Anti-theist Surprised by God – Jeff Dockman’s Story

Former atheist Jeff Dockman wanted nothing to do with religion. Over time, his presumptions about the world, and his place in it, ceased to make sense and he began to consider the possibility of God.   The CS Lewis Institute: www.cslewisinstitute.org   Jeff’s recommended authors and books:

• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
• C.S. Lewis, Miracles
• Alvin Plantinga

 

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side to see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone’s who’s been an atheist and became a Christian. Through listening to their story, we can appreciate both sides from someone who’s been there. If you believe in God, you can see how someone might dismiss the ideas of God, religion, and Christianity. If you don’t believe in God, perhaps you can see how someone who once resisted God moves towards belief.

But as for all of us, what we believe in affects our understanding of who we are, our identity. In fact, our identity can be shaped by many things. How we see ourselves, how others see us, what we do, the group we’re a part of, who we want to be, or how we feel. Our identity can be shaped by our friends, our family, our life experiences, our desires. For atheists, there is a sense of freedom in creating your own identity without restraint. Free thinkers who form their own identity, their sense of self. Sometimes our identity can also be shaped by knowing who you don’t want to be, a soft anti-identity. We don’t want to be a part of a group of people that seems culturally irrelevant, judgmental, unscientific, hypocritical, uneducated, weak, narrow minded. Pick your adjective. These are terms often used for the religious. We want our identity to be as far from that as possible.

That is where our story begins today but not where it ends. The sense of rejection of the religious identity. Jeff moved from an atheist identity to take on the identity of the group he once despised, Christians. How in the world did that dramatic shift happen? I hope you’ll listen in today to see how this story plays out.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeff. It’s wonderful to have you on today.

Hi, Jana. It’s great to be here.

You’re a familiar voice to me. We met several years ago. We both have a mutual affiliation with the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, and so that’s where I got to know you a little bit and got to know a little bit about your story, so having you on the program today is truly exciting for me, because I know the dramatic changes that you have made in your life. In fact, you’re doing some pretty amazing things now in terms of even your current study of theology at the graduate level. Can you talk with me a little bit about just who you are now and what you do, so everyone gets a chance to know a little bit about who you are.

Yeah, sure. So I work as a software manager at an engineering company here in the Atlanta area, I’m still in school, but I have switched my major from theology to Old Testament. I just had a lot of interest in looking deeper into the Old Testament, the history of the text transmission and things like that. So that’s my current focus in school, working on a Masters of Arts in Old Testament Studies right now.

I know, in your story, you’ve come a long way from where you were, from your atheism. So why don’t we start at the beginning, in your childhood, and give me a sense of the home in which you grew up, your family, perhaps your friends and the culture. Was there God in that world at all before you had a sense of your atheism? Tell me about that.

It’s a very interesting question because there was God in the sense that some members of my family would consider themselves Catholic from an upbringing perspective, but there was not God in the sense that we ever went to church or prayed or talked about God or anything like that. So we’d occasionally get together, and when my grandparents were in town, for example, my stepmother’s parents, they would pray, and they were pretty devout in their faith, so they would go to church. We would say grace for supper every night, even though that was about the only time we talked about God. Other than when my Dad would hit his hand with a hammer or something like that, and then I heard God’s name quite often.

Okay, yeah.

But growing up we didn’t really have much interaction with other Christian families. My friends, there were no Christians in my peer group, at least not that I knew of. If they were, they were closet Christians. Primarily I hung out with people that were pretty much humanists and a lot of interest in the occult and anti-Christian sentiment. So a lot of it was rooted in some of the punk rock culture and the New Wave/industrial music scene and things like that. So a lot of the people that I hung out with could consider themselves Wiccans or witches or humanists or even Satanists in many cases. Not a lot of Christians.

So, Jeff, as you were growing up, you had some dots of religiosity with a dinner prayer, that kind of thing, but it’s obviously not something that your family took on with any serious nature. As a child, it sounds like it was just part of the routine but nothing more, but I would imagine that these humanist friends that you had, was that more towards like middle school, early teen? Or high school? Tell me about when you started hanging out with these friends.

