[00:00:00] Speaker A: I lived a double life. I was kind, I was positive. I was very involved in a lot of organizations, but privately I was self destructing. I made a commitment that I would not be a person who had any faith in God. And I just had this sense of overwhelming love come over me and say, just say yes.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Welcome to X Skeptic, where we explore unlikely stories of belief. This is a place for those who are curious about the Christian faith, those who wrestle with doubt, and those who want to understand why. Some skeptics and seekers come to see the world, God and themselves differently.
Here, we don't shy away from questions. We listen to them, think through them, and follow the evidence and experience where they lead.
Today I'm joined by Erika Diaz Castro, a thoughtful young woman who tried to make sense of her life while carrying deep intellectual and emotional doubts about God and faith.
Like many, she knew how to live one life in public and another in private while searching for truth, meaning and identity.
In this conversation, Erica invites us into that tension. The pull between independence and surrender, the struggle to believe when answers seem unclear, and what finally led her to trust the very God she once avoided.
Let's begin.
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Well, welcome to exskeptic. Erica, it's so great to have you with me today.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: Thank you, Jan. I'm happy to be here.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: I loved meeting you and hearing your story and just learning a little bit about you. I'm so thrilled to have you tell your story today as we're beginning. You wear a lot of hats. And I would love for the listeners to know just a little bit about who you are, the kind of things you have your hands in, the things you're passionate about, the things you're studying, even podcasting.
Do tell us about those things.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Well, first and foremost, I am a passionate follower of Jesus Christ. I see everything I do through that lens, and I'm really grateful for the many hats that I wear.
Sometimes it feels like a lot, but I know that this is all to glorify him, and I'm really grateful. I'm married to my college sweetheart. We have two children praying for more. We would love to have a bigger family and just continue to raise children who know and love the Lord. In addition to that, I founded and lead Her Renewed Strength. We exist to help women get in the Word of God and grow confidently in their faith.
And the biggest catalyst for pursuing the Lord and really having a passion for God has been reading the Word. So just taking that experience and seeing the value of that has driven my desire to do the work that I do inside of Her Renewed Strength, including podcasting, blogging, coaching, and for a time, we were hosting online conferences as well. So we're excited to just encourage and equip sisters in the faith to really know the Word and to know what they believe.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: That's true. That's terrific.
We'll post those links to Her Renewed Strength, your podcast and resources in our show notes. So thank you for bringing that forward. And I'd love to kind of start back at the beginning of your journey because it wasn't that you weren't always in that position, and I'd love to. To really explore that a little bit today. Why don't we start back at your story. When you were young, where were you born? What kind of family were you raised in?
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I was born and raised in New Jersey.
My. My dad is from Puerto Rico, and he came over to the stateside United States when he was a teenager in a program that allowed folks in the island to come over and work and then go back. And so he did that trip.
I believe it was about four or five times before he decided to stay. And then he migrated up to New Jersey, so he worked in sugarcane fields. He did all of the farmer stuff, and then he ended up working in factories and doing music at night. He was a musician, and he always loved the Lord. My dad was very passionate about his faith. He was Pentecostal, and when he was involved in music, he met my mom, who was born in New Jersey, but also of Puerto Rican heritage. They got together as bandmates in a Puerto Rican folklore group. And my dad played an instrument called the cuatro, which is a special stringed guitar. And my mom, though she doesn't admit to having the best voice. She just decided she was gonna sing because she enjoyed it and she didn't care. And that's when she met my dad. And when they got married, they both were in different denominations. My mom is Roman Catholic, has no plans to leave the Catholic Church. My dad would never convert to Catholicism.
And my mom tells me the story that a priest sat them down one day and said, okay, this is how she's gonna worship like this, very quietly, and this is how he's going to worship. Very charismatically and loud and passionate. Are you both okay with this? Are you both still going to raise your. Your family in the faith? Yes. And they moved forward and they were married for, geez, 38 years before my dad passed this past summer.
And faith was very present in our home, Bibles everywhere. My dad had a, you know, a radio on in every room playing worship music.
He really took his faith very seriously. He would disappear for about an hour every day, and we were not allowed to interrupt him because he was having his time with the Lord where he was praying and worshiping God.
My mom the same, very passionate about her faith. In fact, she tells me that when she was younger, she really considered becoming a nun because she felt so passionate about her commitment to. To the Lord from a very young age.
She also tells me stories about when she was a little girl, she would walk to children's church on Sunday mornings when she was 7, 8 years old by herself in the snow, and she carried that into our home. It was really evident that both my parents loved the Lord.
And with that example, I knew that God was real.
I don't know that I had my own personal relationship with the Lord during that time, but I knew that God was real.
And I did go to Catholic school all of my life, from kindergarten all the way to my senior year of high school.
And I learned a lot.
But I think because my brain is more wired to appreciate information and intellect, I took it more as an academic training than a preparation for living out the Christian faith.
So I wouldn't say that the gospel fell on fertile soil, but it certainly didn't fall on, like, a bushel of thorns. I think I was getting primed through seeing the example of my parents. For a long time, I just hadn't made that decision for myself.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Were there things or teachings, you know, in the church or that you read in the Bible that just seemed suspect or how were you questioning how they could be true intellectually, rationally, evidentially?
Was were you in an environment where you were.
