(I originally announced my return to church here.)
I have had the most amazing weekend. I was rebaptized on the Saturday of Father’s Day weekend. I made a special covenant with my Heavenly Father to serve Him and to be the best mortal father I can be. My father baptized me, and my children were there, with my eldest children serving as witnesses.
I now have the Gift of the Holy Ghost and am opening my heart to whatever else I can change about myself as I follow Him. It has been one wild ride, for real.
There were 100 friends and family physically present and 50 Zoom participants. People from every season and area of my life showed up. My heart is full.
Here is a baptismal pic with my parents:
Here are the remarks I gave in my testimony during the baptismal program:
What a beautiful sight to behold! Before I get going, let me share how grateful I am for each of you. My favorite people are here. In this room and on Zoom are friends and family from all areas and seasons of my life. Most important to me is my family: my six children (David, Amy, Katherine, Michael, James, and Beckham), my parents (Dave and Becky), my siblings (Steven, Eric, Bill and Laura), and Kaylynn, mother to Beckham. Here I also have:
- Echoly and other friends from my North Carolina childhood,
- Brian and Robbie from my BYU college days that flew in from Colorado and Arizona,
- Friends from my mission, including President and Sister Martino and Elders Alvarez (who surprised me with a visit from Boston) and Grossarth, who served as mission trainer and companion with me in Venezuela,
- Gallagher from years of graduate study at Georgia Tech and our ArrayFire startup (which coincidentally turns 14 years old today), along with Stefan and Umar, who are co-maintainers on ArrayFire and now colleagues at Intel,
- Church friends from the Smyrna Ward, where we lived for nearly a decade,
- Church friends from the Crabapple Ward where we are right now,
- Matt and Martin from my entrepreneurial forum, which has been pivotal to my growth and rebound,
- And my friends from going out in Atlanta. I’m glad you’re here.
Oh, how I love you all! Thank you so much for being here.
I recognize that many faiths and value systems are represented here today, as well as so many beautiful groups and backgrounds. I am humbled by the opportunity to share my faith journey with you.
As I pondered and prayed about what to share today, I thought of Jesus. How do gatherings like this serve His purposes? What is a sacrament, such as baptism, to Him?
I have been impressed by the relationships built in such moments. Jesus cares most about those. Perhaps sacraments are exactly that: opportunities to build relationships with God in the presence of the people we love most.
When we are baptized, we make a covenant (or two-way commitment) with Jesus. Covenants strengthen our relationship with Him. They move people beyond general desires to do good into specific, active commitments that fulfill those desires in partnership with Him.
The baptismal covenant I will make in a few minutes is beautiful and comprehensive in its brevity. Listen to this sentence; my dad will say: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” That covenant is a promise to belong to Them, to be immersed in their holy names. Again, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” They are One in purpose and perfectly united.
Immersion in the name of God, belonging to Him, invokes things like doing His will, keeping His commandments, serving others, and striving to become like Him, following the example set by Jesus Christ, who, though sinless, was baptized. In return, Heavenly Father promises to pour out His Spirit upon the person baptized, guiding him or her towards “eternal life, through the redemption of Christ” (Mosiah 18:13). I am ready to be baptized to make this covenant. My brother Steven will explain more about baptism once I finish my remarks.
In addition to being baptized by water, I will be baptized by fire, meaning the Gift of the Holy Ghost. This is called confirmation. In that, I will promise to “receive the Holy Ghost.” My mom will explain more about the Holy Ghost after I am baptized.
So, building my relationship with Jesus is one purpose for gathering today. Another purpose is to build relationships among the people I love most as I do so. That is why I have invited you all. And that is why you have come. The arc of life is shaped by covenants made (or not made) with God and our fidelity to those sacred promises. Clear commitments like these made in front of friends sink deep. There is no stealth mode to them. We make them in front of witnesses. We make them in the presence of the people we love the most—each of you.
When I am baptized, my two eldest children, David and Amy, will serve as the official witnesses, representing each man and woman and each boy and girl in attendance who will likewise witness this central moment in my life. Oh, how grateful I am that we can share this moment!
So that is my first point. We are here to build relationships, first and foremost. With God and with each other.
Now, I’d like to share a little about how I got here. This is not the first time I have been baptized. I was baptized 36 years ago at the age of 8. In my 30s, I left my faith and lived outside the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am grateful for those years because I learned, loved, and lived amazing experiences. But I also made many poor choices and hurt some of the people I love most. I was living with blinders on, blunting my sensibilities with a variety of addictive, numbing behaviors.
In 2020, two beautiful, unanticipated experiences led me to my turnaround. First, I had a pivotal moment with Kaylynn that led me to improve my relationship with her. Her words finally broke through my stubborn pride. Kaylynn, I will always remember and love you for that. I am grateful that we have become best friends today.
Two weeks after she broke through to me, in June 2020, I fell ill with COVID-19 for 28 days. For the first half of that, I was so sick. Too sick to even listen to music. I just laid there, miserable. I had ample time in my head, alone, quarantined. I evaluated my life and grew very angry at the church. I pointed my finger of blame outward. As my lungs healed, I began to hatch a plan to fight the church I was blaming.