It was really late middle school and going into high school, I guess, is where that really started. And just one point from the earlier comment. I do remember one time clearly going to Mass with my stepmother’s parents, and my dad went with me, and I remember as we walked into the Mass, they had the holy water set to the side, so that you could genuflect, make the sign of the cross and all of that, and I remember watching my grandparents, step grandparents, go in and dip their fingers in the water and cross themselves, and as a young kid, I wanted to emulate that behavior, and I remember reaching over to touch the water and my dad pushing my hand away. So it was a very interesting dichotomy because, on the one hand, we’d do these supper prayers. On the other hand, when we are engaging these rituals in a Mass setting, it’s something he didn’t want me to participate in. And it’s funny because I’ve never talked to him about it. I never really thought much about it. But it’s just an interesting contrast.

Yeah. It makes you wonder why he would almost endorse a ritual in one sense but not in another.

Yeah.

I’m sure that was a little bit confusing for you.

It was. But as a nice young person I just put it aside and didn’t think about it for years.

Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. So your impression of God or religion or Christianity at that time, growing up, particularly in your teenage years, as you were, it sounds like, part of a group that was rejecting all of that. Did you have any views towards religious people or institutions?

Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that actually gets at the root of what my religiosity was. Because it was really focused on people. And I’ve told a number of people over the years that, as an atheist, I actually wasn’t a very educated atheist. I was educated in my observation of people but not educated earlier on in the way atheists approached questions about who God is and the historicity of the Gospel accounts or things like that. So it was very much a focus on people, and even more so a focus on how I perceived Christian people to be, particularly with my peer group and my desires as a young man. It was primarily centered around hedonistic enjoyments, and so for me, Christians were those that were trying to take away any fun out of life, take away the joys of life.

Yeah. And that’s interesting, especially related to even the… perhaps not only the activities that you were involved that were no doubt pleasurable on some level, but also you hinted that there was some kind of dark spirituality that you were even interested in. I’m curious about that aspect of your kind of pushing away from one form of spirituality but actually engaging in another.

I think on some level there was a part of me that wanted to believe in something more, and I remember, at a younger age, maybe earlier middle school or sometime in middle school, reading The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, which was talking about King Arthur legends and Merlin and things like that, and I remember at one point—part of the story line centers around Mithraism and the idea that perhaps Merlin was this Mithraist and that’s where his power came from, and I don’t remember the story that well, but I do remember the aspects of Mithraism, and so I recall walking to the bus stop one morning and tying this little spruce branch around a tree and sort of doing this little offering idea, and I think I was always enchanted by the idea that there’s something greater, but I didn’t really believe in it, particularly as I got older. So while I had friends that were involved in Wiccan religion and some paganism, I didn’t really have the sense that there was this devil that would listen to you if you decided to become a Satanist or that you could influence nature as a witch or anything like that. But I wanted it to be true on some level. And, in fact, I embraced the humanistic aspects of Satanism, to the point that I had a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and read through that and was really enamored with that sort of mindset.

I know that the humanistic impetus in that movement is very strongly that you’re the captain of your own ship and a very strong sense of autonomy and control over your own destiny. Was that appealing to you?

Oh, absolutely! A big part of that is, “If it feels good, do it,” and I think our modern culture even has quite a sense of that as well, which is, “If it feels good, it can’t be wrong unless it starts to encroach on somebody else’s boundaries.” And so, for me, that was a very appealing message, and again, as young man with a desire to have the sensual enjoyment in life, that was very compelling, to say, “Whatever feels good to you, go ahead and and do it.”

So in a sense, then, you were involved with friends and your particular culture that was pushing away, I guess almost an anti-God sensibility, from religion and religious things, but at the same time, you said that you were focused on the people and that there was a negative hue or a negative perception of Christians and Christianity. What informed that? Was that informed by the actual experience with Christians? Or was it something that was informed more by what people were saying and what you perhaps wanted to hear?

That’s a really good question. I think that some aspects of it were certainly informed by the media, and in particular, this was growing up as a teenager in the eighties and watching MTV and music videos. As an eighties kid, there was a lot of push back against the culture. I remember—I was speaking about it to somebody the other day—the Genesis video with Ronald Reagan and just this idea to push back against authority. And then Reagan and Nancy and the Moral Majority and all of those influences, where you’re looking at this media imagery of far right people wanting to put censorship labels on music. And you just sort of built this view of Christians as this vocal group of people that want to take away anything that you might enjoy. But again, I wasn’t really informed by a lot of direct personal experience with individuals. It was more of a collective thing.

