Former atheist Jon Wilke had no desire for God and wanted to go his own way. After years of living on his own terms, he became open to the possibility of God, and his life completely changed. Resources Mentioned by Jon Mark Mittleberg, Courageous Faith For more information on CSLI Events and Resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. If you can hear more of our stories at our website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page. You can email us also at [email protected]. We love hearing from you. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. At the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They give advice to Christians as to best [00:45] how to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them. There’s something extraordinary about an extraordinary life change. When someone’s before looks dramatically different than their after, we lean in, and we want to know what happened. In the context of religious conversion, in this case from atheism to Christianity, you would expect an observable change in the way that someone thinks and lives. And that’s typically what you find. Everything changes, and not in subtle ways. Life looks and feels different in very significant ways. Former atheist Jon Wilke says that his life is hardly recognizable from the man he was before he met Jesus Christ and the man of God he has become afterward. I hope you’ll come along to hear his story of dramatic transformation. Welcome to Side B Stories, Jon. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you for the invitation, Jana. It’s always a pleasure to be able to share what God’s done in my life, and maybe somebody who’s listening or watching will be encouraged by my testimony. Oh, I’m sure they will. I’m sure they will. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself now. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Professionally, I am a media relations guy, so I work with a lot of reporters who want to talk to ministries and see what God’s doing in and through those ministries. I’ll share more about how I got into that maybe later. But I’m a dad, a middle-aged dad, and I love being a dad. I have an 11-year-old and 14-year-old girls. And the essence of who I am is as father. So I’m kind of your standard middle-aged guy with two kids. And I take them to the park. We go to the pool. We ride bicycles. We ride skateboards. I take them rock climbing and that kind of stuff. Well, that sounds fun! Sometimes as an adult it’s really great to have kids. They just keep you young. All right. Let’s start your story now. Tell me about your family, where you were born, your home life. Was it religious at all? Did they talk about God? Did you go to church? What did that look like? I grew up in a large southern family, so there’s a cultural side of religion that’s in there. We had a giant Bible on our coffee table. We occasionally went to church, VBS, Vacation Bible School, was a great daycare for working families. They could drop their kids off for a week at a time. So I had some of those experiences. But my family… I have six brothers, four sisters. I come from a family where my mother was widowed, and then a couple things didn’t work out, and so I am the baby boy of ele