Ep. 10 "Faith Through Fire: Our Journey to Christ"

Faith is easy when life is going well. The real test comes when hardship, loss, suffering, and uncertainty force you to confront what you truly believe.

In Episode 10 of The Spencer Parks Show, Spencer Parks and Cameron Collier step away from politics and current events to share the deeply personal stories that shaped their faith journeys and ultimately led them to Jesus Christ.

The conversation begins with their childhoods, how they were raised, and their earliest experiences with Christianity. Spencer and Cameron discuss the doubts, questions, and struggles they faced as young men, the temptations and distractions that pulled them away from their faith, and the spiritual battles that many Christians experience but rarely talk about openly.

They also explore why they ultimately became affiliated with the Catholic Church, what they found compelling about Catholicism, and how their appreciation for Christianity extends beyond denominational lines. While both men discuss their Catholic faith, this episode is ultimately about a shared belief in Jesus Christ and the transformative power of a relationship with God.

Most importantly, Spencer and Cameron reflect on the life experiences that brought them back to Christ. From personal hardship and adversity to moments of grace and clarity, they explain how suffering often became the catalyst for spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of faith.

In this episode:

• How Spencer and Cameron were raised
• Their earliest experiences with Christianity
• Doubts, struggles, and questions about faith as young men
• Why they became affiliated with the Catholic Church
• Their appreciation for Christianity as a whole
• Life experiences that strengthened their belief in Jesus Christ
• How suffering and adversity can lead us closer to God
• Why faith remains the foundation of their lives today

Whether you’re Catholic, Protestant, another denomination, exploring Christianity, or simply curious about matters of faith, this episode is an honest conversation about belief, redemption, purpose, and the journey back to Christ.

Faith Through Fire: Our Journey to Christ

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

All right, folks, welcome back to the Spark Show. Today is a very big day for us as we accomplish a small achievement in our long line of goals that we have for the Spark Show. Today is episode 10 of the Spark Show, finally running into the double digits on our podcast. And we couldn't be happier. Welcome, Cameron, our co-host of the Spark Show, back onto the show. It's great to have you here, Cam, and to have the conversation continue. Today we're gonna do a little something special and we're gonna commit this conversation to faith as we haven't had many conversations centered around faith. So today we're gonna open up and discuss a little bit about Jesus Christ, God Almighty, and our walk back to faith.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Yeah. Probably more nervous for this one than anything else. It's pretty funny how that works.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

It's hard for us as grown men to get vulnerable and speak and be outward in our faith, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm more nervous for this than anything else.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

So seems like talking politics and taking a pretty hard stance on some of the things that we have deep convictions in when it comes to policy, culture, politics in general. It's a little bit easier to spit into the microphone than to speak the word of God, in which I'm not going to sit here and claim that I am a perfect Christian Catholic. I'm still somebody who struggles to get to church every Sunday, and I am still very much walking back to God myself. But we just thought it was a good idea to speak about our past and the things that have walked us back to a relationship with God and ultimately allowed Jesus Christ back into our lives. And what are the things that have transpired that have walked us back into our faith and things that make us more deeply convicted in our belief in God?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah, it's really hard to articulate the intangibles. So here we go.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Yeah, so for me, I was became a confirmed Catholic pretty young. That was my mom is a Spaniard, and so we come from deep Spaniard roots. As many know, Spaniards are heavily and deeply convicted Catholics. As I learned when I lived in Spain for a brief moment of time back in 12, the culture there is very heavily centered around Catholicism, and you can see it in the history, La Sagrada Familia, the famous cathedral there. These popes visit there. Absolutely. Sorry to spin this off, but I'm also a Lego fanatic. But they also Lego just released La Sagrada Familia as one of their architecture sets, which I was pretty stoked about. Heck yeah. So great to see faith coming into the Lego community and repres representing quite a feat for architecture and Catholicism in general.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yeah, the the service that they put on there was pretty incredible. The children choir, it's just like it's amazing how angelic children's voices can be and just like that pitch that they can hit. That's just like it just strikes a chord in you.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

