I Grew Up in a Mennonite Church but Missed the Point - Sam Baer

I have to be authentic. I have to tell people who I am. And I did. I told my parents, and they're like, "What? No. Like, something's not right here." I mean, we knew that you had struggles and stuff like that, but we didn't realize that this is what was going on. When I look at my heart through that time, I loved the world. I was hard-hearted, and I had all the head, but there was no connection between the head and the heart. It's embarrassing to think about, but I basically just lived a life of sin. You'll have to forgive me if I get emotional, because the mercy of God is beyond comprehension. And I opened it up, and I read it, and my heart leapt, and I knew that this is truth.

There is life here that you are not going to find anywhere, that this is alive. It was like touching an electric fence. I looked at her, and I said, "I think I know where we can go. I think I know what we can do." And we prayed together in that little room across the dining table from each other, holding hands.

She prayed. I prayed. We got up from that table, weeping, looking at each other like, "What just happened?" We laughed, and we cried, and we hugged, and we just, like, I remember walking around that little room just like, "What just happened to us?"

She looks up from her Bible one day, and she says, "How do I know which of these things to take seriously?" Well, I'm like, "All of them." And she says, "It doesn't look like it."

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So, Sam Bair, welcome to the Anabaptist Perspectives podcast. Something we hear from people just in our churches and around, and I've heard this, is something along the lines of, "I have a family member who's walked away from the faith, and I don't know what to do. How do I handle that kind of situation?" And that's something we want to talk about today, but that's particularly relevant to your story and what you experienced. So let's start with your story. Take us back to the beginning. Where were you born, raised? What kind of church situation did you come from? Sure. It's a pleasure to be here. I've watched a lot of your videos and enjoy them very much.

But yeah, where it began, I mean, I was born into a Christian home, like a Mennonite family home in northern Alberta, like way up north, close to the Northwest Territories. And it was a good childhood. I had fantastic parents, and we lived on a farm. I grew up feeding the chickens, you know, feeding the pigs, learning how to butcher the animals, like just pretty close to the earth childhood, and learned how to work is something I'm very grateful for. My parents were very keen on teaching us how to work. So before we moved, when I was 13 years old, and so that was, I would say that that's, you know, the first dozen years of my life, it's just, I remember the good summers, you know, going to school, had a good friend group, and enjoyed my childhood a lot.

So that's a lot of fond memories, and I feel like it's a lot of what shaped who I am is the home that I grew up in and the discipline or the character that I have. I think I can contribute a lot to the home that I grew up in in my childhood.

But this is, there's a pivot in your story, and this is the piece that gets really relevant and raw and real. You left the church there somewhere in that process. Like, how old were you? Tell me about that and what happened there, like, and why? What was the lead up to that? Yeah, good question.

So we moved when I was, so before we moved, I made a commitment to be a Christian. I was 13 years old. I had just turned 13, and, you know, it was the revival meetings, and my little brother actually came up to me after the meetings and said, "Don't you want to be a Christian?" And I was like, "Uhhhhhhhhhhh." And he ran and told Mom, you know, "Sam wants to be a Christian." And so I ended up meeting with my dad and the evangelists that we had there in the basement and prayed with them. And I would say that that was, I was sincere. I mean, yeah, I wanted to be a Christian because I was raised in a home where, you know, these are the values.

But I remember explicitly, you know, or specifically kneeling to pray in that meeting, and they had, you know, part of becoming a Christian is repentance. You need to repent. And I'm like, "What am I, what am I repenting of?" Like, I'm trying to remember, did I tell a lie or what am I, what am I repenting of? But anyway, I remember being relieved when that happened. So that began my Christian journey in the church there. And so I didn't get baptized then until I was 15. So that's two years in between there. And part of the reason for that is we moved five hours south to Grand Prairie, Alberta, and there was a new church plant there.

