Peter Richardson Part 1 "Why?"

Peter Richardson, a 19-year veteran career officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, shares his faith journey on the DP1 Podcast. Raised in a Christian home and having prayed the sinner's prayer as a young child after watching a Jesus film, he later drifted into skepticism and materialism during his teens and early adulthood, influenced by secular education, unanswered questions about science and faith, and a lack of satisfying answers from churches. Over time, especially amid the social divisions, institutional distrust, and moral upheavals of the early 2020s—including Canada's pandemic response and the trucker convoy—he lost faith in people, systems, and traditional anchors like family and country. Reaching a personal low point of isolation and despair, he began noticing what appeared to be a pervasive spiritual conflict in the world, marked by seemingly gratuitous evil and an inversion of biblical values in culture and media. Exposure to C.S. Lewis's *The Screwtape Letters* via YouTube proved pivotal, as its depiction of unseen malevolent forces aligned strikingly with his observations, ultimately dismantling his materialist worldview. Late one night, he knelt, confessed his sins, surrendered to Christ, and sought forgiveness as the prodigal son. He later reconnected with a longtime Christian friend who had prayed for his salvation daily for over a decade, confirming his return to faith amid subsequent trials.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to DT1 podcast. Want to introduce you to Peter Richardson. Hello, Pete. Hi. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:12

I'm doing fine.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Well, I am a Christian and a child of God, first. I'm a father of a five-year-old daughter. I'm happily married. I'm living in Oromocto, New Brunswick. I'm a career officer serving 19 years in the regular force in the Canadian Armed Forces. And I'm happy to be here tonight.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Well, I'm glad you're here. We're glad to have you on the podcast. I want to start off with some questions on faith. And how did you come to faith in Christ?

SPEAKER_00 0:50

That is that that's that's a long story, but I'll I'll keep it succinct.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