It's amazing. Well, the the organ and everything they have inside the cathedral, the stained glass, the architecture within the four walls, not the four walls, there's many walls, but you know, the inside of that cathedral is an incredible, I can't explain it. It's a sensation that overcomes you. You almost walk yourself right back through history and all the time that the religion of Catholicism has occupied this earth and it brings you the only place it brings you is back to God.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's very interesting to kind of see the surge going on in Spain because Spain has some interesting things going on with its politics. I mean, I don't really know too much about the politics, but the guy is very left-wing, the president. I saw some interesting policy decisions. I'm pretty sure he just decreed people migrants to become citizens by the pen, no legislative process at all. Just, oh, your 500,000 African migrants are now Spanish citizens, and it's very questionable to say the least, but then to see the hero's welcome that the Pope received was kind of shocking. You see him enter into this football stadium, and it's just packed all the way up into the rafters, and they're just everyone is just losing their mind, and it's just like there seems to be this huge surge for moral clarity in all this ambiguity.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Yeah, and I think that moral clarity it yearns from at the core, the spirit that is conservative, which a conservative's morality is usually derived from a religious perspective or religious core values, which usually starts with the Ten Commandments. And when we start to abandon those core values and things that at our core help us understand the world, then we become a little bit lost in our way and we start to fear the world rather than have belief in it.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Well, so much of the Western world is dominated by the thought of my truth. You see it all the time. That's my truth, that's my truth. And it's like, well, wait, what? My truth? There's no, there is the truth. There's your perspective on the truth, because we all have different perspectives and we all see different things, different aspects, but there is only one truth. Two plus two equals four. Sorry, communists, it does not equal five or whatever their math was. Have you ever you ever seen the communist equation? It's pretty, pretty wild.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Can't say I've spent much time going over the communist equation. I usually try to stay away from that literature. It's not really, really one that I keep in my quiver.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Well, you gotta understand your enemy. That's true. But at the end of it, it's there's I don't know, it's one of these things I talk to people about. It's kind of like the language, the languages of God. In in the the book of John refers to the book of Genesis, and it says the word of God. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. So the word is God. So God is the language of the universe. And if you kind of like dissect that, well, what does that mean? And then you look at our DNA, and in one cell, there's three billion letters. So there's three billion letters that create our genetic code. And then we understand code in terms of digital code, zeros and ones, and look at what that is able to create. And then so you see the genetic code, three billion, and then you see how many cells are in our body. So you have three billion times for the average male, it's something like 30 trillion. So, I mean, you're talking about a coded genetic code, a genetic language that was created, and here we are materialized on this earth, and then so that's genetic code is like biological code. Then you have physics and you have chemistry, and so you have the languages, those mathematics, and that's all logical, it's extremely logical, and that's the way the universe forms, and so we have like this imperfect sort of creation myth, as they like to call it, but it's grounded in logic when you start to really dissect these things, and it's like that's it's mind-boggling because it's like okay, look at how the universe seemingly goes on to infinity, but then that's when we're looking through telescopes. Then when we're looking at life through microscopes, it seems to go on infinitesimally, it's wild to see.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Well, I will say that that is one thing that I struggle to articulate with my faith and reality as part of my struggle with keeping my faith as a young man, was this idea of creation. You start to really heavily think into that, and you can start to really fight this idea that one man, one God, could have been responsible for creating this heavenly earth. And the more you think about it, and I have to give Grand Canyon University a lot of credit for this for walking me back on my faith in creation and giving me the right understanding of how all this came to be and why no science can actually prove that God is not real. The only thing that is capable of creating something so grand and something so big out of nothing is God Almighty, and that's the only thing that you can explain creation with. It's the only thing that you can fall back on.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Well, our exploration of space has proved to us how unique our Earth is. You know what I mean? So it's like you keep zooming out on the solar systems, and you just keep zooming out, and it's like, okay, where are the other habited planets? And the best guesses are millions of light years away, maybe. I don't know. I mean, I'm not an um astrophysicist or whatever they're called, you know what I mean? But I certainly know these distances we're talking about are described in light years, and it's just like mind-boggling. But when so when you just look at like the laws of probability and you look at like the Goldilocks zone of like, okay, what are the chances that a planet is X amount of distance around a sun to where it can actually be inhabited with the perfect temperature zone? And then when you're looking at like the decimal points of the probability, and it's like what is the saying in a preponderance of evidence? And like, so you just see this like preponderance of evidence. It's like there's no direct evidence, right? But it's like you start to collect these things, and you're just it's like it's mind-boggling. I mean, just go and look at what the probability of the earth to be where it's at, and then look at the diversity of the earth. It's it's like what how many species do we have, and then how many subspecies? And then it's just like the biological life, then you have all the the flora, the plants, and like all the diversity within the plants, and it's I mean, what is it's mind-boggling? It's like, what is going on here? And so it seems to be some sort of expression, and do we just boil it down to it's an expression of love and creativity? Because from love springs creativity. Think about our own hum human creativity. What are the most it's always a cry of the heart, sad music or happy films, or sad films? It's all from the heart.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

One thing that when I was younger that always had me curious about faith in God was studying the stars when I would learn about history and all of the incredible men that existed in time, that I always just had a very peculiar fascination of Magellan. Oh, geez, who am I thinking of? Not Picasso, but oh, I'm having a brain fart here. Explorers? Yeah, all the explorers, Columbus, anybody who's navigating the seas by the stars, trying to think he's an Italian. He was known, he was, oh, I'm having a total brain fart. This is not good. Well, describe what he did. He was known as like a pagan, and he was eventually, because of his science experiments, he was accused of paganism and all these sort of things because of his radical experiments. Da Vinci. Leonardo Da Vinci. Okay. Because he was always pushing the limits, trying to understand things in time. And even he was one of the artists, eventually became sort of like a political figure, but he had big pushback from like the Catholic Church in particular because of his searching for answers and scientific approach to everything. But searching and looking up to the stars was always something that I was inspired by from these artists or these men that were constantly pushing limits, trying to get answers to figure out what was going on in the universe. How do we figure this place out? And ultimately, I think a lot of these men were convicted in faith at the end of it. And so that was one thing that inspired me. And I wanted to, before we get too lost in astrology and getting lost in space, quickly kind of jump back to how did you end up, Cameron, at this point in time? How were you raised? How did you come to be into the Catholic faith?