I see. Yeah. Because it sounds like there weren’t a lot of Christians, I suppose, in your world.

No. Not at all.

I would imagine, too, that it would be easy to develop a bit of an us/them kind of mentality and strengthen your understanding or perception of who you think someone is without direct engagement. That’s a very easy thing to do.

Absolutely.

So you were developing this sense of identity, this, I would imagine, anti-Christian identity, informed by your friends and the culture, your moral choices. Was there anything else involved in that? Perhaps education or your view of science or anything else that contributed to that push back against Christians and Christianity?

As I said, I wasn’t a terribly educated atheist. In fact, I’m much more educated in atheist arguments at this point in life than I was at that age. But I did think that science was the answer to everything, so it was, in a sense, my religion. Although again—I was a smart kid. I had a good education. I understood basic scientific principles. But I did not really have a clear sense of all the different lines of argumentation that I’m aware of today. Nevertheless, I still felt like the earth began with the big bang and everything evolved, and where was the need for God in all of that? Science could explain all the questions that we have. And religion was just some holdover from a time where people didn’t have any understanding of the universe they lived in. So I absolutely held that prejudice, but again, it wasn’t a terribly well-informed prejudice. It was just something that I inherited by default.

So Jeff, it sounds like, again, you were pretty well comfortable with your identity as an atheist. How old were you, by the way, when you really identified yourself with that label.

I think the first time I applied that to myself was when I joined the Army. In fact, when I joined the Army and they were issuing my dog tags, they ask you for your religious preference. And I had never really thought much about it as a question, and so I put atheist on there as my religious preference, and it was, I think, the first time I had ever thought enough about it to say, “This is what I am.” Later, I remember having to get dog tags reissued, and they refused to put atheist on there for some reason. It was very strange. So I put agnostic, but I really still considered myself an atheist. And I think I did teeter back and forth a little bit, only because it seemed like atheist was such a firm position to take, and how much can we truly know? So while I was functionally an atheist, sometimes I would label myself as an agnostic.

So then, Jeff, walk us along. Tell us what seemed to move you in a different direction. What seemed to cause you to perhaps question this identity or the way that you were thinking about God and Christians and Christianity?

It’s a difficult question to answer on some levels because I don’t really know when the transformation of thinking began. When I look back at the influences that stuck with me, many of them were things that happened, but I didn’t recognize until later that they had some impact. So for example, as a 19-year-old person with an attitude, I had a Jehovah’s Witness come to my door, and he wanted to talk to me. And I was feeling particularly obstinate that day, so I invited him in, and he started talking to me about what he believed, and at some point in the discussion, he was talking about the Bible, and I said, “Well, what makes yours more valid than mine?” And he said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I walked back and I brought out LaVey’s Satanic Bible. And I fully expected this to have the guy kind of walk out on me, and he didn’t. He stayed and engaged.

And I had asked a number of questions, and I remember, several days after he had visited, he came back, and he had a stack of papers that he had printed out that had answers to a number of the questions that I had asked. And I never even looked at them. I threw them away. And to this day, I’m not even completely sure he was Jehovah’s Witness because I don’t really remember, but he knocked on the door and wanted to talk about God. But looking back, I recognize the impact that that had on me, because this guy believed what he was selling enough to come back to an obstinate kid and want to give him the education, to give him the answers that the kid was asking for.

So things like that, as I look back, I see that there were a number of occasions that were similar to that throughout my life. And I think, over time, those softened me a bit. And I was able to start to see that it’s not just a bunch of hypocrites but that there are people that really do put into practice what they say they believe, and they take it seriously.

And so as I started working in a professional career, I was 29 when I finally accepted Christ, and over a few years prior to that moment—and it really wasn’t a moment. It was actually a process. But a few years prior to that, I had been befriended by a guy who I worked with named Greg, and Greg was a very devout Christian, and I had another friend named Kevin who was a very devout atheist, and it was that picture of the angel and the devil on your shoulder, each one whispering in your ear. But Greg and I would talk quite a bit, and I would ask questions, and he would have answers. And when he didn’t have answers, he would find answers.