But I I was exposed to it very young, and I can't say I fully understood it until much later in life. So I had what some would call a prodigal trajectory. So I found a VHS tape in my parents' house while I was unsupervised around the age of six, and it just said Jesus on it. And I was looking for something to watch that day. So I shoved it in the VCR, and it was, I believe it was a 1979 Hollywood production movie that did its best to reproduce the gospel of Luke in its entirety.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Yeah. So I was a strange child. Uh I had a limited attention span until I became fixated on something. So I ended up seeing the whole movie. I was just kind of left to my own devices for the afternoon. And I watched the Jesus movie, and it it opened, it opened not in the Gospel of Luke, but it had a sequence from The Garden and The Fall. And at the end of the movie, it had it had a wrap-up, a narrated sort of what you might know as a sinner's prayer, right? So within that movie, within that VHS, technically it has all the information you need. And it's not just the Gospel of Luke, it goes into why Jesus' sacrifice was necessary in the first place. It touches on the fall, Adam's sin, and Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac through the Gospel of Luke. And then it it has a final conclusion. And I remember being very scared of perishing. You know, I was very young and I didn't know very much about hell. I knew it was a place I didn't want to go. And I I just I just said the sinner's prayer right there and then in the living room out loud. And no one witnessed that, no one saw it, and I forgot about it throughout my life. I mostly forgot about it. I I didn't think of it often. I was in a in a Christian household, so we would go to church, we'd go to Sunday school in a variety of churches. My my father was briefly in the military, and we we did have some moves, so we we lived in various places around Canada, and we we'd go to a different church in each each city we were posted to. And over over time, like I kind of had this missing missing chunk of my Christian education. I had been in Christian schools from a very young age, and I was raised in a Christian environment. But I think for me, what was missing was the why uh on all of it. And it was it it came to be like an obligation and it became inwardly, it became burdensome to me. And I I by the time I was in my early teens, I had questions and doubts that I didn't really bring to anyone, and if I did ever bring them up, uh, even around pastors, it usually resulted in the a figurative record skipping sound, like okay, why are you asking this? You know, like all sorts of things. And as soon as as soon as there was no one making me to go go go to church as a teenager, I stopped doing it. Not because of necessarily an outright rejection of everything all at once, but I just teenagers don't have very good discipline. Uh, would you rather sleep in on Sunday or get up early on Sunday? Well, you get up early all the other days of the week, and I'll sleep in, right? Teenager move. And at the same time, secular education got its claws in me. And I was being shown two competing worldviews. I was being shown a materialist worldview on the one hand in school, full time, eight or nine hours a day for five to six days a week. Yeah, I mean, going to church for one to two hours a week versus 40 hours a week of secular education. And there were competing, competing worldviews in my own mind, and they they clashed with each other often. And and so I had these questions like, how did the dinosaurs get on the arc, right? Like how how what about the carbon dating? What about all these things, right? Because I'm being presented with these supposedly scientific worldviews. In hindsight, it was a bit of scientism. Like uh I find now that a lot of the supposed evidence for a material worldview is vastly overstated. But as a child, you're not very well equipped to to defend against such a seemingly coherent and sophisticated worldview. So I had I had two worldviews, and one of them was present mostly on Sundays, and the other one was present the other five or six days of the week, right? Saturday was like a free space a little bit. So I I drifted away. Was it all at once or was it slowly? Yes. That's like what they say about going out of business. How did you go out of business? Slowly at first, and then all at once, right? And I there was a friend of mine, a good friend, who was a solid believer and my classmate for many years. And once I was in my twenties and I was back on leave, I went back to my hometown and he could he could tell I was falling away. And one one night he he must have worked up the courage to ask me, like, Peter, do you believe in this? And I I thought of a passage in Revelation that said, I wish you were hot or cold. And I said, you know what? While we're being honest, I'm cold. No, I don't believe this. I'm I'm I'm done with it. I'm out. I might as well have the courage to say, no, I'm out. I'm not gonna pretend. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna beat around the bush on that. And that evening, my friend probably went home very disappointed indeed and very discouraged. And in hindsight, like, I'm sorry. Um I I feel bad in hindsight. So I I was not satisfied with the answers I was getting from institutional churches, not at all, not about dinosaurs, the age of the earth, or how many angels were at the tomb, or all these other things, gospel harmonization, all these things, parallel reading of the four gospels. The that that's heavy stuff. And at the same time, I was never fully satisfied with the material explanation either. But at that point, I wasn't I wasn't serious about working out these answers yet. I had a career. I was a young man, I was doing sinful things, I was chasing after girls, I was thinking about my career, about this and that deployment, posting, all these things. And it it these these greater questions about life were somewhat lost in the noise. Very occasionally they surfaced and you know, I kind of flip-flopped, but I I kind of was forced to throw up my hands and say, well, the evolutionists have problems with their worldview, and the Christians have problems with their worldview. I I really can't decide between the two of them. Maybe they're both wrong. Well, in that case, I got nothing. I might as well just go and live my life. And for a long time, that's what I did. And I I tried in in the absence of a moral framework, I come, I I tried to come up with my own. But you know, what unbeknownst to me in that that meantime, this moral framework I thought I was concocting was was vaguely tracking with with biblical values, vaguely, vaguely. And I I went through a lot of stuff in my career. I've I switched trades, I switched from the army to the air force, I was posted a few times, and as as I got older and I got more experience, I could I could start to see problems with the world. I wasn't I wasn't looking for the the answer to life. I wasn't looking for the meaning of life. I had already thrown up my hands and say, I said it's not for the having. I guess there's so many competing claims and so much noise out there. Like, what if