What a journey it’s been! I have a wife that loves me and we’re best friends. We have two dogs. I have a family and some lifelong friends. I started my own company and it’s finally starting to thrive. There is a lot that I’m very grateful for.

However, I’ve also experienced a lot of loss and heartache in my life already. I’ve been divorced. My dad passed away from a heart attack very young, recently I lost my last grandparent, and my wife and I have lost 5 babies from miscarriages.

I guess I’ve learned that you can’t really experience the highs unless you know what the lows feel like. The strange thing I’ve found though is that neither the highs or lows last for very long. They are fleeting moments. They are a memory, sometimes.

This story is about my personal journey to discovery something that changed my life. Something that has filled me up with a sense of love and purpose that I’ve never experienced before.

My hope in writing this is not to try and convince anyone of anything. It’s simply me sharing something that has impacted me so deeply and has brought me an incredible sense of peace and joy that I hope others get to experience it too. Because it’s awesome!

When I was young, my parents got divorced. My dad no longer lived with us but would come in town on weekends. He would take my brother and I to church or he would try and have our own Bible study at home. I did not really understand much other than it was something that was supposed to be important. I guess because my Dad thought it was important, I did too.

As I grew up a little more, I came to think of God more of a measurement of right and wrong or being a ‘good person’. I don’t remember my church or anyone around me talking about Jesus very much. It was just God the almighty it seemed.

In high school, baseball and partying were my priorities. In college, I transitioned my energy to starting a career and being successful at business but partying was still a top priority. My faith was not something I even thought about really. I guess I felt like God would always be there if I ever needed him kind of thing.

I was very career focused and after being part of a startup, I got recruited into a healthcare tech company where I grew up so to say in my profession and became passionate about technology and business. While at this company, I completed my MBA and got married. Things were going really well until they weren’t. And then things fell a part quickly.

My ex-wife and I did not have any foundation to fall back on in terms of our faith so when things got hard in our relationship, we fell a part. It was devastating and humiliating for me. Ever since I was kid, I always vowed that divorce would never happen to me. I would not let it happen. But it did. And it impacts every area of your life. What I thought was real, wasn’t. I thought I could control my life but I couldn’t. This experience cut deep and through it, I learned what it feels like to be alone. It created a spark inside me though to discover something more meaningful than what I thought was my world.

Through the experience of my divorce, it was motivation for me to start my own company. I was now at a point where I didn’t need to support anyone except for my dog, and I’d figure out a way to feed my dog! So I went for it but slowly at first. It would take some time before I left my full-time job and went all in and moved to Atlanta by myself to join my partners to try and grow our company. I remember my first night in my one bedroom apartment. I had just driven a moving truck up from Jacksonville where I rented out my house. I remember looking around by myself thinking, what in the hell am I doing? At the time I was dating my now wife and did not know if she would be willing to move to Atlanta. I literally gave away, sold, and packed up everything else I owned into a truck and moved to a city that I barely knew anyone to start a company that I had no idea if it would be successful.

I remember making a trip back home to Titusville, Fl where my mom, brother, and nieces live and was out seeing a good buddy. We were out at a bar catching up and a friend of his joined us. Somehow the conversation turned to religion and he declared that he was an atheist. So I asked, why? It just seemed odd to believe in nothing. That we as people are just matter with no soul or sense of higher purpose. He looked at me with this sarcastic grin and asked me, ‘so, do you really believe Noah built an arch?’ .

I found myself in this position where I was not able to intelligently articulate why I believed what I believe. I had always just believed at a high-level that there was a God and that I would go to heaven after I die. This conversation put a chip on my shoulder and it pissed me off. Not at the guy that asked me the sarcastic question, but more around the fact that I wanted to find out the truth for myself. I wanted to dig in and discover what was really true. Not because someone thought I should believe in something but because I wanted to decide for myself if I truly believed in God and in the Bible or not.

During this time of me starting to search for what I believed, I got engaged and married to my wife in Atlanta. I felt a strong desire to bring faith into our relationship so we started attending Buckhead Church together. During one service, there was an open invite made for anyone to check out a program they offer called, Starting Point. It was pitched that this was for anyone with questions and since I had a lot of them, I thought it was perfect.

My wife joined me at Starting Point, which is a small group of around 10 people who commit to meet for 8 weeks where we would discuss and learn about what it means to follow Jesus and give us opportunities to ask real and tough questions without being polite.

So I came with my questions and I wanted answers. The funny thing was, when I started asking honest and genuine questions about my faith, other people started opening up too. We started having these really authentic conversations that I never had before about life and faith and I was really attracted to it. After the program ended, I felt like I wanted to so something more but didn’t know what.

A few months later, a good buddy of mine was visiting me and we were picking up a few things at the grocery store. My wife doesn’t like going to the store with me because I talk to all the people that work there. She likes to be in and out but I like to get to know the people. Many of the employees know me by name. I even had employees at Publix texting me to wish me Happy Thanksgiving!