And as I started questioning what I believed about the origin of the universe and what existed prior to the big bang and how did it come to be, some of those questions really started to nag at me. And I thought, “I need to look into this a bit more.” And those were the kind of questions that Greg actually wasn’t very well educated in, but he had friends who were, and he would get resources and help me to start to explore some of those things. And so, over time, that exploration is what led me to change my views and come ultimately to believe that Christ is who He says He is. Who Christianity claims that He was.

Wow! That’s interesting because… especially the way that you describe your being softened to the possibility of God, that it came through people who authentically believed. It wasn’t just a ritual that they performed or I guess a service that they showed up to and lived differently through the week. You engaged with people who actually took their faith seriously, and believed that there were answers to be found within religious faith, which I’m sure was a bit novel in a way, particularly not only with regard to answers spiritually, but also answers you’re describing even with regard to reality and the world and the cosmos. You’re talking about a bigger picture of reality and having answers to questions like that. I find it interesting, too, that you had these two friends, both kind of speaking into your ear and into your life. Was that a bit challenging at times? I’m also curious. Did your atheist friend find substantive answers for you when you were looking for them?

Interestingly, no. And I think part of that is because there’s a certain degree of posturing that goes on as you’re coming to these questions about what you really fundamentally believe. And so I had a reputation as a loud person of atheistic persuasion, and so, with my friend at the time, my atheist friend, I probably was not very forthright with my questions and this process. Because you don’t want to be seen as somebody who might be going to the other side, although to be fair, I didn’t think that I was. I had no belief that I was actually changing what I ultimately thought or believed to be true, but I just had these questions. And I didn’t take the other questions back to this guy. The Christian friend was a compelling place to go and ask because of the authenticity. And because he really did live out what it looks like to be a Christian, with the humility and the kindness and the love and the gentleness. And so he was very approachable in that way. And I didn’t feel judged by going to him. And I would have felt judged going to my atheist friend and saying, “Hey, I’m looking at these questions, and there’s something compelling about this Christianity thing.” So I was not very comfortable going to my atheist friend, which is interesting.

Yes, yes. So I would imagine, in this exploration, it was intellectual. There were answers that you were seeking. How long did this process take? I presume, over time, that as you were finding answers that you were able to see how those answers were making sense, not only of the world but of the way that you were living or perceiving life?

Yeah. And it was a fairly lengthy process for me. And this is where our relationship with the C.S. Lewis Institute is interesting because I can very much appreciate Lewis’s journey from an atheist to a theist to a Christian and the time that that took. And I can also appreciate his story about his motorcycle ride where, when he departed he wasn’t a Christian, and when he arrived, he was, if I remember it correctly. I have that view, to some extent, of my personal journey as well. Because, as I started down that road, I started believing that there must be something more and particularly looking at the origin of the universe as one of the big questions. The scientific answers just ceased to make sense for me after a while, and they almost became a little bit reaching, particularly when you start looking into multiverse theories and things like that.

It seemed to me that you’re exercising a different kind of faith to kind of go down that road, so as I became more of a theist and open to the idea, my wife, at the same time, who has grown up in a Christian home and was a very strong Christian as a young person, started returning to the church and found that she wanted to raise our kids with Christianity which, early on in particular, a very contentious desire for her. It was contentious within our relationship. I didn’t want my kids to be raised as Christians. I certainly didn’t want her giving money to the church, which, for some reason, bothered me more than the idea of her raising my kids as Christians, and so as she started returning to church, I started being more open, and it was during this time that, one morning I woke up, and she was getting the kids ready to go to church, and I said, “I think I’ll go to church with you today.” To this day, there was nothing besides God that I could say that informed that desire, because I was adamantly opposed to it up until that point.

And so I went. And it was one of those stereotypical moments that you hear about where the pastor seemed to be speaking right to me. And that was not a conversion moment for me, but it was a moment that continued to open me to the possibility that maybe Christianity does hold some answers. And so that helped me to get past that obstacle of going more into almost a theism to being open to a greater possibility of theism to being open to the possibility of the truth of Christianity.

One thing I think about when I hear your journeying is you continue, beginning at some point you became open to the possibility of God. And then you became open to another aspect. Something softened in you because of seeing authenticity or commitment to faith or perhaps you became more open because you started questioning. And you allowed yourself the possibility of another worldview being true. And that strikes me because oftentimes, if we’re not open, it’s hard to really see and weigh your current worldview versus potentially another worldview or the explanatory power of another worldview. And to me it sounds like you were making intentional choices to be open to another perspective. Oftentimes we hear there’s no evidence for God, and so if there’s no evidence then it’s not even worth engaging for some. How would you respond to someone who might make that declaration, “There’s no evidence for God,” in terms of perhaps even openness to consider another perspective.

