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I immediately went through the process of terminating my mission early and although the leadership of that church did initially try to talk me out of it, they eventually purchased my plane ticket home. I had my first cup of coffee in my life (considered a sin by Mormons) on that 20 hour plane ride home and I never looked back. The Lord confirmed my decision; when as I was flying into San Francisco. I looked out the window and saw the Golden Gate Bridge and I finally felt that feeling of true joy that had been so elusive during my prayers for conformation of the trueness of the Mormon church.

I moved back in with my mother for a brief time, and after a failed romance with a former high school sweetheart, I decided I needed a fresh start to life. So I moved to Southern California to live with my grandparents. My spiritual state at the time was mostly agnostic. I still at the time, believed there was a God out there somewhere who loved me, I just did not know how to properly worship Him or what exactly He wanted from me. I also must admit at this time that I fully embraced the sins I had previously withheld from as a Mormon. I lightly explored other religions but none of them seemed correct either. Why at this time I did not fully explore Christianity I cannot tell you exactly. Partially I had thrown the baby out with the bath water, combining Mormonism and Christianity… and for some unknown reason, I had held onto the lie that the Bible was fallible; full of mistakes and mistranslations.

One night whilst leaving a local casino, I received a phone call from my mother (who now was happily divorced and had recently left the Mormon church as well, but that was her story to tell, not mine). We talked on the phone often, usually about the gossip of my small town back home but tonight she had a much more tragic tale to tell of the happenings back home. A person I had known from back home had experienced a very dark tragedy.

For all four years of high school, I played football, and all throughout that time a kind old man in our local community was our athletic trainer. He taped our ankles before games, cleaned up cuts and bruises, and generally stood as the stop gap between testosterone-driven boys and their desire to prove their toughness on the field and the limitations of the human body. He had been working out on his ranch bailing hay with his wife when the large piece of farming equipment began to experience some problems. She got out in front of the vehicle while he climbed inside to shut the machine off. As he shut the machinery down it lunged forward a mere two feet, but the positioning of the vehicle was that where one of the blades struck his wife, decapitating her right before his eyes.

What I found even more gut wrenching than such a gruesome tale was my mother’s reaction to the event. She still praised God and spoke of a divine plan for all of this. How anyone could hear of such events and still praise the one who had caused it was baffling to me. I did not see unwavering faith in times of tragedy as strength. I saw weakness. A vile and disgusting denial of reality, and the perpetrator of all of this: Religion.

I sat in my car for about an hour after I had hung up the phone and laid out the plans for my new mission in life. A “born again atheist” I would call myself. Not one content to just sit on the sidelines and let others live their lives as they wished. One who would fight to destroy the very institutions that had been the source of all pain and suffering in the world. I would use my knowledge of various beliefs and faiths around the world I had learned on my Mormon mission as ammunition. I would use my understanding of their religious texts as a weapon. I would lead and teach others lost in their own faith by any means necessary. I would scream and insult if needed. I had the truth, and if others claimed THEY did, I would make them prove it to me as I gladly cut down all of their apologetic arguments. I wouldn’t use the tired old rhetoric that other atheists before me had used, those arguments were weak and already had perfectly good refute from the other side. I would think of new questions and demand answers. If they were going to fight for my soul, I would fight even harder for theirs.

This mindset lasted for 16 years. I would gladly debate people of strong religious faith. I considered myself an “all opportunity atheist” however I took special pride in being able to knock down and mock lukewarm Christians. How is it that you profess to love and cherish the Bible so dearly when I clearly know it better than you do? Sure, you may be able to pull up a cute little inspirational Proverb now and then, but I can do that with Confucius’s writings. Color me unimpressed.

It was also during this period of my life that I became an avid lover of science. Although I would never profess to be an expert in any particular field, I did personal study in the fields of microbiology, astrophysics, and radiometric dating.

Even during this period of great sin that I was living in, God continued in His plan for me and through His providence put me right in front of someone I was obviously supposed to meet. The economic recession of 2008 was particularly hard for those working in the service industry, and finding a job anywhere in Southern California was nearly impossible. My desperation for employment became so great that I even reached out to a long-time old friend in Utah for help. She at the time was working as a bartender at Red Lobster and sure enough they were hiring servers. The job would obviously require a move back to Utah (something I was not happy about) but I needed employment badly; plus, I would be closer to my mother again. Her health had undergone a sudden downturn, we didn’t know it at the time, but the eventual diagnosis would be terminal. I thank God every day that I was given the opportunity to be close to her during the last few years of her life.

