Someone did a duet video with this video that I just saw & it really caught my attention. People ask me, “How do you know Jesus is real? What if God and Jesus and Heaven isn’t real and the Bible is really just a bunch of stories designed to keep us under control?” This kind of thinking is EXACTLY what I was thinking about four years ago, around December 2020, when I started seeing that Jesus could save my life.

I had been wanting to go to church and go back to reading the Bible with an open heart and open mind. The question of how to find a church that would be good for me was something that kept me from going out and looking. My experiences with church were mostly negative. They made me feel out of place and unwanted and strange. The people seemed to want to know things about me that I really didn’t want to talk about like, “Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Who are your parents? Did they go to church? Do they read the Bible? Are they Christians? What do you do for a living, or do you got to school? What brings you to OUR church? Do you live near here? Have you been to Sunday School? Do you know any hymns?”

Reading the Bible up to that point had been something that was suggested for me to do over and over in my life but I just didn’t want it. I couldn’t understand the strange language of the King James Version. The language just didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the repetition. It just didn’t come easy for me and I didn’t enjoy reading it. I liked to read non-fiction and horror and classic and contemporary literature and folklore, mythology, fantasy, and science fiction. War memoirs.

I had already read most of the Bible while I was in prison for a stretch in the late 1990s-early 2000s, my last years of my twenties. That’s another story.

The Bible clearly contains great wisdom and fascinating stories that are hard to put down sometimes, but I didn’t BELIEVE in the goodness of God or the miracles described in it. didn’t  seem like it was trustworthy. So it didn’t change my skepticism and doubt and pessimism, especially about God’s creation: man.

People are horrible, I thought, and I was trying to be a good person in a horrible world with all these horrible people trying to take from and hurt good people. The New Testament tells the story that Jesus is the only way and I just couldn’t get behind that because I had read and seen and experienced so many other ways that seemed to lead to joy and happiness and “enlightenment.” I believed in Williams Blake’s sentiment that ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’

World culture, traditions, customs, beliefs, practices, music, art, storytelling, and technology was everything I wanted to learn about in life. I wanted to see the world.

Playing and making and listening to music was my thing. Writing was my thing. Reading was my thing. Partying and socializing and meeting new people was my new thing.

Jesus, in my eyes back then, lived a good way, a really good way, but he wasn’t living the only way.

Flash forward to 2020, four years ago, I was feeling heavy depression. I had panic attacks and anxiety. The whole COVID drama and BLM drama and all the politics garbage and fear and distraction and division was adding so much stress to my life. Watching news videos on the internet, just scrolling and clicking, was a big part of my days.

Also, I was searching for a new partner, after the relationship with my longtime girlfriend had fallen apart. So I was lonely and felt alone and alienated.

On top of that I was “self-medicating” with weed, beer, wine, liquor, sex, and anything that would distract me from my thoughts and feelings. The good things in my life, like my family and friends, my job, the stray cat I nursed from a kitten… they weren’t enough for me to get out of the pit I was in. It was a deep, dark pit of destruction I was sinking further and further into, and I sought mental health treatment but ended up becoming part of a peer to peer therapy group and also took a short class once a week on how to cope with mental health challenges and “recover” from them. 

Around that same time I started watching videos of online church services, particularly Pastor Steven Furtick of Elevation Church and others. Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch. TD Jakes.

Soon, I bought a Bible and started reading Genesis. No longer was reading the Bible something that I felt I should do just for my education but it became something I KNEW I needed to do to open myself up to God. What I needed was God in my life. 

As soon as in-person church services started I went to my pastor cousin’s church. Quickly I started building a church family that I can see only growing and growing as my faith grows. 

Also around that time, the summer of 2021, I met my future wife. We got baptized together over three years ago, and married a year later.

I’m still not completely sober. I still struggle with a belief that I need to have one every now and again, but I drink one or two drinks maybe once a month as opposed to a case of beer every week, maybe two, a bottle of whiskey a week, and the occasional bag of weed. Now I no longer use weed at all. I have zero regrets about any of it.

I don’t go to bars anymore to socialize and numb myself and try to feel so not alone, hitting on single women or chatting up the other people there. Bartenders and servers were some of my favorite people. But I don’t go to bars anymore. 

Now I am a leader in the praise band at church, and I love singing about Jesus, and my faith in Him, and playing guitar in worship and praise. I take notes during service. I’ve been keeping a blog about my walk with Jesus. I actually pray EVERY DAY, sometimes all day long. I talk to Him.

I think and talk about Jesus and God so much now that people I work with think I’m “religious”, which is ridiculous to me because of how I see myself and my past.

Old Jay earned a bachelors degree in Anthropology. I studied evolution. I used to think the Bible was all just mythology and folklore.

Don’t get me wrong. I believed in a Creator, a God, but not THE God who loves me so much that He wants me to include Him in every moment in my life and knows how many hairs are in my head and knew me before the womb. I didn’t believe in THAT God!

Or THAT Jesus — the great teacher, yes. The great rabbi, yes. The great human being who taught love and kindness, yes. The man who had done nothing wrong and was crucified on a Roman cross, yes. But the Jesus who was the Son of God? Jesus who was born of a virgin mother? Jesus who was Messiah? Jesus who rose from the grave? Jesus who turned water into wine? Jesus who fed 3,000 people? 5,000 people? With some bread and fish? Jesus who walked on water? Jesus who cured a bleeding woman when she touched His garment? Jesus who cured blindness? Brought the dead to life? Cured leprosy? And… took away our penalty for sin? I didn’t believe in THAT Jesus!

But now I do… and I know that God changes me little by little. I know that I’m still living with the old Jay. I know that my spirit is at constant war with my flesh. I know that I’m tempted by the Devil and the world he rules. I know that the Kingdom of Heaven might not be attainable for me and that I don’t deserve that anyway, but I KNOW that Jesus is real. I KNOW that He has saved my life. I KNOW that God has been with me my entire life. I KNOW that He has been saving me from things and trying to get me to walk in the light all my life.

Thank You, LORD! Yahweh!!! Thank You, Jesus!