everybody's wrong? You know, and and I said, Oh, what am I to do? And I think I think what what shook me up was the the events of the early 2020s and and the lead up to that. So previously before in in the 2020s, with the pandemic and the response to it and the the tearing of the social fabric in Canada, the United States, and Europe, I I lost trust in just about everything I I could I could count on. So I mean traditional traditional values are thought of as like God, family, country, usually in that order. Well, I didn't have God. I had I had discounted God being locked indoors with very limited family support that was basically knocked out from under me. And then country, I mean, there we were, we were very divided as a country, and and the scars of that definitely still remain, I think, in Canada. Yes, I degree with you on that. Yeah, uh it's not really gone away. It's still it's still lurking beneath the surface, so to speak. It kind of culminated in 2022 with the trucker convoy, and people I had known came on both sides of that. And it was my my my faith, should I say, faith is like trust, and trust is like faith. Um, my faith in institutions, in people, in systems, in the so-called Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That was thoroughly shaken. That was thoroughly shaken because I I saw I saw those things basically crumble around me. And at that time, we had we had we had gone through several chiefs of the defense staff. Art McDonald was unceremoniously fired within weeks of assuming his position. This is all very public. The governor general was removed, Julie Payette. There was all sorts of big shakeups in the top leadership. So I remember thinking to myself, man, I can't trust in anyone. Where are all the good people? Like, I can't trust in people anymore. That was foolish of me. You might say it was a house built on sand, right? So I I thought to myself, well, everything's everything's crumbling, everything's terrible. I've lost the foundation for everything, and there doesn't seem to be anything or anyone I can trust in or or you know, give my life to. Like I was rudderless and depressed and very isolated and alone. I was very withdrawn. I felt like I couldn't trust the people around me. So I I was I was rapidly reaching the end of myself. Things things got very bad in my life. And I believe, I believe that was when God started to do some of his best work on me. So if you if you've got if you're out fishing and you've got a very strong fish on your line, you could fight the fish and maybe I don't know, break the line or throw the lure. Or you could you have a drag reel, you can just apply just amount of the the right amount of drag to your to your fishing line, and you let the fish tire itself out and then you reel it in. I was I was an aggressive fish that God carefully and patiently reeled in. That's that's what I would say. And yes, in in hindsight, it was almost like I I had some opportunities where where God was communicating to me, basically, are you done yet? Are you done yet? And of course, I I could I could dismiss these things as as superstition. I wasn't I was Mr. Hard Truth. If Christianity was this social club where people enjoyed it and they would they would have a good time at church, that's all well and good for them, it works for them, but I couldn't I couldn't bring myself to ever go back to church knowing in my heart of hearts that it's not true. I don't know, I didn't know what was true. And I thought to myself, well, you know, the people now now now that I had a little more life experience, I could see that the people that were really all on board for Jesus, the people that went in with both feet, the big faith energy people, the the BFEs, they they experienced hard times in life, same as everyone else, sure. But they seemed to not only weather it but thrive. They seemed to be fulfilled and satisfied. And the people that thoroughly rejected either rejected the gospel and rejected Jesus vehemently and did their best to go against biblical values and scripture and were obsessed with self, or they had a a strictly material worldview with no thought to the spiritual. Well, as life went on, they seemed less satisfied with life, with existence, they were less hopeful. I I had a conversation on a 12-hour shift once with with a major who was who was on that shift with me, who is a Catholic. And he and I were talking about the state of the world in 2021 and 2022. And he had he and I had a lot we would agree on, and we we arrived at a lot of very similar conclusions. There was one salient difference between the two of us, and he he he managed to to draw my attention to it. He said, But Peter, like you have hope, right? Because you've got to hope in something. Like I know you I know you don't believe in Jesus, but you've got to you've got to hope in something, right? Where's your hope? I'm like, uh don't have one boss, like Mr. Hard Truth here, you know, if ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face, you know. Like I'm not I'm not going to lean on something that I suspect is a rotten reed, you know? So he had hope and I didn't. And I didn't I didn't tell him that in in plain language, because he said he went on to say, like, well, if you if a person doesn't have hope, they don't really have a good reason to exist, which is which is dangerous territory to tread on. Once you arrive at that conclusion, it can lead you to some dangerous places. When I said, when I said I had reached the end of myself, you you take my meaning, right? I was like, that is true, and that had occurred to me more than once, you know. And I was doing my best to try and pull myself together mentally, not spiritually, because I didn't believe in that. I didn't believe in a spiritual realm. I was a materialist, right? If if I couldn't prove a thing, then you have to assume it doesn't exist. So I was reaching the end of myself, but I couldn't, I noticed the Christians, the Christians that were really into it were happy. And there were a lot of pretendians. There were a lot of fake ones out there. Actually, I found the fake ones outnumbered the real ones. I was very disappointed with that. I remember a chaplain coming to my unit, and I thought it was a joke. There was there was someone who said that they were a secular humanist and they were a chaplain. I'm like, oh, that's it then. This is the punchline. The atheist chaplain is real. I can't believe that. And it's hard to believe. Yeah, they're they're everywhere now. So I I really didn't trust chaplains either for reasons like that. And I'm I'm sorry for any viewers who are chaplains or who have friends who are chaplains. Hashtag not all chaplains, yes, but that's that's how I felt, and that's what I was seeing playing out in front of me. And I could tell by what what you know the the party line was within within the spiritual leaders, I was like, this is not biblical. None of this is biblical. This is therapeutic. It's therapeutic deism. Uh if if people find comfort in therapeutic deism, that's their business. That wasn't my business, it didn't work for me. And I remember being like slightly irritated. I was like, you you wear a crucifix on your uniform, but you know and I know you