I suppose if you've visited the site you'll be interested in who exactly I am and what my testimony is, so here it is.
I was born in Northern Illinois in a town called Evanston, which is north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. I grew up in Elgin Illinois, which is North-West suburb of Chicago. I was raised by my mother, and her "partner". I have never met my father and don't know his name.
My mother was raised in a Bible church, which I wouldn't find out until years later, however she converted to Catholicism because her partner was Catholic, and so I was raised Catholic.
Our family, which consisted of me, my two brothers, my mother, and her partner, were devout Catholics. We went to church probably 50/52 Sundays on any given year. Some of my earliest memories are dressing up to go to church at St. Mary's in Elgin when I was 4 and 5 years old.
My parents were very liberal, and so I naturally took that as my idealogy growing up, although I was never really interested in politics. My older brother and I went to a public school in Elgin called McKinley Elementary School. During my 2nd grade year, my older brother got into a fight, which scared my mother.
Also during this time, my parents were unhappy with the "preaching" at St. Mary's and were looking for a different Catholic Church to attend in Elgin, and things kind of fell into place so that I wound up attending St. Lawrence Catholic School for my 3rd grade year.
I now went to church twice a week - once at school on Tuesday or Wednesday and once with my family on Sunday. I was a good student, but I will admit that none of the "doctrine" we were taught (if we were ever taught any) really sunk in. I don't recall knowing much about Catholic doctrine or the Bible, other than some of the famous stories like Noah's ark, Sampson's life, and Moses's life from an illustrated Bible story book I read in fourth grade.
All this to say that when I graduated from St. Lawrence in 8th grade, despite having been an altar server, funeral server, and having sat through hundreds of Catholic masses, I probably couldn't quote 5 verses of Scripture if I had a loaded gun to my head. I knew nothing about where I was going when I died.
My eighth grade year, 2 of the kids in the class above mine (they were freshmen in high school then) died. Since the class sizes were very small at St. Lawrence, this was devastating to all of us. One of them, a close friend, was hit by a car by a woman high on prescription pills in Denver. The other one died in his sleep because of an undiagnosed heart defect.
I don't remember if these events made me ponder whether I was going to Heaven or not, but I do remember being extremely sad. When you're taught and led to believe that such a thing as assurance of Salvation is impossible or unknowable, I think crises like this don't really lead to a search for truth, but instead a redoubling of your efforts to try to be holy, if that makes sense. That was my case anyway, if I remember correctly.
I had been going the way of the world towards the end of my 8th grade year, and that process hastened and progressed into high school. I won't divulge all the gory details but you can probably imagine what all I got myself into. This was a very frustrating time of my life because I knew enough about what the Catholic church's teachings were to know that I had become a bad Catholic. I suppose my introduction to the "bigger" sins destroyed whatever image that I had allowed myself to believe before that I was an above-average person in terms of morality and behavior.
However things went on for 2 years like this. There were recourses within Catholicism that I could appeal to in order to make myself feel justified, and I guess that's what I did for those 2 years.
It's strange to look back on things because I remember thinking at the time in the back of my mind that I was probably going to Hell, but I suppressed any religious thoughts so that this didn't bother me. I guess that's the position of many unsaved people today. I figured it was likely that I would go to Hell, but I tried not to think about the topic, and just held out hope that maybe things would work out alright, especially if I was able to clean my life up in the future.
I would consider myself a nominal Catholic at this point because I wasn't entirely sure I believed any of it. I had frequent doubts as to whether to adhere myself to any religion, and since skepticism was so common, I would say that my faith was quite weak in the conviction that God existed at all.
However, sometimes the Holy Spirit evidently uses strange tools to convict people. My Junior year of high school, we were studying European History, and my textbook had a section on Pascal's Wager, which is basically the idea that if God exists and you decide to live for him, you've gained everything - eternity in Heaven. If God doesn't exist, and you live for him, you haven't lost much - only a finite lifetime. Therefore, the wager goes, it makes sense to operate as if God exists even if you aren't sure.