It was presumed that you just take things on faith? What was it that that was unsettling or just not convincing or are really just not interesting to you, that you didn't take that in personally?
[00:09:28] Speaker A: I think part of my struggle to take that in personally was that I had my own struggle within our family dynamic where I felt that I was treated a little differently. And even though I saw their faith and love for God, I didn't feel that love myself. And it did make me question what faith could really be. If that's what I perceived. It impacted my trust for the people I was in interacting with, including in Catholic school. Looking back, I remember some conversations with teachers and they were really appreciative of my questions, but it's clear now that they didn't have answers. And so they were kind of shooing me away.
And I also think that a lot of people are of the opinion that they just need Jesus. They don't really need to understand doctrine broken down. They don't need to dive into theological matters. They just know that Jesus is God and he came to save us. And that's enough for a lot of people.
And I, I didn't get that breakdown as a child, but looking back, I can see that those were the people I was interacting with.
Faith was enough for them. I wanted understanding as well.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: What kind of questions were you asking that were putting them on the back foot, unable to respond?
[00:11:01] Speaker A: You know, I think one of the biggest questions anyone asks, adult and adults included, what does the Trinity really mean?
How do we understand that?
And now that I've studied the Trinity in more depth, that's actually my area of interest as it pertains to research.
I see why it's so complicated and I appreciate it.
I appreciate that it's not something that people want to fumble because I've seen it fumbled and people are really cautious to consider how they respond. And so they kind of bow out of that.
Another thing that stood out to me was that I struggled with same sex attraction since I was a child and that came out of sexual abuse.
I didn't tell my parents about that as a child.
I just knew that I experienced same sex attraction. And I knew that the Bible said that wasn't allowed or that wasn't right.
And no one could ever tell me why.
My dad would say in Spanish things are bad. In Spanish, he would say, las cosas esta mala. And what that means or what that translates to in the context of what we were talking about are, times are hard right now. Like, let's not go down that rabbit hole.
And he just wanted me to accept that that wasn't acceptable and I didn't understand it.
I was a.
A very feelings kid.
Feelings really matter to me. I was looking for a logical argument to be presented to me so that I could consider that and decide if I would buy into that.
And that wasn't something that was explained.
Another thing that I struggled with was, and I know, I know now, that my struggle was specifically with the feminist movement and the influence it had on the women around me and then their influence on me. There was a very independent woman attitude in my family, a very woman first attitude.
And while I didn't read the Bible regularly, I knew enough about what I was being taught that there was a really big emphasis on men in the Bible and not a big emphasis on women in the Bible, except, and this is a big except in Catholicism, Mary.
And I appreciated Mary, but I didn't have a great view or great trust in my mom.
And so I couldn't appreciate the role of the mother of Jesus because I really didn't appreciate the role of my own mother.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: So there's really a lot there.
So much, a lot, a lot. Personally, emotionally, intellectually.
And I'm sure that over time that those things continue to kind of reinforce one another in terms of increasing maybe a doubt or a distancing or a questioning, at least of what you had been taught. What did you do with that? How did that work its way out and work its way through. Is it something where you continue to push away thinking, okay, this isn't the story that I believe when I look at the feminists or when I'm not, you know, I'm trying to understand my own sexuality or I'm not understanding these intellectual questions. What did you do with all of that? Did you just walk away from faith? Or did you stay, remain in a sense of faith or belief in God and just try to grapple with it? How did that work out?
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I know now that what I was struggling with resulted in a defense mechanism that looks like being more prideful. So I would defend myself. I would defend my own decisions and my own opinions.
And I was always passionate about writing.
Language arts was one of my favorite studies, grammar literature.
And so my.
I know the Lord gave me the gift of communication.
And I know now that I weaponized it for a time.
And so I, I look back and I see how I interacted with others and how those interactions put distance between me and people who could have had a bigger impact on my life. Again, it was a defense mechanism.
I also recognized that I lived a double life, probably starting around 12 or 13 years old, where I continue to grow in the Catholic Church and move on the trajectory that is set forth for believers who want to pursue faith in Roman Catholicism. I move forward with confirmation. I went to an all girls Catholic high school, I got involved in the liturgy team and I went to a preaching conference for high school students where I learned to use my gift.
And in a liturgical setting.
I was designing liturgies, I was speaking and getting into public speaking and doing more of the stuff that looked like I was growing in the faith. But secretly I was starting to party. I started to use alcohol, I started to use drugs. 16, 15, 16.
And I did it all behind my parents back. I would sneak out, I would make decisions about who I was hanging out with and lie to my parents about that.
And I really abused their trust in me. And my mom ended up finding out about pretty much everything in my senior year of high school when she read my journal again. I love writing. I have journals since I could write.
And when she read my journal, it was all incriminating and she found out the truth.
But she also learned about some of the things that I had suffered through silently. And there was a twofold response. She gave consequences for my actions and she also offered an olive branch and asked how she could be supportive because my mental health was suffering and she didn't really know until she read my.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Journal through all of that. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean that's beautiful what you're telling me in terms of. Her response was clear but loving. You know, there was.
Sounded like what was needed to address the issues at hand, but also understanding, yeah, there, there still needs to be resolution and peace and relationship through it all. And that's really beautiful, especially considering all that you had suffered in your life there that silently as you say.
