Testimony
I grew up in a Christian home. Faith was part of everyday life from the very beginning, whether we were doing devotions at night, going to Bible Study Fellowship, or just playing sermons on TV while taking care of chores around the house. My parents were Lutheran when I was born, and I attended a Lutheran church until I was about five years old.
However, when I was only a few years old, my mom began looking more closely at some of the church’s teachings and practices. As she compared elements of the catechism with what she read in Scripture, it became glaringly obvious that certain points didn’t line up with the Bible.
That process led our family to leave and join a non-denominational church, which I stayed at until I got married. Looking back, that season planted an early seed in my life: tradition should never be accepted uncritically simply because it’s tradition.
Truth is worth examining carefully.
At six years old, during Vacation Bible School, I made a decision to follow Christ and call Him Lord. I can’t claim I understood everything at that age, but I did understand that I needed Jesus. When I pursued baptism at eight, I knew very clearly what I was doing and why. My faith was simple, but it was real.
Around age nine, I had what I’d now call my first existential crisis. The reality of my own mortality suddenly felt very heavy. I began thinking deeply about death, eternity, and what happens after this life. That led me to spend a surprising amount of time reading the book of Revelation, trying to understand the end of the age and what eternal life with God might truly be like. Even then, faith wasn’t just cultural to me: it was connected to ultimate questions about existence.
Still, like many who grow up in church, I drifted into complacency during my teen years. I didn’t reject my faith, but I didn’t pursue it with much urgency either. It was familiar, comfortable, and easy to take for granted.
That changed when I was 20.
I went on my first mission trip to Nepal, traveling with my dad and four others into the remote Manang district to share the gospel with people who had never heard the name of Jesus. We hiked upwards of 20 miles each day into isolated mountain villages. I dealt with severe altitude sickness, narrowly avoided a fatal accident when a vehicle I was riding in slipped toward the edge of a cliff, and had to stay out of sight of authorities who were actively trying to stop our Christian proselytizing. In a span of a week, I lost around 17 pounds from the physical toll.
But in the middle of all of that, I saw God move in ways I had never experienced before. Twelve people chose to put their faith in Christ. One man I prayed for, who had been paralyzed on one side of his body, was healed. He dropped his cane, took his arm out of his sling, and walked around with astonishment on his face. For the first time, my faith wasn’t just something I believed; it was something I lived, something I saw at work in real time.
I also became deeply aware of spiritual darkness in a way I never had before. The spiritual realm stopped being an abstract theological idea and became a lived reality. That trip opened my eyes. The world was bigger, the gospel was more powerful, and the Bible was more alive than I had ever realized.
Since then, I’ve never read Scripture the same way. What once felt familiar and surface-level now feels layered, historically grounded, and theologically rich. I’ve come to see that Christianity is far deeper than what many of us experience through a weekly sermon alone. There is a depth to God, to His Word, and to His work in the world that we often miss.
My desire through this site is simple: I want others to discover that depth too. I want believers to know that faith is not meant to be shallow, inherited, or stagnant. It is meant to be explored, wrestled with, refined, and lived. God is not distant or uninterested; He reveals Himself to those who seek Him.
And the more we truly know Him, the more we are changed into the image of Christ.
So get ready. The path of deeper faith isn’t always comfortable. Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we may find ourselves in the furnace…
But we won’t be there alone.