I stayed with my grandma a lot as a kid, so I remember going to church with her and seeing the way she practiced her faith, like the liturgy. I’m now part of a denomination that doesn’t have a whole lot of liturgy. She was Reformed and now I’m a Wesleyan, so completely different. I’m a ministerial student studying to be a pastor. I do jail ministry. I guess that might be one time where I knew that God was really talking to me was through jail ministry. If you told me 10 years ago that some of my best friends would be meth addicts, meth cookers, or murderers, that I’d be best friends with somebody that’s in prison right now for life for killing a kid, I would have said “no, I think you’re crazy.” But then I started going to The Ransom and Phill Tague started preaching the way he preaches – it’s like he put it in a way that I’d never heard it. And then I started going to the jail and a lot of times some of the stuff that I would say to the guys that I’m ministering to, it’s almost like spiritually, God comes up and smacks me on the back of the head and says, “This isn’t just for them. I’m telling you this stuff for you too.” That’s very humbling and convicting. I don’t go into the jail expecting to say anything in particular, but then I always end up saying something that applies to them and applies to me. I always say that all the smart things that I say come from God, and I take credit for all the really stupid stuff that I say, which is a lot of stuff. That’s a time where I know that God was real because of that. But to say when I first realized God was real, that God was there, I don’t know that I could point to a particular time.  

My dad was an alcoholic, and because he grew up in the Reformed Church he was always like, “If they don’t say the words, prayer, and the apostles creed then we’re not going. And I don’t like electric guitars on stage.” I guess just going through that was something that really convicted me against alcohol and kind of opened me up to searching for something to fill the void and then I went to college. I had some of my own negative experiences with alcohol and I said “I don’t want to go down that road because that’s what my dad did.” I decided that’s not something that I wanted or needed. Then I guess God just said “This is what you’re supposed to do.” I started exploring different denominations and I read several different religious books and found them all to be a lot of nonsense, but the Bible was legitimate. Then I got into apologetics. Now I’m a big nerd for that.