The Long Road Back
I grew up in Las Vegas, caught fire for Jesus at sixteen, built a ministry, and then walked away from all of it after the church I’d poured my heart into broke my trust. I spent over a decade running through a backslid life, a move across the country, a marriage that nearly didn’t survive, and a slow return I didn’t deserve. I’m not a pastor or a theologian. I’m a man under grace — an ordinary husband, father of five, and cybersecurity guy who reads the Puritans, studies his Bible every morning, and still fails before lunch. This is what the journey back looks like from the inside.
I was raised in Las Vegas — not exactly the buckle of the Bible Belt. My father was Baptist, my mother Presbyterian, and between the two of them, I spent most of my childhood in a church pew, whether I wanted to be there or not.
For a long time, the faith was borrowed — inherited, not owned. I could recite the right answers without them ever reaching the part of me that made decisions on Friday nights. Then, around sixteen, I fell in with a group of kids from school who were attending a fundamental Baptist church — and everything changed. The borrowed faith caught fire.
I became that kid. Tracts on windshields in the school parking lot. Cornering classmates about their eternal destiny. I was militant about it — absolutely on fire for Jesus, but carrying almost no compassion in how I brought Him up. I didn’t ask people where they were hurting; I told them where they were wrong. If you’ve ever seen the movie Saved!, picture Hilary Faye hurling a Bible at her friend and shouting, “I am filled with Christ’s love!” — and meaning every word of it. That was me.
Looking back, I cringe at the method even as I respect the sincerity behind it. I was sixteen, and I had marching orders — or thought I did. There was zeal but no grace, conviction but no tenderness. God didn’t use those moments because they were good. He used them because they weren’t — and the Christ who was shaping me had a longer curriculum in mind than I could see from a high-school hallway. I can only ask forgiveness for the way I went about it, and trust that He was already writing a different ending.
By my early twenties, that fire had matured enough that a friend and I launched a singles and young-adults ministry at our church in Vegas, and it took off — dating couples, married couples, people showing up week after week. I poured my heart and soul into it. For the first time, the gospel wasn’t just something I was shouting at people; it was something I was building with them.
I had every advantage. I heard the gospel clearly and often. I knew the truth. I was even building something with it. That’s what makes what came next worse, not better.
The ministry my friend and I had built was growing. People were showing up, lives were changing, and I thought I’d found my lane. Then the pastor brought in a newly ordained kid — fresh out of college with a ministry degree in hand, someone who’d attended the church in high school and had now returned to claim his place. The pastor decided this young man and his diploma would do a better job than what we’d spent years building from nothing. My friend and I were pushed aside without so much as a conversation.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that degree was worth the paper it was printed on — because the man holding it had the same problem I’d had at sixteen. All knowledge, no heart. He was Hilary Faye with a diploma. He and I never got along — maybe because he was only a couple of years older and saw me as competition, or maybe because he believed a credential mattered more than what God had already been doing through two guys who simply showed up and cared.
When my friend and I brought our case to the pastor, he didn’t want to hear it. He’d made his decision, and that was that — take it or leave it. It was his church to do with as he pleased. And he did. He became, to me, synonymous with so many so-called Christians I’ve encountered since: people who confuse authority with ownership. What he never understood — and possibly doesn’t to this day — is that the church is the body of Christ. Not a building. Not a congregation under one man’s thumb. People who follow the one true Christ and the true gospel. Looking back, I believe that church body was being led astray by him — not everyone, because there were some genuinely amazing people there, many of whom I called friends. But his actions broke my heart and my spirit for a long time to come.
I didn’t step foot in another church for over a decade. It wasn’t a dramatic public exit. It was more like a slow bleed — the wound opened the door, and then the drift did the rest. One skipped Sunday became a month, then a year, then “I don’t really do that anymore.” I chose comfort and autonomy over obedience, one small decision at a time, until I’d built an entire life with no room for God in it.
“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
C.S. Lewis
The years that followed weren’t empty — they were full of the wrong things. I swore. I smoked. I drank more than I should have. I lived a backslidden life and did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Whatever fire I’d carried out of that Vegas church, I buried it under years of running.
About five years after I walked away, I met Amanda. By then, I’d already spent the better part of a decade working as an ophthalmic technician — assisting eye surgeons, learning on the job. It was through one of those surgeons, Dr. Wellish, that I got my first real taste of technology when I helped his office roll out a new computer system. That detour became a career. From the outside, it probably looked like a life that was working — marriage, kids, a new professional path. But I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, and the hole I was trying to fill with everything else was exactly God-shaped, just like they’d told me as a kid.