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Well, a little family history, faith history. I believe my dad is baptized Methodist, and my mom is a baptized Catholic, not active at all. Just kind of they were just baptized by birth, and that was about it. My mom went to Catholic school up until like eighth grade. And my oldest brother, he went through the whole process, he was baptized, confirmed, all that good stuff. But my second brother, to my knowledge, he didn't go through that process. I certainly didn't go through that process, and we have both have a six-year age gap in between. So my oldest brother is 12 years older than me. And but my I've always had a personal relationship with God, and that came from my experience with drowning as a young toddler. So my relationship with God started from a very early age when I nearly drowned in the pool, or I guess I did technically drown, I just didn't die. I was about two to three years old, and I found my way past the pool gate that my mom and dad had put up, and I was riding my bicycle around the pool, and my pant leg got stuck in my chain when I was trying to do little wheelies up some steps that my I guess my oldest brother would have taught me how to do. And when I didn't have enough torque to do the wheelie, my wheel had bounced off the coping and put me straight into the pool. And it pulled me down. And I mean, I'm almost 35 now, so trying to remember back to when I'm three. I can just remember the stories that I've told people throughout throughout the time, and I can remember struggling and trying to swim to the surface, and eventually I just started to inhale water, and the struggle stopped, and I turned and looked at the pool light, and the light turned on, and it just got brighter and brighter until it was the brightest light, and then I woke up in the hospital. And the story goes, uh a few months later, when my parents, their best friends, baby had died of SIDS, everyone was grieving, and here's me, little toddler Cameron, coming in and saying that it was okay. Baby Martin was with God, and people were shocked by it, but they just discounted all we saw it in a movie, he saw it's just so I already had this concept of God from when I was a toddler, and I can remember anytime I was afraid of the dark, it was always the dark. I was always afraid of the monsters under my bed or the monsters in my closet, and I would just bury my head in my pillow and I would just pray to God for the monsters to go away. And fast forward, still no church, no nothing like that. When I was in my early 20s, I think I was either 21 or 22 years old. I went to a motocross track, you were there, with uh my best friend who I would have met shortly after my experience with drowning. We were basically still in diapers, barely able to talk, and he was killed in a motorcycle accident right in front of me. And it was that was a surreal experience, uh never experienced been in a state of shock before. But when the accident happened, it's very interesting. I don't have any memory of seeing the impact, but all I can remember is that when so, like in the sport of motocross, I don't know, you just things are happening so fast. So I had seen him entering a obstacle and then lost eyesight, and then I just assumed he would have been at the next obstacle, and then I didn't see him, and then I looked forward, and then I looked back, and then I saw people starting to run, and then I knew immediately by instinct that was him. So ran over to him and I immediately saw his lifeless body, but saw he had some blood coming from his humerus and another guy, and I immediately knew, okay, we need to get a tourniquet because some sort of bleeding is happening here. And so we ran over to the first truck that we saw and just somehow knew exactly where the guy's bag was, grabbed a belt and then ran back over. The other gentleman had secured the tourniquet, but I don't know who called 911, someone called it, and but right in that moment I knew it wasn't good, and I got angry with God, and I told him very forcefully inside my mind, Don't you take my best friend away from me almost telling God what to say. And in that moment I was overcome with guilt because I knew what had happened, and then I simply just said a prayer and I prayed that Tommy would go and enter into the into paradise and I felt Christ. I felt the presence of the Lord right there. I didn't see anything, but in this state of shock, time didn't exist. It was very strange. My perception of time was gone and I knew that I could feel almost like I can see it in my mind's eye. It's the strangest feeling, but I just see the Lord Jesus Christ bathed in white light, and I can just see his face and I can see the white robes and his arms open with his hands welcoming and it's wild. And I thanked God and I said basically, as I said, please Tommy Knight don't linger. Go with the Lord. And then paramedics arrived, they did everything that they tried to do, and all of a sudden it was empty. No one was around, just I think maybe his parents had arrived and the police, everyone was like starting to leave, and then I had to pick up the motorcycle, put it in the back of my truck, and then get back into my truck. And when I went to go back into my truck and I looked over in the empty seat, then I felt the presence of God again right there for the second time. And then I was just kind of beside myself and proceeded to drive home and get shit face drunk. And then then it was time to search for answers. And so what I began to do is I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought books on numerology. I bought all the things that the world had offered. I didn't turn to Christianity because I had already in my mind discounted Christianity because of the hardness of hearts that I witnessed with Christians and their judgment and how they would judge other people, or at least how I would perceive it as judgment. And the best way I could describe that is like seeing someone like preaching to stop abortion. And it from the layman, the person that has never really wrestled with that, it looks offensive and you're offended by it. So I was the person that was offended by stuff like that. No longer am I offended by it, and I encourage it, but that's kind of like the conclusions I came to. So I turned to the world's religions. I studied