So I would say that that played a big role in, you know, my 15 to early 20 years is the fact that it was a new church. I mean, I was having devotions that I think I was 15 when I had devotions the first time. So it wouldn't have been long after I was baptized.

Are you saying devotions like in the church? In church, sorry, at a public meeting. Yeah. Yeah. And so just thrown right in. Yeah. But part of that is because there was only a few families at the beginning, and you rely on everybody. And so then it's teaching Sunday school. And then when I was 19, I went to Vancouver Island to teach school for two years in the private Mennonite school.

And then I quit teaching school there, went back to Grand Prairie, went to work. And then there was another school in northern Alberta, the community that we used to live in. One of their teachers had to leave at Christmas, so they asked if I would come up there and take over, and I did for a half a year and then agreed to teach another year. So I ended up teaching for three and a half years in the Mennonite schools. But obviously, the underlying question in all of that is, where's the spirit? What's the spiritual temperature? Like, where's the desires? Where's your passion? What's going on in that situation? So on the surface, I'm this, you know, upright church member sharing some of the struggles and the things that I wasn't able to be free from in that time with some prayer support and things like that.

And so I was done teaching school in the spring, and I'm a little, I don't remember exactly what year that was, but it was that fall that I left. So it was just a summertime between, you know, teaching in a Mennonite school to, you know, walking away from everything.

I think your question was like, what was the lead up to that? Like, what was the, what was going on in my heart? And I wouldn't say that that was, it wasn't purposeful. Like, it wasn't that I was seeking to leave. It wasn't in my mind until, you know, I would say probably the month that I left. Wow. It wasn't like I was unhappy. And one thing I will say is it wasn't relational. I had a good relationship with my parents, still do. Good relationship with the church. I wasn't bitter. There wasn't church problems that, you know, were causing me to be disenchanted.

So when I announced that, so I was living a bit of a secret life by that point. So by the end of that summer, I was living a bit of a secret life. And so I finally was like, yeah, I can't do this anymore. Like, I have to, I have to be authentic. I have to tell people who I am. And I did. I told my parents, and they're like, what? No, like, this isn't, this isn't you.

Like, something's not right here. I mean, we knew that you had struggles and stuff like that, but we didn't realize that this is what was going on. And so when I look at my heart through that time, I loved the world, but I knew how to talk, and I knew how to dress, and I knew, like, I had grown up in the home. I knew the lingo, and that's not a, you know, to throw shade on the home that I grew up in. It's, that's you want our children to know the things that we believe and stand for. But I was proud.

I couldn't rid myself of sin. Sin was a very real part of my life, personal sin. And you put those two things together, you have a recipe for what exactly happened. I just, I just walked away. And the question that I get over and over and over is, were you born again?

And I don't want to jump ahead too far in this, but I would say in light of my experience now, I was missing all of the evidences of new birth. You mean right from the very start? Right from the get-go. Yeah. Yeah. So when you walk away, did you still believe in God at that point? Like, did you still believe, oh, Christianity maybe has some value, but it's just not for me? Or was it a total switch the other direction? Christianity has no value at all. I don't even believe in God. Like, how, where on the spectrum did you land on this? Like, were you bitter towards the church? Not at all. Not at all.

I felt really bad because I appreciated the people that I went to church with. And so there was just an end. Like, I just dropped off the map. And I felt a lot of shame for doing that because some of these people had known me since I was quite young. And so I felt a lot of shame for just walking away like that and disregarding the relationships that we had. There was something that happened in my heart earlier on, and I don't know exactly when this happened, but the thought that, so I would look at the religions of the world and the thought that maybe Christianity, so I saw some similarities between you take, I think, Buddhism.

I don't know a ton about Buddhism, but this, you know, centeredness, a focus on something, a connection to, you know, an energy, meditation, clear your mind, focus your heart, and all of these things. And I saw similarities to that in Christianity. And so once that thought kind of took root, I actually, when it first hit, it kind of scared me a little bit that I would question these things that I had been taught ever since I was a child. So I would say that my heart wasn't prepared for these kinds of doubts. Like, I wasn't rooted in, I wasn't rooted in a solid relationship with Christ and a desire to serve him. I mean, the desires were to please people.

