I am the youngest of four. Each member of my family has been involved in Christian ministry at some point. My father, mother, and 2 brothers have all been through seminary and my sister has been teaching the youth since she was also a youth and is now a children’s pastor. That made some pretty big shoes for me to fill as I have been the only one who didn’t go through specialized training.

So, I grew up in a deeply Christian home with loving parents and 3 siblings. As the youngest, I would routinely get picked on by my 3 older siblings. This is of course normal, but I started to believe that my family hated me by listening to the lies of demons. When I went to kindergarten, this feeling only increased as I felt like I was abandoned by my parents. My parents started a variety of businesses. Which meant that they didn’t have much time for family (As, ya know, they were trying to keep us alive in poverty). Also, I grew up in a military town with constant active deployment and redeployment as this was right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America and the war that followed soon after.

So, I had parents who didn’t have enough time to give me the attention I wanted, siblings who would pick on me (as siblings do), no stable long-term friendships as all of them would leave in 2-4 years, and separation anxiety from going to school. All of this together compounded into me wanting to kill myself at the ripe old age of 6. I would also get constant intrusive thoughts about such a thing. I would constantly hear voices telling me that no one loves me, that it would be better if I was never born, that if I were to disappear no one would notice me. So, I would test these thoughts by hiding myself to see if anyone noticed. Which was met with both people not finding me or my siblings making fun of me or hurting me during the process if they did notice. One time, I hid between the couch cushions and the springs, and my brother noticed, thought it was funny, then proceeded to bounce on the couch forcing me into the metal which gave me some fun cuts [not blaming him, we were kids].

Well, with many similar experiences, my view (not reality) of life got darker and darker. I let the intrusive thoughts win until there was very little left of me. This got worse as I aged as I found vices very early on. I discovered porn when I was 6 because my eldest brother was looking at a playboy when he was 13. Which is a normal age to pursue sex as a boy. 6 is not. I found internet porn when I was 8 and started masturbating around that time. I started to also sexually experiment with the kids in my neighborhood. So, I was doing all sorts of depraved acts and only getting worse mentally and morally. I started to break the law and be a menace to society when I was 11.

I found myself as a suicidal 12-year-old who was addicted to dopamine, porn, and getting close to death. I also started to question more and more my parents’ religion and faith. How could there be a good God when all I feel is pain, anger, sin, and suffering? I started to not only become an atheist, but I also hated the idea of the loving God my parents believed in.

I also found out that lying was useful to get what I wanted. That was a game changer for me. I started manipulating people immediately and got really good at it. Since most of my friends were younger than me they would often ask me about why things were the way they were. I would just try and tell a convincing lie that made sense and they would believe it. I also found out in middle school that I could lie and spread rumors and control people’s relationships, friendships, and sense of self. I found this very amusing and created a game where I would think out a scenario, and how everyone involved would react, and what they would say, then make it happen to see how accurate I was in my predictions. I was right most of the time. Which gave me an extremely inflated ego and a bit of a god complex. It was around this time that it became harder and harder for me to form normal relationships. I was developing some sociopathic tendencies and couldn’t form real connections between people. I still had a couple dear friends, but I would still lie to them (although much less than others) and treated most of them poorly.

I want to be clear about something. I had/have a great family who loves me. They didn’t mistreat me in an abusive way or anything abnormal. We were poor starting out and my parents worked really, really hard in the real estate world to give us a better life, and they did. We became upper middle class and went on vacations and traveled and they provided for us. The recession was hard, but my parents always sacrificed for us and were great. I hope to be as great of a man as my dad is one day. Much of my experience with my family didn’t actually match the reality of the situation. I was suicidal in spite of the life I had, not because of it. I was introduced to the wrong stuff and believed the lies of the enemy and went down my own dark path at a young age and then kept this from everyone. I am not blaming my parents or siblings for anything. Just the devil.

My life wasn’t all doom and gloom growing up. I had moments of levity and great fun and experiences with my friends. They became a family for me that I spent most of my time with. As with everyone, I had high highs and low lows during this period of time. I found distractions and relief from my pain, but the pain was slowly increasing over the years as more and more lies were believed. A painful thought became a foothold for the enemy, and I always gave in.

