Making a Man: The Ryan Thomas Story
By Ryan Thomas (as told to the Story Team)
I grew up with a view of what a man should be that can be portrayed as Men’s Health—a magazine that advocates a man should be athletic, chiseled, well-dressed, successful, just desired by women.
And at the same time, my father was man preoccupied with athletic prowess. With that influence, I wanted to be a super athlete, successful, worshipped by women, a hero, and admired by worldly standards.
As a teenager, the disdain I had for my father and his ambivalence towards me, grew. Yet, I still followed directly in his footsteps. I pursued athletic success. And really, my primary objective was to attract women, but that ultimately led me down a path of destruction.
During my junior year in college, my father passed away. He was continuing to pursue extreme sports, and he was killed doing hill intervals on his bicycle. That really kind of rocked my world, because I realized at that time, that I was trying to earn his approval and now that he was gone, I really didn’t have that opportunity. It changed the way I thought about the pursuits that I was after. And in some ways, I really wanted to pursue a life of purpose and something that I could give back to, but at the same time, I was still a pretty broken guy and was still trying to prove myself in terms of Men’s Health magazine or the way that my father raised me.
I began to formulate the idea that I could join the military, because what’s better than the ultimate man’s profession of being in Special Ops in the military? So, I joined the Army as an officer, and became a Ranger, and was deployed several times into combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That really shaped what I felt a man should be. And that was the first step, I think, in God’s journey for me—understanding it’s not just selfish pursuits, it’s now doing something for others that, in a lot of ways, is sacrificial.
One of the other surprising things that happened while I was in the military was I met my wife Tasha. We decided to get out, and got married, and had, ironically, two little girls. I never really realized how selfish I was as a man until those three relying on me and looking to me for guidance, and just how many things I’ve screwed up in the past. God has a funny way of doing that, especially when you have two little girls. I really started to realize that it’s okay… to be more vulnerable, to know that I’m not in control—God’s in control—that God is ultimately the one who is shaping my life and shaping my family’s existence, and that I don’t have it all figured out, and that I, in a lot of ways, need to lean on him.
Accomplish: The Tasha Thomas Story
By: Tasha Thomas (as told to the Story Team)
There I was in the Middle East, wearing a camouflage uniform, carrying a 9 mm handgun—a successful U.S. Army officer whose accomplishments were pinned to her uniform.
As a young child I grew up in a home that was just broken. It was filled with domestic violence, alcohol, [and] drugs. And from an early age, I decided I wasn’t going to rely on anybody else, I didn’t need anybody else, that I could just do it on my own. You know, I went to college at first, and then I joined the Army, all to show that I didn’t need anybody else.
I really had the idea of becoming a general as my ultimate goal, because once you reach that level, I felt like you had made it. And I wanted people to go “wow, you did what?” I was really looking for that approval from others, that I was accomplished and I had done well for myself.
So, as I met my husband, Ryan, and we had begun dating, I quickly realized that I was going to have some decisions to make because he wanted a family and I knew deep down that I was never going to be able to balance both. I just knew my heart, that I was going to continue to strive at my job, and that I would probably not balance that well and my family would suffer. So, for me it was going to be a decision, and how to make that work. I kind of had this idea of motherhood that it was going to be something that I was going to accomplish and I was going to be really good at, because in my past I had always done well, I was always at the top of my peers. And so, when Everly came, it was kind of earth-shattering for me because I wasn’t—I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t meeting all of these accomplishments, or these things that people said I should be doing.
I quickly was thrown into postpartum depression, not only because kids are hard, but also because no one applauds you or gives you a gold star for being a mom. So, I struggled with that. And I found myself, at times, I would meet other people, and they’d go “oh, what do you do?” And I would say, “Oh, well I stay at home now, but I used to…” and then I’d throw in an accomplishment that I had from the Army.
Looking back at that, it really makes me sad because I wasn’t identifying as a mom; I wasn’t holding value to that.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this is struggle that I can say that I’m done with, but it’s not. It’s something I struggle with every day. And when I see a peer get promoted on social media, or I see photos of this life I used to lead and was very accomplished in, it’s hard. I’m angry about it, I get envious that I’m not getting to do that. Instead, I have these two little blonde girls telling me what to do. You know, it’s tough. And, I think I always have to remember that I’m not called to this job, I’m not called to that job–I’m really called to be a follower of Christ.
Making the decision to stay home versus working full-time, it made me realize that one isn’t more important than the other as I had earlier thought. Staying home doesn’t mean you’re less awesome, or you’re less important. There’s not a sliding scale of who you are as a person dependent on where you are.
For me, I’ve realized that truly my identity is in Christ, and that’s what I should focus on—to look to him for my strength, and look to him for my being accepted because he’s the one that truly loves me. My identity is truly in Christ, and not in motherhood, and not in a job, and not in the day-to-day. He’s more concerned with the way I live my life than a job that I’m holding.
Rewritten
By Tiffany Ravedutti
When my husband and I relocated from Illinois to Texas in 2013, everything about our move supported what I felt deep in my heart: my life was changing.
Around that time, my husband and I started our own martial arts academy and transitioned from employees to employers. We welcomed our first daughter into the world and transitioned from newlyweds to new parents. We left the comfort of living near our support system, and ventured away from everything we knew. We even traded iced-over roads for streets lined with palm trees.
Nothing felt the same. And as the feelings of familiarity vanished, so did the sense of safety.
Spiritually, I could feel the tides turning, too.
Immediately upon arrival, we started the church-hunting process. I found myself desperately searching for a church just like the one I left in my hometown. My husband immediately felt drawn to Clear Creek Community Church, but I kept asking to visit, “just one more” to see if I could find the Texas equivalent of my hometown church.
Week after week, we tried church after church and found nothing that felt like home. When we missed a service or hadn’t made plans to check out a new church, we’d go to Clear Creek’s Egret Bay campus.
At one point, we attended a morning service at a nearby church and we both left feeling uneasy. After the service, as we walked to our car, I looked at my husband and asked, “So…do you think we still have time to make it to Creek?”
“I was hoping you’d be up for that!” he replied with relief.
It was during that visit to Egret Bay that I began to entertain the idea that my husband’s discernment was right all along: this was where we belonged.
At the end of the service, when prompted to pray, I felt a strong conviction that I had been approaching this whole church thing the wrong way. Rather than searching for a church that perfectly fit my long list of criteria and could serve me well, I should have been searching for the place where God wanted to use the gifts he had already given me to serve his church.
I looked around at the crowded auditorium and found it hard to believe that there was any gift inside of me that couldn’t already be found in a group that size. Nonetheless, I tucked the conviction in my heart and promised God that I’d explore it further.
Over the next few months, my husband and I joined a small group. Suddenly, the intimidating size of Egret Bay shrunk to people we knew, faces we recognized, and lives that intersected our own.
A few more months later, I decided to follow through with that conviction I felt, and started serving in Student Ministry. As our team huddled, and relationships began to form, the church seemed to shrink even more. Soon enough, there wasn’t a week I walked in that I didn’t know someone.
I loved everything about serving in Student Ministry, but I still had a tugging feeling that I had something more to offer.
Inspired by my experiences serving others at our business and our church family, I began to write posts on social media about the ways in which I could identify God working in the world around me. Every time I wrote something, it was as if this hidden talent (that I never even knew was there) ignited a passion in my heart and grew until it became something I craved.