Then 2008 happened. The recession came and took the small timeshare company I was running IT for along with it — turns out timeshares are the first thing people stop paying for when they can’t afford groceries. I lost the job. We were upside down on the house and buried in credit card debt from years of being a single-income household. Amanda had stayed home to raise the kids — a choice I have never regretted and would make again — but when my paycheck stopped, the whole structure came down. We filed for bankruptcy. People who haven’t been through it like to say it’s no big deal, you just start fresh. They’re wrong. It was a weight that followed us for the next decade, no matter where we went or how hard we worked to climb back out from underneath it.
By that point, I’d had enough of Vegas. I was born there, raised there, and the desert was finished with me — or I was finished with it. I wanted somewhere green. Somewhere that felt like a fresh start. Amanda had family in Connecticut who said we could come stay with them while we got on our feet, and we took it. The decision was mutual. But I should be honest about the rest of what I was carrying. Our marriage already had cracks. I was selfish, self-centered, and easily provoked. Amanda swallowed more than she should have because she didn’t want to rock the boat. I blamed God for everything — even for the fact that I existed at all — and I blamed myself for what I was putting her through. The welcome we’d counted on didn’t materialize either. I wasn’t moving toward anything yet. I was just running again, this time with a U-Haul.
We thought a new place would ease the issues, give us purpose, and give us a fresh start. It didn’t. The cracks showed before we even arrived — Amanda and I got into a fight somewhere in Ohio on the drive out that I’m not proud of and won’t try to defend, and the rest of the trip felt like two people in two separate cars heading to the same address. Connecticut only amplified everything from there — the loneliness, the helplessness, the feeling that we were drowning, and nobody could see it. Amanda and I became detached from each other. The only thing that kept us going was our kids, and the stubborn reality that in a state where we knew almost nobody, we had no one to rely on but the two of us. We fought hard and often, and there were stretches of real misery. But even at our worst, neither of us wanted to walk away from the other. At the time, I thought that was sheer willpower. Now that I’m older and a little wiser, I know it was God all along — holding us together, pressing us forward through the misery because somewhere well into the future it would be worth it. It was a promise we didn’t know we needed, and one I’m deeply grateful for now.
I knew while living there that something was missing. I could feel God still reaching out — still tugging — but I resisted. We tried a couple of churches. One was a seeker-friendly recovery church that sought out people struggling with addiction; the people were kind enough, but the leadership rubbed us the wrong way. We landed at another church and, knowing our marriage was in real trouble, sought counseling from the pastor. What happened next only cemented every cynical thing I’d come to believe about the modern church. The pastor — knowing we were hurting, knowing we were struggling — offered a single piece of advice: what God has brought together, no man should tear asunder. That was it. His way of saying he didn’t believe in divorce, delivered as though a verse could substitute for actually sitting with two people in pain. We didn’t go back.
Amanda and I had made the decision when we got married that divorce would never be on the table. Have those thoughts come? Yes — absolutely. There are moments when giving up feels easier than continuing. But we made a covenant, and we’ve held to it. Connecticut was not the end of our troubles. I had a lot of growing up to do — a lot more trials to walk through before our marriage began to heal. But it was the beginning of seeking God again, and ultimately the beginning of following Christ again.
Then things started pulling us back to Vegas. My mom’s health was declining. My mother-in-law needed us. And Amanda was carrying years of unresolved anger and grief over the death of her father — a wound that had never properly closed. So we packed up and moved back to a place I knew was full of hurt, full of memories both good and terrible — a place we couldn’t seem to escape no matter how far we ran. Knowing what I know now, I’m not sure I would have returned. Some of the greatest blessings in our lives have come out of it — but hindsight is 20/20, and from where we sit now, it’s hard to say whether we would have made different decisions. Possibly. Maybe. It’s impossible to untangle.
I didn’t come back to faith clean. I came back carrying the consequences of years of running — years where I was not a good person, not a kind person, easily provoked, and full of errors in judgment. But God didn’t ask me to come back clean. He just asked me to come back. And what I found waiting wasn’t judgment — it was grace. The same grace that had been there the whole time, patient enough to outlast over a decade of silence.
“I can’t correct myself. I can’t even come to the Father without His leading. God always seems to steer me back. And that’s how I know He’s got His hand on me.”
