From Atheist to Church Planter - Justin Mattera

There's a kind of dilemma, our false choice, that a lot of Native New Yorkers will have that live in areas that I grew up in and live in now. And it's, do I go to like Manhattan or downtown to the church that I would feel comfortable inviting my friend as kind of more modern and up-to-date? But I don't really feel at home. I don't have a lot of connection and friendships because it's so far away or, you know, it's very transient. Or do I go to like the church that I step in and I feel at home, these are my aunts and my uncles and lifelong friends, but I would never invite, you know, one of my friends too because I don't know what the pastor is going to say or what's going to happen during the service. Hi, my name is Justin Miterra. I am a father, pastor, and entrepreneur in New York City. I have five kids, beautiful wife, and this is my faithfully story. Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders as they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith journeys through their ministry work and everyday life. Join us as we delve into their challenges, moments of encouragement, and answered prayers. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff, and volunteers. Learn more at Faithly.co. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired as we unveil the heart of faith through stories from the front lines of ministry on the Faithly Stories podcast. Could you share how your faith journey started? Yeah, I am a pastor's kid, so faith journey started really young, but really started when I turned, probably seriously, when I turned 16, where I read a couple of books that really contradicted what I grew up learning and went down the route of atheism for several years. But between high school and college, I decided the question of whether God was real or not was a question that would define the rest of my life and needed time to explore. So I took a gap year before going to college. I moved to a corn field in Ohio to live with my uncle who was also a pastor out there and just trying to figure out the question getting away from friends, family, everything I knew, if God was real, and praise God that He met me in some incredible ways during that year and moved back to New York City, not as a home, but as a mission field for what I would kind of put roost out for the rest of my life and see what God wanted to do here in my city. What was the book? Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. So I grew up a lot around where to faith in prosperity gospel, and what I realized was all this talk about Jesus was from my understanding at the time was no different than all these other ways of accumulating wealth in the world, and so why would I suffer with all these rules if I could just manifest it in different ways? And so that's what started that journey. So what happened in Ohio that made you come back? Well, I never intended to stay there forever. I wanted to... I'm sorry. I meant like your faith, not like literally. So yeah. God. Yeah. What happened in Ohio that made you come back to faith? Yeah. Honestly, I'm charismatic. So what happened was I just spent several months praying through John 10 that if you are his sheep and you will know the voice of the shepherd and asking God to hear his voice and to know that he was real and to know him, and I felt like God had spoken to me throughout my life, but I was never abundantly sure whether that was me or not. And so I knew everything intellectually. My dad was very good at training me from a young age, making me read every apologetic book, church history, everything you can imagine. But at this point, I needed to kind of experience my faith to really know that God was real. And so I just kind of my fleece putting out before God was asking him to give me a prophetic word about somebody else that I had never met before and that I would know nothing about their life. And so I prayed on this and as people, new people were coming to church, I felt like God was sharing things with me, to share with them, but I was too chicken to go up to them and share it. But one night at our youth group, the youth pastor, it came up to me and he said, hey, Justin, you know, I think God is like putting something on your heart to share to somebody. And I did have something that I fell in, so I went up to that person and I shared it with them. You know, no miracle, lightning or anything like that, but at the end of it, the guy just kind of looked at me dumbfounded and said, man, I was wrestling with that all night last night. I couldn't sleep. And I came to church hoping to find the answer and you just shared it with me. And I remember walking out the back door of the church and just kind of like screaming outside like, oh man, God, you're real. And then that just began to happen very often and built my face from there. But at some point, you know, I think that moment was the moment of like, okay, I'm not making this up. I'm not crazy. God is real and I'm willing to kind of go 110% in this. So for those audiences, I mean, I honestly don't know who watches this, but I do have like, you know, more charismatic friends and whatnot. And like even recently, I'm learning like speaking from the heart is actually what God