The story I want to tell you began on Memorial Day of 2005. I had a massive heart attack. I was recuperating from a fusion on my right ankle and just felt yucky. I was thinking maybe I was just feeling the withdrawal from pain medicine, but the attack felt like a knife in my back. I was rushed to Virtua Hospital, where they saw that, indeed, I was having a heart attack.

Through my struggles with faith in high school and the beginning of college, I knew I had to come to the decision: Am I going to continue to please myself or am I going to pursue God’s plan for my life?

I grew up going to church, but we went because it was what “good people” do. Our church had one Bible, and it was read out loud after we communally said prayers and creeds. The Bible, to me, was distant and difficult to understand. I was told I was forgiven because I said the prayer everyone else did, but I never felt forgiven.

The church we attended was very legalistic, setting a high bar for its congregants, and I was unable to discern that some of what was being taught was not Biblical. When I found out that some of the leadership within the church were not being held to the same standards, I was disappointed and turned my back on the church and, more important, on Christ. It would be many years before my faith would be rekindled.