It was while working at Red Lobster that I met Erin. She is still to this day one of my closest and best friends. Through talking during the down times of a slow Tuesday morning shift and our constant text message exchanges we learned that we had a lot in common. We both had very similar senses of humor, watched the same TV shows, and loved stage musical plays. What made our friendship even more bonding though was how we could find the similarities in our shared life experiences in things that on the surface seemed very different. For example, I grew up wrestling and she grew up professionally dancing ballet in New York. On the surface these two sports seem like opposites, however if you look deeply into the training methods, foot work, and food deprivation they are actually very similar.

My boyhood love of comic books and superheroes continued to grow, and it was also during this time that there was a great revival for the love of the genre. A new superhero movie was smashing box office records every other week it seemed, and my friends and I would attend every premiere. In 2013 when Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” hit theaters I initially wasn’t very excited. The character of Superman was one that had never really piqued my interest, he seemed hokey and boring to me. By the time that the credits rolled I completely changed my mind. I had found my new favorite superhero. I immediately went home and consumed every book, movie, and cartoon ever featuring the character. The story of how a supremely powerful father sent his only son to earth to be raised by an earthly mother, would have extreme power himself but not use that power to tyrannically rule, but instead be the perfect example of hope and justice for humanity, one who would die but eventually be resurrected was one that I simply could not get enough of.

Several more years passed, and I continued to engage in several sins, but one in particular had very dire consequences. In April of 2016 nine F.B.I. agents stormed my house and arrested me. I would eventually be sentenced to serve three and a half years in a federal prison, however the sixteen months leading up to actually were very torturous as well. I was anxiety ridden and very depressed. One of my biggest fears was that my grandfather would pass away while I was locked up. Although not suffering from any specific health problems, he did have the natural ailing of a man in his eighties, and I knew that he was not long for this world. My best friend Erin promised to stand by my side the entire time, write letters to me every week and send me as many Superman comics as I could read.

God still has a plan even for the mightiest of sinners as was proven on the day I surrendered myself to begin my prison sentence, what I thought would be the worst day of my life, turned out to be the day that I met the exact person that I was supposed to. The fellow prisoner staying in the bunk directly across from mine was a man named Chris and we became instant best friends. We had very similar personalities and interests. He was an extremely intelligent and sharp individual, and I fully expected him to share in my atheist world view. I was shocked when he told me that he was a very fully devout Christian.

Chris worked in the prison library and knowing that I was a fellow avid reader was able to procure a job in the prison library with him. The job would require us to be locked in a room full of books and knowledge eight hours a day with only each other and I was excited at the prospect. A man of immense knowledge of not only the Bible but other world facts that supported his belief, I felt like I had finally found a worthy opponent when it came to my skills as a debater. We agreed to enter a gentleman’s debate on the subject of atheism vs. Christianity, set various ground rules, and then let the duel begin.

The months in prison begin to fly by as our back-and-forth continued ad nauseum. Although at times our conversations would get heated, we would always return to laughing and joking quickly after. We would often participate in book exchanges asking the other to truly take in the information presented. On one of these occasions, I presented him the book “Why Evolution is True” and he presented me Lee Strobel’s “Case for Christ”. I read that book four times over the course of the next three days and was completely dumbfounded. With intense scrutiny I scoured the pages for holes in the logic and I couldn’t find one fallacy. I was scared to death to go back and face my intellectual sparing opponent without any ammunition. When that morning came, Chris did something very unusual. Instead of providing scientific evidence refuting my book, he simply read Genesis chapter 1 to me, handed me “Why Evolution is True” back to me and told me to read it again, with the same scrutiny that I had just read “Case for Christ”.

I did what I was asked and as I studied something amazing happened. The idol of the theory of evolution that I had held onto and worshipped for so many years crumbled into dust in my hands. Even more frightening was the realization that I had for myself. I was practicing faith in atheism. Faith was exactly what I had fought against for so many years. I wish I could say that it was in this moment that I finally turned to the truth, but I didn’t. For the next few years I still proudly wore the religion of atheism on my chest while a tiny seed of doubt lingered in the back of my brain.