wants of us. There's not knowledge, right? It's understanding. And so for you, like, could you kind of describe what that's like to receive a word and to share it so that you're not checking out and then you know that it's not you that it's from the Lord? Yeah. I think ultimately what I've learned is this comes down to obedience and I would say my life is more journey of obedience than like great ideas and strategy or anything like that. I've just kind of seen what God is putting in front of me and taking those steps. And so specifically for sharing a word with somebody that I believe that the Lord has put on my heart for them is as hard to describe, I would describe it as you didn't have information a second ago. And now you do and, you know, I think I have learned over time to differentiate, you know, what is my own feelings, what is the voice of God and what are outside voices. And God helped me kind of distinguish that. And I was younger while I was away in Ohio, just like showing me different times. He did speak to me in different times in my life where he did lead me and how it all kind of felt the same and sounded the same and looked the same. And now as he was doing that with me about whether sharing with other people or making decisions for my life, it was all in the same vein. And it's different every time. Because it's like, it's a, it's a almost like a, I cannot contain this thing that is in me and I have to share it. There are times where I'm just, I'm praying for somebody and I don't know, I just know. Like I said, it's there. It's there in one second, it wasn't there the minute before. And, you know, to this day, praise God, you know, whenever that does happen, it's, it is, it seems like it has been God speaking and working. So I just continue to obey. It's funny because for me, it doesn't happen with people. It's like when I learn something new, it's like a, like, the way, the best way I can describe it is like the big bang, something that, the spontaneous thought comes and then unravels and becomes this like comprehensive word and it kind of flows, you know, and I realize when I'm trying too hard to make these words make sense, it's me, but when it's just flowing, it's like from the Lord and I'm like, astonished. So thank you for that. So as you are going through your atheist rabbit hole because I have a really close friend who's a so called atheist, but he's more agnostic, but he claims so adamantly, but he has a really good heart. So for you, like, could you kind of explain for you your journey of atheism, like exploring out being an atheist and then what about being an atheist, like most people who find something else, they stick to it, but for you, like something convinced you, wait, I don't think this is it either. Do you know what I mean? So could you explain like your journey and then coming out of that? Yeah, I think that is where the beauty of parenting comes into play. You know, in the scriptures and Deuteronomy chapter six, we are told to parent our children to cycle them, train them, teach them, and my parents were very diligent in doing that with me throughout my entire life. And so I sat down one day on my bed and I realized if I do follow this path of atheism, everything I dreamed about, everything I had been taught, everything I had imagined my life to be would be wrong. And I had to craft a new life, new thought patterns, kind of this entirely new worldview. That was daunting, but I also realized that it would be alienating from my family. It would be alienating from every dream I ever had since I was a kid, would be alienating from everything I knew. And so that's what prompted me to explore more. You know, before I make this huge decision that will literally radically transform everything about my life, what I do, how I make decisions, how I act, how I treat people, all this stuff, I should probably figure out if this is the right decision. And so it wasn't a, yeah, it wasn't a like, oh, maybe atheism is wrong in a sense, it was more of a, I will have been wrong. My parents have been wrong, everything will be wrong. And so let me just make sure I'm making the right decision. And I, I chalked that up to good discipleship for my parents because I would have never had that moment if they didn't spend countless years and hours with me in discipleship because it would have been easy for me. I would have never had to readjust expectations, life, dreams, and all of that. And everything I'd learned and been taught, it would have just flowed naturally into the new lifestyle and state. Could you describe your experience of that discipleship experience because it sounded like your parents were really patient with me. Yeah, they did a great job. They also have five kids. So and they, we have a couple of adopted siblings as well and they always took in children and the church. But you know, my parents intentionally sacrificed parts of their career and jobs. To help disciple us. For instance, my dad would make sure he always dropped us off at school and picked us up. And during those times, he would have conversations with us. We always had to wake up earlier to do Bible study in the morning, our Sunday afternoons, after church. You know, we weren't allowed to go anywhere. We had to have