My Testimony Part 2

Part 2 of my testimony entails the last four or so years of my life (late 2018-early 2023) with a bit of info for future plans. If you haven’t read Part 1, I highly recommend doing that first. That said, let’s get into it.

At the end of part 1 I was still going to Moody for aviation. Before moving forward, I feel the need to give a general overview of the aviation program at Moody. Year one is biblical studies and general education classes. These classes get sprinkled throughout the five years of the major, but they are primarily in the first year. Years two-three are maintenance focused and years four-five are either flight or advanced maintenance depending on the specific major.

In the fall of 2018, I started up my first year of maintenance. Little did I know at the time that this would be my last year as well. The year started out great. The program has quite a heavy courseload (in the two years I was there I averaged 19.5 credit hours per semester with one semester being 22 credit hours), but that didn’t bother me much. I had little issue with learning the material whether that was head knowledge or practical applications. Everything seemed to be proceeding well.

As the year went on, I had a few things happen. The first is that I started seeing things that concerned me at the church that we were going to. I was beginning to notice that our pastor was playing loose with doctrine. This led me to engage with him on this. Originally, I sent an email to him explaining my concerns, which likely wasn’t the best way to start. I probably should have started with just sitting down and having a chat. Though that did end up happening regardless. This ended up developing into a full blown “fight” with our pastor and elders, but more on that later.

The second thing that happened is I published my first book in early 2019. Parables and Teachings Understanding God’s Truth was written primarily to address some teachings in the church at large that are oftentimes held to as true, yet don’t have the Scriptural support to back them up. The topic that originally got me writing the book was creation. While taking “The Church and its Doctrines” online at Moody in my first semester, I had a professor that held to Old Earth Creationism. He posted a discussion board post going into a bit of detail as to why he believed as he did. I saw there were some serious problems with what he was saying and responded to his post. He never ended up responding. That said, this was the catalyst for me writing this book.

The final thing that was going on during this time was that I started having some significant health problems. I was diagnosed with Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia Purpura (ITP). Basically, this means that I had extremely low platelet counts in my blood, but they couldn’t figure out why. I personally am fairly positive that I was exposed to something overseas while I was in the Navy. One of my junior sailors also had the symptoms back in 2017. We just had no idea what it meant. I was hospitalized twice with dangerously low platelets. Low enough that there is risk of spontaneous bleeding in the brain which can prove fatal. Eventually, after attempting to regulate my platelets using steroids for six months, they attempted using a chemotherapy drug to put the ITP into remission. That ended up working. I’ve had fairly normal platelet levels since.

During this time, I started questioning whether God had truly called me to missionary aviation. There were several factors that went into this. The first being that I had never truly wanted to go overseas as a missionary, though I wasn’t opposed to it if that was what God was calling me to do. My thoughts had been centered on some form of domestic aviation nonprofit. That said, I was finding that I just didn’t have the passion for aviation. Don’t get me wrong, I love working on planes, and I believe that I would love to be a pilot. It just seemed like my desire was centered more around a part time/hobby use of planes. Additionally, with the ITP, flying was either not an option or would require waivers and lots of blood draws. This is, of course, barring a miracle. Overall, I started to feel that I had either jumped the gun on picking missionary aviation as where God was calling me to ministry, or I hadn’t but God had never intended me to finish. As in, He was using the time to grow me. Looking back now, I believe the latter to be true. To confirm all this, I moved my internship up from the typical four or fifth year to the summer of 2019. Jenn and I went to Florida for six weeks that summer to intern with Missionary Flights International. We enjoyed our time there, but during that time God confirmed that I was not going to be a missionary aviator. That left me with the question: Then what? I still felt called to ministry, but I just had no clue as to what that meant.

