Yesterday, my life changed forever—I got baptized.
For me, this wasn’t just a tradition, and it wasn’t about other people. It was a line in the sand—a moment of leaving my old life behind to step fully into the life God called me to live. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was 15 years in the making.
I grew up as a committed believer who followed all the rules—never drank, smoked, cussed, had sex, or did drugs. But at 19, I stepped into the world and walked away from everything that once gave my life meaning—from faith, from church, from God (or so I thought). For years, I chased everything the world had to offer… but the deeper I went, the more lost, confused, and empty I became.
But here’s the thing—I didn’t just randomly find my way back.
This journey happened in three major phases. First, I had faith, but it was naive. Then, I searched for truth everywhere but God. And finally, I found a faith deeper, truer, and stronger than anything I had before, a faith I could build a life on.
If you’ve ever felt lost, unsure, stuck, or in search of something deeper, this is for you. Let’s dive in.
Phase 1. Naïve Faith
I grew up in rural Alabama, where faith was as natural as breathing. Everyone around me—especially the adults—was either a Christian or pretended to be.
Being a “good Christian” and being a good person were one and the same—and more than anything, I wanted to be good.
My parents embodied the two essential sides of love:
My mom: Unconditional love—even if I were high in a ditch somewhere, she’d come get me. My dad: Conditional love—I had to earn it through effort and excellence. He demanded the very best I could give in everything I did.
As an adult, I’ve come to see this not as a flaw—but as an ideal. Children need both. One parent to say, You are loved no matter what. And another to say, That wasn’t your best—do better next time.
These days, we get bogged down debating who should play which role. But someone has to play both.
Years after I left their home, it hit me: My parents weren’t just people. They were symbols of something deeper.
Mom was Mother Nature—the source of life itself. The one I could always return to for comfort, renewal, and rest. Dad was Father Culture—the rule-setter, the one who said Here is how the world works. Play the game well—or pay the price.
Parenting isn’t easy. In general, we should go easier on our parents. Too much unconditional love becomes enabling. Too much conditional love becomes tyranny. And no one walks the line perfectly.
But here’s the truth I’ve come to see:
Most of our adult problems—also known as our greatest opportunities for growth—stem from how we choose to react to those two forces.
Even though I don’t think that was the lesson he was consciously trying to teach me, I learned early that hard work earned my father’s love, so I gave my very best in everything:
- Sports & Martial Arts – Always pushing myself.
- Academics – Straight-A student.
- Church – Faithful, obedient, rule-following.
- And Relationships – Committed, serious, loyal.
One day, at age 16, I went to a youth conference and saw an evangelist perform like some kind of magician, grabbing the audience and guiding them toward the truth. In the lobby, I found tables with all the books he had authored.
- In that moment, I knew: I wanted to do THAT for a living.
But at some point, my relationship with my earthly father transferred to my relationship with God.
I didn’t just want to be good—I wanted to be good ENOUGH for God.
I followed all the rules—no drinking, smoking, cursing, sex, or drugs. But even though I was sincerely trying my best, guilt started creeping in. It wasn’t enough. No matter how hard I tried, I felt like I was failing—not just my father on Earth but the Creator of the Universe.
Then came the questions that changed everything:
- If God is good, why does evil exist?
- How do I know the Christian God is the right God?
- If I had been born in Baghdad to Muslim parents, would I have converted to Christianity?
The answers I got weren’t just weak—they cracked my foundation.
I started feeling like a fraud. The identity I had built—the one that looked so composed to everyone else—was falling apart inside.
I truly loved my girlfriend, but I knew in my heart she wasn’t my soulmate. I broke up with her—even though she was my best friend and we had a wonderful relationship.
Instead of going to seminary, I chose Auburn University. I chose the world over ministry.
That decision set in motion a chain of events that changed my life forever.
Phase 2. Rebellious Searching
At 19, I stepped into the world and walked away from everything that once gave my life meaning—faith, church, and God (or so I thought).
In high school, I was a leader in a small town where everyone knew me. In college, I wanted the opposite—anonymity, space to explore, and permission to ask the big questions.
