Hi friends! On today’s episode of Draw Near to Me, we will begin part 2 of Travis’s faith journey. For those who prefer to read, today’s content is also posted below. As a recap, part 1 ended with Travis catching a glimpse of that Baptist church bulletin under the front seat of his truck and being struck with conviction by God. He realized that he was not living out who he was supposed to be. In that moment, he got down on his knees next to his truck, prayed, and surrendered to Christ. Since this is a man’s testimony, my husband, Jeff, will narrate Travis’s story. If you enjoy this post, please share it with others using the share button below and consider doing a free or paid subscription. With that, let’s dive into part 2 of Travis’s story. Enjoy!
After surrendering to God, I drove home. I knew right away that I had to be a part of a church if I was going to do this life with Christ. I remember praying to God that night for help. I told Him, “I need you to show me a church that I need to be a part of.”
The next day was a Saturday. Me and a group of guys went to Cici’s Pizza to eat. Afterwards, we decided to go down to Virginia Beach to hang out. As I drove toward the exit to get on to I-264, which led to the beach, I accidentally turned too soon. Realizing my mistake, I turned down a side road and whipped into a parking lot to turn around. As I looked at where I was, I noticed I was in the parking lot of a big Baptist church! I thought, “Okay God, I guess this is it. This is where I’m supposed to go.”
The next day I attended that Baptist church. At first it was kind of hard. I did not know anyone when I walked in, and it was a pretty big place. I made my way into the back to blend in. Thankfully, a few people had noticed me at the service and invited me to get plugged in.
I started attending a college and career group at the church. It was a Wednesday night small group for people ages 18 to 25 years old. I’d say at the biggest there were about 25 to 30 of us there. I also had the opportunity to learn more about the Bible in another setting. There was an older family that opened their house to our college and career group to do a weekly Bible study. I laugh when I say “older” because they were probably the age I am now.
Every Saturday, about 20 people packed into this family’s little living room as they took us through the Bible. That was my first experience going through the Bible in depth. They pulled things out to study using a verse-by-verse teaching. It was amazing to me. For the first time in my life, I really felt like I was not just part of a community but also a part of the church itself. I finally felt connected.
I learned some theology through those Saturday night groups, but the problem was that my exposure to it was inconsistent. I was stationed on an aircraft carrier, so I missed a lot because I had 2 different six month deployments that I had to do. Furthermore, we always had workups, were out to sea, or had outages on the ship that we had to work. Still, during the times I could make it, I found that what was taught really pulled at me. I had a new curiosity for God’s word.
I was blown away with how much there was in the Bible that I never grasped before. Yet, at the same time, I had an ongoing inner struggle because of my parents. It weighed on my mind that my intelligent dad refused to buy all of this. I was still searching for a more academic way to approach my questions about my faith.
One day, my roommate gave me a copy of the book More than A Carpenter by Josh McDowell. It began to give me intellectual answers to a lot of the questions that I had. After that, I got really big into apologetics, which more systematically defends Christianity. I read and studied every apologetics book that I found. At the time, I got into the scientific side of Christianity even more so than the theology. Understanding how God’s word aligned with science was a huge thing for me. However, just as there were a lot of incredibly smart Christians writing those apologetics books, I could not shake the fact that there were a lot of really smart atheists out there too.
To ensure that I was not missing something, I resolved to give what the atheist thought a fair shot. I started reading books written by atheists to learn their perspectives. It was kind of funny because reading their theories helped me deepen my faith even more. As I dove into studying what atheists said, I saw a lot of conflicts and contradictions amongst them. That community appeared to even fight against each other. For me, it felt like the Christian side was a lot more consistent. That was something that helped me with my faith as I went through the season of my early 20s.
During that time, my life was also changing on a personal level in a different way. Through that very same Baptist church that God led me to, I met Kristina. I saw her at a Sunday evening service and introduced myself. A few days later, on Friday, several of us from church met at the beach. Kristina was there as well. I approached her and introduced myself again, not realizing that she was the same person. It happened once more later that night. She commented on how that was the 3rd time we had met that week. I guess we can say I was not a super observant person at the beginning. But you know what? Kristina eventually became my wife!