That's what I'm afraid it was, that I could do everything the way people wanted me to do and say the things they expected me to say. And I can give you a clue as to why that is later, a little bit later, but to touch on this doubt. And I can remember sitting in a church service thinking this through that, why is this significant when we spend our time praying and focusing on a being, you know, and all of a sudden it took the life out of it almost. Like, it sort of brought Christianity to that kind of a self-help. You know, we do these things to make ourselves at peace and so do other people.

So if that's what's at, if that's what's going on, it sort of rips the whole core out of it. You're basically removing the life from Christianity. You're making it something that we control and you're controlling your own mind and your own heart. But then you see other people able to do that as well to a certain extent.

I don't know what that's rooted in and I'm not even sure where that came from. Obviously, I think, you know, it was a temptation that the powers of darkness put in my mind and it was effective in undermining the foundation that was there. So I would say that that was, that was sort of the pin that was pulled then that brought it crashing down. So if you take the context of, you know, the pride and the inability, the habitual sinning, and then you throw in this doubt that this whole thing was actually, and I think that doubt took root because I didn't feel that changing power.

So it was easy to believe that maybe this is a self-help thing that people are doing to make themselves feel at peace with where they're at and where they're headed and give themselves purpose in what they're doing. So if I wasn't experiencing the life, then it was easy to say, well, maybe this was. So once that happened, it just kind of, that's, that's, that was the way it went in my mind was these people are making themselves feel better. And it's fine because everybody has something that they use to manage life and the complications of life. And this is the one that they choose. And so when I left, I haven't figured out why this is.

I didn't see it as turning my back on Christ. I saw it as, I imagined my mind, my future in the Mennonite church. I would get married, have a whole string of children, farm, or have a business. I started a business or bought a business when I was 18. So I liked business operations and things like that. Have a business, maybe successful, you know, get ordained or something like that, you know, and it felt like a stuffy box that I didn't want to be in. Like that, that future gave me claustrophobia a little bit. So I had that image of what my future was going to be like, and I wasn't okay with that. But then through the connections that I had at work and the relationships that I was building there, unhealthy relationships, it was like this or this.

Well, this, because this went along with more of the desires of my heart. This went along with, you know, my history of, you know, what I obviously loved, which was the sin that I was, I was caught up in.

So then that, that's where the choice came from. And that was even to sit there and this, it seems so hard-hearted and calloused to sit there and you see your parents, which you love. Like my relationship wasn't broken with them. There wasn't any anger or bitterness against them or anything. And they're sitting there weeping and pleading like, what are you doing? And I'm like, this is who I am. I'm sorry, but what can I say?

But then the part of the people pleasing when I, okay, I left and I was living in sin and I was like, I should feel guilty about this, but I don't. I don't feel guilty before God. And who is God? Like, what is any of this anyway? So I served sin.

And the part, so I lived in the city that we lived close to. The part that made it difficult was when my life connected with my families, therein was the conviction. That made me feel convicted. But when I was alone or, you know, out living my life, I felt perfectly fine. They would ask like, how can you sleep at night living like this? And I'm like, I don't know, lay my head down and go to sleep.

What you're describing, it sounds to me like Christianity, church, those things were never quite real for you, like in the sense of like, this is reality. And so if I pivot away from that, I'm going to really feel that jolt, you know, and you didn't, sounds like you didn't really experience that.

I can see why that would be confusing though to someone from the outside looking into your life being like, how, how can you just do that pivot? If that makes sense. Exactly. You know? Yeah. Wow. That's a fair assumption. And that's why it was shocking for my family is like, well, we knew that you struggled with some things, but you, this is where you're at. Like, this seems a little like, surely we need to go through some processes before you make this decision or something like, can we have some meetings or something like that? I'm like, well, this is where I'm at. And I think that you could attribute that to my own pride and fear of people finding out until it was at that point.

