends from Oklahoma by this point, I had never even heard of Moore until the tornado. And so anyway, things came together under the Lord’s provision, and off I went to Moore. I spent the first day helping with manual labor cleanup, but after that first day, the leadership of “Serve Moore” (the organization overseeing the cleanup) asked myself and a few others from The Stone to lead cleanup zones the next day. So I then spent the second and third days of that Memorial Day weekend leading one, and then another, of the ten “cleanup zones” into which the damaged portion of the city was divided at that point. I came back up the next weekend and once again helped lead cleanup zones at first, but by the end of the weekend had been asked to help out at the Serve Moore headquarters itself. I then came back again the third weekend after the tornado, and once again helped out at the Serve Moore headquarters. Then, during the next week, the guy who was leading the whole Serve Moore organization called me in Austin and asked me, and apparently only me, if I’d be willing to come up and lead the whole cleanup process for the 17 days when he was going to be taking his church youth group on a trip to Pennsylvania (where I was born and raised), of all places. I couldn’t do all 17 days at the time, but ended up going back up three weekends in a row to serve in various leadership roles at the Serve Moore headquarters, including leading the whole cleanup effort (at least from the human perspective) at various points over those three weekends. This was clearly the plan of God, as there were many other highly qualified people in Moore who could have done the same thing, but yet God put me in that position. I do not say that to brag in the least, but only to confirm that it was God who had called me to Moore, and to set up what I’m about to say next:
When I came back to Austin (where I live now) following that first weekend, I posted my pictures online on Facebook. Rachel had moved to Chicago by this time, and she generally doesn’t spend much time on Facebook to begin with. But she saw my pictures, and said something that shook me to the core (in a good way), and really blew me away:
After all that God had done, it turned out that Rachel was from Moore. The girl that God used to reach me, He was now using me to reach and help serve her people. Even having lived through it, it’s still hard to believe and process at times, and often brings me to the verge of tears to think how God worked through all that. All of those just further confirmed, in so many ways, that God was real, and that I was called to live my life serving Him.