Hinduism, I studied Buddhism, Zenism, Confucianism. Um eventually led me to Islam because I really respected the devotion that Muslims have to like praying five times a day, and just I liked the structure of it. I liked everything that it said. And my wife, she's she's Muslim, and so I had to to in order to be married, I converted to Islam, and which I was more than willing and happy to do because. Because at this point I'm thinking that God is God loves all religions, God is all religions. They're just kind of like different flavors. All I what was it? My my reasoning was all paths lead to the same summit, is my reasoning. And so I wasn't really afraid of it at all. I actually I was encouraged by it. Love the architecture, the mosques. I mean, how beautiful it is. So there's there's a lot of beauty. And so uh got married, started having kids, and then I started getting the call from God. Started having panic attacks and things like that, because I started really to face my own morality. I remember this one delusional moment I had. I just turned 30 years old, a little drunk. I walk into my bathroom and I look at myself in the mirror and I say to myself, Am I really gonna die? And I'm like, I don't think so. Maybe I am God. And then my eyes red flag, like, whoa, what was that thought? And then I repressed it. I'm like, that was crazy. That was crazy. Maybe I'm Jesus. Whoa, no, that's a little crazy. And kind of walked away from that. And then a few years later, I've been dealing with anxiety and stuff like that, but I would usually just like meditate, pray, and it would go away. And then I started having I think it's called servogenic dizziness, and I didn't know this at the time, but I would get these weird things where I'm like, it feels like I'm floating in space, I'm completely disconnected from reality, and immediately my fear centers are going off, and I'm thinking to myself, I've got a tumor, I've got something's going on, like the blood flow to my brain is being restricted, which it is, and the reason why it is is because there's a vertebrae that's out of socket because I was in I was T-boned years prior. And so now it's starting to manifest. And but then I'm now I'm super afraid and I'm starting to turn to God, and then I eventually start thinking to myself, okay, how am I gonna do this? And oh, you know what? Sorry, I need to back up a little bit. I forgot to say, I st I did when I so when I became Muslim, I studied the Quran and I read it, and what my biggest problem with it, because if you remember, I studied the Eastern rel the Eastern philosophy, so I'm very I love like the philosophy side, the wisdom, all that sort of stuff, and the Quran absolutely has that, but it read to me as a logical refutation of the Jews say this, the Christians say this, but this is the truth. And over and over I saw that, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it didn't there was nothing that like spoke to my heart that like explained the nature of reality, and it was just like it it just left me wanting. And so I read it, I made it about halfway through, and I put it down just out of laziness and neglect, and a few months later started getting this panic attack again, and I was like, okay, God's telling me I need to finish this, and so I because I basically drive for a living, I pulled out my phone and I went, I'm gonna listen to the Quran. So I downloaded the Quran, and a suggestion alongside of that was Bible in the Year with Father Mike Schmitz, and I thought that was curious, so I was like, Oh, you know what? I'm gonna I've never read the Bible, I've never listened to the Bible. I've you hear Christians quoting different things, John 3.16, stuff like that, and but never really gave it a serious shot. So I thought to myself, actually, I'm gonna listen to this. And almost immediately it was epiphany after epiphany, just like, this makes sense, this makes sense. Oh wow, this makes sense. And when you're being guided through the Bible by a Catholic priest who went to seminary, basically college, for this and can connect the various aspects of the Bible. And what a lot of people don't think is they think the Bible is only chronological, but it's not, it's constantly referencing itself. And actually, I credit Jordan Peterson to opening my eyes of the Bible because him him explaining kind of just like the what's it called, the benefits, psychological benefits of like how Christian Christianity kind of like formed our society and stuff like that, kind of that that started to soften my heart for the scripture. So basically at this point, I'm listening and I'm going, oh wow, wait a minute, and now I'm questioning my Muslim faith. Like, okay, what's going on here? And then this is now I'm in an internal struggle because now I have to talk to my wife about hey, I don't I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna become a Christian. I think I need to become a Christian. I think we all need to become Christians, we all need to accept Jesus Christ. Because remember, I've always believed in Jesus Christ, and one of the things that Islam does is Islam affirms the reality of Jesus, but they just say he's a prophet. And then my biggest problem with Islam comes down to the point of okay, so you concede Islam concedes that Jesus was sinless, that Jesus performed miracles, everything except he didn't die on a cross. In fact, God put someone else up there to make him look like Jesus died on the cross and really he ascended. And the reason why that is, is because Muhammad taught that God would never allow his prophets to be humiliated like that, and which is completely against scripture because prophets are constantly being humiliated and cast into sewers and stuff like that, and people are the Israelites are ignoring God's prophets and God's teachers, like repent, come back. Yep. So it's like I'm seeing this struggle, and it's like a struggle for authority, and then it's just kind of like I'm sorry, but what you're saying is if God deceived everyone and that someone did die on the cross, but it wasn't Jesus ascended to heaven, that would make God a liar.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Deception is a lie. Let me ask you one question, because I think maybe a lot of the listeners might be curious about this, but how did it go when you had that conversation with your wife?