So a wiser, more humble person would have been more transparent earlier on so that, you know, it may not have gotten to that. And they could have realized that, wait a minute, this isn't real. Like, he doesn't understand or it hasn't, he hasn't embraced. I wouldn't say I didn't understand. He hasn't embraced the cost of discipleship. He hasn't embraced what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. I did on the outside, but I didn't have it on the inside. Like, I hadn't surrendered in my heart to Jesus Christ. So like you would understand all the talking points of Christianity, all of that, but again, it was that sense of it wasn't real. It wasn't.

Like, was it the kind of thing where you said, I'm not sure Jesus ever existed? Was it, did it express itself in that way? Or was it like, oh yeah, like maybe there's something to this. It's just not for me. Does that make sense? Like, I hear both of those from like my friends that aren't Christians say they'll, oh yeah, that Christianity thing, it might be true. It's just not for me.

Was it that kind of? It was in the sense that if it's a self-help, then I can go choose a different one. Yeah. Okay. But again, it wasn't necessarily about Jesus. It was about God. And I could, I could make God ambiguous in my mind. Like that could be something out there and, and not personal. So I think that also is a testimony to the lack of a living relationship with Christ because it wasn't a personal thing. It was like, and then when I would think like, I should be guilty for the way I'm acting, but guilty before who? Like I felt guilty before my Father because he had been the authority in my life and I wanted to please him.

But it hadn't moved from that to I'm accountable before God. And I knew I was accountable before God, but my heart was hard. I think that's the only thing that I can think of. I went over this because I get asked this question all the time. You know, what was going on? Like, why did this happen? And I know that it was pride and the inability to overcome sin, but I think that I was just hard-hearted because I have a younger brother committed his life to Christ at 17, vibrant follower of Christ. Like there's no question. It's not a sham. Like this is, this is the real passionate disciple of Jesus Christ. You know, you can see the fruit, you can see the life.

So how can that happen, you know, in the same? And so I would say that, you know, I was, I was hard-hearted and I had all the head, but there was no connection between the head and the heart.

After reflecting on it many, many times, that's, that's kind of the conclusion that I've come to. Mm-hmm. So you leave the church. What do you do then? And like, how long is that phase in your life? It was about 10 years. Like I think almost exactly 10 years from when I would have told my parents that, uh, wait, maybe 10 and a half, that I was leaving.

I moved into town. I had purchased a house with my brother. I moved into that house and basically, it's, it's embarrassing to think about, but I basically just lived a life of sin. I pursued pleasure, partying, carousing, you know, just you name it, drug use, just whatever was available. I was open to all of it. I think that's, that's probably sufficient at that point.

So basically, yeah, that was, you know, started a friend group. My youngest brother had left before me. And so we ended up living together. And then it was, it was about a year, maybe two after I left that we decided to move to Calgary, which is in Southern Alberta. That's where I live now. So that would have been in 2011 that I moved to Calgary.

And six months later, I met a young lady who now is my wife. So yeah, it was about 10 years of, and you know, I met Christina and we started dating. We met in May. We started dating in August.

Just lived like the world, I guess. I mean, her and I, we moved in together within a year of not even a year from when we started dating. We started living together and we started our lives together. I tried to justify it in my own heart because I knew that it was wrong to live with your girlfriend who wasn't your wife. And I won't explain how I tried to justify that because it's quite the mental gymnastics and we do what we have to do. But during that time, there was no consideration of God.

And I can remember some of the roommates that we had or business partners that we all lived in the same house. And, you know, we'd be out in the evening having some drinks or something and discussing the universe and, you know, humanity and maybe the spark of life that people have. And it's, you know, just very new agey. And we'd talk about maybe a force in the universe and how we can see that it can, it's good when that force is expressed in people's lives because this is where life comes from and, and possibly goodness. And so we're talking about all the things that I would have in my childhood understood as God. Yeah, but in a very vague and manageable.