We got married in Virginia Beach and had our first son, Aaron. I planned on getting out of the Navy. At least that was my original intention. I applied for a job at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), but never heard anything back from them. When the Navy offered me an instructor position in Charleston, I took the job and we moved to South Carolina in 2004.
In Charleston I was on shore duty. As a result, I had a Monday through Friday job. I was able to be at home instead of being out to sea. It gave us a more normal life. Kristina and I had another son, Luke, while we were there. We also got plugged into a church. I was doing middle school ministry, and my wife was doing children’s ministry. Our church had a lot of great programs and teachings and we made some good friends there.
Even though we loved our church, I missed that verse-by-verse deep dive that we had received in our small group setting in Virginia Beach. Additionally, behind the scenes my wife and I were struggling during those early years in Charleston. The sad thing was that I had come from a broken home, and my wife had her own family issues growing up as well. We married young and neither of us really knew what we were doing. We did not communicate well. I guess the easiest way to say it was that our marriage felt pretty cold.
We put on great faces when we went to church, but then came home to a different reality. We did not have a bad marriage, but it was not as strong as we portrayed it to be either. I started getting pretty bitter. The funny thing is that looking back I can’t even tell you what I was bitter about. There was kind of this underlying anger that I had, and I really didn’t know why.
My wife and I began reconnecting in some ways through community. We got involved in a small group that consisted of good friends that lived nearby. Each Thursday night we had a babysitter come to our house and they all came over. Other times we met at our friend’s house. Yet my wife and I did not reach a point where we got super, super close. Our marriage was still not where either of us hoped it would be.
While we were in Charleston, there was a guy that I knew that was over the middle school ministry. He decided to move to a different state to start a church. As a funny backstory, my wife was from Washington D.C., and I was from a small town in Missouri. She once said she would never move to the Midwest, and I said I’d never moved to D.C. either. We did an online quiz to see where our ideal place to live was predicted to be. Both Louisville, KY and Chattanooga, TN came up. Other than driving through them, we had never been to either. So, I was having lunch with this guy when he mentioned starting this new church. It was in, of all places, Chattanooga, TN.
After that lunch conversation, I called my wife and kind of half-jokingly said, “Hey, what if I get out of the Navy and we go to Chattanooga and help start this church?” At that point I was finishing a contract with the Navy. By then, I was going to have 11 years of service completed. I only had 9 years left to go before I could retire. That was our plan, so the idea of leaving was not entirely straightforward. In response to my message, my wife called me back later and said, “Absolutely. Let’s do it.”
I think Kristina and I both realized that we weren’t heading on a good path. My shore duty was going to end soon, and I was about to go back to sea. I really didn’t want to do a full deployment because of my kids. We both also had a desire to strengthen our marriage. We wanted a fresh start. When the idea of going to Chattanooga came up, I think my wife recognized the opportunity for that new beginning if we moved. I fed off her energy and excitement about the prospect as well.
When I went home that night, we talked and prayed about it. We decided to go for it and told the guy starting the church that we were in for the church plant. That was in early 2007. I was walking away from my career, we had two little kids and no jobs, and yet we said let’s go to Chattanooga. Despite all of the unknowns, it was the most peaceful decision we’d ever made.
Of course, being in the Navy we could not just pack up and move the next week to Tennessee. We ended up being in Charleston until May of 2008. During that time, we went through a period of prepping, house hunting, and looking towards Chattanooga. It was funny because when we talked about what our life looked like there, I said that I was done with the nuclear power program, shift work, and we definitely did not want to build another house as we had done in Charleston. God, however, had the final say in all of that.
As the time to leave approached, I was still looking for a job. My wife and I had agreed to start this church in Chattanooga, but I had no idea where I was going to work. The reality that I had a wife and two kids to support set in. What were we going to do?
Me and my wife sat down one night and really talked about it. We knew if this was where God wanted us to go, we were going to have to trust Him. We talked about going down to one vehicle, buying a smaller house that was more affordable and cutting out cable. We figured out everything else we had to do to make ends meet while I tried to find a job out there and we settled in. We did not know how all of it was going to go. All we knew was that if this was where God wanted us, we were going for it.
To be continued.
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