The Long Way Home
1 Peter 1:3–5
I grew up in church. Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, summer camps, VeggieTales. The whole rhythm of it was as familiar to me as breathing. But I never really engaged with it. I didn’t talk about it. Prayer was foreign to me. I knew the stories and I believed them in a general sense, but it was less a living faith and more a moral framework. A sense of right and wrong that I absorbed without ever making it my own.
College came, and with it, the slow fade. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no big moment of rebellion or defiant walk away. I just quietly stopped showing up. The moral compass stayed, but the little bit of connection I’d had to church life faded out without a sound. Like a car you park in the garage and never drive. It didn’t break. I just stopped turning the key.
I married a woman I loved, who happened to be an atheist. Life moved on. We built a life together, and faith was just something from my past. Then in 2019, an RV accident near Carlsbad Caverns upended everything. We packed up and moved from Nebraska to Arizona to start over.
Two years into our new life in the desert, something I never could have predicted happened. My wife, the one who didn’t believe any of it, picked up a Bible and started reading. No one pushed her. No one handed her a tract. She just started seeking on her own. And not long after, she gave her life to Jesus and was baptized.
I’d spent years walking away from God, and He brought me back through the last person I ever would have expected.
We started looking for a church together and found Boulder Mountain. That was almost four years ago.
Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I still remember every word to the worship songs I grew up singing. But now they speak to me in ways I never could have imagined as a kid just going through the motions. And it’s not just the old stuff. I still can’t make it through “Gratitude” without tears. Something is alive in me now that wasn’t there before.
1 Peter 1:3 says God “in his great mercy has given us new birth into a living hope.” I used to think mercy was just about forgiveness. God letting you off the hook. But mercy is so much bigger than that. Mercy is God refusing to give up on the guy who quietly walked away. Mercy is God working in the heart of someone who didn’t even believe He existed. Mercy is a long, patient, wildly creative pursuit of people who aren’t looking for Him.
If you’re in a season where faith feels distant, or if you love someone who’s walked away, take heart. God’s mercy doesn’t wait for you to find your way back. It comes and finds you. And it almost never looks like what you’d expect.