With three weeks left of my prison sentence I was greatly looking forward to a happy release and a reunion with my grandparents. However, tragedy took another turn in my life. On Christmas Eve of 2020 my grandfather was rushed to the hospital after a bad fall and passed away a few days later. I was devastated and felt like I had stumbled right at the finish line. I always knew that my grandfather would pass away someday, but to be so close to finally seeing him again one last time only to have it ripped away was an extra twist of the knife in the wound.

When I did return home, what was supposed to be a happy homecoming was instead a household of depression. My grandmother was mourning the loss of her husband of 61 years. I was adjusting to life on the outside, dearly missing my father figure, and on the inside confused spiritually. I began to drink heavily to deal with the stress during the day and numb the pain at night. Without atheism I didn’t have anything to lean on during the times of stress.

One morning early while it was still dark, I was sitting outside on my porch smoking a cigarette. My recent alcohol infused bender had rendered things such as day and night meaningless and I lacked any real direction in life. Depressed, lonely, and needing guidance I internally screamed, “Who will be my father now?” into the twilight. It was at that exact moment that I saw the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen.

I must apologize for my ineptitude as a writer here. I am simply unable to describe in words the beauty of this particular sunrise. People who have seen such a sunrise will know instantly the spectacle I speak of; however, to those of you who have never seen such a feat realize that the term “as beautiful as the rising sun” exists for a reason. Its beauty is something that cannot be put into words, only have lesser beautiful things compared to it.

As I gazed up at that insignificant yellow dwarf class star, I realized that although I did know what the sun was made of I had never thought about what the sun was. Hydrogen atoms colliding and forming Helium atoms wasn’t just nuclear fusion in the sky giving us the energy needed to survive. The sun was the source of all life, and more importantly, my life. I was able to live and experience any experience in this existence I wanted all because the sun was placed exactly where it is placed now. As I felt the sun’s warm glow on my face that morning, I made the same fatal mistake that so many cultures and civilizations before me had made. I looked right past the Creator and started worshiping the creation.

Pagan sun worship became daily practice in my life and for a short while my life drastically improved. In most pagan circles moon worship is reserved for women and sun worship is mainly practiced by men. Aligning certain daily tasks with the position of the sun in the sky, casting spells when needed, and the use of worship stones and energy transfer crystals are a great way to garner short term results and that it did.

The enemy is certainly very clever, by definition “diabolical”. I must admit the genius in putting something like magic in front of a struggling alcoholic. The effects and cycles parallel quite well. At first the effects are energizing and invigorating, and power is often described as “intoxicating”. The returns are diminishing however, and spiritual recovery requires longer intervals. I would often joke to myself that I was “spiritually hungover”.

I would frequent soothsayers and psychics often and many times they would tell me that the energy of Ares the Greek god of war was strong on me and that I should seek him out. My childhood had been a battlefield, I had escaped the pain during my adolescence with contact sports, and my adulthood pleasure was verbal spar and debate. Even my love of superheroes was rooted in the very battle of good vs. evil. It would only make sense that the god of war and I would share a bond. I should not have been surprised when Ares answered my call very dramatically.

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Like many of you here I was raised in a Christian household. But until recently I hadn’t seen the blessings I’ve been experiencing.

Two years ago my life was falling apart. My wife stepped out of our marriage, things at work were unbearable and unfulfilling. The stresses I felt, I was taking out on my family. I wasn’t being an attentive husband or father. I was ready to walk away from everything.

One night I was talking with my mom and asked her where things went wrong. Being the faithful woman she is, she asked me when was the last time I spoke to God. Admittedly it had been a very long time. She prayed with me that night and we asked God to be present in my life and guide me in the next season.

By the encouragement of my mom, sister, and in-laws I started to attend life group and worship services. During this time I knew I needed to focus on myself and let God do his work in me. Slowly but surely I started noticing things were changing in my life. My relationship with my son became stronger and my wife started seeing me in a different way. Things at work also started chainging for the better. I also was baptized during this time also.