That's, that's like pop culture, pop culture philosophy or pop culture religion. Yep. It's vague enough that it can kind of makes you feel good. Yeah. It makes you feel good and it kind of fits with everybody, but it doesn't really deeply affect your inside. You nailed it. You nailed it because it doesn't cost you anything. Yeah. It doesn't call you to anything because if you're a part of a greater power. So the idea is that there's a life force and then every bit of life that pops up on the earth has a greater or lesser degree of that life force.

And humans would have a greater degree. And if you're the kind of human that's open to developing it, you can strengthen that life force within you. And if you strengthen it, it will make you a more respectable, a more honorable, a kinder, a more loving person. And the fellow that I was visiting with at the time, we're still friends today. And he still believes this. And he just believes that Christ is a piece of that. Oh, that Christ is just the greater expression of that life force. He had it better than some of the others. Right. And he's kind of a guide maybe to that, to that expression.

So to me, it was fun to think about. And it also kind of scratched an itch to try to think of something supernatural. You know, if you could kind of have that, but yeah, and go on and live your life and, and do whatever you want, really. And I would say that, you know, I was a selfish, self-serving person and I made some of the lives of people around me miserable sometimes because I, you know, sometimes struggled with insecurity and, and you mix alcohol or drugs or something with that, then that side of you comes out. And I would say that there's a lot of that part of my life that God has had to work me through since my conversion and free me from because it can keep me up and, and give me anxiety.

But I felt God's healing hand, you know, in thinking about that person. So there's, there's another piece to this that I haven't mentioned yet is early, I would say in my mid-teens, I think it was, I was very insecure and there was this idea that you were, I was somehow fundamentally flawed, that I was, I was a bit of a fake.

And so that carried through all through. So any insecurity that showed up, I mean, I'm in my mid-20s, anytime, you know, I was having a weaker moment or something, that insecurity or that truth or that, that fear that you're fundamentally flawed, you're a fake, all the people can see through you would strengthen. And so that kind of dogged me for, for many, many years. And sometimes it would be dormant for a long time and then it would pop back up again. So I'm just kind of giving you a picture of the landscape of my heart, I guess, during that time. And you know, a lot of times just normal life, I mean, years and years of just waking up, going to work, you know, carousing on the weekend, doing the things that you enjoy, you know, just really nothingness.

And that's the, that's the part that gets me is so many years of just nothingness. Like I didn't go study. I didn't, you know, travel that much. I did more when Christina and I started dating. We traveled more then, but anyway, I don't know if that gives you a bit of a glimpse into, into that time. The word that comes to mind is almost like indifference or just. That's exactly. Yeah. Just kind of living, you know? It's what it is. Not a whole lot more beyond that. Thinking of what's in front of you. Yeah. That's basically just going through life. Hey, there's a party. Let's go. Oh, this is happening. Let's go. Like not really any forethought.

We need this. Well, we better do this. Yeah. No strategy, no discipline. Just living in the now, I guess. So you've laid the groundwork that gets us to another pivot point in your life. Somewhere in this journey, you come back to the church. Tell me about that. What changed? What broke the indifference? You'll have to forgive me if I get emotional because the mercy of God is beyond comprehension.

So we get married. We dated for, I don't know, two and a half, three years. We got engaged on the Eiffel Tower. We get married in 2015, September of 2015. So next month is our 10-year anniversary. I had started a business in 2016. That business took us out of town for a while. We have our first child in 2016 at the end of, in December of 2016.

