Granny passed away in early November of 2017. The house that had been filled with the constant hum of oxygen machines and the rhythm of her care grew suddenly quiet. Sabrina and her mother grieved deeply. For Sabrina especially, the loss cut close. Granny had been more of a mother to her in many ways than her own mother had been able to be. The finality of death settled over the home the way it always does: heavy, quiet, and unwilling to be reasoned with.

In the months prior, Sabrina’s mother began attending a large church in the area called Christ United. She invited Sabrina into some of the language and atmosphere of that place. It was the kind of church that spoke much of blessing, favor, and personal breakthrough, yet said very little about sin, repentance, or the holiness of God. Good deeds were encouraged, often in ways that seemed designed to be noticed. The cross, if mentioned, was rarely held up as the place where the wrath of God against sinners was satisfied. It was more often presented as a symbol of how much God wanted to improve our lives.

Sabrina began asking her mother and I questions; questions about God, about eternity, about what was true. The death of her grandmother had stirred something in her that the busyness of early motherhood had not. She started listening to teachers whose names were well-known: Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, Steven Furtick, and others like them. The messages were smooth, hopeful, and centered on the listener. They spoke of destiny, of breaking limitations, of speaking things into existence. They did not speak much of a holy God who must judge sin or of a Savior who had to die because of it.

I would start to think seriously about if God was a reality. In that season, things my mother told me pertaining to the Scriptures, parts of sermons I never paid attention to, the information would come flooding in as I sought to answer Sabrina’s questions. I would give biblical answers, but I’m sure they were interwoven with my opinions as well. I reluctantly began listening with her later. For a little over a year I tuned in to Elevation Church services online nearly every Sunday. We even gave money. At the time it felt like something we were doing together, a shared spiritual interest that seemed better than the complete absence of God that had marked my earlier years. I started waking up early, smoking pot as I had done so daily, ritually, for so long, and opening a Bible. I would read ten or more chapters in a sitting. Most of it fell flat. The words were there, but they did not land with power. Still, something was stirring. Conviction would come in small, uncomfortable waves; moments when the emptiness of my double life became harder to ignore.

I was still using regularly. The pot, the occasional harder substances, the old patterns of escape had not left simply because I was now reading Scripture or listening to sermons. I had merely added religious activity on top of the same curved heart. It is possible to read the Bible and remain unchanged. It is possible to listen to preaching and still love darkness. I was living proof of both.

Then one ordinary day while folding laundry I searched for something from Elevation and instead found a video of a woman named Doreen Virtue interviewing a former staff member. They laid out evidence that the church and its leader were not what they claimed to be. As I watched, something in me recognized the truth of what was being said. The discomfort was immediate. I urged Sabrina to watch it without defending what we had been consuming. God was beginning to open our eyes to the emptiness of the teaching we had accepted so readily.

In that same video, Doreen Virtue pointed people toward Ray Comfort and the ministry of Living Waters. I began watching his street evangelism videos. For the first time the gospel I heard was not about improving my life, claiming promises, or speaking positive words. It was about the law of God, the reality of sin, the certainty of judgment, and the finished work of Christ on the cross for those who would repent and believe. The conviction that had been only a faint discomfort before began to grow sharper. I saw more clearly the chasm between the life I was living and the God who was holy. Yet even as the light was increasing, the darkness in me had not yet been broken. 

In 2019 Sabrina conceived again. We went to the eight-week appointment with the ordinary mixture of hope and excitement that attends early pregnancy. The room was quiet as the technician moved the probe. There was no heartbeat. The child had already gone to be with the Lord at around six weeks. The silence that followed was deafening in a way I had never quite known. We left the clinic carrying a grief that words felt too small to hold. 

Sabrina later wondered whether the long stress of secrets she had carried for years, together with medication she had taken for nausea, had played some part. Whether or not those things were the medical cause, the loss itself was real and personal. We had already begun to imagine a face, a name, a place in our family. Now there was only absence and grief unbearable to that which we had ever known. I tried to comfort her, but I had no true comfort to give. I was still living at a distance from the only One who can speak peace into that kind of sorrow. My own heart was still curved inward, still managing its own darkness, still unable to weep with the weight of eternity in view. We mourned together as best we could, yet even our mourning was limited by the fact that I did not yet know the God of all comfort.

Looking back, I see the Lord’s hand even in that painful providence. He was already preparing soil. The grief of losing a child we would not hold in this life became one more place where the emptiness of life apart from Him was felt more sharply. At the time I could only feel the loss. I could not yet see that God who numbers every hair and every day had also numbered the days of that little life, and wastes nothing; not even sorrow, in the lives of those He intends to redeem.

In 2020 I took what was precious family heirlooms and sold it for a little over five thousand dollars. I used every bit of it to buy marijuana products—flower, wax, edibles, vapes, and newer paraphernalia that went with them. The theft was calculated. I told myself it was only things. The truth was that the same heart that had once stolen pretzels and later twenty dollars from friends was still willing to take what did not belong to it when desire demanded.

I was a husband. I was a father. I was reading the Bible. I was listening to preaching that was beginning to sound more like the truth. And yet I was still a thief and a man ruled by his appetites. The contradiction should have been unbearable. At the time it was simply how I lived.

The months that followed carried a strange mixture of growing spiritual hunger and continued indulgence. I could feel the weight of conviction more often. The videos of open-air preaching left me quieter than before. The Scriptures I read no longer felt as flat. Yet I had not surrendered. I had not come to the end of myself. I was still trying to manage the tension; holding onto enough religion to soothe the conscience while holding onto enough of the old life to satisfy the flesh.

Sabrina was watching. She had never been a drug user, yet she could see the hold it still had on me. The distance between the man who was beginning to speak of spiritual things and the man who still disappeared into the bedroom with his supply was becoming harder for either of us to ignore.

I did not know it then, but the Lord was cornering me. He had allowed the false teaching to be exposed. He had placed clearer truth in front of my eyes. He had let me taste enough of His Word to make the old life taste more bitter. And He was about to allow the consequences of my double life to fall in such a way that I would no longer be able to hold the contradiction together.

The night that would change everything was approaching, though I had no idea how near it was. I was still the same man: married, a father of young children, employed, occasionally religious, and still deeply enslaved. The heart that had curved inward upon itself from childhood had not yet been made new. But the God who had followed me through every previous chapter was drawing the lines tighter. The false lights were being exposed. The true light was getting harder to ignore. And the mercy that I had spent years running from was coming closer than I knew.