SPEAKER_01 28:53

She was supportive. You have to for her your spiritual journey is your spiritual journey, and it's like you have to do that, you have to figure that out for yourself. So she was supportive, but I'm sure it's jarring, right? Because now you're at a clash with cultures and things like that. I can see people being offended in many ways, but at the end of the day, I'm taught to love and to love all and to have an open heart to everyone, so that's how I feel. I love my Muslim brothers and sisters, I love everyone. I don't hold any ill will towards anyone just because we might disagree.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

I know your wife, uh, I met her before you guys got married. She's an amazing woman, she has an incredible amount of grace, and it's easy to see how she could be so understanding and accepting of a big decision like that, which is incredible. I do want to walk it back just a little bit, talk to you about my journey to into Catholicism, and also I want to touch base on that harshness that we can experience of loss and what that does to us as Christians in a Catholic. So when I was quite younger, I started my journey at the Catholic Church, probably at the end of elementary school. So I was probably about 10, 11 years old. And I had started the program at the Catholic Church at the time, which was called CCD. I'm not sure if that's still the program that they have at the church, it's the same church that we still attend and go to when we do attend. And at a young age, I was taught the Ten Commandments. So my morality started to be guided by the Ten Commandments and the Word of God. And I started to have that relationship with God really young. My understanding wasn't exactly all there. However, as I got older and started going through the steps of confirmation, junior high, it's an interesting process doing the confirmation when you're at a young age in the Catholic Church because you're at odds with dealing with puberty. There's tribalism within school and a public and public school environment, popularity, and how committed do you want to be to your faith at a young age? Because I remember going on a Catholic retreat, which was the end phase of the confirmation process at the Catholic Church. And so we went to a church camp up in Fraser Park, and I was all about it. I wanted to have that spiritual connection. I wanted to do what I needed to do to have that connection with God and to confirm my faith and to become this official member of the Catholic Church. I wanted to wear that cross on my sleeve. And the one thing that happened to me at Catholic retreat was the very last ceremony or process that they had us go through, in which they had us bear our own cross and they reenacted us being put on a cross to sort of feel what this would have felt like maybe for Jesus. And in that moment I felt like maybe that violated something very sacred. And I questioned the Catholic Church and I said, Why God would they make me do this? Why would they have me bear a cross? And so I started to that's when my questions about the Catholic faith Catholic faith began. It's a hard truth. It is, and I started to, at the time, this was when there were news stories breaking of Catholic priests and all these sorts of different members of the Catholic Church molesting children. People started questioning the morality of members of the Catholic Church, and so questions start spiraling in my mind. And I'm starting to have these lived experiences as a young man, and I'm starting to wonder like, how can this how is this true? How can members of this church be corrupt? How could they be doing wrong when this is supposed to be the ultimate moral clarity that you can experience in life? How could this exist? But what we aren't taught so young, or what we're not understanding, is that evil can corrupt anywhere and anyone. This isn't just your There are no safe havens. No, and evil and the devil can be found within the church as well. This is God, this is Satan's domain. Right. And one of the things, and this is funny, some people might think I'm a little bit crazy, but Mel Gibson did a really bang up job on me when I was young in some of the films he created. Yeah. Okay, because as a young man, I loved the movies about the Catholic Crusaders and the Christian crusaders and all of the wars and the sacrifice and dying a noble death and the knights, brotherhood, the kings, and how the world came to be medieval times. God wills it. God wills it. Kingdom of heaven. Let's go. And it's an incredible thing to feel like you're religious or that you have faith as a young man. You also have to put into perspective that we live in a time where looking back on history, we do not live under the same conditions whatsoever. We live in the greatest nation to ever exist, and we live under this guise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which are our main focuses now in life. That is a privilege. And these men that existed prior to us that were fighting for God's will and his conquest and were on these crusades, you see these mass volume of men dying for what we thought was a noble cause, a conquest, a fight for the world to spread a certain faith, Christianity or Islam, whatever it was. And you don't understand that the perception of the world was much different back then. When your conditions of living aren't just trying to raise up a family, buy a house, and you're not living under this threat of some a horde of savages coming through and wiping out your family and your farm and your crops, or an evil tax collector from the king coming to rape and do all these horrific things to your family and stuff if you're not going to pay your taxes. And so for me, I watched all these incredible movies growing up thinking that when I experienced death, that I was going to have an easy time digesting it because it's under much different conditions now. And I think one of the things we like to think as Christians, Catholics, is that we're going to have an easy time digesting when we experience a loss, and the grieving process won't hurt us so much because we have our faith. But what I've experienced and being there with you with Tommy and his passing and seeing something like that happen at a young age and being a young man, watching my dad's aunt go through breast cancer inevitably passing away, and watching my dad's grieving process, watching great-grandparents pass away at a young age, and watching the grieving process for my mom, seeing all these things happen, and then understanding and starting to get that humility that starts to build up in you that our time will eventually come. And the ones that we love most dearest and hold closest to our hearts are eventually going to perish, that our faith matters more than ever because eventually they will be gone. But having your faith doesn't make the losses any easier, but it helps us to understand why. And it also gives us that moral clarity of well, there is an ultimate eternal life that is to be achieved and a place where we will all once again be together. And I think like that's the importance of Catholicism for me, and especially now having a family, is knowing that I can pass on something to my kids that will give them a reassurance that this isn't it right here.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

Well, one of the things that you sparked in me when you were talking about how could these people be corrupted, at least priests in this institution set up by God, or so they claim. And I just go back to when Jesus renames Simon Peter and says, Peter, on this rock I'll build a church and the gates of hell will not prevail. Well, you think of that, the gates of hell will not prevail. So what does that mean? He's not saying I'm going to establish a walled garden where the forces of hell will not prevail against us. It's the other way around. We're going out into we're going into hell, into the gates. So that means that those forces can come in as well and attack. So it's one of those things where call that the Trojan horse. Yeah. So it's that it doesn't really bother me because humans are fallible and they harden their hearts. And once once they start to lead themselves, once they start to be led with my truth, my experience, why I I'm a good person. I should be able to do what I want to do, love who I want to love, that sort of thing. And you exalt yourself above the natural order established by God. And then that's when things start to spiral. Because once you can allow one of those in, now all of them can come in behind it and flood in, and you can constantly be questioning. And the way I see it is when you see Christians or people who purport to be Christians getting very angry about the abortion topic. There's I think there's a someone that comes along my feed, I think it's called abolition rising or something like this, and they just stand out with signs and advocating against abortion and illustrating the whores of it. And it makes people very angry when then they purport to be Christians, and they're well, why are you putting that in that's not nice? Like we're in Christianity, it says that we have to be nice, it says that we have to speak the truth, and the truth isn't always nice. But I'm sorry, go ahead and continue your story. Oh, I was you know Journey back to faith.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