Throughout all of this, our struggle with our church leaders continued. Prior to going on the internship, I learned that there were others in the church who were concerned about many of the things that were going on. We ended up meeting and saw that our struggle was the same though from different angles. We joined forces as it were and continued trying to bring our pastor and elders back to the Bible. After coming back from my internship that summer (2019), we spent another couple of months trying. We ended up being wildly unsuccessful, at least as far as we know. Eventually, we were given the ultimatum from the elders to “shut up or leave with our blessing.” They said it in a much nicer way, but the way they said it doesn’t detract from what they were actually telling us. We (us and the other couples) realized that we couldn’t remain and pretend like nothing happened. That is what they were asking. That we be willing to agree to disagree and then be quiet. From our perspective we had two slightly different choices. The first being leave the church which, despite being tired from the struggle, we felt as though we would be abandoning the church members who we were trying to protect. The second would have been to continue at the church but disregard the elders’ wishes. Ultimately, we all decided to leave in order to not cause undue damage to the congregation. Unfortunately, we all went our separate ways. We have tried to stay in contact over the years, but as these things go, we haven’t been super successful. I am sure that most people can relate to the difficulties of keeping up with friends and family who aren’t seen regularly.

Leaving our church and finding another signaled a significant change for me. I had stopped going to school and we began attending a church that was solid doctrinally. And I fell asleep spiritually speaking. I don’t know whether it was the lack of challenge, exhaustion, or something else, but I backslide in my faith for the next two years. It was like I had been swimming against the current and making progress in my faith but once we left that church and Moody, I began to merely tread water and the current swept me backwards. I knew that I was still called to ministry, but instead of pursuing what that might be, I started to go after various hobbies. I was quickly swept away by the lack of direction that I had. It didn’t take long for me to start making plans that had nothing to do with God whatsoever. If asked, I, of course, would have said that I was still called to ministry. That said, I wasn’t welcoming of God coming in and telling me where He wanted me to go. I had figured out what I was going to do. I was going to make a business of my hobbies. For a while, it looked like that was going to work, but I inevitably got interested in new and different hobbies. These new hobbies would take over my mind for weeks at a time. I would spend all of my free time researching them. Obviously, this came at the cost of my business actually functioning well.

During this period, I not only stopped pursuing God, but I also fell back into a sin that hadn’t been a problem for years. I fell back into porn. This, of course, came with a significant strain on our marriage. Our marriage was never in “danger” as it were, but it definitely wasn’t in a good place. As we were working through that, we found out that Jenn was pregnant. In March 2021 Quinn was born. At the time, we were living in a one-bedroom house, so she ended up living in our closet for six months. It was a decent sized closet, but a closet, nonetheless. Once we had Quinn, we started to seriously consider moving back to Billings MT to be closer to family. That had been the long-term plan anyway, but having Quinn moved it up to a 2 to 3-year plan. God ended up having different plans for us in regard to that. When Quinn was roughly six months old, we moved back to Montana because Jenn lost her job due to not getting the Covid vaccine. What was crazy was what God did to provide for us through that. We had bought our house only two years prior for half of what we were able to sell for. God came through in a big way for us to be able to make that move. The house that we wanted in Billings was really perfect for what we were looking for, but our realtor really didn’t expect it to be around by the time we were ready to put an offer in. There were three separate offers made on the house that got accepted prior to our offer yet, for various reasons, these people withdrew from the purchase. We ended up getting the house in a really hot market despite being months late to the party. Praise God!

After we bought the house, I continued to pursue my business. I never ended up getting to a point where I could say that the business was “successful” even though I was technically making a profit. This was mostly due to my failure to focus on it. Still, anytime I was asked what the future holds for me, I would always say that God had called me to ministry, but I wasn’t sure what that looked like. After nearly a year had gone by, we started going to a new life group in the fall of 2022. This life group was following the Experiencing God Bible study. While there were things that I wasn’t a fan of or disagreed with in the study, it ended up being a very good thing for my walk with Christ. The Holy Spirit used the study to open my eyes to see that I hadn’t been pursuing God and that I was in a rather dangerous place. I realized that if I continued to push God away much longer, I was running the risk of completely losing my way. I had to make a change. The first thing I did was abandon my business and hobbies. This wasn’t a complete abandoning necessarily, but rather a refocusing on God. My hobbies and business were taking up all of my attention and time, so much so that I didn’t give God any room in my life aside from church and life group. So, I felt that I needed to stop doing both cold turkey. As I said above, this isn’t a permanent thing. I still allow myself to do hobbies, just not to the same extent. This allowed me to refocus on God.