So through that, through all of that, did you, did you question God?
Did you just say, oh, I think that he exists, but I'm just going to go live my own way because it's really not making sense to me and it doesn't make sense to me emotionally, it doesn't make sense to me intellectually. Nobody's giving me good answers now, of course, you're still in high school where a lot of things are going on in your Life.
How did that look in terms of your own faith walk? You're saying you were duplicitous, you know, going through the motions, even as a leader in the Catholic Church in some ways, you know, in front giving sermons and going through liturgies and those kinds of developing liturgies, but yet living a totally different life. And I think many people are caught up in that. But through that kind of facade, in one way, was there still something real underneath the facade?
Or were you just.
Was it. Was it pretending?
[00:19:59] Speaker A: In a sense, I don't think I thought about God. I did what I was supposed to do to be a good girl.
There was a big emphasis on behavior. And so in front of the right people, I behaved.
And in private, I had no conviction. I experienced no second thought, really. I just went my own way. And I think what I started to practice is like a melody.
I was moving in the direction of. I think I could be spiritual.
Maybe God is real, maybe he's not, but I'm just gonna do my own thing.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: What did that look like?
[00:20:52] Speaker A: Oh, dear. I went to college and I just never came home. I did a whole lot of partying.
I was dating someone. I had dated women. I had dated men or boys.
And I.
Whatever felt good was what I did. And when it didn't feel good, I crumbled. I had a very, very poor stress management, you know, coping mechanisms. I coped with drugs, with alcohol, with isolation.
I attempted suicide at 18.
And I remember a friend who had been my friend since we were 10.
She just reached out to me that day. We didn't always talk, but she reached out to me that day.
And I had just swallowed so many pills.
I felt so sick. And I just asked her, can you come get me?
And she went and got me, and she took care of me.
And I was.
I was grateful that day because I felt like God saw me.
But aside from that, I didn't think about God or who God might be.
And this continued until my sophomore year of college when I was alone in my dorm room.
And I remember experiencing. I had actually told you about this experience.
I felt like there was a great evil in the room, and I couldn't move.
And I was so frightened that I was frozen. I didn't want to breathe.
And I remember thinking, who's going to save me from this? And I felt like something was sitting on my chest and trying to penetrate me.
I'm wide awake. I have no idea what to do.
I'm not speaking.
And knowing what I know now, if I truly belong to the Lord. I would have called out the name of Jesus, but I didn't even think to do that.
What came to mind after it passed was if God was real, he wouldn't have let that happen.
And the accusations in my mind started. And so from there I put my trust in people, the people who I could see who would show up.
And I made a commitment that I would not be a person who had any faith in God because I felt abandoned in that moment.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I can imagine. So it's.
When you experience a palpable darkness like that and anyone who's out there, who has nose, how profound that sensibility is, there is an acute awareness that there is.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: If you're.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: If God doesn't exist, I wonder how you made sense of that spiritual world that you had encountered that was something of darkness but not light.
Did you, did you think. Well, you had, you had mentioned that you thought you would pursue maybe something spiritual, not religious, kind of, not, not in the orthodox way, in a sense. So did that just reinforce your understanding that maybe there is a spiritual world, maybe there is something real, obviously enough to have frightened you so that you needed, you needed someone with you. You know, no one wants to be alone like that.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: I did start to think in terms of positive and negative.
So after that my conclusion was I just need to be more positive.
I was probably being too negative and I attracted these things to myself.
And from there I was a positive friend, encouraging everything I was before, but now, in the name of my own, you know, self, my own reputation, doing it on my own. And again, just the double life that I was living in the eyes of others. I looked responsible, I was kind, I was positive. I was very involved in a lot of organizations, but privately I was self destructing and participating in things that are destructive to the soul.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: So were you standard, were you. Yes. Were you beginning to feel any sense of that in your heart or, or were you.
Were you sensing, well, maybe I. Maybe I should look at the question of God again or any of that. Was any of that going on?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: No, not in that.
Not in a way that would be consistent with what a person indwelled by the Holy Spirit is experiencing. I started dating my husband in that last year and he was a devout Christian.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: And I would have to wait for him to get out of his Bible study before I could hang out with him.
And so the thing about him was that I didn't know he was a Christian. He was on the football team, he was super popular. He was a person who I had my eye on for a little bit, but I would never talk to him because it was. He was so intimidatingly good looking.
And I just knew that he wasn't interested in me because he did not want a part of a party girl. And I, he, He went to the parties that I went to, he went to the after parties that I went to.
And.
But he didn't participate in that way. He was an observer. And so he knew things about me that I later learned I didn't know that he knew.
And so I remember there being a point in time when I thought, am I really gonna pursue something with him? He's a Christian.
Does that mean that I have to become a Christian? Probably not. And he didn't say that. He didn't make me feel like I needed to. He just had his boundaries and he was really good at holding his boundaries.
And there was a point in time when he and I got very comfortable with each other after dating for some time. And he would say things that made me feel like he was judging me.
And it had to do with my habits and with the way that I operated within our relationship, which was very prideful because again, I have this mindset of women are the greatest gift to the world and men should appreciate women more. We should be equal, and I'm probably smarter than you anyway.
A lot of pride.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Isn't that so sad? He was living at a higher standard, and I knew that. And I felt like I didn't deserve him because I knew that I wasn't meeting that standard. So when we started to date, I did try to come up to that standard, at least in my behavior.