After writing a post, women I’d known from different times and places in my life would send messages encouraging me to keep writing because I seemed to write their own thoughts. It was when a friend asked me to get a coffee with her that I realized there may be something for me to pursue in writing when she reached across the table, grabbed my hand, and said with tears streaming down her face, “You wrote the words of my heart and reminded me that Jesus sees me. Thank you.”
Somehow, writing seemed to marry my creativity with compassion, and I could no longer ignore the overwhelming desire I had to point people to the grace found in Christ through the written word.
In one Student Ministry huddle, our leader, Aaron Lutz asked the question to the group, “What’s something you see in the world that God is breaking your heart about right now? What’s he asking you to do about it?”
I knew my answer immediately, but I hadn’t spoken it out loud before. When it was my turn to answer, I almost choked on the air I was using to speak.
“I…uh… well, I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think God’s been leading me to write,” I said, staring at the ground.
Startled by my own words, I immediately started dismissing them.
“But, I don’t even know what this is. All I’ve ever known is martial arts and it’s really all I know to do. I don’t know anything about writing…I just…I don’t know.”
Feeling flustered, I looked to Aaron with a hurried half-smile that said, “Okay, next person, please!”
His eyebrows raised in interest and said, “Hey! That’s awesome! Don’t leave today without me introducing you to my friend, Jon.”
After service, Aaron introduced me to Jon Coffey, the director of Story Team.
After a conversation about the power of storytelling, the vision for Story Team, and cultivating a culture of story at Clear Creek, I was hooked!
He explained the process that we’d follow: I’d meet members of the church for coffee and they’d share the story of how God has worked in their lives. I’d write their testimony and it would be shared on the church’s blog to encourage others.
I remember thinking, “So, I get to talk to people about Jesus while drinking coffee? Is this real life?”
What a perfect way to serve my church.
It only took a few minutes into my first interview for me to understand exactly why I felt convicted to shift my church-hunting perspective all those months ago.
To date, there hasn’t been a single, Story Team testimony I’ve had the pleasure of hearing that I haven’t silently swept tears off my cheeks as I’ve listened to the redemption and restoration and goodness of God. There hasn’t been a single story I’ve gotten to share, that I haven’t walked away in awe that God would be gracious enough to give me a front row seat for the work he’s doing in the world.
There hasn’t been a single story I’ve written that my own faith hasn’t been strengthened from hearing.
And along this incredible journey of discovering and using my God-given gifts to serve the church, there hasn’t been a single cup of coffee that I’ve regretted drinking either.
The Big Picture: The Nate Fisher Story
Growing up on a farm in northeast Kansas bolstered Nate Fisher with good morals, a hard work ethic, and some spiritual understanding, as his mom regularly took him and his sister to church in the small town nearby.
Official NASA Portrait for Flight Dynamics Division (CM) – Nate Fisher. Photo Date: July 11, 2018. Location: Building 8, Room 183 – Photo Studio. Photographer: Robert Markowitz
“What I took away from my family was that to get through life, you want to be a productive person and not a weight on society and culture,” 33-year-old Nate said.
Nate also lived by the idea that while you are working to provide for yourself, you should also treat your neighbors well. To an extent, Nate believed that if he treated others well, then they would approve of him and, in turn, treat him well, and that all of this would lead to happiness in life.
Instead it led to a chaotic life with sporadic highs and crushing lows that included depression.
“My self-value was anchored in my performance at work and my perception of what others thought about me,” Nate said.
But that anchor didn’t hold.
As a kid, Nate was always interested in science. With hopes of becoming an astronaut, he pursued an engineering degree at Kansas State University. However, as he studied science, he found it difficult to reconcile the latest theories—how old the universe is, what stuff it is made up of, how our solar system came to be—with the Bible stories he had heard about growing up.
“When I came to college, I started drifting away from any kind of religious values that I did have. I perceived religious people to be very two dimensional, always putting on a happy-go-lucky persona, and whitewashing all the bad things in the world.”
Nate’s vision in life was to finish college, get an internship, and get a job. Towards the end of his college career, he landed himself a multi-semester internship with NASA Johnson Space Center, which then led to a post-college job offer. Once he got the job, his focus then became working hard and saving up money for retirement. But his flight operations job was very competitive and, while he wasn’t the bottom performing person, he also wasn’t the top performer. Once again, he had to prove his worth and gain other people’s approval through his performance. After finally passing his first certification, Nate’s immediate future seemed secure. But all his hard work didn’t pay off with the contentment he’d hoped for. All the while, Nate was slipping further into depression.
“I remember sitting at my desk at the house I was renting and realizing, So I’ll work for a while. Maybe I’ll get married, maybe not. I’ll eventually retire. Maybe I’ll move back to Kansas, maybe not. I’ll keep hanging out with friends, and then I’ll die, and the universe will continue to exist without me.And I remember thinking, Wow. That really sucks. What’s the point of all this suffering? Sometimes you’re happy, but most of the time you’re not. What’s the point of all of this? It just seemed like a gigantic waste of time.”
Within the next month of having that conscious thought, Nate was invited to a Bible study and to church by three different people: a friend from work, his roommate, and a cute girl named Rachel.
“I thought it was kind of funny. I had just been wondering about the point of life, and then all of this happened. It was very surreal. It seemed like the universe was telling me to do this.”
So Nate decided to pursue faith again.
“I went to the Bible study that my good friend was starting, and I also went to church with Rachel, because she was much cuter than my dude roommate.” That church happened to be Clear Creek Community Church. It was 2013 when Nate started attending on and off for the next year-and-a-half.
Through studying the New Testament book of John in the small group, and listening to the sermon series at church, Nate began to see a greater purpose than simply living, working and dying .
“I slowly came to the conclusion that life isn’t all terrible things. There are good things to it, too. It started to make sense that serving Christ, becoming a member of his church, doing what he tells us to do, living the way he tells us to— really his whole message— that is the real point of life. It’s not just this gigantic chaotic thing that just sucks at the end. It’s actually really beautiful.”
After studying John, his small group read through Genesis, and Nate began making connections between the Old and New Testament histories and the more he studied, the more his preconceived ideas began to be challenged. It even opened up the possibility that science and the Bible aren’t mutually exclusive.
“The more I learn about science just points me to the beauty of creation. God made an incredibly ordered world and studying the world and physics is just another form of worship. Diving into all the little details and learning about it only increases his magnificence.”
Nate got baptized and a few months later started dating the cute girl, Rachel, who had originally invited him to church. They eventually married, and now Nate currently volunteers with the technical arts team, running the sound board at the Egret Bay campus.
But just because he became a Christian didn’t instantly take away his struggles.
“One of my biggest preconceived ideas when I was a kid was that if you were a Christian, your life is perfect and everything goes your way and you’re happy all the time.”
While it’s not as deep-seated as before, Nate stills struggles with wanting other people’s approval to give him a sense of worth.
But, instead of focusing on doing what he needs to do to make other people feel good, and mostly looking to his performance and productivity at work for personal self-worth, Nate has started to replace that with what the Bible tells us about where we should find our self-worth.
“My highs and lows aren’t as big as they used to be, because now I find my self-worth is grounded in something different than it was before.”
He has made a practice of taking the time to get up earlier than he really needs to go to work to read his Bible — not just to read the words and go, but read it slowly and think about what the words actually mean.
“If I can start my day off that way, then it gives me the tools to try to enter into the various things that happen to me during the day and attack it with the right point of view such that I can do my best to honor God.”
While Nate claims it’s no silver bullet, he finds that studying the Bible daily does help to keep him in the right mindset.