Around middle school, I discovered that professors all around the world would upload their lectures to the internet for their students to access. This is still common practice but it is usually either housed in an app (like canvas or blackboard) or the websites are locked to student user accounts. Back in the day, no such thing existed and Google would easily display the lecture pages for professors from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, New Delhi, and Berkeley. So, I found free education from the most distinguished professors on the planet, and my drive for knowledge forced me to binge it. I wanted to both know how I could show that God doesn’t exist and to see how things really work. Normal kids my age were just watching porn and playing games online. I was doing that too of course, while also learning biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics from the best sources on the planet (at the time) while I was in middle school. Which inflated my ego even more as I started looking down on others who I thought were beneath me intellectually.

When I was 12, I decided to kill something. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to kill, but something more than an ant but less than a human. My father is a hunter and I wasn’t alarmed at the death of things. I wanted to feel and experience what it was like to kill a larger animal. I had killed many insects, spiders, rats, snakes, and lizards but nothing I would feel like has a soul or personhood. So one day, I decided to go hunting in the woods near my house with a metal pellet gun made for small game hunting. I found a squirrel searching for food and decided to shoot it. I hit it in the abdomen and watched it shoot off into the air as if it was struck by lightning. It rolled around for a while in a frenzy then got still as I approached it. I noticed a very pure red blood pouring out of it and I vividly remember how its arms, legs, and tail twitched as its heart was racing due to blood loss and hyperventilation. It finally started to slow down its breathing and I watched intently as the life left its body and it was dead. I stayed looking at it for a while after it was dead. This thing was alive and then it wasn’t. It was searching for food, possibly for its family, and I killed it. I had no reason to kill it. I didn’t want to eat it, use its skin or bone. I just wanted to know what it felt like to kill something and watch it die. It was cold. Strangely surreal. It affected me in a way that nothing else has. I have only killed things out of necessity or by accident after this event (I even watch where I step so I don’t kill ants now). I wasn’t so emotionally dead that the death of small animals was fun for me, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. I still had the capacity for emotion at this point, but I could tell that something was very wrong with me.

Around the age of 13, I got into a serious relationship with a girl. I loved this girl very much and she was about the only thing I was super fond of. Of course, I didn’t have a good relationship with her. I was too broken by this point to approach any kind of relationship in a normal or good way. So, instead I would lie both to her and about her to a variety of different people. I was living 6 or 7 different lives depending on how you knew me and for how long. To some I was an ex-gang member who is constantly surrounded by death and violence, to others I was an abuse and rape victim, to others I was an alcoholic and drug addict, to others I was a normal kid who played video games. I found myself inventing new and more interesting ways of existing just to see what would happen and for the most part I kept those lives all separate. Granted, I have never been raped or in a gang, but I took on the part. I manipulated and abused those around me for entertainment and attention.

2 weeks after my 15th birthday, the girl who I loved moved away after not talking to me for a couple of months. This was the lowest point in my life. She basically told me the truth. That I was trash, a liar and just an all around terrible guy. She was right. But her total loss from my life, as well as all the closest friends I had (the family I chose) moving away all at the same time, left me with a deep loneliness that I had never felt before. Around this time, I also discovered issues with evolution and the big bang theory so my pursuit of an escape from God was also being shattered. Feeling rejected by everything and with no more will to live. I went to my father’s hunting room and put a pistol in my mouth and tried to pull the trigger. I couldn’t. The trigger didn’t move. And I am an experienced marksman, we have been shooting guns since I was big enough to hold one (and I had previously shot this gun). The safety wasn’t on, the trigger pull was only 3 lbs, and it was cocked and loaded. I couldn’t seem to kill myself no matter how hard I tried. My demons had won but I was still alive. I instead laid on the floor for a couple of hours crying, until I lost all my energy, and decided to go to bed to sleep. I was then just left in a state of emptiness. I couldn’t die but didn’t want to live. My normal vices didn’t seem to do anything for me. My family still wasn’t aware of my situation so they had no idea how much pain I was in or that I tried to kill myself. So by an act of God, my parents decided to force me to go to a Christian youth conference in Midland, Michigan called Invasion held by Josh Barclay and his Father’s church, Living Word Church.