And still he noticed things in me that were at odds with what his convictions were at the time. And so he would make comments or he would ask me not to do or behave in a certain way or participate in certain things, or reconsider who I was hanging out with. And I took offense to it.
I wanted to be offended, I think, because I wanted to stay where I was and I just wanted him to accept me. I just wanted to be accepted.
Over time, seeing him continue to grow in his own way, I started to ask questions.
If he is a smart man, and he is, and he is a very logical person, the most logically minded man I had met to that point.
And he thinks God is real, that he will go to a church and raise his hands to sing and praise God. Am I missing something?
Am I thinking about this wrong?
[00:29:39] Speaker B: So then how did you answer that question?
Was it with conversations with him? Did you enter in going to church? Did you start reading the Bible? What did that look like to. To start investigating?
[00:29:52] Speaker A: I didn't ask him questions because I was afraid that he would judge me, that he would look down on me for not knowing these things because he knew I went to Catholic school all my life.
So in a sense I was trying to put forth an image of myself that was just not real. I wanted to seem like I had already considered these things and that I was too smart for Christianity.
What I found myself starting to struggle with was what happens after death.
And I think that's where I.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: I.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Started to look for near death experiences. And I read about many.
I wanted someone to tell me that they saw Jesus and that he was real and that I had reason to believe. Can someone who had a near death experience tell me, can I read about someone who saw Jesus when they had that near death experience? And I thought that would be enough.
And in all the books that I read, that was the consistent outcome. And I remember on Christmas Eve of 2012, I was very depressed. I was experiencing.
I probably would have been diagnosed with major depression if I had seen a professional. But I coped in my ways that I coped with.
And my husband, boyfriend at the time, hated it.
And I remember going into the bathroom and just kind of preparing for the evening. It was Christmas Eve.
And I thought to myself, tomorrow's Christmas.
It's Jesus's birthday.
And it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had for the first time in years, associated Christmas, Christmas with Jesus.
And I remember saying, I just started crying and saying, I'm so sorry that I have denied you all this time.
I won't ever do that again.
And then from there is where my faith journey started. But there were many, many, many hurdles to overcome because I just didn't have discipleship. I did not open the Bible, didn't go to church.
And also when I came out of the bathroom and I told my then boyfriend, now husband, I just, I think I just decided I'm gonna follow Jesus. Like, I think, you know, Jesus is, is real.
And he just looked at me and he said, okay.
There was no excitement.
And I felt like he was rejecting me in that moment. And he said, so I didn't want to talk to him about it anymore.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, because that was a big, big deal.
It was big. Yeah.
So. So you decided to follow Jesus and on your own, it sounds like.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't know what that looked like.
I didn't know what that really meant.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: So how did you Navigate that.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: A few weeks later, I broke up with him because I thought to myself, I am unhappy and I don't know why, and I don't think it's fair to try to figure it out while I'm still with him.
I don't want to drag you along.
And when I told him that I was crying, he was crying.
He said, I, I want to come along.
I said, no, I don't. It's. I don't know if I will end up wanting to be with you, so I don't want you to wait for something like that. And he said, I will wait.
And I just didn't want the pressure.
I didn't want to feel like I was indebted to him. I wanted the freedom to what I at the time called find myself.
A lot of people go through that. And what that ended up being, practically, was just being free to do whatever I wanted with no accountability. Because again, I always felt like he was judging me.
And so I. I think what I craved was a time of no accountability while I dropped my standards and figured out what I was really doing.
And we ended up separating and breaking up.
And about six months later, I ended up dating a woman who, I won't get into this too much because it is its own thing, but I thought she was a man. We had talked online and she ended up being a woman.
And the long and short of it is that I had been talking to her for years and years and years on the Internet. And the last prayer that I prayed made before I decided to walk away from God was that if God ever let me finally meet this person and try to work out a relationship, that no matter what, I would try.
And so that flashback, which was probably about five years before, six years before, came to mind when I have this moment where I realized, oh, you're the guy that I've been talking to online, but you're not a guy, you're a girl.
She did not know that I had experienced same sex attraction because I didn't tell anybody.
And so it was a shock to her when we decided to. When I agreed to move forward and try to work out a relationship despite the major lie that was there.
And in those six months leading up to that, I had been seeing a therapist who introduced me to the law of attraction, asked me to read the Secret, got me into Eckhart Tolle and a lot of the other New Age books and gurus.
So I was actually led down a very different path than Christianity.
And I started getting into what is considered Witchcraft. I started to see a psychic. I started to try to speak to spirits myself.
And I got really deep into this spiritual darkness. And that's when I officially met that woman and started dating her. And I look back and I'm like, wow, what a.
What icing on the cake to get duped into what? I ended up saying yes to being in a relationship with and. And that coming kind of in the midst of me pursuing spirituality, which I was conflating with Christianity, and I was experiencing a lot of spiritual warfare, but coping in the unhealthy ways that I did. My husband now remained friends with me during that time. He would check on me, and eventually I left that relationship with a woman.
I was not ready to go to move into a relationship with him. He did want to reconcile and come back together.
And I was too deep into all the things that I was doing. I was doing harder drugs, I was going on a whim, on trips by myself, spending money, doing whatever I felt like doing.