don't believe that, do you? Like it's it's it's just part of the trappings of your office. Okay, that's that's fine. And so I I noticed, yeah, there's there's a lot of a lot of the fake out there, but when when you see the real, you see the real deal, people that are just totally sold out for Jesus, people that make Jesus the center of their life, they their values and the values that I had observed led to good outcomes in life. If they were expressed as a Venn diagram, like overlapping circles. Okay, yeah. My circle of values in this Venn diagram, I would say had a 90% overlap with so-called Christian or biblical values. I was 90% of the way there, just through through conclusions that I had drawn myself. I was looking for truths, plural, not the truth. I said, okay, why do some people have more, some people have less? Why do some communities thrive, others' communities don't? You know, why do civilizations rise and fall? I I took a degree in history, and so I'd come to the conclusion that human civilization follows a cyclical pattern, and that any system that's designed has humans at its lowest common denominator. And any system that's devised, any constitution or political framework will not will not offer the stability that humans are looking for. And it doesn't, yeah it doesn't actually inculcate morals into a population. Any constitution is only good as good as the the citizenry that that are underneath underneath it, right? But the the Venn diagram lined up, and I could see that the Christians were happy and they were right about a lot of things. They were right about like social decay and all these other things that I saw playing out in real time, especially in the 2020s. And I I said, Oh, I think I owe some of them some apologies, you know, like they were right on a lot of stuff. But at the same time, I couldn't drag myself to church. And the reason for that is because if I didn't believe in God and Jesus, and I showed up and I sang their songs and I ate their rice crispy treats, and I said, Good to see you, brother. Yeah, I'll be praying for you too. I would have known. It was a lie. I couldn't do that. Okay. I couldn't do that. I couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to go through the motions. Or if if I did, it would be very brief indeed, the briefest of stints, right? And so I was like, yeah, I'm not going to live that lie. I'm not going to lie to these people's faces. I like them, so I'm not going to lie to them. I don't believe it. I think I think it took just one more prod from the Lord to put the nail in in the coffin of my materialism, so to speak. And I I I started to see the effects of a spiritual war playing out in the world. A spiritual propaganda. Yeah. I I noticed that what the Bible refers to as the world, writ large, in John's Gospel and John's epistles, the world was like this propaganda system, this system of values that I'd grown to really hate. I'd really grown to dislike. And it was it was a near near total inversion of what the Christians were saying. And I'm like, that's that's strange. You'd expect the broken clock to be right, like at least twice a day. That's true. And just just the the uncomfortable feeling I would get seeing seeing some of this propaganda in entertainment, in music, in movies, the things that that public figures would say. And at the same time, because this was the 2020s, the church burnings, the arrests of pastors in Canada, that definitely that definitely influenced my thinking when I saw when I saw pastors getting dragged away in cuffs for keeping their church open, that made me do a double take. Because it seemed to me that Christianity somehow faced the most opposition from the world out of any religion I could see in front of me. People are free to quibble about semantics on that, but what I was seeing is well, you take the most flack when you're over the target, right? And I was like, this world system of values that I hate is dead set against what people would call the universal church. And the the Christians that I was looking up to, the Christians that I thought were sold out for Jesus, they were pretty innocuous. Like they weren't they weren't going out there and beating people up. They were not at marches or rallies. So for the system to levy propaganda, arrests, lawfare, street violence against them, it it struck me as odd. It was kind of like kicking a puppy that that sat ill with me. And I was like, hold on, what's what but you know, there was always a material explanation for it. At the same time, I was I was seeing a lot of things in the news. And you know, there the world is an evil place and there's a lot of atrocity in the world, but I couldn't, I couldn't always make sense of it. Like, why did why did a hundred gunmen on motorcycles descend upon a village in Niger and kill everyone inside? Well, why? Well, I can previously I could say they wanted diamonds, they wanted money, they I don't know, they uh they thought there were government sympathizers in the village or something. I could I could think of that. But once in a while, just once in a while, you see things that are very heinous that benefit no human being. And the the evil, though that was the only word I could use for it at the time. The evil seemed to want to metastasize, to spread, to pollute innocence, to defile things in that sense. It's not enough that the evil act occurs. It must be witnessed and it must draw in more participants and and kind of taint more people with it. And it's not always for gain in a physical material sense. Well, what I was seeing without realizing it is is a kind of a kind of spiritual conflict. These these things, these exceptionally evil things were happening not to gain anything, but just to simply tear down what was good. That's that's very strange. I still wasn't there. I still wasn't there. So the the nudge came from the Lord. I I was sick of the propaganda in music and movies. So I I went, figuratively speaking, I went back in time. I went back to the music and the movies and the entertainment and the video games I liked from 20 plus years ago. And I was on a nostalgia trip and I kind of buried myself in older forms of entertainment, which are cheap and widely available, and you have a hypothetically unlimited supply of it, right? I will I will never run out of these things. And it it just seemed to be such a better quality, and that the propaganda was less obvious, and it it it it met it met a need when I was very mentally distraught. But I also I also listened to one or two Christian songs from from when I was when I was growing up. I liked the old school newsboys, I liked I liked the old DC talk. I liked these things, so I'd I'd throw on throw on the track every so often through usually through YouTube, because it was free. And that that meant the algorithm started the algorithm thought, hey, he likes Christian music, show him more Christian content. So that's what happened. And one of one of the one of the videos that popped into my feed was a video series of someone narrating the screw tape letters by C.S. Lewis.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Oh good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Have you read the screw tape letters?

