Michael's Story, Pt. 3

This is a multi-part episode. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And somewhere in there, there was just a really big faith crisis as well. I think it was more along the lines before I learned about alien righteousness. I was just really struggling with my faith, and it was like this really bad broken rollercoaster that I just wanted to get off of, but I couldn't. And some days I was convinced that the church was true, and then the next day I'm like, it's completely a fraud. And I just kept going back and forth on this, and I finally came to the realization that it was false. And a lot of the Christians online just made such a huge impact on me.

One of our friends, shout out here to Fred Anson, really helped me a lot too, because he encouraged me. He said, you know, if you're in a submarine and you have a compass, it'll always say you're going north because of the magnetism in the submarine, and you need to get out and use that compass. And he encouraged me to get away from the church and look at it objectively.

And once I did that, I was appalled by what I saw. You know, the more I looked at the church, the more it looked like a cult. I could understand why people said that about Mormonism, and it frightened me quite a bit to look at it from an outside perspective. And Paul, you were a really big influence on me as well. I remember going through, you know, the marriage started going through some big issues, and that was before I left the church. And I remember talking to you about it, Paul, and you said you were going to pray for me with your group at seminary. Yeah, that was actually at church.

We were gathering on Wednesday nights for a study on evangelism, in particular to Muslims. And, you know, the pastor friend of mine who was leading us through that study asked if there were any prayer requests. And I knew that you were going through a tough time, both with your marriage and with the questions you had about the LDS church, and so asked the group to pray for you that night.

And we spent the first probably five or six minutes or so of that class period praying specifically for you and over your situation. Yeah, so I remember that night, you know, I woke up and this is during, right in the middle of my faith crisis, I woke up and it was the strangest thing because I just felt like the atmosphere was different than normal. It felt like there was singing going on, but it was like in a different plane of existence, but I could kind of tell that it was there anyway. It was just unlike anything I'd ever experienced. And I got up and it's just like, wow, I feel good. And I just, I knew what it was. I was like, right now I'm being prayed over. I don't know how I knew that, but in that moment I just knew that that's what was going on. And I'm like, this is incredible.

This has never happened to me before. And I think, you know, I think it was really close to accepting Christ that night. I had been really depressed with the faith crisis and the way things were going in my marriage at that point. And I remember going to my son's bedroom.

He was probably two and a half at that point. And I knelt by his bed and I realized that in the state that I was in, I couldn't be a good parent to him. And I was just, you know, the realization of how pitiful I was just washed over me. And I was just like, I give up, God, you know, I can't do this. But I didn't take the next step and actually accept Christ as Lord and Savior of my life. And I was just like, I give up, you know, I can't do this.

And so I kind of reached rock bottom there. But I remember, you know, I kind of asked you if you had prayed for me the next day. And you're like, yes, we did.

And so that confirmed that something really was going on that night. Yeah, that was a really interesting time to, you know, be kind of close to you and become your friend through what you were going through. You know, obviously, we have similar journeys in terms of leaving the LDS church, but your experience is different than mine in several ways. You know, I just remember you mentioned that you were you belong to like a super secret Mormon apologist Facebook group. Well, you know, we we had our own kind of Facebook messenger threads going as as evangelical Christians during that time. You know, you were often the topic of discussion on those threads because a lot of us could tell that that you were really wrestling with the question of grace and and your salvation and that you were we could sense that you were sincere about it. You know, sometimes when when you're in the in the kind of the trenches of witnessing to Mormons, you know, you experience people who will just say they agree with just about everything you say. But you can tell that they really don't write.

They're just looking for that that kind of pat on the back. Okay, you're a Christian to kind of kind of feeling, but we could sense that you were you were not in that place. You were you were sincere. I remember having one late night conversation with you over messenger where I was working on a on a paper. You mentioned that I was going to seminary at the time and I was I was up late working on a paper. I'd worked all day and and but I could just sense through our conversation that you were you were working through something and we were talking about grace. And, you know, I brought up the passage, you know, that we were dead in our sins and trespasses and I asked you, you know, can a dead person do anything, you know, because we were talking about works righteousness and just just those conversations. And it was just it was a real pleasure to be involved in that holy experience of seeing you go through go through that and seeing God draw you to himself. Yeah, no, I'm grateful that you were there at the right time and the right place. I mean, there were there were a couple, you know, people that just I know God put them there and and you were one of them so really, really good stuff. I was thinking about like like I wish I could have been there just hearing all this. It's just an incredible story of Michael coming, you know, coming to faith in Christ. And but it just makes me think that, like.