Yeah, so for me, it's being a grown man now. There's been some things that have happened to me in my life. A lot of those things have been experienced troubles, health troubles, experiencing losses of my own. One of the most compounding traumas of my life happened back in 2021 when we're going through the peak of COVID. My wife was pregnant with her with our first child. At that same time, about four to five months into the pregnancy, my father-in-law tragically passed away, not from COVID, but from other health complications. And to watch my wife grieve and go through this horrific process after we had experienced three prior losses in pregnancy leading up to our first successful, viable pregnancy. And then to then experience the loss of her father, who is the only parent in her life actively involved. Her rock was a very tragic experience. And I felt the weight of the world then fall onto me as a father and a husband in that moment. I hadn't become a father yet, but I had been in the process of attempting to become a father. And I knew that we had our first viable pregnancy. We had gotten past that first trimester, in which after the first trimester in pregnancy, the viability of a pregnancy increases substantially. And we did eventually give birth to our first child, our daughter. And what happened after that was just a beautiful blossom of life. And that has evolved now into three children. But with three children, my wife and I have experienced nine or endured nine pregnancies in total. So it didn't come with sa without sacrifice. And that was an incredible, incredibly tough process on my wife, the toll it takes on a woman's body when she had to have several DNCs, which are essentially abortions performed on fetuses that were either non-viable or ones that were genetically just not forming like a human. It was like a cluster of like almost like tumor cells or something that would grow just out of a bad misfire or something like that. And so that was one thing that definitely has walked me back to my faith and tried to give me comfort is the unborn lives that I never got to meet, the ones that were viable, but we lost a heartbeat or something like that. And we never looked into, we never knew the sex of the children other than one of our lost fetuses. And it's knowing that we were going to have a daughter, another daughter that we lost on the way, that I'll pray for. And I wonder, even though she never came to be that I don't know, maybe she's raising up in heaven, she's becoming something more up in heaven, and maybe one day I will meet that child. And so I think for Christians and Catholics, that's why we take a deeper meaning to heart for unborn lives, because especially in on earth, we have laws that prosecute the murder and the killing of people that are living, but those same laws should apply to unborn lives as well. And so there's this conflict of morality when it comes to the abortion argument as to why can we treat something that's just within a woman's body as if it were just garbage and make this reckless and completely just senseless decision to terminate that life when we're not called to be the executor or the judge.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Well, it's we value the autonomy of the woman, right? And it's all about her autonomy and her decision. And there's this sort of idea that the fetus is is hers, right? It's not its own unique individual identity, and that identity doesn't come until birth.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

Well, they say that this unborn life is essentially dependent on the mother, right? Inside the womb. But the argument is that the child is still dependent on the mother when it comes outside the womb. What is it that the child needs when it's born? Well, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

That's my point. It's like is it the umbilical cord? It's like it's still its own individual, even if it's this big. And I was an advocate of abortion before having children, before coming to Christ. And my reasoning always centered on the woman and economics and things like that. But the minute I actually held an innocent child in my arms and I saw how vulnerable life is, and like, and especially you with your your guys' nine pregnancies, you start to appreciate it way more. You realize you don't take it for granted. And it's really easy to take it for granted. It's just like it's just one of those things. And then people always kind of throw the emotional arguments. What if your daughter was raped? What if this, that, and the other? And I understand how emotionally triggering those things are. It's very it strikes you deep. I would want justice. I would want justice for my daughter, but I would also want dignity for my grandchild. It doesn't matter that the father is a corrupt fool that's still my grandchild. And I would love it more than anything in the world. And it's one of those things, oh well but a teenage pregnancy. Still, it's my grandchild. Right. And I have to raise my grandchild as my child because my child was too stupid to use contraception, or I was too stupid to teach the realities of sex and biology and try to instill that morality in her. Or she was just a human being wanting to search out those experiences. Still, it comes down to my responsibility as a father and not taking God's you know God gave put me on this earth to be a father, to be a grandfather. And so I'm not gonna abdicate that for my own comfort.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

Yeah, it's hard to say. The other argument is that a life conceived in an act of evil, is it worth any less? Because the argument is that it's still life worth living.

SPEAKER_01 45:18

And what's hard to get past that that act of evil and this idea that we have a decision, and so that's one one of the most beautiful stories that I've seen is a an unwanted pregnancy with a woman with Down syndrome, and everyone wanted her to abort child, because how can a mother with Down syndrome have a baby? And she absolutely refused. And she had that baby. And that baby is grown up now and perfectly healthy, perfectly normal, and it's a beautiful thing because it's just you know, it's like a an inversion. What about how comfortable is that for her? What are her economic situations this and it's like, well, this is where a faith in God comes in because everything that I have been given in life has been a gift. I haven't earned anything. It's not because of me. You know what I mean? It's yeah, sure, like I I I did the work, I gave some advice, like but the opportunities, I mean, it it's my it's kinda like out of thin air. These the doors just appeared. Well, who offered the door? You know what I mean? And it's like that was God. So God is going to take care. So it's like, have a little faith. Have a little faith that everything is gonna be okay. And the thing is, it's one of those things when you're a kid, it's very hard to self-sacrifice. That's what love is ultimately. I see all these things running around Instagram explaining what love is, love is this, love is kind, love is and yes, but at the core of love is self-sacrifice, and that is evident of Jesus on the cross. That is the epitome of love. It's no longer about yourself, it's about everyone else around you and serving them. That is the ultimate act of love.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

