Testimony

Why I believe in Jesus Christ and why you should too

Dungeons and Dragons has fascinated me ever since I was a kid. The idea of creating a world for my friends and I to explore was infinitely appealing, and the game eventually came to define a large portion of my teenage years. I spent hours pouring over notebooks, drawing maps, writing out plotlines, and developing my own systems in the hopes of creating the best experience possible for those who would play with me. Some of the best memories I made growing up took place around a table covered with dice and homemade character sheets. My friends and I still recount DnD stories from back then to this day. Oftentimes, I would do everything in my power to convince the less nerdy people around me that the game was worth trying, because I wanted others to get a taste of the thing that brought me so much joy. After all, since it had such a big impact on me, it felt certain it would do the same for others. I still remember the fun of watching my younger brother slowly move from indifference to fascination with the game as he learned just how much could be done with it, or witnessing the evolution of my friend’s homebrew systems. I even got to introduce my now-girlfriend to the experience while we were just friends, and watched her go from assuming it was some sort of board game to clamoring for every opportunity to play. I’m sure many of those who read this might relate to this experience. If it’s not DnD, maybe it’s a sport or a show. Perhaps it’s a hobby or some sort of lifestyle choice. Regardless, I think almost everyone who has been touched deeply by something understands the desire to share it with others. This is how I feel about the Christian faith, and sums up my motivation for writing this piece.

I’ve had an interest in apologetics since I was a teenager, for reasons that are probably self-evident. Setting aside all desire to be right, to satisfy my ego, or even to simply make the truth known, I believe life with Christ is infinitely better than life without. Every single person reading this would be infinitely better off converting to Christianity, no matter the personal cost to them, because the result is greater than anything else that can possibly be gained in this world. It’s not that the Christian life is easy, exactly. In many ways, it is quite the opposite, often presenting new challenges unlike any that might be faced outside of it. It’s not for no reason that Christ implores us to count the cost of our discipleship to him (Luke 14:25-33). Indeed, to follow Christ demands everything we have in one way or another. It involves a total transformation of one’s life, often in wildly unexpected ways. The Christian walk doesn’t allow us to sidestep suffering, but it does expand our means of enduring it. This becomes clearer whenever one takes into account some of the less-than-pleasant realities of life. Most people today try their best not to think of such things, so it’s important to take a moment to consider their implications.

Starting at the most basic level, every one of us will die one day, no matter how pleasant our experience might be up to that point. For most, this will involve some degree of suffering, often beyond that which would by any means be considered tolerable. That applies to you directly, whoever you are. I used to find it easy to ignore this fact simply because it felt so far off that it might as well be an eternity away. When I was six, I felt the same way about the idea of graduating high school or getting married as I do now about death. Now, though, I’ve not only finished high school but college as well, and I’ve been having a lot of conversations with my girlfriend about getting engaged, so marriage isn’t too far off either. I imagine this becomes easier to understand the older a person gets. If you’re in high school, how far off did the thought of being here feel when you were in kindergarten? If you have kids, how far off did that seem when you were just a freshman? How far did forty feel from twenty, or sixty from thirty? At one point, wherever you are must have seemed as far off as death does now, yet here you are. All this also assumes that everyone reading this will live long enough to grow old. A half hour before sitting down to write this, I got news that a friend of a friend was killed by a lightning strike while out hiking. He was sixteen; he had no clue it was his last day on earth. How confident are you that you’ll get to see the next twenty years? Or ten? Or even one? Everyone always acknowledges the idea that they might die at any time in theory, but I think most of us don’t really take it seriously. As if this isn’t enough, most of us will also have to contend with the deaths of many of the people we love sooner or later. Most of us will outlive our parents, every marriage ends in death or divorce, and the odds of losing at least some of our siblings, relatives and friends (assuming we don’t simply drift apart from them first) are astronomically high. None of this even begins to touch on the certainty of dealing with some combination of illness, isolation, financial hardship, trauma, betrayal or goodness knows what else before we’re through. Life is hard regardless of religious belief, yet faith at least provides hope in the midst of it.

While a relationship with Christ doesn’t erase any of this, it does provide just about everything needed to face such hardship. The most basic example of this is the belief in life after death. Death loses its sting when it ceases to be the end of all things. Christianity also has a way of transforming suffering into something meaningful. Financial hardship becomes an opportunity to trust the Lord. A fight with a family member becomes a chance to let go of one’s pride. Faith teaches those who adhere to it to release their anxiety. A commitment to love one’s neighbor often leads to a kind of joy that only finds those who choose to live for something outside themselves. The list goes on and on. Of course, I’ve only covered the psychological benefits of Christianity so far. If that was all it was, there would be a case to be made for the claim that religion as a whole is nothing more than an elaborate coping mechanism. Fortunately, there’s a bit more to the story. Those who accept Christ receive the Holy Spirit, who begins to act undeniably. I’m talking about strange coincidences that are difficult to explain by chance, receiving little “nudges” that guide you towards wherever it is you needed to be, or even just seeing prayers answered in ways that seem difficult to explain without some sort of outside intervention. Many even experience things that can only be described as miraculous.