And we lived out of town for a while. You know, our marriage is great. Christina and I have always had a very good relationship. You know, we have children. My business is some of the contracts that I took that took us out of town, you know, backfired. We ended up losing a bunch of money. We're feeling the pinch big time. Christina and I have always had dreams of, of being wealthy. And that wasn't necessarily, I mean, we, we liked nice stuff and we wanted to be brand name and glamorous and all that kind of stuff. But that wasn't necessarily what drove it. We've, it's something that we've talked about even when we were dating. Like we talked about adopting children when we were dating.

Like we talked about how we could impact young people. Like say we're having a big party and there's, you know, young people there and stuff. And we always had a heart to, you know, oh, you're struggling with this and, you know, we'll hear you out. Like not ministry because you're not thinking about ministry and stuff like that. But you, there was always the context of making an impact in somebody's life.

So that has always been an underlying theme in our relationship, even without God. And so our goal was, so she was a career woman, had a job, really good job. And so she was going to work. I was a businessman and we were going to be rich. But not only just because we wanted the luxuries, we wanted the vacations, we wanted the nice cars and all that stuff. But we also thought about like how could we, how could we impact, how could we mentor other young people into the good life as well.

So that's there. So that dream is on the rocks at the moment because business is not going well. Christina got laid off shortly after our wedding. And so things are looking a little bit bleak for us. We were back in Calgary.

We had gone up north to do the job and we got back to Calgary and our son is, I one afternoon, like I wasn't working, it was wintertime. I'm in construction and I'm up in the nursery with him and I'm just rocking him to sleep. And I would sing to him a lot. And a lot of the songs, like I obviously knew a lot of songs from just listening to secular music, but a lot of the songs that would come to mind are hymns.

And I would sing when, you know, my wife wasn't around necessarily. I would sing some hymns to him. And it was just because I knew him. They were, you know, I want to sing a baby to sleep, what comes to mind, songs that you remember, familiar. So I would sing hymns. And I think that that's where, where, what put these thoughts into my head. And the reason I say when my wife isn't around, because the way she was raised in her family, they were sort of anti-religion. So I think I was singing to him. But anyway, I remember looking down at him and saying, what am I going to tell him about where we come from?

What's our origin? Well, I could tell him that we evolved, you know, to leave God out of the picture, but I can't. That's foolish. Like I know that that's ridiculous. I can't tell my son that we came from monkeys.

I know that that's wrong. But what do I tell him? I have to tell him we're created. And if we're created, then we're responsible. If there is a creator God who has put all of this into motion, who has created man, you know, the marvel that we are, this baby, you know, nothing will make you marvel more than having your first child. You look at this perfect little child, you know, and you interact with them and you see the lights come on in their eyes and they start recognizing you and making noises and giggling. And you know, there's nothing more that'll get to your heart than something like that. And so to think that there's a God that created this little boy and put him in my arms, I'm in trouble.

Because if he's real, if I'm by myself, I can do whatever I want with that reality. But I can't when it comes to him. I can't just let that question be unanswered. I can't make it some ambiguous force of the universe. I have to communicate that to him because this is huge. We have to, we have to, there's a reckoning if there's a creator.

And so I walked over to the window and I looked outside and I looked up at the sky and I said, I know you're there. I know you're there. And that was that. I kept rocking him to sleep. And I think it was that day or very shortly after I downloaded the Bible app on my phone and I would get the verse of the day. And the first time I opened that Bible and I went to, I don't remember what passage it was, a familiar passage. It might have been Psalms 23 or, you know, some familiar psalm that I remembered, you know, I hadn't touched the word of God in 10 and a half years.

And I opened it up and I read it and my heart leapt and I knew that this is truth. There is life here that you are not going to find anywhere, that this is alive. It was like touching an electric fence.

My soul responded. But the thing is, I was a coward. I was afraid of what my wife would think if I started reading the Bible again. Religion was for the weak-minded, you know, as my husband having an existential crisis while I was.