family time where we did devotions and prayer. You know, we were at, we were never allowed to play sports that interfered with our Sunday worship gathering, whereas like a lot of my friends would miss half the year. My parents instilled this, you know, this is a priority and it is more important than anything else in your life to be with the saints. And my dad in particular made sure that I had a good stream of books. And so every night before I went to bed when I was younger, he would read books to me. He would read biographies of like John Wesley, Spurgeon, Whitfield, you know, like all these credible people. And then when I got older, you know, he would just constantly feed me books to read. So starting, like by the time I finished eighth grade, I'd finished John Maxwell's entire library on leadership. When I was in high school, I was reading, you know, lots of books on science and scripture, interpretations of Genesis. In college, I was reading lots of how the canon came to be, you know, how do we trust the scriptures, the historicity of Jesus, of the scriptures, all these things as I, you know, debate with my professors, like it was always a stream. And I think the greatest thing that my parents had taught me is that all truth leads to God and to never be scared of it. And that for anything a professor or a friend tells me there's always an answer. And so to search out that answer, and I did. I love that that kind of explains like what happened to me a year ago where I kept like coming into these confrontations between these two theologies. I was so uptight about like right and wrong in this binary thinking instead of this comprehensive, like, oh, wait, it's just relational. Yeah. What does it mean to, so do you not reform anymore as we're you telling me? My theology is very reformed because I really think it's time to create like the core things and not the tertiary stuff. Yeah, I think we've like gone off the rails because we're trying to, we're trying to give an answer to everything rather than point back to Jesus as, okay, how does Jesus make this make sense, right? What convinced you to see New York not just as home but like as a mission field? Oh, that's a good question. I think ultimately it was the Lord. I don't think it was something I did on my own, but I'm glad that God did this. You know, I always find it strange when like people from out of state or out of city come to New York and like, oh, it's our mission or we want to do, you know, I don't disparage it, but I always think of like the most contextualization that you have is where you grew and where you were born and you know, you don't have to spend years to figure out the culture and the people, you know, we all know that the best missionaries are the indigenous missionaries and God has sent the nations to my city and as my friends and when I planted our church, one of the beautiful things about it is my childhood friends and my wife's childhood friends were a lot of the first people who came and or told their family members about it. These are people I went to middle school with, high school with, grammar school with. We met in the school I graduated eighth grade from, you know, when we first launched and so it's beautiful to see God work where you grew up and I think you have the best context for it, but ultimately it was just a strong sense from the Lord that while I was there that you are, because a lot of people wanted me to stay in Ohio, I made a lot of friends there and me and my uncle just both discerned separately like God was calling me back to New York City and I felt strongly that I had to go back with this mindset that this was my lifelong mission field rather than just going back home. Okay, so did you plan right away when you got here or was that process like? No, I did not plan right away. I was only 18 when I got back so I went to Baruch, which is a business college in the city, studied finance. I got heavily involved in intervarsity, which I would say is like my first real experience with ministry, even though I'd always been a part of ministry in the church, I was the president of my chapter sophomore year and like, there's a different weight, you know, when you're in charge and that, you know, since then, it had been just non-stop ministry. And so after that, I became the youth pastor and my home church and then after that became the executive pastor there after a couple of years of doing that. You know, I left there, took a year off to pray through church planning and then planted Zion the leave in 2017, January, we had our first worship service. So can you kind of unpack what planting the church is like? I'm honestly asking for myself now. So yeah, like, what other steps to planting a church? I do not encourage anybody to do it how I did it. I did not follow any of the models that was taught to me. So when I graduated college a couple of weeks after I did two things, I got engaged and I started my first business. And I felt like, you know, I'd seen my parents struggle monetarily through ministry, you know, my entire life. I didn't want to see that happen. But I think God was just moving and doing something different because planting in the city, bivocational is like pretty much a must if you want to have a sustainable