“This world can seem chaotic and crazy and full of badness that seems to go unchecked, but all of that will be made right one day,” Nate said. “We have to trust in a power that’s bigger than ourselves. The creator of the universe obviously has the power to do what he wants. So there’s a reason all of this is happening. Even if we don’t understand it, that doesn’t mean that the reason doesn’t exist.”
The Road: The Jay Ellis Story
I had an amazing childhood. My dad was a pilot and a good provider, and my parents were always there for me, especially when I developed diabetes at the age of eight. That was my big growing-up moment, because it stole away part of my childhood. I had to learn how to give myself shots and take blood tests five times a day at a young age. I was the only one at school with diabetes, so I was the oddball, which put a little strain on me. But despite that, my childhood was awesome.
My family did go to church, but we never stayed at one place long enough to really grow in anything. But my parents always tried to keep me focused on who Jesus really was even though we didn’t go to church regularly.
Basically, I had a pretty normal childhood, until seventh grade.
My friend Chad grew up three houses down from us, and his dad ran off when Chad was four. His mom passed away when we were pretty young, so my parents kind of took him in. One day, in seventh grade, Chad—along with another friend of mine—handed me a piece of acid.
They said, “Here, put this under your tongue. It will make you see crazy things.” I thought they were just trying to pull my leg but I did it just to see what they were talking about. I thought it was all a joke.
It ended up being really scary, but really freeing at the same time. And I dove into that stuff real fast. I started doing acid every weekend, with those guys and some other friends.
That was the beginning of a downward spiral. I was already behind a grade in school because of my diabetes, and after I started using drugs, I started failing. Most of my friends had moved on and I was falling further behind.
That’s the lifestyle I lived from junior high until I was 29 years old—a complete party lifestyle. All the people I knew experimented with drugs at one point, and then just went to normal drinking or something. I couldn’t get enough. And at the age of 14, my diabetes doctor told me, “If you keep living this way, you’re not going to live to see 21.” In my mind, I wasn’t going to see 21 anyway, so I was like, Well I’ll just party hard and die young,you know?
When I first started using drugs, I realized it was going to be an expensive habit.
I graduated at 19, and three months later I was doing runs to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, picking up a bunch of pills and coming back here. I did that for about two years until I got caught and went to Mexican prison in Nuevo Laredo.
My arrest in Mexico was the first time I’d been in trouble with the with law, and I got a federal offense of trafficking across federal lines on my record. I was on probation and being drug tested three times a week. There are no drugs you can do that are out of your system within three days. I was like, What am I gonna do?So I started drinking like a fish and piling on the DWI’s. I got four DWI’s in three years, despite the fact that I didn’t have a driver’s license.
By the time I turned 29, I’d been working for an organization for 10 years collecting money; large amounts of money—like $500,000 or more. It’s an ugly world where nobody plays nice, and that’s the life I lived to support my habit.
Even in all that ugliness, I never once asked God for help. I’d been run over twice, stabbed seven times, had my face crushed with a baseball bat, and I lost count of how many times I got shot at. I was even thrown out of a moving car on I-45. That one hurt. That hurt bad. But I never asked God, “God, would you just help me get through this?” I never had those prayers. I still thought it was all me getting through all this, and that I could make it happen.
During my DWI spree, I got a call from a buddy who lived in Freer, Texas, which is right on the Mexican border. He wanted me and several friends to come visit. He said, “Just come out for my birthday, man.” And I was like, “Listen, if I make it out there, we’re not going to Mexico because I ain’t ever steppin’ foot back in Mexico. And I’m not drinking tequila, because I go to jail every time I drink tequila.”
But after a bottle of tequila, we ended up in Mexico in a truck. My buddy Anthony was riding on top of the truck, shooting an assault rifle, and the next thing I knew I saw him rolling down the road.
I thought to myself, I’ll be danged, Anthony fell out of the truck. And then I looked around and realized Iwas lying in the middle of the road. And then I thought, Well I’ll be danged, Ifell out of the truck, too.
When we got home from that, I was out on a boat one day, in the middle of the bay. I told God, “God, if you’re really there – if you’re really real – fix me or kill me. One of the two. Because I hate being me right now.”
The next day I got my fourth DWI, dressed in a hula skirt and holding two pistols in my lap – drinking and driving like a rock star. I knew I was going to prison then. I was on the Top 5 Most Watched list in Texas, and they had me. I had seven felony accounts on that pullover alone, so they had everything they needed. And I never did call anybody to come get me out.
That was when my dad showed up. He’d found out.
He was crying when I came out of the jail, and I’d never before seen my dad cry.
On the ride home, he asked what was wrong with me. And the first truthful thing I’d ever said was, “I don’t know… I really don’t.”
He said, “Do you need help?”
And that’s when I laid out my addictions. My parents knew I was an alcoholic because I couldn’t drink and drive worth a poo. But they had no idea about the drug addiction. For a long time, I’d used my diabetes as a cover for things like weight loss and other side effects of the drugs.
My dad asked, “Well, can you give me a week, and let me find a really good place to send you?”
And I said, “Dad, if you give me more than 24 hours, you’re never going to see me again.”
So my dad woke me up early the next morning, and took me to Pathway to Recovery in Angleton, Texas.
I remember feeling petrified on the ride there because I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go. And all I was trying to think about was, How bad did it hurt when I got thrown out of that car? Can I make it if I just jump out and run for it? That’s how twisted an addict’s mind is whenever they’re at those crossroads.
But I held out. I got there.
I remember having 12 Valium in my hand, because I thought the program was 30 days. But my struggle was, How am I gonna space this out over 30 days, so I can stay calm throughout this thing?
When I realized it was a 90-day program, I downed all the pills. I was like, All right, I’m gonna feel good this first day.
***
My very first day there, before I knew the rules and everything else, I was reading about God on all these steps in the program and I thought I got tricked into some church thing.
I was mad.
I said “G-D” and this kid walks up, and he’s all, “God doesn’t need a dam, he can walk on water.” And I’m not good with comebacks, so I just hit him. I got in trouble for that, and I was like, “You need to tell people to keep their mouth shut.”
I ended up being grateful the treatment program was 90 days, because I remember very little about the first 30 days. Detoxing was bad for me. I pretty much just laid on the bathroom floor for three weeks. It was rough. But I finally got coherent enough to start attending meetings and start really digging into the steps—the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that’s where I found a relationship with God.
It was easy for me to admit to Step One, that I was powerless over drugs and alcohol, and that my life had become unmanageable. But it was hard for me to grasp Steps Two and Three.
Step Two was admitting my life was unmanageable and that God would have to restore me to sanity. Despite my situation and current condition, it was hard for me to grasp that I couldn’t pull myself together, that God would have to do it.
Step Three was to turn your will and your life over to the care of God. That one was really rough for me. When we did go to church when I was little, we went to a Southern Baptist church, and I remember the pastor saying once, “God’s got a path for everybody.” That ran through my mind all the time, and my question was, Why does my path suck so bad?So turning my will and my life over to God scared me, because I was like, If I don’t have any control over it, if this is the path God already has me on, how am I to trust that?
***
While I was in treatment, there was an old country guy named Bubba who came in and taught Sunday School. I’d always just stand around the corner and listen because I didn’t want to be part of it, but I wanted to hear what he was saying. One Sunday he did a lesson on forgiveness, and I stepped in because I wanted to hear about this. I was about two months sober at that time, so I had a littlebit of clarity. Bubba asked everybody, “Do y’all forgive those that have harmed you?”