So I hid it for a year. Oh, wow. Yeah. I, I, to greater or lesser degrees, I continued to read the Bible for a year. I prayed during that time some, but there wasn't a lot of connection. I missed an important part. There's two, two prayers that I think are useful to put side by side. So shortly after I left, I would say within the first year I left, you know, I'm dealing with this. Like you do have to deal with something about how you're raised and if God is real. And I remember one night, I don't know what, what brought this on, but I got out of bed one night and I turned the light on.

I'm in the house alone, like there's nobody around. And I'm standing in the middle of my room and I said, God, if you're real, show yourself to me here right now. And I stood there in the quiet of the room and I looked around and I knew that my voice hadn't gone past the plaster ceiling.

I knew that there was a deathly cold silence. And I got back into bed a little bit afraid because I had cried out to God and there was nothing. It was quiet. You fast forward 10 years to a bedroom holding my son and all I said was, I know you're there. And the answer of the universe was there. The change between those two prayers was so powerful. It was like you knew that there was everything instead of a dead quiet solitude.

So that was the beginning. That was the beginning of my journey back to God. But I continued to live in sin, maybe with a little bit more care, a little more caution, less cursing, less, you know, maybe using the name of Christ in vain or things like that. Like just a little bit more consciousness of the life that I was living.

So I think it was about a year. We moved to Cochran. It's a smaller town outside of Calgary. And we didn't know anybody in Cochran, but we felt our lives were kind of changing. We were having children in our friend group. None of them were married. We had some younger friends in our friends group. And so we felt a distance coming between us and the people, you know, the crowd that we used to run with and, you know, live our lives with. And so we moved to Cochran and kind of lengthened that distance between us and some of our friends. And I feel like that was God. God was, you know, nudging us along in this journey and we didn't know it at the time.

So we moved to Cochran. And at one point I asked, I told Christina, I said, why don't we go to church? And she said, no. Like, why would we do that? And that was that. I think it was about three months later, I asked her again, you know, what? We're looking to know people in this community. We know, you know, we've lived here for a little while and we don't know that many people. I mean, we've met some of our neighbors and stuff, but it'd be a good place to make new friends. And she's thinking, well, maybe, you know, good people are supposed to go to church. And so we did. I made a list of churches.

Cochran has a lot of them. I made a list of churches and from my, so I'm coming at this from, you know, reading, starting to read the Bible and starting to feel this something is happening or growing. And so I made a list of churches and I was like, the first one I put on the top was the Baptist church. I told her, I said, we'll just try and see which one we like. But I put the Baptist church on the top because from my recollection, the Baptist might be the closest to the gospel that I might have grown up with. Whereas the Anglicans or the Lutherans or the United or the Presbyterians or, you know, the list goes on.

I don't think there's Presbyterian, but the list goes on and on and on. And I didn't want to go to a Calvinist church or a Reformed church or, and so I put the Baptist on the top. I know some Baptists are quite Reformed, but, and we did. We went to church on Sunday. It was Super Bowl Sunday. We were huge NFL fans. And yes, Canadians like the NFL as well. There's a lot of big fans up there. And we were huge fans of the Seahawks. We get to church. It's Super Bowl Sunday. People are wearing jerseys. There's a Super Bowl party after the service. There's a chili cook-off. And we're like, this is awesome. Like, this is a blast.

And we're like, that was really cool. This was a lot of fun. I think they even brought a, or maybe this was later on. At one point they brought a CFL, which is, I would say the spinoff of the NFL. It's a Canadian Football League. Brought one of those players in, you know, and he got up front and he was a Christian and shared his story or something like that. So we were pretty, we thought this was cool. You know, we're going to go back to this church again. Anyway, well, not to get ahead of myself. Later in the week, Christina asked, are we going back? I was like, you want to? She's like, sure.

That's not where I expected that story. Right. So, you know, of all things, Super Bowl Sunday, you know, but like, hey, like it's amazing that, you know, God will, God uses right all kinds of things, you know, and like, how about that? I know. How about that? Yep. So, yeah, the next Sunday comes, she's asking if she, if I want to go. And I'm like, sure. We didn't have any discussion about it other than that was fun. We met some nice people. And then do you want to go back? Sure, let's go back.