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Uh yes, I've seen, I've I've read a few uh some some of them, yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Okay, for for for the viewers that that might not know, the screw tape letters was a a work of fiction written around the the time of World War II by by literary Titan C. S. Lewis. And this this novel features uh each chapter is a letter from a senior tempter to a junior tempter. Basically, in in this in this book, the the forces of hell are matched up one-to-one with human beings to try and win the battle of influence and drive them away from God and turn them against each other and bring out the worst in them, right? The the the the demons of Lewis's screw tape letters delight in human suffering. They hate humans, they think that humans should be under their boot and they they see them as cattle or sustenance, and they they fail to understand who they call the enemy. Who they call the enemy is actually God and God's forces. And throughout the book, every chapter is a letter, and it's describing various ways to lead humans astray and play to their weaknesses and their insecurities or to their ego and to to introduce ideas in intellectual circles and academia to to poison the discourse against God and to drive people away from the true God. And I thought I thought I would listen to that book because because it was fun. And I had I had read it a little bit in my early teens, and I thought, you know what, let's see if this stands the test of time. Let's see if it's still a classic. You know, I I was I was pretty haughty. I was like, you know what, I'll intellectually shred Lewis's conclusions from this book. And that's what I thought going into it. But out of out of the hundreds of assertions that are indirectly made through this book in a very clever manner, I found myself only disagreeing with a handful of them. And I'm pretty sure if if Clive Lewis was alive today, we probably could have talked it out. Like he probably could have won me over or clarified it, right? They're they're they're not exactly hard sticking points. And so I was like, okay, so a lot of these things, in a certain sense, are true. But you know, there's there's not really unseen, malevolent, non-human intelligences out there trying to sway humanity away from the creator. That would be ridiculous, right? That was my operating assumption. That would be ridiculous. That would be crazy, right? But in light of all the other things I'd seen, you know, the atrocities in the world and other signs of a spiritual war, I'm like, oh well, you know, in the interests of fairness, in the interests of fairness, let's just try it on. Like it's a pair of pants or a key and a lock. Let's try on the Christian worldview and see how well it stacks up against this unseen war, against the state of the world, against everything. And, you know, if if the truth is a keyhole and you are presented with a wheelbarrow of full of keys from the world, there's only one key that's going to fit the lock of truth, right? And so amazingly, the tumblers turned.