I spoke up and said, “Yeah, I forgive everybody that’s harmed me.” And he said, “Well, you say that with hesitance. Who do you not forgive?”
“I don’t forgive myself,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you forgive yourself?” he asked.
“I’ve tortured people for the past 10 years. That’s a hard one for me to swallow and forgive myself for.”
“Well, do you believe in God, son?”
“I’m starting to,” I said.
“Do you believe that God forgave you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
At that point he got right up in my face, nose to nose, and he said, “What makes you bigger than God? Why can’t you forgive yourself then?”
It was like a gut punch. That really got me thinking. Bubba sent me off with a Life Recovery Bible and reading assignments. That exchange made me understand God’s forgiveness in a completely different way than I’d ever known.
***
Four months into my sobriety, I went completely blind. Blood vessels in my eyes had burst and caused my retinas to detach during the detox process.
But, even though I couldn’t see and my life had quickly become more complicated, I was committed to staying sober. I endured 25 surgeries in one year to repair my eyesight, and did so without any medication before, after, or during the procedures. They just strapped me down and gave me something to bite on. I had to sign a waiver for my doctor, and had to explain that the short amount of pain I would feel during surgery would be nothing compared to the amount of pain I would feel as a result of a relapse.
During this time, a friend of mine said, “I want to go to this church down on Egret Bay called Clear Creek Community Church. Do you want to go?” I said, “Sure, let’s go.”
Through everything that was happening in my life, one thing I’d really been struggling with was the concept of God’s will. In AA you’re told to “align your will with God’s will,” but I had trouble figuring that out. I’d been asking people, “What’s God’s will?” But nobody had an answer. Some people told me, “Whatever you’re thinking ain’t God’s will, so don’t do that.” And I was like, “Well, that’s obvious, but what is his will so I know how to align mine with it?” But nobody ever had an answer.
The first day I stepped into Clear Creek Community Church, the very first words out of Bruce Wesley’s mouth were, “If you want to know God’s will, you’ve got to know God’s Word.”
I thought to myself, Oh man! Here we go! I’m never leaving this place! I got the answer I’ve been looking for. And that started a relationship with Clear Creek for me because I heard truth I hadn’t heard before. I heard about a relationship I had never heard about before. What I heard at Clear Creek made my recovery make sense—it connected the dots for me.
But, I wasn’t taking responsibility for learning God’s word and his will. I was a big-time consumer of church. I would show up each week dressed up in a suit, and it wasn’t until I recovered my eyesight that I realized I was the only one. I wanted to come and get fed and play the part, but I was still fighting outside. I still had my anger. I tell people I have 14 years of sobriety but I haven’t put my hands on anyone in six years. It took me a long time to grasp that there’s a new way to solve things without using your fists.
Coming to Clear Creek and hearing the sermons started a change in me, and led to other significant changes in my life.
I exchanged some messages with a woman named Jennifer, who I’d met previously through a mutual friend, and we discovered we both attended Clear Creek. At the time I didn’t have many friends at the church and usually sat by myself. So I said to Jenn, “Come sit with me, please.”
As it turns out, we were both already going to the 10:30 a.m. service at the Egret Bay campus, so we started meeting up and just going to church together. One Sunday we went out to lunch at Chuy’s, and as Jenn tells it, “We were there for four hours because he laid out his life.” I didn’t watch the time, but that last part is true. I wanted her to know everything so she could either run or stick around.
She stuck around and we started hanging out for a while, always meeting at church. After about four months, Jenn asked, “Are we dating?” I said, “I don’t know, are we?” (I honestly hadn’t thought about it.) She said, “I think we’re dating.” And I said, “Hey, that works for me. You’re beautiful, you know? I can handle this.”
We ended up getting married, and by then she and I were each already serving at the church. She volunteered with the junior high ministry, and I started greeting. I wanted to work with junior high students but was sure they did background checks and knew there was no way I would pass that test.
One Sunday morning, I was at the doors and a woman I knew walked up, along with a guy I also happened to know but hadn’t seen in a long time. The man jumped back when he saw me. “Oh my God! Jay Ellis?!”
I said, “What’s up Eugene?”
He looked at the girl he was with and said, “You’re friends with this dude?” She answered, “Yeah.”
“This dude stabbed me in the neck! And he chased me around the neighborhood with a frickin’ knife!”
By this time Eugene is yelling it at the front door of the church. I looked around and everyone nearby had pretty much stopped and stared at me. I just smiled and tried to continue greeting.
***
As Jenn got more settled into the junior high ministry, people started learning more about our story. Student ministry leaders, Angie Thomas and Lance Lawson, asked me to sit down with them and tell them mywhole story, and after I did they both said they wanted me to be serving in junior high ministry.
I filled out the necessary paperwork but told Lance, “Dude, the background check is pretty extensive.”
Lance said, “Is there anything with kids?”
“No.”
“Then I’ve got a shot,” he said. “I might be able to make it work.”
It took about a month, but I was finally approved to serve in junior high ministry, which I ended up doing for five years.
That was a huge growing experience for me – just leading in student ministry, learning how to be compassionate to a student instead of wanting to slap him upside the head, which is what I wanted to do a lot of times. And I learned so much from those kids—particularly Thatcher Arrington. I was so new to the Bible that anytime we looked up Scripture, I would fumble through, trying to find the right book. Thatcher would grab my Bible and say, “Let me get it for you.” I don’t think he realizes how much he helped me through that first year.
During this time I was attending the Celebrate Recovery class at Clear Creek but wasn’t getting too much out of it—I wasn’t finding recovery in it. Four months after we got married I was laid off from my $12-an-hour job, which was the most I’d ever made in sobriety.
As I wrestled with what to do, Jenn asked me, “Well, what do you want to do?”
I said, “I don’t know. I don’t have any skills. All I know how to do is sell dope and go collect money. That’s it. I don’t know anything else.”
She came back with, “Well, why don’t you go to school and figure out what you want to do?”
So I got an associate degree in occupational safety and health and started applying for jobs. Jenn sat down beside me one day and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Applying for jobs.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” she asked.
At this point I was completely confused. I’d never gone to college or applied for jobs. I was just trying to play out the process.
“Well, aren’t you supposed to start applying for jobs once you graduate from school?” I asked her. “Isn’t that how it works?”
“I feel like God’s building you to do something different. I feel like he wants you to do something more than safety.”
“Well, what are you talking about?” I was still confused.
“What about ministry?” she said. “I feel like he’s building you to do ministry work from the way that you’ve been learning and going.”
I trusted Jenn but felt this was a decision too big to make on my own, so I reached out to Lance from student ministry. I’d spent several years learning from, and serving beside, Lance in ministry. I’d come to consider him one of my greatest friends because he was able to present himself and present the gospel in a loving way, but willing to call me out when I needed it. He had become “that guy” for me.
After my conversation with Jenn, I went to Lance and said, “You know, I think I want to get into ministry.”
“Okay. What kind?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Well, student? Campus pastor? What kind of vision do you have here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I like them all. I kind of like each of the duties that everybody does.”
“Well, I’ve got to tell you something,” he said. “I see you do really well in front of groups of people. I always see you do your best, in your environment. Think about this Jay: God allowed you to go through everything you went through—every single drug, every single drink, he allowed you to hurt as many people as you needed to hurt, and get hurt as many times as you needed to get hurt—in order to reach the people that you can reach; people God needs you to reach, that I can’t reach because I’ve never walked that walk.”