church plan. And so my marketing business at that time was able to sustain me where I didn't need salary for the first several years of the church. So essentially what I did was for that year off, what you were supposed to do in year zero is you're supposed to do fundraise. You're supposed to build a core team and you are supposed to like look for all, you know, a place to be, have interest meetings, small group meetings, all of this different thing. But that year God had spoken to me a couple very clear things which was I'm not to tell anybody that I'm planting a church that I'm supposed to rest from ministry work and that he wanted to do a lot of internal things in me before I did this work. And so I was actually in Redeemer City to City's church planting cohort at that point. And, you know, every month we're getting together and everybody's sharing about their core team that they're building and the funds and what network and denomination they joined and how much they raised and their small group meetings and their strategy plans and I'm just like, yeah, I got nothing. I'm not doing anything. But I remember a morning and I would come to God regularly and say like, God is the time and God would just say no. But one morning I woke up and sometimes this happens to me where like I just feel like the first thing that happens when I wake up is the Lord speaks to me and that morning I just felt like God tell me it's time. And so like any good millennial I just opened my smartphone and posted on Facebook. I'm going to plant a church. But the next six weeks after that I got 30 people that joined, you know, we're interested in being part of the plant. I was able to raise a little over $300,000. I joined a network and it's a nomination. Right a few blogs that had gotten, I don't know, I think it was like five or six thousand views and shares around me. So it's and so within those six weeks, you know, a year's worth of work was done and I think, you know, it's just God's timing. You know, he just had everything mapped out. I had a be obedient and he provided funds. He provided people and my wife was also pregnant with our second one at that point. And so again, not something I would recommend to be having. So between our first interest meeting and our second interest meeting, my wife gave birth to our second son. And a couple months after that we found a space and started doing, you know, monthly preview services. But yeah, within a few weeks, everything that I should have been planning a year for happened. And our first preview service, we had 50 people come and it was just kind of explosive from there for us. Oh, were some of your thought processes and joining at the nomination and not just doing it independently? Yeah, I had grown up non-denominational. So I all of our friends and other pastors and churches and all that stuff were in the non-denominational worlds. And even though I do think there's benefits to that, the major downfall I saw to that was the lack of accountability. And I knew as good as my intentions are, you know, at the end of the day, power corrupts. And I needed to have a way to get fired. And that would keep me honest, it would, you know, keep the church healthy. And so when I kind of determined I needed to be fired if anything happened. And I didn't want to have this kind of set man mentality. Then I started looking into a bunch of denominations. And what I looked for were generally I wanted somebody that would, you know, strategically have the same vision I had, which was planting in urban areas. And two would be relational rather than bureaucratic. And so I praised God was able to find somebody new of a denomination that wanted to plant in New York. They hooked me up with them. And in our first meeting, which is kind of wild thinking back like there were no tests. There were no interviews at the end of the meeting. He just shook my hand and basically was like, yep, we're going to fund you. We had it three hour coffee meet. But after exploring, you know, it was it was a God move. And I'm thankful for it. So could you describe the progression and the like, I guess, quote-unquote explosion? Yeah. Man, so my heart for New York City is, you know, I'm a Native New Yorker and we reach Native New Yorkers, but Native New Yorkers don't generally live in center city. And so I want to plant congregations as far away from Manhattan as possible, but still in New York City. There's a kind of dilemma or false choice that a lot of Native New Yorkers will have that live in areas that I grew up in living now. And it's, do I go to like Manhattan or downtown to the church that I would feel comfortable inviting my friend as kind of more modern and up to date? But I don't really feel at home. I don't have a lot of connection or friendships because it's so far away or, you know, it's very transient. Or do I go to like the church that I step in and I feel at home. These are my aunts and my uncles and lifelong friends, but I would never invite, you know, one of my friends to because I don't know what the pastor's going to say or what's going to happen during the service. And so I wanted to kind of plant right in that sweet spot. And so yeah, we, by our third Easter, we had 400 people that came to that service. It was a