The first thing that I did was make sure I had intentional time in His word every day. That is something that I have struggled with ever since I was saved originally. I also knew that I needed to pour into someone else and have someone else pour into me. This made me seek out a discipleship relationship. I talked with our pastor, and he suggested that our associate pastor and I should meet. This has been a huge blessing in my life. He has pushed me to continue to follow God, and has also given me opportunities to pour into others.

As I started pursuing God again, Jenn and I went to Ekalaka MT to do some hunting (November 2022). Well, Jenn and Quinn came along to spend time with my grandparents. I was the only one actually hunting. Anyway, while I was there, I got an email from the director of the aviation campus at Moody Bible Institute. Basically, he told me that I was still an active student despite over a three-year hiatus from attending Moody and that there was an updated program at Moody that would accept most of my coursework. This had been one of the challenges for me. I had a bunch of aviation credits that were essentially worthless for any degree except aviation. Over the last three years, I had considered going back to school several times for various different degrees. I rejected the idea each time because I was basically going to have to start over. Well, as I started researching this option, I felt a pull to do it. It was a step towards ministry whether it was something God was leading me to or not, but I thought God was leading me there. Thus, I decided to switch majors. Once they evaluated all of my credits, Moody determined that I had 109 credits that applied to this degree. This meant that I had one semester to finish up my bachelor’s degree. Not even that busy of one at that. I am currently halfway through that semester (spring 2023), and I will graduate in May 2023.

As I was preparing to go back to school, I started thinking along lines that I had never considered in my life. You see, I will still have over half of my GI Bill left after finishing my bachelor’s degree. This got me to thinking about a master’s program. I had never thought of doing a master’s program before. Yet, here I was realizing that not only could I do one, but the VA would pay for most, if not all, of it. Despite never considering this possibility, I found myself looking into more schooling beyond a bachelor’s degree. After spending time researching, praying, and talking with loved ones, I decided to pursue both a MDiv of Theology and a PhD of Theology and Apologetics. I start the MDiv this summer with the hope to finish in the fall of 2024. We will see if that will happen since that is a heavy courseload. This summer should give me a pretty good idea of whether I am capable of doing the MDiv that quickly and still be a present husband/father. As of right now, I feel that God is guiding me in this direction, but I also am aware that this is exactly how I felt prior to going to Moody for the first time. We all know how that turned out. That said, this time I am going into it with a more open mind realizing that this may be the path God wants me on for now, but it may change prior to getting the PhD. I believe that God wanted me to go to Moody Aviation, and I believe that I was never meant to finish the program. God used my time there to grow me, and He let me know when it was time to move on. I am going into this season of school with open eyes knowing that God could do the same thing in this situation. I held on too hard last time since I had assumed that, because God called me to Moody for aviation, He was expecting that I would finish. I really struggled with letting go of missionary aviation due to that assumption.

The final update is that we are expecting again! Jenn is due sometime in October. We still don’t have an accurate date, but we should know more accurately by the end of the month.

Now you are up to date again with my testimony. This portion of my testimony ends in March of 2023 with a glimpse of what is currently in the future. I make no guarantees that things will continue as I am anticipating any better than the end of part one. That said, I look forward to the time when yet another update on my life’s story is due. I pray that next time there won’t be a two-year gap of not following God.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to contact me at ljandersonbooks@outlook.com and I will do my best to answer your questions. Additionally, if you are interested in receiving notifications when I post a new blog, or release any other updates, please consider liking and following me on Facebook and/or Twitter.