And I didn't. Again, I just didn't want the accountability. I just wanted to be free of what is. What I was calling judgment.
But it's clear that I just wanted to live below standard. You know, I did eventually date a Muslim guy and wow, the feminists in me really hated him. I was not very pleased with his standards.
He was fine with me partying. He was fine with me, you know, doing whatever. I had a social media following.
[00:38:31] Speaker B: And he was.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: He loved it. He even loved the idea that he was a Muslim guy dating a Christian girl. That was like, you know, kind of rebel ish for him, and he enjoyed that. But then I had a. I. My online presence was a fitness account. I was doing physique competitions, so I was posting pictures of my physique, and he did not enjoy the attention that came with that and asked me to stop. Asked me to.
To behave like a woman and not to try to be the man in the relationship, which was really off putting for me. So that ended and I realized that if I was. If I really was a Christian, I was calling myself a Christian and I was willing to be in a relationship with a Muslim guy. I must not be taking Christianity too seriously, because it just seemed like it didn't jive.
And about a month later, my aunt, maybe two months later, my aunt reached out to me. Never on her own reaches out unless there's something happening. And she said, hey, I'm going to church today.
Do you want to come?
And I said, okay, what time? She said, I'll pick you up in, like, 20 minutes.
I was like, okay. I used to wake up really early so I would get my morning cardio in because I was still competing.
So I was awake.
I said, yeah, I'll be ready. I'll throw on some makeup. I had a pixie cut. I didn't need to do my hair, so I was ready. And the church ended up being a block from my house.
And I went back every week until December of that year.
I raised my hand in a salvation call, and I had already felt for weeks that draw, that desire to surrender.
I think because I called myself a Christian, I thought that I didn't need to. But one day I just. One Sunday, I realized I'm not really a Christian, am I? I'm not living like it.
And I felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
To fully commit.
And I remember thinking of everything that I had done in those last two years and how God must think I'm horrible.
And I just had this sense of overwhelming love come over me and say, just say yes.
And so I did.
And it was the end of December of 2014.
I.
I decided if I'm going to do this, if I'm going to follow Jesus, I need to know what he says, and I need to read the Bible.
And I committed to reading the Bible in a year.
And during that year, I was preparing for major competitions in Pittsburgh, in New Jersey, New York. And so I committed to listening to the Bible app on my phone, doing a Bible in a year plan. Whenever I trained, I thought, if I'm going to train my body, I'm going to train spiritually, too.
And that's when I would get in Bible.
I did cardio 30 minutes every morning, 30 minutes in the afternoon. And if I was on a run, I was listening to the Bible. If I was lifting, I was listening to the Bible.
And I remember having so many questions, but I. And I'm one of those people that needs to scratch that itch.
But I decided I'm gonna try to control myself and not look for answers until I get to the end. And once I get to the end, I'll go back and I'll see what I need to start with.
[00:42:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Wow. So you.
You've been through a lot in that, journeying that the kind of resisting that you did for years.
[00:42:53] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Until. Until you came to a point where you were ready to surrender and do things Jesus's way.
And that is the biggest decision of all, isn't it? And it was not, it was not met with judgment.
It was met with love.
And that's the beauty of the gospel, isn't it?
When you, when you finally come and you lay your life before him, warts and hall, and he says, you are my child.
And then you know that when you're surrendering, you're surrendering to someone who loves you, who wants the best for you, someone who wants to give you life. That's truly life.
So it sounds like you really started pursuing him.
You started listening to him. You weren't resisting, you were listening.
So through that process of knowing and I obviously listening to the Bible, reading the Bible, there are some hard things and there are some questions, but you were looking at it through the lens of someone who loved you and was trying to communicate to you what is true, what is real, what is good, what is beautiful, what is life.
So how did you find that? I mean, that for that next year, when you were listening and you were learning and you were submitting innocence, you were. Surrendered that posture, you were pursuing Christ as he was pursuing you in that.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Period.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: How did that time affect your walk with Christ? The way that you perceive yourself, the way that you perceived your life, your.
Your. Even your identification as a Christian?
Sounds like all of that was on the table.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: Well, I'll say that sanctification is indeed a process.
And so many of the habits that I struggled with since I was a teenager were habits I continued to struggle with.
I gave up alcohol for large bouts of time, primarily driven by my desire to do well in competition. So I didn't want to have empty calories, but I still use drugs periodically, motivated by my hobbies, I like I laid down bad habits, but I would pick them up again.
And by this time I had reconciled with my now husband. We got back together. And at the point that we got back together, I already started trending toward Jesus. It was kind of leading up to the time when I finally surrendered in December.
And we had a serious conversation where he said, if we are going to get back together, it is because we're building something that will not fall apart.
And I knew what he meant, and I agreed. And he agreed. We had some things that we needed to work through. But we persisted and we both were aligned again, not just in our hobbies, but in our beliefs.
And the more I read in the Bible, the more I wanted to read, I would consume, you know, days at a time.
Sometimes I just didn't want to stop.
I remember the way that my. My mind works when I'm moving. If I'M taking in information, I will remember that information. And the next time I read it, I'll remember what I was looking at when I was moving. It's so weird, but that's like what happens. And so I would go on runs. And I remember one run I had, I was listening to the Book of Ruth and I got lost. I was deployed for, for work in Cleveland.
