How Nature Saved My Soul

This is my testimony to how nature saved my soul and led me to Jesus.

When I was a kid I went to Sunday School every week. I went to confirmation class and was confirmed, but I left for college without fully understanding who Jesus Christ really was. 

I knew he was a good guy, and He was God’s son, but that’s about it. The true message of the gospel… that Jesus came down in the form of man to live among us and led a perfect life. That He died on the cross to atone for our sins. Then rose from death three days later, carrying with Him all who accept His unconditional gift of salvation….

That message never got its way into my head..

Maybe I just was a poor Sunday school student.  Maybe my church just didn’t give a clear message.  Maybe a combination of both.

But it resulted in me entering college without thinking about God very often or at all.

I was going to school for engineering and became enchanted with the allure of science and technology. I became obsessed with space travel and the cosmos. I was a weird form of agnostic. I ‘sometimes’ believed in a Creator. 

My ego made me attracted to the idea of transhumanism.  I believed the only way to achieve eternal life was for humans to advance their technology far enough to grant infinite lifespans.  Then, at some point, we would master the science of the entire universe, and in essence become equal to our Creator.

On top of my delusions of being on the same level as God, I adopted some very bad lifestyle habits. I had many vices in my twenties and spent most of my time in dingy bars. I was very materialistic and would buy clothes and toys that I thought would impress others.

I was very insecure.

In my early thirties, I started to get burned out. Something didn’t feel right. I felt there was a greater truth and that my life was a lie.

I was in a sales role and frequently left the house at 5am to make it to the metro NYC area during business hours.  I was eating a lot of fast food and had horrible digestion, erratic energy levels, and would become easily irritable.

Routinely, I would come back home so late that I would hardly have enough time to work out or eat before bed. I didn’t want to ‘waste’ my free time, so I would stay up late watching TV in bed, making me perpetually sleep deprived.

Was this really how I was supposed to live my life? Taking emergency exits off the highway to use the McDonalds bathroom? Sitting for hours on the Belt Parkway breathing in exhaust? Spending my weekends hungover because I felt compelled to ‘blow off steam’ after a grueling work week?

I was becoming increasingly convinced that there was a greater truth out there.

Something deep inside me began to call my name. I cannot offer an explanation, but I felt the need to go out west, and the feeling became more powerful over time.

Eventually I decided to buy a tiny Jayco trailer and disappear into the wilderness.

I was not an experienced camper or outdoorsman, so I had some trepidation, but after losing the cell signal and entering the mountains, all my fears dissolved and I felt liberated.

My stress vanished. I was living out of a tiny 15-foot tin can with few possessions, but I felt wealthier than ever before.

I remember vividly, sitting alone at the edge of Canyonlands UT, watching the setting sun paint the slots, folds, and buttes of the canyons purple, blue and pink.

I wondered to myself…”How on Earth am I the only person in the entire world who wants to observe this incredible beauty?”

It was in that moment that a powerful wave of understanding racked my body. Our natural world was SO beautiful, SO perfect, that it could only mean that God was real, and He made this world for us.

I felt so connected to God in that moment that I could feel it in tingly waves cascading through my entire body. It took my breath away, literally.

But I still had some ways to go in my spiritual journey. I still didn’t know about Jesus, just a conviction that there was a God the creator, and that He was intertwined somehow within me.

I knew that in nature, I had become connected somehow to God. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but by searching for the ultimate truth, I had opened my ‘door’ to God. When I shed the world of man, and entered nature, the world of God, I allowed Him to enter my soul.

I began to have a thought of understanding that I would repeat to myself over and over.

I had always envisioned God to be some mystic apparition in Heaven high above us. He would look down on us perhaps, but was very distant.

I now knew that God was inside me.  I repeated it to myself. God is inside me. God is inside me.

The more I repeated it, the more I felt the warmth of God’s presence inside me, right in my core, in the middle of my chest.

I ended my long boondocking trip with a newfound sense of reality.

Nature was the medium I had used to download God. I decided I needed to adjust my lifestyle long term to include much more nature, and much less urban sprawl.

Knowing God existed, I could feel His presence, but knew very little about Him other than that.  I decided I needed to better understand the instruction manual of God. The Book I’d never read. The Bible.

I switched jobs and moved with my now wife, Erin, to Western PA. On a mission to learn about the Bible, I started to hunt for churches that could teach me the meaning of what I was reading.

I went through about ten churches. It started to seem like a hopeless endeavor.  Many of them were poorly attended, and I left the services without feeling I’d learned a single thing. 

They were all so wishy washy it was painful. 

The majority of sermons went something like this.

Pastor: “You love the Pittsburgh Steelers, right?  Well Jesus is great just like the Steelers. So you should love Him as much as you love the Steelers.”

‘OK…’ I thought. Jesus is a good guy, sure. But WHY?

On about the 12^th church I visited, I finally found someone who could give me the answers I craved.

I had found Harvest Baptist Church, and a man named Marc Likins held a Bible in his hands as he read from it, preaching the word in a way that made me understand scripture, and how it applied to my life.

I immediately knew I had found my source.  I told my wife Erin that I found our new church, and we began attending each Sunday.

As I listened to Pastor Marc, I learned about the gospel. I learned that Jesus had come to clear my slate for me. I learned that I wasn’t judged on my works (which I had plenty to be ashamed of). I could bury my old man and lead life anew.  I had been offered a free gift of salvation. All I had to do was accept it from Jesus.

After finally understanding this, my soul became saved. My life transformed 100% for the better. Now that I knew that my life was infinite, I felt compelled to walk in the image of Jesus. And doing so turned out to be the cheat code for life.

My life has been fundamentally changed for the better after I began to try to emulate Jesus. I have become a better husband, father, and neighbor.  I have lived a life of abundance and happiness, rather than jealousy and scarcity. I am slower to anger, and more patient.  I direct my love to others rather than only to myself.

Since nature was the medium that first sent the lightning rods of salvation into my body, I knew that I needed to get me and my family into it as much as possible.

I made a point to take my kids into the outdoors routinely. And ended up building products to help in the process.

So that is how nature saved my soul. Or at least started the dominos to me finding that Jesus already had.