I remember this argument distinctly piquing my interest in the spiritual side of things, and I began looking up things about religion in my free time. I approached all of these arguments with the desire that God did exist, because I was interested to know about him if he existed, and no doubt that influenced my mindset and which arguments I was convinced by in the various Theist vs Atheist debates I would watch around this time.
During this time, I found a ministry called GotQuestions, which seemed to have an article on every spiritual topic that I could think of a question for. I read probably hundreds of these articles during this time, and many of them were Salvation-related: How to go to Heaven, How to not go to Hell, etc. At some point, I don't remember which article or when, I became very convinced that the Bible taught Salvation by faith alone and not what I had been taught up to this point in my life at church.
I remember the first time that I saw Ephesians 2:8-9, and it became plain to me that "Yep, faith alone is what the Bible clearly teaches". I remember praying a prayer many times to ask Jesus to save me and telling him that I trusted him, since I thought you had to do that at the time. I firmly believed that He was my only hope of getting to Heaven, sometime during the Fall of 2015 when I was 16 years old.
Unfortunately nowadays, GotQuestions is 4-point Calvinist and teaches Lordship Salvation, but they still have many articles that teach a Free Grace Gospel, including their main Salvation page, at least as I write this article.
Around this time I was introduced to Kent Hovind's material online, and his presentations convinced me that Evolution was a fraud, while also introducing me to the King James Version issue along with many other Biblical topics. Through him, I discovered Steven Anderson, who was my main "teacher" along with Peter Ruckman for many years when I was newly saved. I disagree with all three men on various things now, but in general they are solid Bible teachers and helped get me rooted in some vital truth when I was first growing up as a Christian.
Early on, I also came across the significant contingent of teachers that were Calvinist and taught Lordship Salvation on YouTube - Paul Washer, John Piper, John MacArthur, Francis Chan, Todd Friel, James White, and Ray Comfort were the main ones when I was newly born-again. This was troubling to me because they used a lot of the same terminology that I had grown accustomed to, and said that they believed in faith alone.
I recognized immediately however, that what they were teaching was totally different from what I originally considered "faith alone" to be because of their constant reliance and emphasis on a believer's works and desires as proof of Salvation, while never quantifying the amount of works or the extent to which your desires would need to change in order to have assurance that you were genuinely saved.
The thought that their brand of "faith alone" was the real thing was something I found very distressing, as I still was battling a lot of sins and sinful desires that I had picked up before I was saved, and this perversion of the Gospel message didn't allow for that without seriously bringing my Salvation into question.
Being an obsessive person at the time, I went through a very stressful period of confirmation, trying to make sure what I was taught and believed was right. I went through a period of trying to determine if I had believed in Jesus "correctly", praying that Jesus would "truly" save me, and doubting whether it was possible for me to truly believe at all, since I had tried to believe so hard and yet I knew my life and thoughts were so far from perfect. Such is the natural outcome of Calvinism and Lordship Salvation.
This turmoil is what I credit for being very anti-Lordship Salvation, as I personally know the kinds of doubts and mental anguish that this causes a person who wants to have complete assurance of Salvation. As I grew to understand the doctrine of the Old Man vs the New Man, and got more confident in the Bible's teachings on the utter freeness of Salvation, this uncertainty dissipated, and my assurance was gradually restored.
I can confidently say that I came out of that turmoil on the other side so strongly convinced of the truth of the freeness of Salvation that I can never conceivably be shaken from it at this point. I now hope to preach the freeness of the gift of God, eternal life, as much as I can, and that's the reason why I made this site.
I thank God for directing my paths in this way, and I pray he will let me live a long life and win many to himself by preaching the simple Free Grace Gospel - that anyone who trusts in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to pay for their sins and rose from the dead, has everlasting life, and will not be condemned (John 5:24).