And the next Sunday was a skit. One lady, wasn't even a message. One lady got up front. She had her leather bag and she was dressed up like John Newton's wife, the author of Amazing Grace. And so she did a one, one person skit and John Newton's out living his crazy life. And so she's kind of sharing it from her perspective and reading his letters and wringing her hands because her husband is living in sin. Like he's a vile man. And she was giving us details about, you know, how he was acting and some of the things he did, some of the atrocities that he committed in slave trade and stuff like that. Gruesome, horrible stories.

And I'm sitting there, we're sitting at the back of the church and I'm listening to this story of this man. And I knew that John Newton had been raised by a Christian mother and he had been raised with truth. And here he is living this awful, gruesome life. And I'm sitting there thinking about this.

And it just kind of came to me like, if there is hope for John Newton, there might be hope for you. Maybe there's a chance for you. You didn't kill any babies, you know, like you didn't go that far.

So that's kind of in my head. And I'm thinking about that like, man, maybe there's hope. And services ended. Pastor gets up, makes his closing comments, and he starts praying. And during the prayer, I turned over and I look at Christina and she's sitting there with tears rolling down her face.

And I'm like, she's a little bit stoic. I mean, you'll, you've met her. You'll see that. But she's not an emotional person in public. And she's sitting in church, public meeting, you know, tears rolling down her face. And I'm looking at her like, what is this? Like, what is going on here? The service ends. We, you know, kind of do our thing and we get out of church and we drive home. It's quiet.

We eat our lunch. We don't talk about anything. We put our, by that point, we had our second child. Autumn was three weeks old, I believe. And she's six years old now. And we put our children down for naps. And we go down and we're living in this little townhouse. It's like three stories up, one down. And honestly, the main floor wasn't much bigger than this room. And so we had a very small dining table. And we sit down at the dining table across from each other. And I'm looking at her and I say, why were you crying? And she says, I have wanted joy all of my life. When I was 16 years old, my, I don't want to tell her story, but it's part of this.

When I was 16 years old, my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. And I said, I just want to be happy.

And I looked at her and I said, I think I know where we can go. I think I know what we can do. And we prayed together in that little room across the dining table from each other, holding hands. She prayed, I prayed.

We got up from that table, weeping, looking at each other like, what just happened? What just happened? We laughed and we cried and we hugged. And we just like, I remember walking around that little room just like, what just happened to us? What took place? And I got to say, so remember I was saying our business, things were, things hadn't looked up that much by that point. There were some uncertainties about our future. And I know, I don't know if it was that day or the day after, the day after, we looked at each other and we're like, we don't even care. We don't even care what our future is.

We have hope. It's not our, like, who cares where we're headed or what our financial situation is like? We have Christ. And so we started reading the Bible. I have never read the Bible so much in my life as we did in the first, I don't know how long that period was, but I would come home from work, listen to podcasts or read the Bible. She's sitting down and reading the Bible for the first time in her life, reading the scriptures. And I got to say that that time has such a warm place in my heart because we were digging into the word. And to me, the word of God went from being flat and quiet to just this deep, 3D, rich, like you can't even get enough of it, hunger.

And we're sitting there like on the couch, literally just reading books through when we had time. Obviously, we have, you know, responsibilities, but I wasn't working much at the time. So we did have time. And it was like, man, this is crazy. Like this is hard to believe what we're experiencing.

And so we're going to the Baptist church. It was great. We told the pastor about our experience and he was just like, what? This is crazy. We ended up getting baptized there. Both of us got baptized together. Christina had been baptized as a baby. You know, I was baptized in the Mennonite church. But the funny thing is, is he looks at me in one of the meetings with him and he says, are you getting baptized? And I was like, nah, I've been baptized.