Absolutely. And I'm gonna shift a little bit into another perspective of the things that really walk us into our faith. And one of those things is our health. And when you become humbled by this idea that we are not an infinite, infinitismal being, that we have an expiration date, we quickly come to this realization how much that our health matters. And the way that it happened for me, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease back when I was 18 years old. And over a decade, I resisted every step of the way the pharmaceutical approach at treating Crohn's disease, which includes immunotherapy regimens and other medications. Chemotherapy or low dose chemo, right? Well, that was essentially the first medication they had for me, the option, and I just resisted that at every step. I was like, I am not doing that. That is not for me. I am not going to get cancer at a young age and die. So I took the minimal approach, or I took the less therapeutic approach, which was these taking steroids when I would have a flare-up, taking these anti-inflammatory medications, which turned my urine purple and always just weird things. And over a decade I thought I was okay. I thought, oh, I'm just battling. You're managing it. This this chronic inflammation and stuff would be okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna outlive this thing, like I'm gonna be okay. Until I finally gave birth with my wife to our first daughter, and I couldn't be the father that I wanted to be. I was in pain, I was struggling, I couldn't be up with the baby when my wife needed me to be. My life was essentially more of a focal point than being the father of the household and the husband that I needed to be at that time. And that was probably one of the ultimately most frustrating times of my life because I didn't know if I wanted to have more kids at that time. I didn't know if I was going to be able to be a provider for the rest of my life, like how I had been. I didn't know all of these things. They were up and they were a question. And so eventually it got to a point where I was just so burnt out that I had to make the ultimate decision. Am I going to go through with this surgery? And that decision came when I had a follow-up, finally got with some great doctors and surgeons at UCLA. I had an MRI done on my intestines because I was dealing with some pretty horrific flare-ups that couldn't be controlled with the steroids. And when you become steroid dependent, things can really quickly start to spiral out of control. And I was pitched this idea that the best approach for me was going to be removing 10 centimeters of my small small bowel. I had to repair some fissulas that were starting to grow due to the disease tissue that was starting to overcome my abdomen area and things were just starting to get really bad. I I went through a crazy phase where I told my wife I was maybe gonna go to the Cayman Islands to try to get to stem cell therapy that could reverse my disease and do this in the most minimally invasive way possible. I think I scared the living hell out of my wife with that thought. She thought, well, you're gonna go to the Cayman Islands and probably die. But whatever you do there. And I was thinking about spending our life savings at the time, which she was just not very happy about to go do that. And so with my insurance, she was like, Well, you have insurance here, and these surgeons are the best in the world, and they're giving you a plan and you can get medication here that can handle this. And so, you know what? I I listened to my wife ultimately, and I went through with the surgery. I had an ostomy bag for four months while they took out my intestine and had to allow some healing to happen in there, and I had to get off the steroids during that crazy time, right after it was like two or three days after I had my surgery to have the intestine removed. My wife comes and taps me on the shoulder downstairs with a positive pregnancy test for our second child. And I am just thinking, like, man, that last two raw right before the surgery really paid out, huh? Yeah. And so God delivered on that promise for us, gave us our second child. I was reversed, had all my intestines put back together four months later. And I think so that was April and then May June. By June, I was reversed, and September came along and we had our second baby. And I could tell you, just even four or five short months after having that surgery, I mean, and having a second child, I felt like Superman. Yeah. And that was when I found like God gave me my second lease on life. And I remember before my surgery going and being rolled into that surgical room, I told God, I said, God, if you get me out of this situation, I am going to do the best that I can for my family, for myself, and for you. Please just get me out of this situation. And it's not to say that he can give us that or do those things or he will. But I do feel like I owe it to him for this second opportunity that I've been given because I know where my health was headed. I know that I was in decline. I know that if I wouldn't have gone through with this, that I probably would have died because I remember sitting with my mom at the after the appointment where I saw the MRI and they told me that I was going to need surgery. And after over a decade of being told by all the doctors that were treating my Crohn's, like the one thing you don't want to end up doing is going into surgery for this stuff. Facing that situation made me fall into a pretty deep depression.

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Well, yeah, because for so long you were hardening your heart and saying, I'm going to figure this out. You're it's you were taking your health into your own hands and you weren't gonna let some doctor tell you. And so you were being quite prideful about I can figure this out, I can do this. So is uh the conversation was centered around you, and then at some point you had to surrender that and you had to show a little bit of humility and you had to put your faith in other people, and that's one of the things that my my faith has taught me is this concept of surrender. So often, like I'm not on this podcast to win a conversation, I'm not here to win the political thing of the day. It's I'm here only to encourage dialogue and to have an open, meaningful conversation to these issues that we face. And the first thing in having open dialogue is surrendering that prideful will to win the debate. And it's like I don't care about winning the debate, I just I care about solving some of these issues, and here's the reality to our political situation is that no one man has the answer, and no one's God, you know what I mean? So it comes down to having a humble spirit and listening, utilizing the Socratic method to come to some sort of consensus on how we can move forward as a society, and just ignoring the trolls that simply want to provoke reaction. It's like stop being reactionary to this stuff, and that's the one thing that my faith has taught me is that humble act of surrender, and that's one of the things too. Is I know what you mean about you want to try to do the least invasive, more homeopathic remedies, and like that's the end all be all, but and forsaking the allopathic medicine path. But it's like one thing that I've learned is that God operates in the imperfect, and don't let the pursuit of perfection become the enemy of good. And I see that so much where it's just like, especially in our politics, we have to have the perfect answer. We it's everything you have to be perfect when it's just like I mean, what point to one thing on this earth that's perfect. It's actually what makes the earth so beautiful is its imperfection, it's not its perfections. That's why AI art sucks. It's not because it's not perfect, because it's pretty much perfect. There's not one line that's not straight. Yep, and that's why it sucks.