He added, “God allowed you to go through that so that your story can reach the people he needs you to reach. So my recommendation would be for you to start a ministry that involves that.”
And that sounded very pleasing to me.
“All right,” I said.
So Lance set up a meeting with me, and campus pastors Greg Poore and Karl Garcia. They asked me, “If you could change one thing about Celebrate Recovery, what would it be?” And I said, “Everything.”
“Really?”
“I really don’t like any part about it, but that’s just me. Celebrate Recovery works great for some people, but it didn’t work great for me.”
“Well, what would you do different? Can you come up with a plan for what you would want?”
Over the next year, I went to 15 different recovery ministries in the greater Houston area and found one curriculum I really, really loved called SteppingInto Freedom. It’s the same 12 steps as Alcoholics Anonymous, but every single step points to Christ. The three fundamentals of their step work are growing a foundation in Christ, learning how to walk in Christ, and maturing in Christ. And I loved that! I thought, This is what people need to hear, right here.
I presented the curriculum to Greg Poore, then took him through it. Following his approval, it took a year to get our new ministry, Pathway to Peace, ready and going. We launched Pathway to Peace with four in the group and went through the 12 steps. But then we started getting new people coming in who had never heard of one of the steps, and we heard things like, “Well, what’s steps one through six, if y’all are on seven? I don’t get it.”
Jason Wilson, who was leading the group for me, suggested doing topics at each meeting rather than going sequentially through the steps. “That way,” Jason said, “anyone can relate no matter how far along they are”
I took the suggestion back to Greg—with my sales pitch all prepared—and Greg looked at me and said, “Well, really, my opinion doesn’t amount to crap for you, because I feel like I’ve got the right man for the job for this, because I don’t know about recovery. I don’t know how it runs. I feel like you do, and you’re in a good position to lead these people. So I trust your opinion. If you think this is what y’all need to do, run with it.”
We made the change, and Pathway to Peace attendance has multiplied ever since. We had about 40 people show up at a recent meeting, and we’re an established ministry at Clear Creek Community Church.
A year into the life of Pathway to Peace, we realized that on top of ministering to recovering addicts, we also wanted to minister to the families and friends of addicts. Jenn now leads the Concerned Persons group that does exactly that, while I continue to lead the Into Freedom group within Pathway to Peace that is solely for those battling their addiction.
I get one or two phone calls from somebody new every single day, from either the website or a referral from somebody at one of the campuses. We hear so many stories of people who had zero relationship with God, and are now serving at the church, and in small group, and, even leading groups. People now having a relationship with God. Three people who have gone through Pathway to Peace have been baptized.
It’s beautiful to sit back and watch when we see the light go on for someone, and they’re finally understanding grace and the relationship aspect of God. That true surrender finally happens and it changes their life.
***
You should know, my life isn’t easy. It’s tempting to read all of this and think, Oh, I guess it all worked out.In reality, I continue to battle constant health issues because of my past. But for all the bad, and all the hurt and pain I’ve caused and endured, God continues to use my experience for his good.
We all have a story, and we all need to use it to reach the people that God needs us to reach. Our story is our platform, it’s our poster, it’s what we need to go show the world so that we can say, “Thisis what I was, but thisis who I am in Christ.”
Forgive
Physically, I’ve been somebody who, since I was in high school worked out every day. I was a college athlete. Played sports my entire life.
I stopped working out, I stopped training. Things didn’t get to me. I could really feel my heart hardening to a lot of things that would previously affect me, and that was when my wife really knew that something was wrong.
When people are going through depression for whatever reason, they don’t necessarily recognize it at that time. And I didn’t either.
So, my brother had a child with my sister-in-law, my wife’s sister. And he just up and left. He abandoned the family, took off. And whenever all of that happened, because of how tight-knit both of our families are, it created a lot of animosity and thrust me into that middle man role. With that came a lot of expectation and things – the way other people wanted me to handle the situation. And it created a lot of tension within my marriage. And we were still a very young marriage, at that point we hadn’t even been married a year.
When I would come home from work, I would eat dinner and go to bed because the last thing I wanted to do was have a conversation with my wife.
I was a coward to the point where I was going to try to push her away.
In my mind at that time, that was the only way I was go get the resolution that I wanted, which was to get everybody away from me so I could get a fresh start, and I could go out and be alleviated of this situation, because I didn’t want to live that way for the rest of my life.
Everything I was doing was dictated around trying to get rid of that sense of stress in my life to the point where it actually pushed me to commit adultery. That was the lowest I’d ever sunk in my life. I didn’t know how to come back from that.
At that point, I fully anticipated coming home, her having my stuff waiting outside. I could pick it up and hit the road.
And I was wrong.
When I got home… Well, I didn’t go home. She met me at a church. And, she sat there and I expected her to chew me out and to want to know why, and to hate me, to just throw me out. And she didn’t. She sat there and she looked me in the eyes, with tears coming down her face and she told me that she’s not giving up on me, she’s not quitting on me. And it made me so angry. I was so mad at her! How can you respond that way? That makes no sense to me.
So initially, I just fell deeper into that depression and started struggling even more, and tried to push her away even more. Then it was just a slow battle of redemption.
It wasn’t me.
Because at that point, there was nothing that I wanted to do that was going to bring me out of that. I wanted to get away from it, and that’s what was going to bring me out of the depression in my mind. It was God working in certain ways. Everybody thinks about the way that God’s going to work within them. But what you don’t understand, and you don’t anticipate, is the way that God works in people around you.
That was the thing that I guess affected me more than anything, was I got to see it in my wife. I got to see the people who I expected to be the angriest, and the most disappointed in me, not be so. I got to experience things that were total God moments, where people that, for no other reason than God being in that place at that time, were pouring very specific messages that I needed to hear during that journey into my heart. That was kind of how it happened. It was gradual, it wasn’t just overnight I flipped a switch, but there was that moment of clarity for me where I realized I do love my wife, and God brought her into my life for a reason. And she’s the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.
For a lot of that entire process I didn’t want to know necessarily the answer for forgiveness because I didn’t feel like I was forgivable. I felt like what I did was the most heinous thing that anybody could ever do. For me, there was no excuse why my wife should stay with me. I didn’t deserve to be with her. Just kind of painting this pity party, so to speak, of why I didn’t deserve to be forgiven. All the while, I’ve got people who are showing me the entire time what it means to forgive, what it looks like to forgive. I didn’t understand that God is a forgiving God, that he is a redeeming God, and he forgives us and allows us to be able to have these opportunities at redemption.
So, understanding that, and learning exactly what the gospel teaches us about forgiveness. Because in our world, when people do things as heinous as what I did, you don’t forgive them. You don’t ever lose that sense of being angry toward that person, that just doesn’t happen. You don’t see that happen unless God is truly working in somebody. So, learning what that looked like, and seeing it firsthand from my wife, that was the lesson that I learned. It wasn’t a particular verse, but it was seeing the lesson of forgiveness being lived out through the people around me. You know, the way that she was handling things with sending me prayers, and sitting there and actually seeing her go through and revert back to Scripture to pull her through the situation, because, obviously, she was struggling as well. And so, she’s finding Scripture to pull herself through it, she’s finding Scripture to pull me through it. And then from there, it was just, you know, we had a very intentional sense that the Gospel has to be at the forefront of our lives.
So, we got plugged in at Clear Creek [Community Church], and really started to grow, and continued to push each other.