Now, any agnostic or atheist reading this would be likely to say something along the lines of “Christians just use God as a cop-out to explain things they don’t understand and call it a miracle.” They will point to the many Christians who talk about Jesus “changing their lives” and point out that others make similar claims about separate faiths. They’ll look at examples of the strange coincidences I referenced above and point out that such things can also be explained by random chance and that they cannot be used as evidence for God by themselves. I would probably say the same if that was all I had to go off of. I personally do believe that coincidences are often, if not always, orchestrated by God, but it would be unfair to expect others to join our ranks solely because of such experiences. We must distinguish between signs that stand as direct evidence for God on their own, such as something in the vein of instantaneous miraculous healings, and signs that only provide circumstantial evidence, such as the aforementioned coincidences and little nudges.

I bring this up because I would like to try something a little different than what a lot of people attempt when talking about evidence for Christ. Many apologists will spend a lot of time trying to prove the historicity of the New Testament or disputing certain scientific theories like those surrounding evolution. There is certainly value in such discussions, but I would like to take a different approach here. When the apostles went out to preach the gospel, they did so on the basis of what they had personally seen and experienced. They simply told their testimonies and performed miracles to confirm them, which were enough to convince those they preached to that they were telling the truth. While I’m not confident in my ability to perform miracles, what I can do is to write about some of the things I’ve personally witnessed, or at very least have heard about second-hand. Seeing as I’m just a guy on the internet, I understand that some readers might doubt whether I am being honest about my story, although I promise I’m doing my best to stick to the facts as closely as possible. If this happens to be the case for you, all I ask is that you consider whether you would take my testimony as evidence for Christ in the event that it actually was verifiable. In other words, if I am actually telling the truth (which I am to the best of my ability), would this be enough to convince you to follow Him? I’m not the only one who has stories like this. If this sort of thing piques your interest, go to a few churches yourself and ask around. Get a decent sample size, and you’re bound to stumble on stories like this quicker than you might think.

Probably the most blatant sign I’ve personally experienced was a miraculous healing I received in the spring of 2025. For several years, I struggled with a laundry list of food intolerances including gluten, dairy, and soy among other things. It was bad enough that the week before my healing, I ate a single potato chip offered to me by an old woman on a plane and was sick for the next three days. For a few weeks leading up to the event, my girlfriend said multiple times she felt strangely confident that my stomach was going to be healed. It was right around the potato chip trip that I began to feel similarly. I remember getting a pretty strong sense, not just that I would be healed, but where and when. I had been attending a weekly prayer group semi-regularly at the time and had made plans to go that Sunday. Towards the beginning of the meeting, I told them I wanted prayer for healing, but no one laid hands on me, as it was assumed that everyone was going to cover the prayer requests outside of the group. I wanted to be sure that if I was to be healed that day, it would be the real thing and not just a placebo, so I decided I wasn’t going to bring it up again. I asked the Lord to bring the conversation back around to it without my having to do anything to make it happen on my own. There were originally other plans for the end of the meeting, but the man leading it said he felt that the Lord wanted us to pray over some people in the group. One other person received prayer before me, and the leader still felt that there was someone else who needed prayer. Still, I kept quiet. I wanted to be certain that I wasn’t bringing this about myself. Then, one of the women in the group asked me if I wanted to be prayed over since I had asked for it at the start of the meeting. I said I did, and the whole group laid hands on me. As they prayed over me, an image came into my head of myself wrapped in layers upon layers of chains. I watched as they came off of me, one by one. I started crying, and felt certain in that moment that the healing had been done. Of course, it still needed to be tested. Someone happened to have brought a cheesecake for everyone to share that day. In the past, even a few bites would’ve sent me running to the bathroom within minutes, but after eating the cheesecake, nothing happened. So I tested it further. I went on a bit of a binge the next few days, eating everything I could find that I hadn’t been able to before. While I’d learned that I hadn’t magically become immune to the effects of eating large quantities of sugar, food actually took its time moving through my system. It’s been said that you don’t notice the sound of your heartbeat until it stops, and I learned that it’s the same way when it comes to food moving through you at a normal rate. For the first week, I actually felt my food sitting in my stomach instead of passing right through the way it had seemed to before. I’m still able to eat what I like to this day. I had three slices of pizza for lunch today, and I feel fantastic.