lot. We had 300 people regularly on a Sunday. And this was in a few years. There was just a huge need, but we grew too fast. And there were a lot of cracks, you know, our core values or community, discipleship and prayer. And I didn't know half the people in the room and our leaders that don't know half the people in the room, you know, and with that came a lot of headache and hardship. And we wound up having a Thanksgiving feast. We were renting a public school and one of our volunteers made a mistake in how we did a cleanup. And that prompted the principal to terminate our lease immediately. And so the day before Thanksgiving in 2019, I got a call from the principal saying, we weren't allowed to be in the school anymore. I just begged her on the phone for one more week. She gave me it. And, you know, I went through all the, I'm going to sue them. We're going to buy another building. We're going to find another space. But in prayer, I just felt God strongly say, like, you're not going to another space. You're not going to sue them. I'm removing you from this space. You're not supposed to be here anymore. And so we wound up moving to a house church model in December of 2019. And as you know, COVID hit a few months later. So we're all I'm just thinking, like, I'm an idiot. I didn't want to start a house church, you know, model. God, why are you doing this to me? But when COVID hit, it kind of all made sense at that point, like why we did what we did. And that helped us survive. But in COVID and coming out of COVID as a leadership team, we kind of reflected on what happened. We never wanted to be a mega church. We didn't feel like that was where we're being called to, especially if our value of community to do it well. And so we decided our sweet spot would be about a church of 120 to 150 people. And as we grew beyond that, the hopes would be to plant in more neighborhoods that kind of fit that model of being in New York City. But we're more native people are immigrants lived, which was our, you know, 99% of our makeup. And so we had about 50 people were coming from the North Shore and Staten Island. So we thought, all right, coming out of COVID, let's just plant another congregation in Staten Island. And, you know, then replant essentially the one in Brooklyn. And so we did that. And we, you know, kind of tried to develop this model where we're not at campus, but we're not another church plant either. So have some kind of backbone operations, marketing, and thing where our congregation pastors can really focus on ministry, but they have their own budget, own leadership team, own ministries, and our ministries will cross pollinate as needed and help each other out. And so that kind of is what built out that model. And so much stuff happened in between then. I mean, I had just opened up a coffee shop six months before COVID started. Then me and Pastor James kind of co-founded Pre-March Act in the middle of the George Floyd riots. And so coming out of COVID with all of this stuff, it was just, you know, more like we want to drill down to the basics. We don't want to build a large crowd. We don't want high production. We don't want like all of these different things that originally we were using to draw people, but we realized we're not, you know, we're not drawing people that are interested in Jesus and Jesus alone. We're drawing people that are interested in concerts or production or nice music. So even that, like we had only a piano or a guitar on a singer, you know, for a year after COVID intentionally. And we're just, you know, we want to be here for Christ of Christ alone. We have a third congregation now because I wound up, my parents wound up retiring and giving me their church. So we merged their church into hours. And so our Brooklyn congregation is a bit bigger right now again. And they also had another Staten Island plant. So we have three currently one in Brooklyn with two services and then two plants out in Staten Island. What advice would you give to people or maybe you can give like a case study or a situation of like the struggles? So you were mentioning like the mistake. Yeah, because like church planning is tough because it's like a startup and you don't know getting yourself into and if you get an influx of people like you don't know what to do. Like how did you kind of come to those decisions as a team? Yeah, I wish I could take credit for it. A lot of it was prayer. You know, we would pray together, pray through our struggles we're doing and just felt like God was kind of leading us through it. You know, we would all still talk very openly as a team. You know, our leadership meetings are very different than what most people are used to. You know, there's no decorum and respect. It is honesty and discussion. And you know, I'm combating my ideas and they're combating their ideas and we're just trying to get to the best stuff. And so there's no like a niceties of oh, it's so great or this is nice or and people are kind of feeling like something isn't good. So if we're coming to the table and most of our leaders are saying like what's going on, we don't know how to people. How are we discipling these people? You know, this is an issue. You know, we would wrestle with that regularly. If there were people