I mean, obviously, since I got baptized last year, there are things that I still struggle with.
When you get baptized and you come to faith in Christ, it’s not easy. I tell people oftentimes, it’s a lot harder. Walking this way and living your life by faith is a lot harder than not. But there’s no better way to live it
Comeback
People often ask George and Carrie Sutherland and their family, “Does it get easier?”
“It changes,” their daughter, Jessica says. “You take it breath-by-breath, and then step-by-step; day-by-day, and then week by week. And then some days it is back to step-by-step.”
***
One Sunday in October 2014 at the Clear Creek Community Church Egret Bay Campus, the pastor invited anyone in the congregation who had a relationship with Christ to take the next step of baptism that very day. George and Carrie Sutherland had already been attending CCCC for several years, but had never been baptized. It was their 20-year-old daughter, Clare, who spoke first.
“Mom, I want to go. Will you come with me?”
“Of course, I will,” Carrie said. “I’m right there with you, baby.”
Leaning over to inform her husband, George too said, “Okay, I’m in!” And the three of them got in line to publicly express their faith in Jesus Christ.
About two weeks later, Clare’s headaches began.
During one particularly debilitating episode, Clare was driving to class at nearby San Jacinto College. She pulled her Jeep Liberty to the side of the road and called her mom, in tears.
“Mom, my head hurts so bad, I can’t stand it.”
“Okay, I’m on my way.”
Unable to get a doctor appointment quickly, they headed to the emergency room. After a CAT scan, the doctor delivered the news.
“We need to do an MRI. She has a mass — a tumor.”
The week of Thanksgiving, doctors performed brain surgery to remove the mass. But, they weren’t able to remove it all.
Carrie, a sonographer in Maternal-Fetal Medicine, shared Clare’s pathology report with one of the oncologists she worked with. The co-worker gave a very direct response: Clare had 32 weeks, maybe 52. That was it.
“We knew that we could lose her,” George admitted. “But at the same time we didn’t knowthat. So we didn’t live there until we knew we were out of bullets. The statistics were not good, but statistics are just numbers, you know? Maybe we’ll be an outlier, we thought. We weren’t ready to give up hope.”
In January 2015, Clare began her first round of chemo. But shortly into treatments, her doctors realized there was little, if any, progress being made.
“Each time, we thought, Okay, this is bad news, but maybe it’s not,” George said. “And through the whole thing, it was a lot of prayer — a lot of faith. It was always, we can’t control this, but we know it’s in God’s hands. What can we do? What’s the next step?”
Doctors began talking about targeted therapy and clinical trials.
“It felt like to me that step 1 didn’t work, so ‘Let’s see what the latest emerging research is that we might be able to throw at it; it’s not proven, but let’s go there,’” George recalled. “And I just thought, Oh, dear God. It’s too early for a Hail Mary.”
“I knew that the only way that Clare would survive would be God’s miracle,” Carrie said, fully understanding the medical realities. “And I knew that was possible, but that it might not be what he wanted. He had already given her back to us once.”
At birth Clare had an Apgar score of 1 on a scale to 10 — a score of 7-9 being normal, and a score of 0-3 requiring immediate resuscitation. So Clare, with a heart rate of 40, received CPR upon first entering the world. Yet, she breathed. And she breathed on her own, as though making the bold statement, I’m okay! A statement Clare went on to live her life by, even throughout her fight with cancer.
“We knew that if God was going to call her to him (which is kind of what it felt like he was doing), we had to say, ‘okay,’ too,” George said.
As George and Carrie walked with their daughter through her suffering, Clare trusted that they would let her know the things she needed to know, but there wasn’t much that Clare really wanted to know. She didn’t want to be over-informed.
“Clare’s comment through the whole thing was, ‘I know God’s got me,’” Carrie said. “You could really feel that the Holy Spirit was holding her… it was like a presence.”
“She wanted to wrap her faith around it,” George explained, “and she had such a peace around her. She knew where it was going, there was no misplaced hope, she just didn’t know the statistics. So she just kept life as comfortable as she could, and wanted to do the same things that she usually did.”
Clare didn’t want to make a bucket list. Instead, her mantra became Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.” In a time when the wrecking balls of doubt or fear inside her brain could have potentially destroyed all belief, Clare faced her fight with this song and an impenetrable shield of faith. At times, even when others felt like unraveling, it was Clare’s faith in God that held them up.
“Her walk with God through the whole thing was beautiful,” Carrie said. “It was beautiful.”
“She was magnificent,” George added.
***
Clare’s older brother, Clay, was living in Baton Rouge at the time of her diagnosis. He was running a restaurant and church was not a part of his lifestyle anymore. Over the years, he had grown a distaste for organized religion and “church people” and had fallen away from any relationship he once had with God.
“When my sister was battling cancer, she called me one day and challenged me to ‘just go to church, any church,’” Clay said. “At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about or why she would even ask such a thing of me.” Clare would even text Clay’s girlfriend, Candie, “Can you make sure Clay goes to church?”
“Clare kept saying, ‘Mom, if anything good comes out of this, I hope it’s that Clay comes back to church,” Carrie said.
While Clay wasn’t ready to go back to church, he did find a way to shift his schedule so that he could split his week between Baton Rouge and League City. He and Candie began spending half the week in Louisiana and half the week with Clay’s family in Texas while Clare underwent chemo treatments.
Clare’s older sister, Jessica, remembered how normal Clare made it seem like to be going through chemo. She would drop her off for her treatment and afterwards Clare would suggest a trip to Starbucks before heading home to play with her nephew, Luke.
“She truly remained herself through it all, including her everything-is-going-to-be-okay mentality,” Jessica said.
But there were many times Jessica and her mom longed to say more.
“We wanted to have conversations about faith and where we were, and where Clare was, and how we were feeling,” Carrie admitted. “But Clare would just say, ‘I’m in a good place, Mom.’ I think it was harder for us to not have those conversations than it was for her. We needed that.”
“I remember feeling kind of a guilt that we didn’t have those deep detailed conversations to try to help her understand it, but she didn’t want that,” George admitted. “So that was me feeling guilty for me. As a parent, I kept wondering, how do I best help lead my child through this?”
In those last days, as Clare began losing her eyesight, she was still cracking jokes with her eyes closed, as she laid in the hospital bed in her parent’s bedroom.
“She kept her phone near her playing Christian music, just looping; just kind of resting in it,” George recalls. “Her faith in God held her, and she just relaxed in it, like a hammock.”
***
“I honestly never believed she was going to die until the minute that she did,” Jessica said. “I kept thinking Is this really happening? Did she really just die? Are we really picking out flowers for her funeral?”
One of the things Clare wrote about in her journal was that she was most concerned about her family. I’m worried about my family — if they’re going to be okay, she wrote.
“I told Carrie a long time after Clare had passed that my faith felt kind of wooden,” George said. “I had no interest in picking up a Bible or learning. Didn’t feel like picking up [the guitar] to play music. I was in this place where I was just spent. And that lasted several months.”
“I can’t say that I was angry at God. I knew his decisions were all good, but it wasn’t what I wanted, so I just needed a time out,” Carrie admitted. “It was like, I love you, Lord, and I know that you love me, but I don’t know what to say to you right now.”
“And I still believed that God was good, but I was numb, and it was hard to pray,” Jessica said. “It was hard to accept that he chose not to heal my sister.”
“How do people who have no faith deal with something like this?” George wondered. “For many of them it’s a bottle of whiskey in the fetal position, which I have to admit was tempting, but when you sober up — and you invariably do — that problem is invariably there.”