Yeah. It’s a great question. And one of the difficulties in talking about evidence for God is that there is no single one thing that you can point at and say definitively, “There you go. God exists.” By the same token, there’s no one thing you can point at definitively and say, “There you go. God does not exist.” And so for me it was ultimately a cumulative case, where there are a variety of evidences and things that we believe to be true, hold to be true, understand to be true. Things that we scientifically believe and things that we intuitively believe. And I spoke earlier about morality as an example of right and wrong and the idea that right and wrong is either grounded in something or it’s just grounded in our own preferences and group-think. And particularly in America today as we look at all of the division and the challenges that we face as a country, of people that have different views of what’s right and what’s wrong, we all believe instinctively that there’s something grounding that sense of right and wrong. And so being open to the possibility that that foundation is, in fact, God, that without God, there is no ultimate floor for morality. It really is a question of preference.

And so as we start to wrestle with our own priorities, in life and in how we engage the world, I think this question keeps coming up. As I look at beauty, how do I understand beauty? Recognizing that different people view things differently. How do I understand morality, recognizing that people have different beliefs about different subjects. And being open to the possibility that God ultimately is and can be a foundation to those beliefs and thoughts and considering that. And looking then at the different evidences that are available, at the different ways of approaching the subject.

So yeah, as you were saying, I think sometimes it really does require a little bit of openness to take a look at the evidence that’s there, but I’m glad that you really emphasize here that there’s not one sort of bulletproof argument for God, if you will. That Jesus is not the end of a philosophical argument, although of course there are other things like the resurrection that really historically, evidentially ground the reality of His resurrection and claim to be God. Some perhaps have a little bit more evidential value than others, but still, as you say, it’s not just one thing. It’s a combination of things. And I applaud you for really being open to taking a journey of exploration because, for most of us, I think we like to live in the comfort of our own worldview and not be challenged, but you were willing to go on a journey. And that’s not an easy thing to do. For your worldview and your world, really, to flip upside down.

Yeah. I think you make a really great point, and I just wanted to weigh in on that and say that I think you’re absolutely right, and particularly with the resurrection. That was a significant factor for me. And particularly as you look at how the church spoke about Jesus and wrote about Jesus. It was all based on the resurrection. And you look at Paul’s writings, and he essentially says, “If Christ has not been raised, then your hope is in vain.” And, to me, that is an interesting confirmation of the fact that these Christian writers were making claims that they believed to be true because they’re flat-out saying, “If He didn’t come back from the dead, all of this is just a joke. It’s useless. So go on and do something else.” That aspect of Christianity has always been very important to me because it is making the claim that our faith is rooted in an actual event that took place at a particular point in time.

For those who might be listening and are curious about perhaps what resources you might have looked at in investigating some of these big questions, do you have any recommendations?

Great question. Of course we mentioned C.S. Lewis Institute, so I have to say that C.S. Lewis has a number of books on various topics. I think Mere Christianity is a great starting point to be open to exploring some of these questions of what is Christianity and what do Christians believe and why is it compelling. I think moving on, his book on miracles, for me, is a very interesting one and compelling because it’s essentially… To distill it down, it’s opening up to the possibility of miracles and understanding them in their context and whether or not they logically could exist. I think there are a number of great books written by different philosophers, Alvin Plantinga comes to mind, to just explore some of the questions. And there’s a number of books on Old Testament history, and I guess, as I think about it, maybe the answer is so difficult to come up with, particular set of resources, because I recognize that everyone’s challenges are in different areas, so some people might have challenges with the historicity, and some people might have challenges with some of the ethical claims or moral claims. And so it’s more difficult than to make a single recommendation or a couple of recommendations, because people are going to want to research in the area where they’re most passionate.

Right. You mentioned, as part of your journeying, that you read the Bible, perhaps for the first time. Was your experience with that informative or enlightening or surprising or those kinds of things, in terms of your own journeying?