I didn’t know what I wanted to study. The only successful people I knew were doctors or lawyers, so I started pre-med… hated it. Switched to political science… hated that too.
I eventually landed on finance for practical reasons, but my real love was philosophy and literature. I considered majoring in philosophy until my first professor made it clear I didn’t belong.
During this time, I made Three Decisions That Changed Everything:
- I started reading—but only what genuinely called to me, outside the curriculum.
- I started journaling—not for school, but to process my thoughts and search for truth.
- I began experimenting with substances—not just to numb, but to explore.
These three practices—reading, journaling, and altered states—became the core of my inner life. As uncomfortable as it may be for many believers, substances gave me breakthroughs I could never have reached otherwise, and that is the truth.
- Alcohol dulled the pain (I quit at the end of 2023)
- Nicotine gave me energy and focus (I quit at the end of 2023)
- Weed—also known as cannabis—opened up insights I had never encountered before and let me see things from a different perspective (I quit at the end of January, 2025)
- Mushrooms gave me what I would later recognize as my first direct experience of God
Over time, I fully left Christianity, the church, and even God—at least in my own mind.
I made a vow: I would only accept what I sincerely believed was true in my heart—no more inherited answers, no more blind faith.
I decided I would no longer let anyone else other than me be the final judge of truth. And I put my full effort into figuring out what was true.
I told myself: “If God sends me to hell for chasing truth with everything I’ve got, then I don’t want to be in heaven anyway.”
Around this same time, I realized that I didn’t want a job—I wanted freedom.
The only people I saw with real freedom were entrepreneurs because business owners made the rules that employees have to follow, so I pursued business—not for money, but for autonomy and time to keep searching.
I took a dealership sales job after college—not because I thought that would be my career, but to learn how to sell.
After 90 days of hating being told what to do, where to be, and asking for permission, I co-founded my first business: RV Heroes with my best friend.
That eventually led to real estate at age 26, which I did for nearly 8 years.
The secret of that era: Entrepreneurship was never about building empires—it was about buying time to read, write, and think.
This was the most painful season of my life.
During this time, I chased success, pleasure, and knowledge—thinking I was breaking free but actually losing myself.
At first, it felt like freedom—but the deeper I went, the more lost, confused, and empty I became.
I used substances not just for fun but as tools for escape and for searching.
I felt betrayed by the Christianity I grew up with—as if I’d been sold a lie.
I saw Jesus like Santa Claus—a comforting fiction for weak people.
I was never quite an atheist, but I became a committed agnostic. I believed you couldn’t know what happens after death, so why bother worrying about it?
I now think of this time as my desert—like Moses, I was wandering outside of the stories that I grew up safely within, unprotected from the elements.
And without God, my life had no meaning.
I wasn’t part of any grand story or higher purpose—yet I still had this persistent feeling that I was here to do something great.
I dreamed of being an author and professional speaker. All my heroes are authors, but the secular self-help route felt shallow and incomplete.
I started at least seven different manuscripts, but I always hit a wall. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had no foundation to build on.
Phase 3. Redemptive Reconciliation
The turning point came at 2AM on a thin mattress in a hostel in León, Nicaragua.
In 2017, I left RV Heroes with some savings and a 60,000-word manuscript, chasing the dream that had haunted me for years: to write a book that would stand the test of time. But deep down, I knew I’d never truly been allowed to fail. Everyone back home would catch me before I crashed. I needed to find out what I was really made of.
So I devised a trial by fire.
I bought a one-way ticket to the cheapest, safest country I could find—Nicaragua. I didn’t know a single person. I didn’t speak the language. I figured I’d become one of those digital nomad writers and see if I could build something from nothing.
But two weeks in, I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, gripped by dread. The fear had followed me into my dreams. Later, I realized I’d had my first, and only, panic attack.
I was drowning.
Just surviving—securing food, water, a place to sleep—took everything I had. The book felt ridiculous. I opened my manuscript and couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t even know what it was about anymore. I had no direction, no anchor, no reason to be there.
This was the pinnacle of my desert wandering.
I had traveled there because I wanted to be truly free, unmoored from anything I had known, unattached to any responsibilities other than chasing my dream. But now it all felt foolish.