And I get lost in Cleveland running around, I end up running when many more miles than I needed to. But the whole time I'm listening to the Book of Ruth, just going back and re listening. And so when hear the Book of Ruth and when I read the Book of Ruth, I have flashbacks to that part of Cleveland that was running through.
[00:47:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: And it's, it became a joy. And I, I remember at the beginning it was very hard because these Bible in a year plans are hefty. I mean, you're reading Old Testament, New Testament, Psalm, Proverb, Gospel in a day, and then the next day it's like you just have to do more again. So if you miss the day before your, your work is double.
And at the beginning I did not have a desire to do this to continue reading. But I did it out of discipline because I was a disciplined person. And I went to a friend's house one day. She invited me to a Wednesday night Bible study at her church. And so I stay over her house that night. We're talking about it and she's just like, yeah, this is normal. Like this is what we do.
And the next morning I wake up and I was getting ready for work and I couldn't find her.
And I was looking all over. I find her in a corner, far corner of her apartment. And I said, what are you doing? She said, I'm reading my Bible.
And I said, are you doing like a plan? And she said, no, I just read every morning.
And I was like, why? Why do you do that? She said, I love it.
And I was so shocked that someone loved to read the Bible that wasn't a pastor.
And I prayed that night.
I didn't, I didn't go back to the Hail Marys and Our Fathers. I just decided to talk to God how I talked to my friends.
And at that time, probably with less reverence than I do now, and I remember saying, you know, no offense, but I don't want to read this.
I know this is your book and I should want to, but this is really not very exciting for me to read sometimes.
And I would love if you gave me a desire for this. Like Jackie has And he did so much.
I continued mid year after my season of competing, my season of competing came to an end because I got very sick.
The next year, I was diagnosed with cancer. So it kind of explained a lot of things.
Oh, it was a gift. I mean, it was the greatest gift that God could have used in my life to really change me. My husband and I end up getting engaged. We get married, we moved to California, not in that order.
And we.
Five weeks after I was. After we got married, I was diagnosed with cancer. And so at that time, I was two years into reading the Bible, and I had been listening to Chuck Smith, the late Chuck Smith's podcast, A Word for Today.
And he goes, it's just his sermons. He's just going through the word. And I was eating it up.
So when I got that diagnosis, I remember thinking, whatever you want for me, I will do it.
Just don't let me die. And I lived on with cancer for another four years after that.
And the doctors did indeed think that the cancer had spread. I had a.
A scan that was scheduled, and as I was getting put into the machine, the machine suddenly stopped working.
And so they had to reschedule me.
I go back two weeks later, and they say, oh, we have the wrong dosing for the fluid that we have to inject you with. It's like a metabolic fluid that they inject you with before you get a PET scan.
We have to bring you back. I thought, I've already done this, like four times. How do you have the wrong dose? I haven't changed. But they brought me back two weeks later, and two weeks later they did a scan, and two lymph nodes in my pelvis area lit up, but that's it. The lymph node in my neck lit up, and then the two lymph nodes in my pelvis.
And the general oncologist I was seeing referred me to a specialist because I was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma. So she wanted me to go to a lymphoma specialist. She said, it looks like it's spread. It would be considered stage three. You agreed to do chemo if it spread, so it's time to do chemo. I said, all right, let's do it. I went to a fertility specialist because that was the first appointment I could get.
I was supposed to start on shots that night.
I took one shot because I forgot I was supposed to take a pregnancy test first. I remember that I forgot the right needle to take. I had gone to a friend's House. And I was doing this in her bathroom. I'm like, you know, I gotta go. I'm just gonna go home. I stopped, get a pregnancy test, and I'm pregnant.
[00:51:50] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: And so I take a test again the next morning, and I'm pregnant. I call them. I'm like, hey, I'm supposed to start this process to do chemo with you guys.
And it says, I'm pregnant. And I'm not doing it. I'm not doing chemo.
And so they get me in for blood work, confirm the viability.
I am indeed pregnant. And the lymphoma specialist called me and said, I looked at your scan.
Your lymph nodes are not consistent with disease spread. Your lymph nodes are reacting to your. Whatever is happening in your lower abdomen, it looks like you're pregnant. This is consistent with your lymph nodes reacting to the pregnancy.
So you're still stage one.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: Wow. What a blessing and a relief, honestly.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: And a relief. Yeah.
It was just a answer, you know, a reiteration. I felt of God showing me, I'm going to take care of this. Just trust me.
And that's been the gist of our lives ever since. It's always, step out in faith. Trust me. And then he shows up in a big way.
And I never stopped reading the word.
[00:53:08] Speaker B: You are, obviously, you presented yourself as a thinker. You're curious. You research. You want to know. And you had questions unanswered.
Once you.
You gave your life to Christ. There was such a profound sense of his reality. It wasn't as if you're saying, okay, this person doesn't exist because you had experienced him. I mean, in such profound ways. Now you're at a place of deep faith. Now is obvious, of solid faith.
So what do you do when those difficult questions come?