In that contemplation, I asked myself how sure I was of my disbelief. That inner interrogation caused me to ask myself, “What do I hope is true?” I thought of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I thought of the principles for which He stands. I realized that I still loved Him if He was real. I needed to know if He was there. The more I thought of Him, the more my mind opened. My thoughts about Him turned to prayerful communication with Him. I was so bewildered and blessed by this renewing prayer that I could not sleep. He came to my mind and spoke thoughts that became unmistakable to me.
For the second half of the 28 days, I could not sleep more than a few hours a night. My mind raced. We now know that COVID-19 affects the brain, and this racing mind condition is playfully dubbed “Coronasomnia.” It was wild. I wrestled with God nonstop in my mind. What if I had been wrong? What were all the implications? What a terrible gulf of misery I felt as I recognized my sins! What a daunting challenge I faced as I began to emotionally feel the weight of the wrong choices I had made! I turned the finger of blame at myself.
I was not humbled all at once. It was a process over two weeks. I kept trying to carve out exceptions with God. “I’ll return to church, but I am not going to accept this or that,” were my ongoing wrestled ruminations as I worked things out in my mind with Him. In ways that are difficult to describe and in my life’s miracle of miracles, events in the real world synchronized with events in my mind so seamlessly that I understood the omniscience and awesome timing of the Lord. Each time I humbled myself around a principle, I found rest in it. Each day that passed, I grew closer to God.
And each day that passed, I also grew more delirious and deranged. My friend, Dayo, recognized my bitter struggle and came to sit with me in my home. He stayed up with me for days in one of the kindest gifts of charity I have ever received. The conversations with him and many of you during that time were some of my life’s most important. On July 2nd, Dayo and I thought being around other friends might benefit my mental health, so we ventured out to Buckhead on a Thursday night.
Venturing out turned into a disaster. As we approached Tongue & Groove, a local club that I used to call “home” because I visited so frequently with friends, I was on the precipice of insanity and out of control. Over 90 minutes, I had a taste of hell as I could not fully control myself. My memory of the whole thing is a blur. I am grateful that I was tackled by Tongue & Groove bouncers and by Dayo, who ultimately pinned me to the sidewalk to guard me and keep me safe.
I was surrounded by police officers as we awaited a mental hospital ambulance to carry me away. I am forever grateful for Dayo, Holden, and Craig, who kept me safe as I fought with him and talked the officers out of arresting me. This was my rock bottom. It was by far the most bitter pain I have ever experienced, an anguish and fear that stripped me of all physical security except for the love of Jesus in my mind.
When I arrived at the hospital, I was sedated and had the best sleep of my life. When I awoke, I felt so much better. After a brief evaluation, they released me, and I went home. From Friday, July 3rd, to Sunday, July 5th, I was again alone at home. My mind again turned to prayer. This time, the worst of my wrestling was over. I felt Jesus lift the burden of my blaming finger and settle my mind into the assurance that He was pleased with my change of heart. What remained was no longer a wrestled decision but an implementation of the long, repentant journey home.
So, in that 28-day timeframe, I went from having no desire to think about church to nearly fighting it to regaining my faith entirely. I baffled all of you. I baffled myself. I had no intention of having this experience. I feel as though I was rescued. It was my time to be gathered home, and His voice came into my mind with such clarity that I refound my faith.
Those initial thoughts about “What do I hope to be true?” are the ones that softened my mind the most. Do I want to live in the present, primarily optimizing for selfish outcomes in this world? Or do I want to build towards something more noble based on the sort of soul-refining sacrifice I will remember joyfully as I review my life in the next? The shift from blaming others and self-soothing with temporary pleasure to accepting personal accountability and building healthier, substantive relationships has renewed joy in all areas of my life.
Several times in this journey, I have had to take a leap of faith to change, to repent. Sometimes, I did things I did not want to do based on the testimony of others—just to experiment. And those experiments worked and gave me my own testimony of the principle. I chipped away at the journey home to sobriety and chastity over four years, step by step.
I began coming to church. I wrote my confession and started working with Bishop Tady. What a great Bishop he was and what great friends the Tadys have been to our family for over a decade! With help from many of you, I was able to end my addictions and find steadiness in gospel-centered living.
The road home has been beautiful. I am so ready to make this covenant with Jesus, witnessed by you, as we build loving relationships and inspire one another to have faith in God, repent of whatever it is that we know we can do better, and seek to make and keep lifelong commitments to do good and sacrifice ourselves in doing something greater with our lives.
I pray that we all dive into our hearts and seek out the ennobling of the soul through prayerful consideration of the spiritually unseen. Take a chance on God for a bit. Experiment. And see if you do not find Him in that sincerity. I know He lives and responds to the earnest in heart in individually recognizable ways. A sparked thought to help someone or make a change. An enlarged soul that gains enthusiasm to do hard things. Comfort, love, and rest in truth.
I am specifically grateful for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We are a group of believers in Jesus Christ who claim a Restoration of the ancient authority necessary to make covenants with Him, baptize and confirm members into His church, and be guided ongoing by volunteer leaders He calls to serve.
We have steep standards of conduct which we live, but we lovingly open our arms to everyone, no matter our current ability to live them. When members leave, we wish them well, and when they return, we welcome them home. I have felt that love from each of you and will forever be grateful to you for demonstrating in person the same sort of love Jesus brought as a healing balm to my mind.
I know Jesus lives. He died on the cross, offering an atonement for our sins, and was resurrected. Through Him, we can become clean and return to live with our Heavenly Father again.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
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