The Sutherlands began to find healing joy in even the smallest reminders of Clare, like eating chicken curry.
But, they remember, while Clare loved the Indian cuisine, she had a love-hate relationship with one of its most prominent spices, cumin.
“She hated the smell of cumin, because she thought it smelled like body odor,” George chuckled. “And you know, she’s kind of right. But it sure makes your [food] taste good.”
It’s impossible to separate the odor from the flavor.
“The pain and the joy [of loss] are the yin and the yang,” George realized. “They are so inextricably interwoven. And so, you can’t have one without the other. If you try to numb out the pain, then you also lose the joy.”
“You know, I just saw, through the whole thing, so many answered prayers,” George said. “From the time this thing started, we had people jumping in to help and support. And where did all those people come from? It was a cumulative experience of the past 20-plus years of our lives. It’s like God was saying, ‘The Sutherlands are going to need some help — not for about 21 years, but let’s get started now.’”
Some of the same people who they befriended in the bleachers at their kids’ YMCA sports games, were the people who just showed up with groceries and started cooking.
“You can’t see God, but you can see where he’s been, like leaves blowing through a tree,” George explained. “That’s how it felt for me. I could see God just kind of working on this whole thing, sort of orchestrating our lives. So God was at work bringing people into our lives over the years long before we knew we would need the help.”
The key was letting people in.
“A lot of people, when tragedy strikes, they close their doors,” Carrie said, “But I knew from having lost a family member already, that people want to love on people, and that those people need closure, as well. So I don’t think our front door was locked for months. People just came on in.”
Their small group, in particular, had committed to work together to provide consistent meals and keep the house stocked with tissues. Since the door was unlocked, they quietly came in and did what they thought needed to be done without disruption.
“The funny thing now is that friends will come over now and I’m like, ‘Why did you ring the doorbell? Didn’t you learn anything?” Carrie joked.
***
“Towards the end of Clare’s battle with Cancer, it got really hard,” Clay admitted. But these ”church people” he had never even met before, approached him, hugged him, and told him they had been praying for him for a long time.
“It was such a stark contrast from our community back in Baton Rouge,” Candie said. “We did not have that group of faith and love and support because the way our friends dealt with difficult things was by escaping or avoiding dealing with them.”
“That’s when it really started to hit me” Clay said. “I was seeing two different worlds.”
“We watched people wrap their arms around George and Carrie,” Candie recalled. “People were there all the time and just loving on them. And I had never seen that. People were living out the Word and not just talking about it.”
“I spent most of my life justifying not going to church because of the people,” Clay said. “But I watched these people who had a faith that can weather really hard storms versus people who didn’t. And we decided that we wanted to be closer to people like that… I really wanted to see what it was all about.”
After Clay proposed to Candie the Christmas after Clare passed, they both started job hunting in Houston, and by spring they were packing up their lives in Baton Rouge and moving to League City.
“Moving [to Texas], I was still dealing with a lot of really dark things,” Clay said.
It was then that Candie finally got Clay to go to church. Through a couple of sermons that he says spoke right to him, Clay became more open to seeking out this tangible faith he was witnessing in his parent’s community, which was now his community. Clay and Candie did their premarital counseling through Clear Creek Community Church and eventually joined a small group.
Roughly two years after his sister passed, Clay became the first person baptized at the East 96 campus. But, as George and Carrie Sutherland reveled in their son’s newfound faith on that June Sunday in 2017, it wasn’t without the shadow that Clare couldn’t be there to celebrate with them.
“I get it now,” Clay said, about Clare asking him to go to church. “Through dealing with a faithless grief, I learned about that ‘rock bottom’ thing that people frequently reference. Thankfully, the good Lord placed some amazingly patient and loving people in my life that helped me to experience Christ’s love and my need for him as my savior.”
Clare got her wish.
***
On the first anniversary of Clare’s death, George penned his reflections in a letter to close friends and family.
“I wrote that the loss is like a hole in your heart that you can never fill in,” George recalled. “But surrounding that hole there’s so much joy, and love, and laughter, that you learn to love the hole. There are a lot of bad experiences in your life that you can just put a box around, and just, you know, put in the back of the closet — a bad relationship, a bad job experience, a bad this, or a bad that — and just forget about it, and get past it, and never worry about it again. But this is something you have to hang on to, and it changes you forever because you can’t let go of the hurt. You just can’t… It always becomes a part of you.”
People still ask the Sutherlands, “Does it get easier?”
“We’re all still pushing through it,” Carrie said. “It still stings, but it’s going to sting. So you own it. And actually, in a way, you don’t want the sting to go away.”
Behind the Science: The Tia Fink Story
A person does not need to look too far before they are faced with the puzzling mystery of how everything on this earth and in our solar system and out in the universe works together in such ordered fashion. The beauty of science and creation is clearly seen all around us— if we are looking.
Tia Fink is a scientist and professor of environmental science at Lee College. She attended many churches growing up that had either very human-centered views of religion or very corporate views of religion. The focus was either on what humans should or should not be doing to please God or how a person would be blessed to the degree that they were willing to empty their pocketbooks on a Sunday morning. Both these unbiblical and damaging approaches left Tia with a distaste for God, church, and any kind of religion. She decided to become an atheist.
“I was just happy letting everyone believe what they wanted to believe,” Tia said.
In 2004, when Tia was 20 years old, a work friend invited her to visit Clear Creek Community Church. While the fill-in-the-blank sermon notes were pleasantly non-threatening, and the people seemed friendly, Tia stopped going after only a few weeks.
“I liked the fill-in-the-blank worksheets a lot,” Tia admitted, “but at that time, I just didn’t want to attend and didn’t think any of it was important.”
Sometimes people would talk to Tia about church and God, and her responses varied between ‘I don’t get it,’ ‘No, that’s not for me,’ and ‘Never again am I trying that.’
“There were other times when people really wanted to know what I thought, and I would say, ‘Well, everyone believes in some sort of “higher power,” no matter what name they called it.’ For the most part though, sometimes I would recognize that maybe there was a higher power, but that he doesn’t care at all because this world is so messed up and evil. But because of all the evil in the world, I believed that God didn’t exist at all, neither did Satan, neither heaven nor hell.”
Years later, this approach to life was no longer working for her. She and her husband found themselves in a huge financial bind that led to depression and eventual separation from one another.
“Within four months, I lost my husband and all my earthly possessions,” Tia recalled. “I thought we were still going to work things out, so I let him have anything he wanted from the house.” But then it turned out she had nothing left.
At that rock-bottom point, Tia had another co-worker who noticed that she was really struggling. He told her, “If you’re looking for answers, the Bible is where you could find them.” Although she was very skeptical, she had nowhere else to turn and she did need help. So in either a moment of courage or desperation (or maybe both), she asked him where she should start. Tia finally started her journey of truly discovering whether or not God was really real, and if he was, how he could possibly care about her life.
Tia began reading both the Old Testament and the New Testament at the same time. And being a scientist, any time she came across verses that didn’t make sense or that she disagreed with (or even ones that she didn’t like), she put on her research hat and started digging.
“I’m not one that if I read something, if it totally doesn’t make sense, I’m just going to move on and leave it alone,” Tia said. “I would research, ‘Why? Why would God do that?’ There were some very interesting parts that, from my standpoint, just seemed horrible and cruel. But when I researched the background for them and why they happened, it started to make sense why God would choose to want things done that way or allow certain things to happen.”