And are they enough for you to say, oh, no, I think I've made a wrong turn here. I don't believe anymore. Or is it just something you can kind of say, okay, I don't understand it right now. I don't. I don't understand. You know, I can't put all the pieces together, but I know that, that. That the puzzle that God has created, you know, it's solid and it's. And it's built on a solid foundation, and that there are answers. And I'm not just believing on faith, because I know you were really pushing back against that. But now maybe you should perhaps describe what faith is and how it's grounded and that it's not blind. In a sense, faith.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: Is Believing what you cannot see and believing that understanding will come with patience and with humility, and also accepting that there will be things that are still mysteries.
And that that doesn't take away from who God is or what he's leading us to.
It doesn't take away from the beautiful gift of salvation.
It just means that there are many things that we have to decide to be humble about and many things that are revealed that will help us to make judgments regarding what we believe and why.
And I think a lot of that comes from maturity and surrender.
For a period of time, if I couldn't know something, I would dismiss it as not true. But now I see that it's actually maybe to my benefit that I don't understand everything.
And even when I. I don't understand anything or some, you know, any particular matter that I might be stuck on, I have asked God for understanding, and he has brought it.
When it came to the Trinity in the middle of chemotherapy, I was.
I came back to that question, how do I understand who you are? Because I was in a place where I was starting to question how I saw myself all these years.
At that point, I didn't even know that I had stopped having same sex attraction, that I wasn't tempted by that anymore until my husband introduced me to someone. And I don't know why this came up. I still think back to it. I'm like, what an inappropriate thing to say. But this fellow decided to introduce his wife who was bisexual. And my husband said, oh, my wife is bisexual. I said, no, I'm not.
And it was the first time that I ever rejected that as an identity being associated with me, and the first time that I actually experienced distaste, dissatisfaction, where I felt a sense of being repulsed.
And I say that knowing that someone in the LGBTQ community will possibly take offense to that. And I don't mean to offend you. I've been there.
Trust me, that I know.
But God took the desire away, and I. I didn't notice it because I was so focused on God.
And a couple years later, I'm in Florida. We end up moving to Florida, and apologetics comes up every. Every week that summer. And I remember thinking, I have to go to seminary. I was supposed to go. This is. This is my cue. God's queuing me back.
And I end up in the THM program.
Master of Theology.
My concentration is apologetics and philosophy as.
[00:57:51] Speaker B: We'Re kind of coming to a close here.
You have so much in your story.
It's very rich. It's filled With a lot of twists and turns, I will say, but it's a story of redemption in the end, because you're sitting here as this, this beautiful woman of God who has this profound trust and this profound hunger to know him more, to know his word, to proclaim it. You know, you, you. You want to, to be in a place where ideas are debated at the highest levels. And you're. You're willing to contend not only that the Bible is true, you're not the only one who believes it for good reason, but. But you have a deep and. And beautiful relationship with the reality of God as a person.
And I know that there are people who are listening, who are curious, who may have looked at Christianity, maybe thought they were Christians, maybe weren't living as Christians, maybe can feel or sense that resistance, but they know that there's something better once they surrender.
And if someone is willing to. To kind of lay down their arms for a moment and say, okay, God, what do you have for me?
How can I know God?
You. You know Jesus in the way that Erica does. How can I know that it's true?
How. How would you recommend someone take a step forward?
[00:59:26] Speaker A: I feel like that's a very personal approach for each person.
And so I think we have to be honest with ourselves about what our stumbling block is. What is the real thing that is keeping you from fully trusting God?
Is it a past hurt that's clouded your view? Is it an intellectual question? Is it that your current beliefs don't allow you to get behind your understanding of a particular passage?
I think everybody has that thing that they're wrestling with, and some of us have gotten to a place where we're more willing to wrestle but say yes to God, whereas some of us are still wrestling and aren't willing to submit.
And so I think every person has a responsibility to get to the bottom of what their real issue is.
I think about this in terms of the questions that I get. So I think if you will take the time to get to the root cause and then bring that root cause to God, he can really work with you. And I think he'll meet you where you. Where you are.
And I do believe that he'll honor the way that he created you, how your brain works, how you tend to think and behave and follow a thought and either scratch the cre. The curiosity itch, or not.
I know that each of us are so different. And what worked to get me to the point where I finally said yes will not be the same for every other person. But I did get to the point where I realized what my real issue was. And my real issue was that I was so ashamed that I didn't think anybody would love me, much less God, who is holy. I understood holiness, and I understood that I was the actual opposite.
And I could not, of my own volition, bring myself to present myself to God because I was experiencing rejection from my own self. I was kind of saving myself the heartache of being rejected by the one true God.
But God knows you already.
And so I would start with asking him to help you know yourself a little more so that you can get to the root cause of your resistance, and then from there, ask him to help you with that. And I know, I believe with out of shadow of a doubt, that the Lord will bring around the right people, point you to the right things to read or consume.
I think that life will take unexpected twists and turns like mine has, and you'll be pleasantly surprised by the time you get to the point where you are ready to respond.
[01:02:32] Speaker B: That is beautiful, Erica. And I think you've gotten to the root of the issue, isn't it? It's just sometimes it's so deep inside of ourselves that we just don't even want to acknowledge what those points of resistance are because they're hard to see and they're hard to acknowledge so many times. And thank you for being so vulnerable and honest there.
And you, you are, again, a beautiful example of someone who's sitting here as a Christian in a way, beckoning others to come through your story, through the brokenness of it and the beauty of it.
And.