that were coming in that were having undue influence because we didn't have the infrastructure, you know, to kind of weed those people out and make sure they weren't. So there were a couple of wolves that were able to get in that we figured out they were wolves a little too late before we kicked them out. And so when COVID kind of made us stop and just spend a lot more time reflecting praying and talking, it just, you know, I just felt like the the spirit used that it's an opportunity for us to really change forces, redirect what our primary goals were. You know, I think if you so aren't kind of guiding versus X242 where they people gave themselves over to the fellowship, the breaking of bread, the apostles teaching and the prayers. And then after that, you see all these great things. You see generosity, you see the church is growing, daily, you see unity. And I think we chase the outcomes instead of chasing like the values. And so we've really redirected. We're not going to chase numbers that's not on any of our goal sheets. We're not going to chase generosity that's not on our goal sheets. You know, we're going to chase these values that we really believe is what centered the early church. And if we're doing well, if we're healthy, those outcomes are going to come. You know, we're going to grow, we're going to see generous people, we're going to have united church. And so the outcomes are, we'll look at our numbers, we'll look at all of those things and we'll be able to determine how, how, what's our health at? And if those things aren't good, we don't put a new number on the board and say like, let's hit that number. We go back to have we've been developing good community. What is discipleship looking like? And so the thought around all of that is how do we build good frameworks? Because we don't, you know, I talked to this one church planner and he had 30 people in his church for about a year or two at that point and he was looking and researching discipleship models and he was researching discipleship models that he would could grow into 500. And my word to him was like, you need to grow into 50, you know, like stop worrying about, you can't, and I think so many pastors get caught up in the scale like I need to figure out the best home to build and this model where it's like, you know, you're, you're trying to build an apartment complex and you haven't yet built like a correct foundation for one family home. And we just get so caught up in that. So for us, we wanted to develop good frameworks and so frameworks are around our values and being missionless our values and how do we have organic discipleship and but also have some church structure to provide discipleship. And I always tell people like we were never a small group church because like when I would ask pastors, how's discipleship going in your church? They would give me like, oh, 60% of my churches and small that tells me nothing about how discipleship is going. It just tells me like how good you are getting at getting people to admit weak thing, you know. And at any time I ask a pastor how have you been disciples in your life? They never tell me they went to a small group. They tell me about somebody who took them into their home and had dinner with them and confronted them and prayed with them. And so yes, we have groups, right? We have midweek groups, Bible studies, life groups, whatever it is. But that is not discipleship. Discipleship is taking people into your home. Discipleship is praying with people. Discipleship is sharing is done over a meal. And so how we are defining these things as well is where we do have programs, but programs don't run the church, right? There's lots of ways that people get to cycle, lots of ways that people find community. And so this kind of simple church model really alienates a lot of people from finding that and it's all about scale. And in scale, we lose a lot of nuance. And I personally think we lose what it means to actually be a church. You know, the family aspects, the chaos of being in deep community, the discipleship that is one on one, that is confrontational, that is convicting, the prayer that is not individual, but very much corporate and with the body. And so everything that we do is trying to live into that. How did you meet your wife? I met my wife in youth group at church. So when I had gotten back from Ohio, I just kind of jumped right into youth leadership. And she was kind of coming on and off and I just took it upon myself with a bunch of the different kids that were going to just like email them whenever they were not there or back then I was my space messaging all of them. And so every week that she wasn't there, I would just send her a message like, hey, we miss you today. Hope to see you next week. So we just developed a friendship through that. And we didn't have feelings for each other in the beginning. It took a couple of years for that to happen. But once it did, you know, rest this history from there. Did she like you back? Like initially. No, so neither of us had feelings for each other. And then when I started to develop feelings for her, she's three years younger than me. So I was 19. She was 16. And at that point, it was like, you know, she's too young. I'm just going to keep