unknown 32:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

It seemed it seemed feasible to me that there were unseen forces that hated human beings, delighted in their suffering, but their their real objective was to was to thoroughly corrupt and debase humans in every sense of the word, any way they can, but just just basically keep humans suffering, blind, complacent, greedy, selfish, to generate maximum infighting. And it it it that that book does a really good job of showing the the difference between the the attitudes in the in the senior tempter versus the junior tempter. The senior tempter, screw tape, is is constantly chiding his his junior to play the long game instead of opting for temporary suffering. He warns, no, no, no, no. Suffering sometimes brings them closer to the enemy. You can't have that. If if suffering is about to bring them closer to the enemy, you've got to keep them comfortable and ignorant, and you've got to make them think everything is fine. You've got to keep them complacent. I was like, oh, okay, okay, this is this is this is making way too much sense. And so I got so fed up with the world, I got a a prod, probably from the Lord, to this C.S. Lewis thing. I listened to to all of it in the course of a few days. I said, Wow, wouldn't that be crazy if it's all true? And I thought about it again and again and again, and it just wouldn't depart from my head. And you know, at some point, I I found myself saying, Okay, Peter, you've got you've got all this information and you've drawn some conclusions. What are you gonna do with it? Like, what's the practical outpouring of all this thinking you've been doing? And I remember being really irritated with the world and thinking the most rebellious thing I could do would be to be a Christian. And so, but uh at the same time, I was I was I was determined to rebel against the world, but at the same time, that means that if there's a war going on, it takes two sides to have a war. And this side that was determined to rip down everything good, well, there had to be a source of something good. And, you know, other other religions didn't proffer the same explanations for what I was seeing. They had it kind of right, some of them, some of them acknowledged it, but the the narratives of the Bible were so utterly on the nose, and it was it was clarified so well by by Lewis in screw tape letters that I really didn't consider Islam or Mormonism or Buddhism the same way. And I I didn't take them seriously, full stop. I mean, the the other the other claims of the other religions just didn't stack up to the to the claims of Jesus. And I I recalled that the prophets of the Bible had their heads beaten in, they they suffered terrible things, they lived in caves, they ate bugs, and and people thoroughly rejected their message. And I'm like, that's the world I know. That's the world I know. When you tell people things they don't want to hear, but things that are true, they'll turn on you. Absolutely. And so I wasn't I wasn't having it with the others. Like other other religious founders and religious leaders, they got everything they wanted out of life. They got riches, they got women, they got power. The prophets of the Bible, including Jesus, were were repeatedly forced to the margins of society again and again and again. And so late at night, I unbeknownst to my sleeping wife and daughter, I I I looked up how to give your life to Christ in a search engine, and there's a wiki how on it. I I I wiki howed it. Nice, nice, and it it said it said, oh, that that's as that's as easy as ABC. Admit you're a sinner, believe Jesus died for you, and confess him as Lord. So I made it a point to do all those things out loud that night on my knees, and and I was I was overcome with emotion. I don't know what I was experiencing. Was it the presence of the Lord? Was it guilt? Was it regret? Was it I don't know what it was, but I I remember just just weeping endlessly for for a long time. And I didn't I didn't tell anyone at first. And I said, okay, if if the devil's real, then God's real and God can hear me right now, and God knows all my sins, but also I knew enough that God would forgive me if I asked him. So I I did the the Luke 15 was the prodigal son, and I knew that. And I I went back and I begged his forgiveness.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Right on, right?

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Yeah, and and the the last part of the story is I needed I needed someone that I could trust who is who is the real deal, who is a Christian I knew to be very solid. And I thought of that friend who had basically confronted me all those years ago. And so I sent him a message on Facebook. I said, Hey, hey, buddy, can you can you pray for me? I need to surrender. Because Lewis had basically said in in his writings that fallen man is a rebel that must lay down his arms. So from a military standpoint, I was like defecting, I was crossing the line from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. And you know, the act of defecting can be a dangerous thing. You've got to, you've got to fly your MiG to another country, or you've got to make your trek through no man's land, preferably bringing your kit with you, you know. And so I I messaged my buddy and I asked him to pray for me. And that must have seemed very strange to him because we only talked once every couple months. Like we had talked maybe twice a year, you know, and he said, Okay, okay, count the cost and do it. And so I did. I immediately went into a season of trial. I think, I think the enemy was was rather angry with me for leaving. Life got very difficult, but I I finally managed to to talk to him on a video call. And he said, Peter, it's so good to hear you talking like this. Right. He said, I prayed for this day. He said, I prayed this whole time. This whole time. He said, Yeah, I have to I have to stop myself from praying that you'll be saved. I prayed it so much, it became so automatic that I have to remind myself that it's done. That was 13 years. 13 years ago. Probably every day he prayed for me from like 2010 until 2023. He prayed for me that so don't give up.

SPEAKER_02 39:47

We hope you have enjoyed this episode of DP1. Also, if you are hoping to connect with other military Christians in your area, consider joining the Military Christian Fellowship of Canada, which you can connect with online at mcf Canada.ca.