After pacing the room, trying to escape the collapse, I opened my journal and did the only thing I knew to do: I wrote. And what poured out were two crushing fears:
- That I would never find my soulmate. That no woman would ever choose me. That I’d never build a family like I’d always dreamed of—and I’d die alone, with no one to care.
- That I would never find my “thing” professionally. I always believed I was meant to do something great… but had no clue what that was or where to begin.
And then I saw it.
The same fear that had driven me out of the church had returned: I was terrified of disappointing my dad. But now, that fear had extended to the whole world. If I failed to find my wife, my purpose, my calling—I would let everyone down. My family. My friends. Everyone who ever believed in me.
So I wandered. I walked Nicaraguan streets, reading and journaling. I never touched the manuscript.
And then came a light.
Jordan Peterson had just started to rise. An academic I could actually respect. And what broke everything open for me was his lecture series on YouTube entitled The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, especially the first episode: An Introduction to the Idea of God.
What I found changed everything.
Peterson re-opened the entire religious enterprise for me. He wasn’t preaching. He wasn’t making shallow appeals to blind faith. He was doing something else entirely—treating religion with seriousness rather than dismissal. Faith not as fairy tale, but as deep psychological and philosophical structure. He helped me realize that there was a totally different perspective on religion—and God Himself—that was far deeper than anything I had ever been exposed to before.
I listened to all 12 lectures at least 10 times. Long walks. Bus rides. Pages of notes.
His primary sources became my next intellectual guides: Nietzsche, Mircea Eliade, Freud, Piaget, Neumann, Kierkegaard, and Jung.
Jung, especially, cracked me open.
His insights on the collective unconscious and archetypes resonated deep in my soul and helped me start making sense of the patterns in my life—why I was so restless, what I was searching for, where I had gone wrong.
From there, the flood gates flew open. I devoured Huston Smith. Meister Eckhart. Rumi. Hafiz. Shankaracharya. Alan Watts. Richard Rohr. Lao Tzu. I dove into the great religious traditions of the world and drank as deeply as I dared.
What I found surprised me: the traditions weren’t at odds. Their contradictions were only skin-deep. Beneath the surface, they were wrestling with the same eternal mysteries:
- Where did we come from?
- Why are we here?
- What should we do with our suffering?
- What happens when we die?
I stopped asking, Which religion is right?
And started asking, Why do religions exist at all?
Because we are born out of mystery.
We live surrounded by mystery.
And we die into mystery.
That’s what the deepest thinkers, great theologians, philosophers, and mystics, take seriously. Not mocking mystery, but revering it. Unlike the condescending atheists of our time—Dawkins, Harris, and the rest—who stand above faith and scoff, as if their present understanding of reality itself is the final word.
Then I found the book that broke what remained of my secular shell: The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart.
Hart is the greatest living philosopher, in my opinion. A scholar fluent in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Syriac, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Hebrew. He translated the entire New Testament himself—and it’s my favorite translation to this day.
In The Experience of God, he lays out the classical theistic vision shared across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and even some sects of Buddhism:
God is not a sky deity with a beard and lightning bolts.
God is the ground of Being itself.
The infinite, eternal source in which all things live, move, and have their being.
He demolishes modern atheism by showing that their arguments don’t target the real thing—they target a straw man. They reject the Sunday school cartoon, not the God of Aquinas, Emerson, Augustine, Shankaracharya, or Rumi. Suddenly, it was all right there—perfectly obvious, intuitively true.
And for me, that was it.
The death blow to the materialist worldview that had hollowed out my life throughout my twenties.
I wasn’t looking for a “guy in the sky.” I was looking for the foundation of reality itself.
And I had just found it in God, who I had spent my entire adult life running from.
But one insight lit the final fire.
I learned that the Greek word for sin, hamartia, means to miss the mark. It’s an archery metaphor. And it blew my mind. All that guilt I felt as a child was unfounded.
Sin was never about rule-breaking. It was about mis-aiming.
It wasn’t about failing God.
It was about hurting myself.
The goal was never to be good enough for God. The goal was to act in a way that made my own life, and every one else’s life, better over time.
Which led to the next question:
If sin is missing the mark…
What’s the mark?