And I love the way that you have.
You no longer seem.
How can I say? You don't. It's not that duplicitous person that, you know, you were pretending and posing for the longest time as a Christian, but now you're this whole and beautiful and surrendered woman of God. And I. I can imagine that the impact that you have and the voice that you have in teaching others is. Is just really profound.
How and. And just the wisdom that you've gained. How, as Christians, can we engage others? I would imagine that vulnerability, the humility that you have is something we can grab and be inspired by. Your story that you are our sponsor in this moment of mentoring us in a sense of how to.
To move out into culture and to have these real conversations.
Not pretend, not posing, not pretending like, you know, we have it all together, that we know all of the answers.
All we know is, what's that old saying that we are just a beggar who's, you know, inviting other beggars to come and to receive bread and to receive love that we have also received.
How can you advise us as Christians to kind of move into this space, into this culture in this moment where there's so many lies, there's so much lie and lying and deception and. And all these possibilities. You know, you were going down different roads to try to find life that's truly life. And it took you a while to get. To get back to Jesus. But. But we are representatives of Jesus.
How can we best show others that Jesus really is the way and the truth and the life?
[01:05:18] Speaker A: I'll share something that I shared with the students last night.
When we receive the Great Commission, we see that Jesus tells his disciples, and obviously us as readers, to declare the gospel, to go out and make disciples. And I think so many times we are under the impression that that is a verbal declaration, but actually it has to be accompanied by a demonstration of the Gospel.
And every time I interact with a person who is far from the Lord, when I interact with my gay and lesbian friends, the fear is that I will judge them.
And when I don't meet them with condemnation, they're shocked.
They're drawn to more conversation.
When I talk to my friends who aren't Christians, who maybe are Jesus curious or maybe not, they'll still talk to me about things, because I remember, and I think a lot of people are like me in this way. I remember being on the outside and being afraid of feeling judged and condemned.
And I remember how much shame I carried because of my choices, because of how opposite and rebellious I was to God.
And I think that if we remember that at one point we were also on the outside, we might be a little more inviting in how we engage with others, especially people we disagree with, especially on topics that are very culturally divisive.
And I understand the camp of people who want to speak truth, but I can say this with confidence because I live this out.
Truth is very rarely received unless accompanied by love.
And love is not necessarily affirmation, but it is treating people with dignity and treating others as though their values and their opinions are important because they are image bearers, because they represent the one who created them, even if they haven't chosen to live to that standard, to accept the free gift of salvation.
So if we are looking to evangelize, and evangelization is one of my.
It's like what I hope to instill the most in my children. Evangelism is so important to our family.
If we're Going to carry out the Great Commission and do so faithfully.
We have to demonstrate the gospel as we declare it.
And that means showing mercy just as we've been shown mercy, giving grace just as we freely get, we freely receive it and being willing to go there when people have struggles, when their questions are hard, even if you don't know the answer, being humble enough to say, I don't know, but I'll find out with you. Maybe we can go together and, and look into this.
I think we have to be advocates for Jesus by inviting others to the table. And sometimes we want to be safe with like minded people, but that's not gonna spread the message of the gospel.
So I think we have to just be bold to step out of our comfort zones and, and do uncomfortable things and be okay with disagreeing with people and being okay with people making accusations against God because we know that that's always happened and not getting offended. Like we have to choose to not be offended.
[01:09:33] Speaker B: Yes, that. You're so right. You're so right, Erica.
There's again, being bold but loving and compassionate and valuing and seeing the other, all of the things, all the things that Jesus was, you know, he, he's with us and he's in us and moving through us. It's really, it's really, I think it, your story for me goes all.
It points towards surrender.
You know, it took you a long time to surrender to Jesus.
[01:10:10] Speaker A: So long.
[01:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it takes us all right. It is a process. You mentioned sanctification is hard that, that ongoing process of surrender. It is. Christian life is daily surrender.
But even through, it's very obvious to me the way that you live now, the way you, that you, you live in your life, that your goals, your aspirations, your loves, your passions, your desires, how you treat others, the desire for others to know what you found.
It is a life of surrender. But it's beautiful. It's like that you have found the treasure, you have found that pearl of great price and you're willing to give everything to him and everything for him. And it's a beauty, beautiful story of brokenness, but yet such depth again, such beauty, such abundance of life. Thank you so much, Erica, for coming on, for telling your story, for being the sponsor again for us all, mentoring us, really helping us to see what a redeemed life looks like, what it can be.
And it's really quite glorious.
[01:11:27] Speaker A: Amen. Thank you so much, Jana, for having me. This has been a great gift. I'm grateful.
[01:11:33] Speaker B: Wonderful. In today's conversation, we saw what it can look like to wrestle honestly with doubt and to finally find peace and surrender.
Erica's story reminds us that faith isn't about pretending to have it all together other it's about finding what we most deeply long for in the person of Christ.
If Erica's story resonated with you, explore her works through the links in our show notes. If you value thoughtful conversations like these, please take a moment to rate, review and share this podcast. It really helps others discover these unlikely stories of belief.
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You've been listening to the Exsceptic Podcast, part of the C.S. lewis Institute podcast Network. Special thanks to our wonderful producer Ashley Kelfer and to each of you who listen, question and seek with us every week. We hope you'll join us next time for another unlikely story of belief.