Her year-long process of excavating the truths underneath the scriptures led to a true discovery of what the Bible really said about God. This also led her to read supplemental books at the same time she was reading through the Bible. She was looking for answers to explain some of the most challenging topics she encountered both in the Bible and in her personal life: Why does God allow horrible things to happen? Where is God during my suffering? What does it mean that God is sovereign?
When Tia was reading through the Bible, she was looking for answers for her situation, but she wasn’t seeing those. Originally, she didn’t know you could look in the Bible about marriage, or divorce, or finances.
“I think the way I approached [reading the Bible] helped me have a bigger picture of it all, versus just looking at my current situation.”
Eventually, Tia came to faith after reading about the nature of God, Jesus, and her own need for a savior. She realized God wanted his people to worship him and him alone when she read about the pagan concrete idol Dagon in 1 Samuel that broke to pieces and bowed face down before the Ark of God and His presence. She realized Jesus was the only pathway to a right relationship with God when she read his words in John 14 that he was “the way, the truth, and the life.” She realized that because of God’s great love for the world, expressed in John 3, Jesus’ life was given up as a sacrifice for the sins of man. And when she read Romans 3, she realized that no one was good on their own and she needed this savior, Jesus, too.
The scriptures even revealed the kind of person she wanted to become because of her newfound faith in Jesus. She wanted to be like the deep-rooted trees planted along the riverbank that Jeremiah spoke about because these were the trees that never stopped producing fruit and could withstand heat and drought without worry. And she wanted to be like the wise person who builds their house on solid rock from the parable that Jesus told in Matthew because the person who builds their house on bedrock could withstand any amount of rain and wind and floodwaters.
It was clear to Tia that Jesus, who was both the living water and the rock of her salvation, was the answer to her circumstances. It wasn’t that the heat or drought or the rain, wind, or floods in her life would necessarily cease, but that her faith in Jesus would ground her to no end. It was only after these revelations that Tia decided to check out church again.
“This process of fact-checking the Bible also led me to fact-check some local churches, too, and I think that was unbelievably helpful,” Tia said. “I first started by watching some online sermons… and I found myself saying, ‘That’s not true!’ or ‘That’s not what the Bible teaches! Why are they teaching this to people?’”
Then she remembered Clear Creek Community Church and the fill-in-the-blank sermon notes. She started watching many archived sermons and decided to attend in person again. Tia even fact-checked Clear Creek messages. But after finding them to be biblically accurate, she knew she had found a church she could trust.
Tia has now been attending CCCC for over two years. She joined her current small group in February 2018. She serves on Sundays with the high school student ministry. And she is still a scientist.
“I feel like I understand everything in science better,” Tia said. “We know a lot of things [about our world], which is great. God gives us the knowledge to know these things. The what, the when, the where, and the why are pretty much mostly answered up to this point. But most of the time, scientists are so reluctant to put in the who.”
However, it seems that even the intelligent design of our solar system challenges this reluctance. The simple fact that our planet has an orbit keeps us from crashing directly into the sun. Our specific orbit keeps us from crashing into other planets. And Jupiter is so delicately positioned to act as a sort of shield for the earth, deflecting harmful gases and asteroids that might otherwise be bound for Earth [Opfer, 2015].
“You can read all these scientific things and you can see how the world works and the physics and the chemistry and the environmental science and the biology, but there’s always these holes, like these gaps of what we don’t know.”
The who, Tia explains, is the one who so carefully created both the parameters of the universe and the very atoms that make up a unit of matter.
“Subatomic particles and the strength of gravity appear to be finely tuned just right to support stars, atoms, molecules, and life,” Tia said. “Scientists believe if the Big Bang conditions had been slightly different, then the universe would not exist (Johnson, 2003).
“Or just take neutrons and protons as an example. Neutrons are just slightly heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn’t exist because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses, no atoms, no chemistry, no life,” Tia claims. “Saying that God doesn’t exist in that is pretty much setting yourself up for more failure than understanding.”
At the same time that her understanding of the created world amplified, so did her compassion for her friends and her scientist colleagues who still do not believe. For Tia, choosing to believe in God within a community of atheists can be challenging, at times. Sometimes when presented with opposing discussions with friends or colleagues, she has to say, “I understand where you’re coming from, but that’s not what I’m gonna believe anymore. I’m going to be over here believing this, but if you ever have questions, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“All you can do is try to share the gospel with them sometimes, and share with them in a gentle way so that they’re not going to be hostile towards it. But it’s not our work to do. It’s God’s work to save them.”
On top of these challenges, Tia’s personal circumstances—the ones that drove her to seek answers in the Bible in the first place—have not changed much at all. And yet, somehow, everything has changed. While Tia began her spiritual journey hoping for a restored marriage, along the way she found a new perception that God didn’t just exist, but he knew her by name, he was writing her story, and she could trust him.
“As you read through the Bible, there is all sorts of devastation; we’re not the first people to have war and famine and adultery and everything else,” Tia said. “Lots of people in the Bible had to learn how to be content. I’m sure they didn’t want to be in prison. I’m sure lots of God’s people didn’t want to have all the bad things happen to them that happened to them. I’m sure they didn’t like those situations at all, but He allowed it to happen—and it was still for their good, somehow.”
In the quest to be content in her circumstances, Tia admits that putting these truths into her mind and soul daily is the main thing that keeps her moving forward.
“If you look at the big picture, God’s sovereign over all of it, even from the grass growing to the condition of the soil to every drop of rain. So if He sees and controls all that, what makes you think that he doesn’t see and know and control your circumstances? Because He does.”
References:
Opfer, C. (2015). What If Earth Changed Its Orbit. Retrieved from
https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/what-if/what-if-earth-changed-its-orbit.htm
Johnson, G. (2003) Can Science Prove the Existence of God? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/can-science-prove-the-existence-of-god.html
Giving it Away
Kyle Yawn, a 26-year-old Maintenance Flight Controller at NASA, loved his job, but he could not stop thinking about retiring early. He always loved spreadsheets and numbers, and it became the ultimate optimization puzzle for him. It was fun figuring out the earliest he could possibly retire.
Kyle’s boldest estimates had him retiring in his mid-thirties.
“My dad retired when he was fifty,” Kyle said, “I was ten, and my mom had quit her job when I was born. So I’d seen my parents my whole life, essentially, as I was growing up.” Because of this, an early retirement became a life goal for him. Kyle saved every penny he could, maintaining a budget lifestyle even as he got raises at work.
Then in February of 2016, Kyle received an email that shook him to his core. He had signed his small group up for the Generosity Challenge, and was receiving a daily prompt encouraging people with specific ways they could be generous that day. Kyle had just received a significant raise at work, and the email suggested using a recent raise at work for others instead of themselves.
Kyle was stunned. When he got home he talked to his wife, Lisa, about the email. He suggested they give the whole raise away.
Lisa was reluctant at first, but Kyle assured her that they could afford to give it all away. Suddenly, their lives switched gears. Instead of worrying every day about where the money would serve them best, it became about where it could serve everyone else. They remembered organizations they had always wanted to support, and started recognizing places where they could help the people in their lives. Some of their friends needed help paying for car work, and another friend was raising money for a mission trip. Now these prayer requests became opportunities to give. “It was really fun and exciting,” Kyle said, “because we switched from having this plan all put together to ‘alright God, where are you pointing us to use this money that you’ve given us’ because that’s what we want to use it for.”