this under wraps. And so I did not tell it to anybody, including her for two years after that. So when she was probably midway through her 18th year and her first year of college, that was when I brought it to my brother, my older brother. Chris. And he was like, yeah, you know, I think this like, this could be good. So go for it. And so I asked her on a date in June. And she said no. And then I was funny. I went home and just kind of like prayed. And I just felt like every other time I wanted to be with somebody, I felt God just say no, like stop pursuing. But this time I just felt a clear, you have to pursue. It's time to pursue. And so one month later of pursuing, and she said yes. She tells me she said no, because you know, I've been preaching regularly in the youth group at that point. And she knew my stance on dating to marriage. So she felt like she was saying yes to marry me, not just yes to date me. Which he was, you know, there was no going back after that. I'm glad she eventually said yes. We dated for a year. We're engaged for a year. And then we got married. She was still in college when we were married. So she finished out her senior year in college while in our first year of marriage. What's one thing you learned in marriage that you wish you knew while you were dating? I think the one thing I've learned through marriage in kids is how selfish I am. And you know, that was the kind of joke. The first year of marriage between Heather and I is we didn't realize how selfish we were. And then when we thought we came to a good place, then we had a kid. And then again, it didn't realize how selfish we were. If there's one thing I've learned, it is, you know, Jesus sanctifies us through the responsibility of sacrifice and the more we sacrifice, whether that's for family, kids, the mission of the church. We are sanctified by it because we are doing what Christ did for the church. And that's the greatest calling sacrifice. And so if there's ways, if you want to be married, if you want to have kids, I would, my hope or my word of advice is sacrificed for the mission and for the church because there's no greater preparation. So when you had your first child, like how did that change you as a man and a father? Man, having my first child was rough. I always tell new parents, you know, the first three months of your first child will be the worst three months of your life. Because you're not used to no sleep, you're not used to like, if somebody gets you mad, you can't have a discussion with them, you know, you can't explain and have them apologize, you know, and ask for forgiveness. Anything that they do wrong, you just have to suck it up. You can't shake them, you can't hit them, you can't throw them. You just have to literally lay down every desire, every self-righteous attitude that you have. And you still have to do your normal life. I saw it work my job. There were many nights where I just had to leave at two in the morning because Heather and I were fighting about how to parent our baby at that time and take a walk around the block, cool down, and then come back. It was extremely difficult and, you know, it's simultaneously the greatest thing that I had done. I always find it funny because like, you know, I just couldn't believe it gave me this kid in the hospital and said to go home. You know, I just like, I was 26, Heather was 22 at the time, you know, and we just like, what are you doing? Why are you leaving this life in our hands? But like, you know, waking up to see my son love me and like want to cuddle with me and just smile every time I walked in the room, like there was nothing more precious than that. So it was a profound impact. I mean, I'm not the same person. And I never will be. I'll never complain about being tired again, you know, like because that is true tiredness. My first one was also just generally more difficult than all my other ones in the sense of never wanting to sleep. It was a mix of, we didn't know what we were doing parenting and very strong personality and there was no sleep training this one, you know. So it was two years before we had him sleep through the night. But yeah, I don't know. It's just how do you describe what changes you? I mean, your whole life is thrown upside down. Nothing I thought I was good at. I was good at, you know, the fruit of the spirit seemed. What I thought I was good at or what I thought I had a lot of fruit in. I realized, you know, I just had baby fruit, you know. Yeah, that's perfect, because he knows exactly what it takes to break us up and not destroy us. It's like the Jacob wrestling is like, he'll give you a limp, but don't worry, he'll be one. Okay, so I asked this in context because I know a lot of young parents, especially like nowadays, they only want to have one or maybe two because I'm afraid, but you have five now and I don't know if you're going to stop, but like, like what gets you over the hump of like having too many because, you know, the world says you're going to have this many money and like be this security. Yeah, for me, children was a real theology change for me. The world really does not like children. And we see it's not a different world than the world of Jesus when the parents want to bring the children to Jesus, the