From my own journal
I live in South Carolina now with my family — five kids in all. My oldest is 22; my youngest is about to turn six. After another long stretch of hard years back in Vegas — losing my mom, accusations and litigation involving a family member, living with ungrateful in-laws we’d graciously opened our home to, and a years-long intrusion by CPS that never seemed to end — we’d had enough. But our marriage had begun to heal through all of it. I’d taken a job that kept me on the road for weeks at a time, and while the distance was hard, it afforded us the chance to travel. We discovered the South on those trips — came often, fell in love with it, fell in love with each other all over again. I started praying again on those business trips. Reading my Bible again. Using the quiet of hotel rooms and airport terminals to reconnect with the Lord and bring that energy back home to my family. My wife and I started over with two little ones we adopted out of a situation no child should have been born into, and raising them has become the hardest, most humbling assignment God has ever handed us. There are days we still don’t understand why He chose us for it. A sermon hit us between the eyes not long ago: God’s plans are not your plans. We’re learning — slowly, stubbornly — to stop rowing upstream and trust that He sees something we can’t.
I work in cybersecurity now, which is another gracious thing God provided. It was an opportunity to get off the road and settle back in at home after years away — and it saved us through Covid. It was all God, and I give Him the glory for it: from a recruiter I met on a short flight out of Phoenix, sitting in a first-class seat I only had because they bumped me up on my status, to interviewing with a great company and taking on a new security role. During the day, I help customers see value in our products — a career that started when I helped an eye surgeon roll out a computer system and never looked back. But what I spend my mornings and evenings doing is different from what most people expect.
Most mornings before work, I sit down with John MacArthur’s study Bible — Old Testament, Psalms, Proverbs, and New Testament, every day. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover multiple times in the last several years, and I find more in it every time, not less. I read the Puritans — Bunyan, Owen, Bridge, Burroughs — men who wrote about the Christian life with a depth and honesty that most modern authors can’t touch. I study apologetics, working through the intellectual questions that honest seekers ask. I’ve studied Mormonism and Islam from a worldview perspective because I believe truth should be able to withstand comparison.
Most evenings I walk the neighborhood after the kids are in bed. That’s where a lot of this site comes from — voice memos recorded on dark streets, talking out loud to God and to whoever might eventually listen. Unscripted, unpolished, real. Just a man processing his day through the lens of a faith he’s still learning to trust.
And I still fail before lunch most days. Lustful thoughts, anger, impatience, worry — the list doesn’t get shorter just because I’ve been reading my Bible. I struggle with imposter syndrome at work, wondering if I belong. I struggle with loneliness, wondering if anybody really sees me. There are days I don’t know how to be a Paul or a Peter — I’m just me. But that’s not false humility. It’s the reality of sanctification. The difference between now and my years of running is not that I’ve become a better man. It’s that I now know where to take my failure.
I’ll be honest about the thing that finally pushed this site into existence: loneliness. I don’t have close friends. I haven’t had a real one since high school. I can feel alone in a room full of men at a church fellowship and drive home feeling lonelier than when I arrived. There are nights I need prayer and have nobody to ask. This blog — these voice memos recorded on evening walks — became my only outlet because I literally had no one else to talk to.
And I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there are men all over this country who love the Lord, struggle daily, and have no idea who to call when the weight gets heavy. Men who feel like impostors at work and failures at home. Men whose wives are exhausted and whose kids are hard and whose faith feels like a one-way street some days. Men who know the right verses but can’t feel God in the room. I don’t ever want another man to feel the way I’ve felt on my worst nights. That’s why this exists.
I’m not writing as a pastor or seminary professor. I’m writing as a layman — a man under grace, which is all any of us are. Someone who works a job, raises a family, and is trying to be faithful in the ordinary moments where faith actually gets tested. If C.S. Lewis could write as an “ordinary layman of the Church of England,” then there’s room for an ordinary man from Las Vegas to do the same.
The Bible says iron sharpens iron, and I haven’t had nearly enough of that in my life. Maybe this is where it starts — not with a pulpit or a degree, but with one man saying out loud what most of us only think in the dark. Expect theology that goes deeper than Sunday school. Expect honesty about what the Christian life actually looks like when you’re not on a stage. Expect questions to be taken seriously and answers grounded in Scripture. And expect me to get it wrong sometimes — because I will, and I’d rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise.
I believe the whole Bible, front to back. There are things in it that scare me to death — because I believe them. I hold to the historic Christian faith as expressed in the great Reformed confessions. In plain terms:
If any of this sounds familiar — if you’re a man who loves the Lord but feels alone in it, or you’re on the road back and don’t know who to talk to, or you’re still running and something in you is getting tired of it — you’re not alone. I started this because I needed it. Maybe you do too.