Growing up, I was pretty liberal in my thinking, but there was always one thing I never let go of, I believed there was a God who created all of this. I never bought into the idea that something came from nothing. It wasn’t until I was around 25 or 26 that I actually started going to church, tagging along with my grandparents. Something clicked. A few years earlier, I’d gotten a DUI, and it cost me my dream. I’d gone to school to teach elementary education, and that DUI meant I couldn’t teach in a Pennsylvania public school for seven years. It knocked the wind out of the direction I thought my life was headed.
Sitting in church one day, I heard the head of the Sunday school ministry ask, four weeks in a row, if anyone would step up to teach first and second grade. Every time, something in me said “maybe this is your shot.” But I talked myself out of it and told myself I wasn’t sharp enough on Old Testament theology, that I’d let those kids down. A pastor finally offered to let me sit in and observe a class before deciding. I did, and it happened to be a lesson on the Battle of Jericho. I walked out that day and told my wife I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t smart enough to answer their questions without looking everything up first.
The very next day, after recently getting promoted to Director of Sales and picking up Delaware and New Jersey on top of Pennsylvania, instead of staying close to home, something pulled me to drive out to a store in Newark, Delaware, to specifically meet a sales rep named Dom. I always went to my store in Elverson but this day I didn’t. His numbers were incredible, and I wanted to know why. When we sat down, the first thing he told me was that everything he did was rooted in his faith. Half-joking, half-testing him, I asked what his favorite book of the Bible was. He said he’d been locked in on the Book of Joshua for months, specifically the Battle of Jericho. Then he quoted, word for word, the exact verse I’d read the day before, the one that convinced me I wasn’t ready to teach. I got chills. Not normal chills, but bone chilling intensity I have never felt. “Holy Spirit Chills” I call them now. We ended up talking for four hours, and Dom became one of the best managers I’ve ever worked with and a mentor for years after. That day, he told me something… that in Hebrew there’s no word for "coincidence, that everything happens for a reason. I went on to teach that Sunday school class for the next 14 years, right up until I moved out to California, and those months that I taught, were by far some of the best of my life. Looking back, that day with Dom was the first time I truly recognized God wasn’t just real to me, but He was present, active, and had a plan for me all along, even in the middle of what felt like my biggest setback. I have 4 similar events that were bone chilling, but there was no denying His presence after that and I will never forget it. I still get chills thinking about when I tell the story.