The answer came like a meteor after many years of consideration.
Truth.
Let the arrow fly true to the target.
So what’s the Truth we’re aiming at?
The answer is right there in the gospel of John where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
He couldn’t have been any clearer.
That’s when everything fell into place.
Christ is the Target.
God the Father is the Source and End of all things, the framework of being itself.
Christ is the embodied Target of all right action in so far as he is the embodiment of that same force—the Logos, the ordering principle of the cosmos, and therefore set the perfect example for our behavior.
The Holy Spirit is the animating force within all things, including us.
This was it.
The theological, philosophical, and existential framework I had spent 15 years searching for.
It wasn’t childish faith. It was mature, integrated belief—one that could unite head and heart, East and West, faith and reason.
And once I understood it in my mind, I started praying again.
Two years later, it reached my heart.
Privately, I prayed the salvation prayer again—not as a boy, but as a man.
And that’s what led to my baptism.
I’ve come full circle.
Not back to who I was—
But forward into who I was always meant to be.
After three months wandering in Nicaragua, I answered the call, came home, faced my fears, and ultimately found my soulmate…after seven years of being single. Then I married her.
And now I finally understand what ministry means to me.
Not a pulpit.
Not a congregation.
The internet is my sanctuary.
And the Big Bad Plan Program is my offering—a tool to help people articulate their calling and build a real system to pursue it.
It works for anyone.
But it becomes sacred after salvation through Christ—because only then can your plan truly align with God’s, only then are you aiming high enough.
Here’s the truth:
I never abandoned God.
He was with me the whole time.
I thought I left Him to chase the truth.
But chasing truth led me straight back to Him.
Because God is Truth.
My Three Turning Points were: 22:56
- Understanding Sin – Not just as rule-breaking, but as misalignment with Truth.
- Understanding Truth – Not just as success, but right orientation to reality.
- Understanding Christ – Not just as a man or even as God, but as the Target of all righteous action.
My heart and mind are now fully reoriented toward the Highest and Deepest Good.
And baptism was the necessary conclusion—a public, embodied death to my old life and resurrection into the new.
I’m proud to say I have now left behind all my old vices, even the useful ones, to step fully into the man I’ve always knew I could become.
God brought me to this ministry.
All I had to do…
was say yes.
Conclusion
And that’s my story.
But this isn’t just my story—it can be yours too.
Salvation through Christ means leaving your sins in the past by turning your thoughts and actions toward the Highest Good—Christ, the true target of all right and good action.
You don’t need to conform to some unspoken moral code to be saved. You only need to say yes to what you already know is true in the deepest part of your heart.
Salvation isn’t about avoiding hell in the afterlife. It’s about letting the love of God burn away all the false parts of you—everything that built up through years of missing the mark—so you can begin living today in His grace, doing your part to bring earth up to heaven.
And if that’s what you want… it starts with a simple prayer.
If you feel called, I invite you to pray it with me now:
“God, I’m sorry for the ways I’ve fallen short of Your plan for my life. I see now that my life isn’t what it could be because I’ve turned from You and acted in ways that were selfish and short-sighted. But today, in this very moment, I ask for Your forgiveness. I promise to leave those things behind. I want to live out the purpose You created me for and use my life energy to make the world better. I thank You for sending Your Son, Jesus, to die on the cross for my sins— and for showing me that when I sacrifice my own life in the highest way I can… I can change the world too. I love You. In your Son Jesus’s name, Amen.”
And just like that, you are saved.
You are born again in Christ.
If you prayed that prayer with me, welcome to the family of believers.
You are a new creation. And your new life starts right now.
I couldn’t be more proud of you.
Before we wrap up, I want you to know that whether you’re just beginning your walk with God or you’ve been on the path for years—
you don’t have to figure it out by yourself.
If this episode spoke to you… I’ve built a few things to help you go deeper.
Only if you’re ready.
1. If you need Guidance Right Now, Text Me.
If you’re carrying something heavy and don’t know where to turn…
Or if you felt God calling you during this episode and want someone to talk to—
text me directly at 2054351343
That’s 2054351343
I won’t pretend to have all the answers,
but I promise to listen, and to point you in the right direction.
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