I have also personally encountered several instances of demonic spirits taking over control of others over the course of the last few years, and have seen people set free from their influence. These were people with no prior history of any sort of psychosis to my knowledge. I majored in Psychology and have continued to learn as much as possible about the field since graduating, so naturally I wanted to make sure I wasn’t witnessing something purely mental. Of my admittedly limited data sample, I’ve noticed a few patterns that seem telling. First of all, every instance I have seen has been limited in duration, lasting from minutes to hours. Most of them have occurred during some sort of prayer or worship, as though the spirits are reacting negatively to it. Without getting into the weeds, most Christians who encounter this sort of thing share the understanding that such demonic manifestations are often a last-ditch attempt to keep some sort of territory they hold within a person. Most of the time, it seems they do their best to make sure their host hardly knows of their presence, as detection would likely lead to resistance. When they are exposed, however, they throw a fit in the same way a cornered animal might bite even when it has no hope of survival. Oftentimes, they take control of the body of their victim at varying capacities, occasionally to the point of speaking out of them directly. It is often quite clear that what is speaking is no longer the person, but something else. They often refer to their victim in the third person, doing and saying things that would otherwise be out of character for them. They often mock any mention of Christ, heckling anyone who commands them to leave or prays for their removal. When their host does eventually gain freedom, it is usually through prayer. These last two facts make the nature of these entities more apparent. If they are simply dissociated fragments of the mind, as is the case with something like dissociative identity disorder, then it seems unlikely that they would have such a universally negative reaction to the name of Jesus. The fact that prayer causes their hosts to return to normal and even gain newfound freedom in areas of their lives that were otherwise hindered is also telling. If this could be replicated so easily without the power of the Holy Spirit, psychologists would have a much easier time treating it than they do now. I can say for certain that my college friends and I did not stumble upon some previously unknown psychological technique all by ourselves by chance upon coming out the other side of such encounters.

It’s worth stating here that it would be unwise for anyone to go looking for encounters like the ones I described above. Demons are not your friends. They are stronger than you, they are much older than you, and they do not have your best interests at heart. Without the power of Christ, you don’t stand a chance against them. There’s a story in the New Testament of a group of men who went around casting out demons “in the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches.” Then, one day, a demon responded to them, saying, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” The man controlled by the demons jumped them and sent them from the house “naked and bleeding.” (Acts 19:11-20). This goes for anyone who tries to talk to spirits on their own. Every single one of them is either in alignment with God and will therefore glorify Christ, or is not, and is out to cause as much needless pain and misery as possible. (1 John 4:1-6). I will say it again. No matter how friendly such a being might initially seem, if they do not glorify Christ, you should assume they want to kill you, your family, your friends, and everyone else in the most painful way possible. Through Christ, all such entities have been overcome, so do not give them a foothold in your life. He is your only real defense, so I recommend you turn to him. It is generally ill-advised to attempt to perform any sort of deliverance work without being a Christian, and without the subject being a Christian as well. Without the Holy Spirit to safeguard the work that has been done, there’s nothing to prevent an evil spirit from returning to a person and bringing others along with it, leaving them worse off than before. (Matthew 12:43-45).

Aside from what I mentioned above, there are a few stories from members of my family that are difficult to explain without divine intervention. Once while my Grandmother on my Mom’s side was driving, she heard an audible voice tell her to stop at a green light even though the intersection was clear. She did as she was told, and a massive truck barreled through the intersection right in front of her, just where she would have been if she hadn’t stopped. Its brakes had failed, and it had gone out of control, so without the Lord’s intervention she would have been killed right there. My Grandmother on my Father’s side has a similar story. When my Dad was an infant, she felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to take him into the emergency room, which was thirty or forty minutes away. Right as she was checking him in, he stopped breathing and was only able to be saved because he was already there. Had it happened at home, it is unlikely he would have survived the ride to the hospital. So I owe my life on both sides to the direct influence of God.

I know other such stories. A lot of people within the Christian faith have various miracle stories as undeniable as mine. I know one man who was nearly blown off a cliffside by a sudden gust of wind when he was a child. He felt a hand on his back catch him before he lost his balance, but when he turned around, there was no one there. When he was in college, my father and a friend decided to swim across a lake and got so exhausted they thought they were going to drown, only to be saved by two women that he now believes were angels. At a summer camp for a youth group I used to volunteer at, a girl injured her shoulder to the point that she was in pain for the entirety of the trip. Towards the end, the group laid hands on her and her shoulder was healed. The same thing happened with a friend of mine. His shoulder had been completely messed up for over a year and a half, until a group of college kids from YWAM laid hands on him. A half hour before this happened, he got scratched by a cat in such a way that it left a scar in the shape of a cross on the same arm. These are just a few examples. I’ve seen and heard more, but I think I’ve said enough to prove my point.

These healings aren’t even the greatest works I’ve seen the Lord do, yet they serve as the most tangible proof I have for the existence of Christ. Some readers will likely ask why it is that God heals some and not others, or why, if he is so powerful, he doesn’t just remove suffering and sin entirely. That could be the topic of its own essay, so I will leave it at this. We could talk for hours about whether God is just or fair by our standards, but if he’s real, then he’s real regardless of whether we like the way he operates or not. The purpose of this essay is not to convince anyone to like God (though I’ve found there is quite a lot to like), but simply to believe in him. In the end, there will be no arguing with him. Either He’s God, or He’s not. Every one of us must decide for ourselves if we’re going to follow him. As for me, I know which path I’m choosing. I hope everyone reading this comes to see it the same way.