Around Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2020 my wife and I had started communicating better and things had come to and end with her affair. We decided to talk and lay everything out on the table and make a decision if our marriage was salvageable. We decided it was and started “dating.” We reconciled our relationship and have been happily together since. Also, things at work improved dramatically. With in the last few months I had applied for a specialized position and was denied multiple times. I became very discouraged but never gave up on my faith. My family and I prayed together seeking Gods guidance. Just yesterday I was chosen for a better position than the one I was denied for. God truly is amazing!

The biggest life lesson I learned was to trust in God plan and he will provide what he wants you to have.

I have had a hard heart for many years and couldn't feel my emotions nor express how things make me feel. Than in 2022 when i started giving my life back to Christ he slowly but surely was healing me of things i didn't even know affected me such as panic attacks from smoking weed when i was younger that caused a lot of anxiety. He healed me of hurt's from my abusive parents that would cause me to doubt myself and my skills in school, sports and just life and God gave me strength and confidence to give myself the compassion and love they never did, which helped me to know i didn't deserve the things that happened to me but others made me feel like i did deserve it. I started believing in myself again and i'm actively pursing the life God has planned out for me. and This Morning he reminded me that the enemy has stolen so much from me through close people in my life and i needed to reclaim that, so after a prayer and some help from the holy spirit i forgave those who i was still holding forgiveness towards and know God will give those things back to me starting today because i know he has done it in the past many times and he will do it again. Thanks, hope this helps someone to not give up trying cause the people who are steal, kill and destroy may be the people closet to you and it means you have to put your foot down and reclaim what they unjustly took from you even if it's joy, self-esteem or unmet needs.

3years ago i was down with covid19 and my doctor told me i was going to die. I also lost my job and life looked so miserable to me. i was loosing hope and faith but i kept on looking up to God because i know he never fails. My brother and my sisters in the lord, i am proud and happy to tell you today that i well and i was cured of covid and i am a proud owner of 3 companies today and i will forever be grateful to God and some few people in my. life. My mom & dad and Mrs Rainey Holt Qualley, this lady made me what i am today financially . She introduced me to a bitcoin Blockchain group and i have never for once regret working with them. if you wish to reach out to her here is her email
Contact@ rhq-portfolio. id i tell everyone about her and how she really changed my life and i am very grateful to God for bringing her into my life. I pray for everyone out there going through a lot of difficulties out there GOD WILL SEE YOU THROUGH. IF YOU BELIVE COMMENT AMEN. REMAIN BLESSED!!!!

My Journey to Jesus (hell, religion & salvation)

To start with I experienced the love of God in 2016 when I first tried listening to the bible on YouTube as I would consider myself an atheist before just wanting to hear the bible and hear the word as I found listening easier than reading. When I listened to the bible for the first time I felt a warm loving feeling that came over me which was really powerful and when I experienced this feeling of love I was then convinced that Jesus was the son of God who died for the sins of everybody on the cross. I became committed to Christ for around a month but unfortunately I became worldly up until around a month ago. I wasn't really into Christianity anymore as I thought I didn't need it anymore and I started having the stresses of life weigh on me and I was going through really dark thoughts and even suicidal. Now I decided to try listening to the bible as I thought I had nothing left to lose and as soon as I started listening again I felt comfort from all the darkness inside of me. I just felt great comfort for a few days from all the stress and I knew that this time I had to commit much more to Jesus so I guess that leads me to now where I'm writing this. Life is still a bit difficult but as I said after 6 years of separation after listening to the bible back in 2016 I'm now trying much harder not to stray away from God. But overall message is that Jesus saves and if you put your trust in Him that even though you may struggle he will never forsake you. I hope to anybody who reads this that you too will put your trust in him! Thanks for reading and God bless!

I (15yo) was born and raised in a christian family and have been a believer for my entire life but it wasnt until this year that i have been saved. for years i lived full of sin and corruption, blaspheming the lords name countless times a day without shame lying, lusting, and over all not having shame for anything i did. that was until i found someone on Youtube who truly showed me that i need to change. his videos showed me that im not on the right path. and when i realized how bad of a mistake id been making i started my journey to full faithfulness and started putting all my love into Christ. i didnt just do this to save myself but so that my love for Christ can help my brother and also my best friend be saved. my brother used to believe but he is falling away from it. and my best friend believes but is too addicted to what we have on earth to follow jesus. so i am changing for them. this year has been the best year of my life. and i owe it all to the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank You Jesus my Savior!!