Well on this visit with my buddy in town, the same thing happened and many of the people that worked there saw me and wanted to chat. As my buddy and I were leaving, I’ll never forget what he said to me when he stopped, looked me in the eyes, and said ‘John, the day you use your talent for the Lord, it will be an amazing day.’

Then and there it hit me. I have this talent to connect with people. To make others feel welcome and relate to people. I wasn’t using the talent that God gave me for His purpose. I was merely sitting on the bench when I could be using my abilities in the game! I decided that I was going to combine three things I was passionate about which were entrepreneurship, technology, and my faith and would start a Bible study group, similar to what I experienced with the Starting Point group at Buckhead Church. My company had an office located in the Atlanta Tech Village where there were already plenty of tech entrepreneurs, so I decided that I’d bring the faith component and start a group there.

I knew one other person who was a believer in Christ at the Tech Village and I told him about my plan and asked if he’d be willing to join me. He said, sure! But, he suggested we talk to this guy from an organization called High Tech Ministries. I knew nothing about this organization, nor had I ever heard of this guy before. When we all connected, I told him about my plan to start a group at the Tech Village and he said that’s great because there were two other people that recently came to him and wanted to start a group at the Tech Village as well.

In January of 2017 we all met to discuss a plan to start a new Grace@Work group, which was what they were called as a part of High Tech Ministries. That February we hosted our first study meeting. I didn’t know what to expect. I was blown away when about 50 people showed up!

The study took off and so did my faith journey. I was learning so much and here I was leading this group that I felt I had no business leading, given my lack of knowledge about the Bible. But God used my heart to reach people in ways I did not know were possible. God used the talents he gave me to connect and relate to people in a way that was authentic and genuine. It was amazing! There were weeks when I felt a tingling on the back of my neck, as I’d be speaking. I swear it felt like God was speaking through me some days.

The group was going strong and my faith was growing as my knowledge about the Bible grew and being around others who shared experiences about their faith, which strengthened my own. That Spring, the co-leader of our Grace@Work group invited me to something called, Walk to Emmaus. This was right around the time of my dad’s funeral so I pushed it off. Basically, I was told that he couldn’t tell me anything about it but it would be the best experience of my life. However, I won’t have my phone and I wouldn’t know where I was going. Needless to say that my wife was not exactly thrilled about me leaving on a Thursday and coming back on Sunday with having no way to get in touch with me and not knowing where I was going.

That Fall I agreed to go. It was the first weekend in November. I remember on that Saturday, praying. I was praying harder than I had ever prayed before. I had tears coming down my face. I was making the decision to truly give my life to Jesus. I mean really doing it. Down in your soul doing it. Giving up control and taking all of these doubts and questions and giving them to Him and fully putting my faith in Jesus as my Lord and Savior. That day I laid down my life for Christ and His Holy Spirit filled me up to where the love overflowed. I have never felt so much joy and peace like that. It was the best feeling I had ever experienced and I’m so grateful for it. Love overflowed in my heart and it made me want to just love others. I experienced what it felt like to have a relationship with Jesus. To know that I was known by Him. This is what I had been missing. A love greater than any love I had ever felt. It changed my life.

I realized that all my life I had been searching for something to bring me happiness. Something that would give my life purpose and fulfillment. I looked for it everywhere. I looked for it in alcohol, sex, and in business achievements. For me, with running my own company, it was really easy for my business to become my identity. The problem was, when the company was not doing well, it meant I wasn’t doing well.

As an entrepreneur, you are always trying to hit that next milestone or round of funding. You notice how others seem to have success with the latest press releases. You sacrifice everything to build something and be successful. The only thing is when you finally get there, to whatever goal you’ve been working so hard for, it feels great for a moment but it doesn’t last very long. The next day when you wake up, you realize you’re still the same person. Now you have to go after the next milestone. It’s an ongoing cycle and it never stops. The sense of fulfillment you achieve doesn’t last but for a moment until you’re looking at the next goal that you think if you achieve, you will feel happiness.

I’ve now learned that all these worldly things can’t fill the God size whole you have in your heart. The only thing that can truly give you fulfillment, peace, and happiness is a relationship with Jesus Christ. I now know that because I experienced it for myself. I now know that I am loved beyond anything I can imagine and have a purpose greater than any one company or whatever I’m focused on. Regardless of what happens in my business, I know that it does not define who I am as a person because I have a greater purpose. This has meant I don’t have to constantly be searching for something to fill me up. I already have it. I found my happiness.

Now don’t get me wrong, I work harder than most and extremely committed and want to win. I just know that it’s ultimately in God’s hands so now in addition to working very hard, I pray. I pray for God to bless my business and my family. I ask him what he wants for my life. I ask how I can serve him and bring him glory and pray that he would work through me to reach many with his love. That many others would get to experience what I have experienced.

My hope is that you get to experience this love that I have. My hope is that no matter who you are or what you have done in the past, or what you believe or do not believe, that you would just take one step towards Jesus by asking him to come into your life. Ask Jesus what he wants for your life and ask him to be with you. Ask him to help you. It takes just making that one step towards him and see what happens with the next. It changed my life and I know it can change yours.