disciples rebuked the parents because they don't think that children are worth the time of Christ. And right before this, Jesus gives a parable in Luke 18 of the tax collector and the Pharisee who pray in the temple and the Pharisee prays a prayer of pride of how great he is and he leaves the temple unjustified and the tax collector, praise and prayer, Lord have mercy on me a sinner and he leaves justified. And Jesus says those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted and then the next story we get is these children coming to Jesus. And Jesus not only says to let them come to him, but he says that they are, that if we don't have faith like a child and become born again and act like a child, then we will not receive eternal salvation. And so not only does he welcome them, but he uses children as a model of salvation. And now we say born again because we literally become children again. And to understand the preciousness of children and God's eyes, I actually serve in our kids' ministry and our church because I believe that is probably more important than teaching adult through my sermons and getting to know whenever I meet a parent, I also meet the child, I ask them their name, I ask them all they are, I talk to them, I believe it is our duty to do that. And so children, the world hates them because it is sacrifice, it causes, it takes away our independence, financial or autonomy of time. And yet these are all things that Jesus calls us to live a life of dependence on him. If we are living in American independence, then we are not living a Christian life. Jesus calls us to live financially dependent on him to give up all of our riches, to give up all these things. And so when you think about what children produce in us, it is godliness, it is sanctification, it is holiness. And naturally are the world and our flesh hates these things and to produce these things. And so who wants more children when it means less free time, less money, less autonomy, like we don't want that. And I think when you begin to change your theology around children and you realize that children are a blessing even though, you know, me and Heather will chuckle like these blessings are not the blessing. You know, when Jesus tells the two disciples that want to sit at his right hand and left hand and he says, will you are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink? And they say yes. And he goes, great, you're going to drink the cup, but I am not the one who can give you the right hand and the left hand, that's for it. So you're going to get the suffering, but I don't know what your position is. It's a place what he says. But the blessing is to be in fellowship through suffering with Jesus, you know, and the more that we are able to do that, the more and Philippians 310 makes sense when Paul says to know Christ, the fellowship of the suffering, the power of his resurrection, we cannot truly know him unless we understand suffering, which is truly, you know, as Jesus said, to lay down our life to pick up their cross daily and to follow him. And children are such an amazing way to do that. And I think the more you let go of your life and you realize I'm just going to lay down, the more you can see the blessing of children. And I can tell you, yes, it has been hard, but there is nothing better than having like, you know, all four of my kids snuggle me on a Saturday morning or having breakfast together like, my life is not my own. My life is now to train them, to care for them, to teach them. And the fruit of my life is not in my paycheck, the fruit of my life is not in my career title, it is not in my resume. It is going to be these kingdom things. One of those kingdom things is raising my family well and training my children. How can we pray for you and your enemy? Yeah, that's an easy one. My wife is doing three weeks. It has been five years since we had a child. So we are just like getting right back in the ring. The end of pregnancy is very difficult, has always been very difficult for her. Just, you know, we can't sleep, uncomfortable, pains everywhere. So just praying for peace over her body, joy in this process. And as we go into this next season, just another measure of grace, you know, from God to walk through well and be pruned of what doesn't belong and and allow new fruit to kind of come into the vineyard. Amen. It's been amazing meeting you. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, man. Thank you. I appreciate it. It was nice to meet you too. I'm assuming we're going to get together at some point. Okay, that's it for the podcast guys, but thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast. We pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue on your journey. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff, and volunteers. The Faithly Digital Platform offers innovative and practical tools and resources to enhance connection, foster collaboration, and promote growth within the church and ministry space. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review our podcast to help reach more listeners like you. Stay tuned for more uplifting tales from the Frontlines of Ministry on the Faithly Podcast. Stay bold, stay faithful, and never underestimate the power of your own story.