This trip was about 2 weeks after I tried to kill myself and about a month after the girl moved. It was a 5 day event. We went with our church so there were 20 or so kids with us. I spent the week looking at girls and playing cards not thinking much of any of it. My father is a reverend and we were taught the majority of the bible and Christianity growing up so not much of the information each day was new. However, on the 4th night they were doing an altar call for kids who felt suicidal.

I was around 100 feet (30 meters) from the altar at the time and there was a large crowd around the altar. Yet, somehow, I went from where I was, to on my face before the altar, without me fully realizing it, in what felt like an instant. It felt like electricity was running through my body and I was on fire. I just somehow appeared there and people laid hands on me and prayed. I basically went into a trance and blacked out. When I woke up I felt completely different. There was a weight on me that was lifted. I felt as if I was reborn. From that moment onward, I have never felt depressed again. I was freed from the desire to kill myself and haven’t felt that level of darkness ever again. So, I had some weird interaction that I couldn’t explain in the naturalistic worldview I had adopted over the years. How do I explain the experience I had? Was God real? Was I just in a heightened sense of group think? Did I really experience the feeling in my body that I did or was it just some weird sense of placebo?

I had to know. So, I started examining Christianity and my own worldview. For years I had ignored everything that pastors and my parents had said. I assumed that it was all stupid and clearly God didn’t love us the way He said or he just didn’t exist. Yet, I found the love of God in me at that altar. Something did happen, but I wasn’t sure what. I had views that disagreed with the bible and I wasn’t sure that the Christian God was God so I started looking at everything. I wanted to be sure I knew what supernatural being was responsible for the event that had taken place. This started a year-long process of desperately searching and finding the truth. I started researching all I could on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Naturalism/Materialism, and Deism. I looked all over the world and found common themes in religion such as mastery of self, use of sex in religious practice, belief in gods that cared about humans, and common myths such as the flood and creation out of water. However, there was one that was different from the rest. Christianity. It is the only religion where the faith is entirely based on a historical event (the resurrection of Jesus). It is very much unlike religion in that sense, as if that event didn’t happen then Christianity is false.

As I examined Christianity, it became clear, slowly but surely, that Jesus was God and that God died for me in order for me to be saved. After my long journey, I had come to the conclusion that the only rational belief I could have would be faith in Jesus as God and savior. This took around the full year between the Invasion that I was delivered from suicide at, and the next year when my church went back to Invasion. At that Invasion, I gave my life to Jesus in a new and unique way. I would say I was born again during that week. I wasn’t perfect however as salvation and being Christian is a process. The Sunday after I got back, I forced my girlfriend to go to church with me (she wasn’t a Christian) and then when we got home, I rushed her into the bathroom while no one was looking, and we had sex with my family around. I still watched porn, and I was still sinning in a variety of ways. Yet, I was still a new creation. I no longer had a desire to use bad language (cussing, cursing, profanity, whatever you want to call it) and my lying almost came to a complete halt (although I still would from time to time it was MUCH less than it used to be). I felt genuine care for others and I could feel the desire to help others in a way that I never had before then. My relationship with my parents was restored after I had confessed all the sin and evil I had done to them. I had a fundamental change in my personality that I could only attribute to God. Over time, I stopped having sex with girls and stopped using dirty language and being generally evil. At 18, I gave up porn for around 4 months until I got roped back in for another decade. I started giving to the poor and living on faith. I recklessly abandoned the road I set out for my life and didn’t go to college at 18 like I was planning to for mechanical engineering (I did go back eventually when I was 24 when my wife made me, for computer science this time). I was doing everything I could to live the life God had for me and it has led me to where I am now. I have 2 kids (as of writing this), a loving wife, a home and career in medical research that I have been blessed with.

So, salvation is a process and Christians are still sinners and hypocrites. All the lies I believed growing up faded and have led to me writing this series of posts/books.