Very much so. And as I mentioned, I had started going to church, and so there were a lot of things I was unfamiliar with. Growing up in the US as a kid, I remember going to the dentist, and they always had these big blue book of Bible stories and things like that, so I had that level of exposure as a very young child. As an older kid, I didn’t have any exposure whatsoever, so I wasn’t fluent with any of the Bible stories. When my wife started taking our kids back to church, she subsequently bought a lot of Veggie Tales videos, which is this animated cartoons about vegetables singing and talking about God, so my biblical knowledge was pretty well informed by Veggie Tales more than anything else. So on one level, as I would read through these stories, correlating the cucumber and an actual person from the Bible is fun and exciting. But the biggest thing was just, again, as I said earlier, seeing pictures of Jesus throughout the scripture. And when I came to the New Testament, that’s when it really all started to click into place.

Reading through the Old Testament was challenging, and you see stories that, they’re hard to make sense of. And you have a lot of questions. But when you get into the New Testament and you start to see how Jesus can answer those questions and make sense of some of those stories that were difficult, I think that’s where things really began to click for me. And so, as I talked about the 34-week Bible study that I was in, it was the latter part of that when we had finally gotten into the New Testament which was when I became a Christian. And even then, going on from there, I think there was still a process. I can’t put a finger on an exact day.

So everything kind of started to come together to make sense as a whole, as an understanding of the world, of yourself, of reality.

As we’re wrapping up our conversation, I do want to, here at the end, give you an opportunity to talk with somebody who may be listening who is curious, not only about your journey but perhaps their own, and that they may have that sense of openness perhaps that you had at one point. What would you say to someone who is a curious skeptic and intrigued by the possibility of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Bible?

I think the first thing I would say is that there’s a lot of noise on both sides. There are a lot of voices clamoring to be heard. And for me, it was important to take myself out of that a bit and to recognize that there are experts on both sides of this subject. There are experts scientifically. There are experts philosophically and theologically. There are people that are experts in the Bible and the transmission of texts, some of which believe and some of which don’t believe. And being open to the reality that there are people with the same inputs that reach different conclusions. So recognizing the impact that your worldview, what you believe about the world and the way things work, is going to have on your ability to receive some of the information you’re studying and being open to the possibility that your worldview is perhaps skewed. And allowing for the possibility that the other side might have something true to say. And spending time researching both sides diligently. And it’s easy sometimes to fall off to one side or the other and not look at both sides, so I think it’s important to look at both sides critically but openly.

I think that’s great advice. No matter which direction you’re coming from. It’s always good to be thoughtful about not only your ideas and your worldview but others as well. And for those who are listening today who perhaps are believers in Christianity and in God, and they want to be able to engage with those who don’t see life and the reality and the world the same way, what would you say to them to help foster a greater example, like you mentioned in your story you had people cross your path who were a real embodied example of Christianity that, on some level, you found attractive. Can you speak to that?

Yeah. I would say be slow to speak and quick to listen. People want to be heard, and they want to know that you’re listening to what they’re asking, that you care about what’s important to them, and no one wants to feel like you’re just there to put a notch in a belt or to get your word in, so listen carefully to what people have to say and hear their genuine concerns, and then seek to find the answers to those concerns. And don’t just go in with a program or an agenda. Take time. And don’t bucket people into one group. There’s many different beliefs across the spectrum of atheism, agnosticism, Buddhism, etc., as there are within Christianity. There are a lot of different things that people believe, so take the time to get to know someone, care about them genuinely, and answer their questions sincerely.

I think that’s excellent, excellent advice, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on today, telling your story, giving us advice, and just some tremendous insights, not only into your journey but challenging us all to really be more thoughtful about what it is that we believe and why we believe it, so it’s encouraging and exciting for me to hear such a dramatic change, really, from actually someone who has an Anton LaVey Satanic Bible on their coffee table to now having a Christian or Judeo-Christian Bible that you’re actually spending time studying at the graduate level. Wow! If someone doesn’t say that’s a transformation, I don’t know what is. So I’m just excited and encouraged really for people to listen to your story and to really be challenged in their own way of thinking and living, so thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s very exciting.

Great.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jeff’s story today. You can find out more about the C.S. Lewis Institute, as well as some of his book resources that he recommended during his story in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it, and if so, subscribe and review and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see again how someone else flips the record of their life.