SPEAKER_00 55:17

And I would just like to add one last thing to my medical journey and why I eventually gave in to taking the pharmaceutical allopathic approach to my treatment was that was in 2022. Okay. We were at the peak of COVID in this time in the hysteria. And so I was battling a I was battling myself internally, but I was battling this external danger as well. This massive propaganda machine that was attacking us. And so while I was at odds and with feeling like this is the first time in my life I've experienced tyranny in real life, in real time. Yeah, real tyranny. I said, I'm going to surrender this fight that I have going on internally. I need to be my best and my strongest. And if they are going to offer me a solution, I'm going to take it because I need my health and my strength more than ever right now. And to surrender to that was brutal, especially at a time when I was questioning everything about the pharmaceutical. Well, I could tell you that I was a pissed-off patient because every time I'd come out of surgery or whatever it was, they'd be like, Oh, are you masking up? And I'm like having to keep a mask over my mouth, but not my nose because I can't breathe. But I'm just like, this is just crazy protocol. Yeah, that's all it was. And not based in science. Not knowing if I'm gonna be able to feelings, not knowing if my wife could be there in my recovery, not knowing if I could be at the birth of my child because they're testing us for COVID, all of these things that were just madness. And so there was definitely it was a trying time of my life, not just medically, but spiritually, physically, mentally. It was like all-out warfare at that point in my life. And I think I even recall there was a moment during COVID where we were still working together. I don't know if you recall this, but I had a catastrophic meltdown where I had a not an immediate family member, but somebody pretty close to our family who had passed away in the hospital and he was separated from the family and died behind a curtain in a glass door away from any of his family members. And at that point, I lashed out in anger so much that the cortisol in my body got so angry and I was crying and angry and screaming and telling everybody how psychopathic I was, and that if anybody put me in this situation with my family members, that I was gonna be yours down, I was gonna break the barrier down, like you will not stop me. And I actually, my autoimmune disease at that time decided to attack the upper digestive tract of my body. My whole throat went into an inflamed state. I went in because I thought I had like strep throat because of how swollen my throat was to the urgent care, and they did some blood work on me and they told me that I had cancer at urgent care. They said the only way that you could have this white blood cell count is if you have cancer. And I remember you've always had high white blood because of the well, it's incredible. I left there and I could followed up with my gastroneurologist. They slowly, one of one of the things I think you even helped me through and my family was you need to decompress, you need to detach from this hysteria. And I went to work and I slowly like my throat started to calm down, things got better, and I calmed down. And several days later, several weeks later, I was getting blood work done to kind of follow up. My white blood cells, white blood cell count slowly started coming back down, going back into normal range for me. Things started calming down, and I at that point I was just like, wow.

SPEAKER_01 58:50

Amazing the power of anger absolutely in that physiological effect. And I don't think that people realize when they're when you're so triggered emotionally by things that you see online that you have no control over, that can have real negative health consequences, not just mentally, but physically as well. So it's like at some point you have to just you have to disconnect from it and remember that 80% of it is probably just propaganda bought farms aimed at getting you to trigger an emotional response.

SPEAKER_00 59:25

Absolutely. Yeah, and ultimately, these are things that have made me lean heavier into my faith and be more convicted and outward in my faith, especially after losing Charlie. I just I was very inspired by the way that he walked this earth and talked the talk when it came to Jesus Christ and proclaiming the faith of the Lord. And I just thought, like, if I'm gonna leave my family behind one day, that I want them to know exactly how I felt on my spirituality and my faith and know that I'm convicted and a firm believer in God and Jesus and welcome him into my life. And I hope that as much as I rub off Star Wars and beach days on my kids now and let that be a highlight of their life, that they will one day accept God into their life and have that same relationship that I have now with him. And what's just important to me that that legacy that we leave behind is a legacy that our kids can cling on to and still have that same faith that we did.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:19

Yeah, it's hard though, because as they say, God has no grandchildren, only children. So what does that mean? Well, that means that your children have to choose God for themselves. And that's very hard. And we see plenty of Catholic or Christian families where they're just, my kids have walked away from God. They don't believe in this at all. What do I do? What do I do? And it's like, well, unfortunately, they have their own path to walk and they have to walk it themselves. And hopefully they you've instilled enough humility in them that they will find their way back. Because there's no lost sheep that God doesn't seek out, but it's the hardness of their heart. And if they're full of pride and they're full of self-love and self-aggrandizement, it's very hard for that subtlety of God to trickle into their lives. So that's the key. The key is to always have an open heart, no matter what. It's who cares if your heart is broken, it will heal. Time heals all. So it's like don't be afraid to be vulnerable, don't be afraid to love people, don't be afraid to look stupid, don't be afraid to be humiliated. Those are real lessons because once you finally are not attached to what others think and how they can humiliate, you experience true freedom. Because humans at the end of the day are herd animals, and COVID proved it. Whatever the herd says, they go with it, and it is very hard to go against the herd. And so, whatever, once you have that faith in God and you know where you are headed, you're fine, you're secure. So be secure in your faith.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:06

Absolutely, man. Praise God. Praise the Lord. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we've bypassed our time that we've allotted for this episode. Yeah, I'm sure my wife is blowing my phone up. Yep, and it's time to wrap it up. But I think that this first episode talking faith and our spirituality has been a successful one, and I think we're gonna have some more to bring you content wise regarding faith and family and all sorts of freedom and pursuit of the truth. For now, this was episode 10 of the Spark Show, and we thank everybody for listening, and we'll see you on the next one. Praise the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.