Growing up as an American-born Chinese boy, faith and religion were topics that were never brought up at home. Instead, most topics of discussion usually involved academic success and embracing Chinese culture. In fact, even if I wanted to attend church, it wasn’t possible as I was enrolled in Sunday morning Chinese school for over a decade to learn how to speak, write and read Mandarin. The only way I learned about Christianity was from the media.

2005-2013: When most children watched VeggieTales to understand Biblical stories and learn about Christian faith, I was watching Supernatural, a show that most definitely wasn’t suitable for a 9-year old child like me to watch. At the time, I was frequently made fun of at school for loving “lame” TV shows such as Power Rangers and SpongeBob SquarePants. Wanting to appear “cool” to my classmates, I watched the pilot episode of Supernatural when it debuted after seeing the trailer for it, which depicted itself as an adult dark fantasy horror show. With grown men fighting monsters, classic rock music, and lots of “colorful” language in it, I thought this was going to make me cool at school.

Unfortunately, that plan backfired hard when Supernatural quickly garnered a mostly female fan-base. As a result, Supernatural became my guilty pleasure show for the next 9 years. I didn’t “come out of the closet” admitting that I loved the show until the tenth season began airing. However, it was through watching all 15 seasons of Supernatural that I learned about some major Biblical stories including but not limited to: The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse, The Seven Seals of God, The Fall of Lucifer, The Nephilim, The Antichrist, Leviathan, The Garden of Eden and The Tree of Knowledge - all of which were fictionally adapted (albeit either inaccurately or only surface-level).

2013-2014: My mother (who surrendered her life to Christ during my high school years) encouraged me to find and attend a church (since hers was primarily a Mandarin-speaking one) to find stable community. I wasn’t opposed to the idea considering that watching Supernatural made me very curious about Christianity and The Gospel. After I graduated from Chinese school, I began attending the local church that was near our home during my junior year.

To say that the first church community I engaged with was emotionally distressing for me would be a major understatement. I experienced a lot of church hurt when I was there and often felt dismissed, excluded and judged. Following that experience, I was hesitant to ever engage with a church community again. However, my mother encouraged me to continue engaging in God’s Word despite the church hurt I experienced.

2018-Early 2020: During this span of time, I was semi-frequently making commutes up to Wisconsin to hang out with a few (former) friends during the weekends. During some Sunday mornings when I would drive up there to meet with those friends, they’d ask me if I wanted to drive up early and attend the worship service with them or come by later after they came home from church. Wanting to spend as much time with them as possible, I agreed to just attend service with them and thus made my first visit to CrossWay Church. Of the few times I attended service there, I didn’t think much of it other than the fact that the sermons were interesting and that the lead pastor there looked like a hybrid of Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman and Ralph Macchio from Cobra Kai.

March 26th to April 12th, 2022: During this time, I went through a major crisis and fallout that left me experiencing a “dark night of the soul.” I became severely depressed, isolated, lonely, misunderstood and betrayed. This experience almost led me to lose my life entirely. As one of my final rituals, I went to the theaters to see one final movie. The film I saw was a newly released film called Everything Everywhere All at Once, and to say that this movie made me incredibly emotional and feel understood would be the understatement of the decade. It felt odd to me that a film like this came at just the right time when I needed it. There was no way it was some random coincidence. Was God trying to guide me somewhere? Shortly after, I began to make a conscious effort to start finding a new church, but this time I was going to be extremely thorough in finding a congregation that is warm, inviting, welcoming, humble, compassionate, inspiring and most importantly: truly centered on Christ.

Late 2022-Early 2023: After watching many CrossWay sermons online on Sunday mornings and going through an extremely thorough vetting process, I finally made the decision to visit CrossWay Church in-person on my own for the first time. The thing was, this church wasn’t close to home. It was going to be a 1-hour and 20-minute commute to this church every Sunday if I was going to commit to this community and join their congregation.

June 11th, 2023: I made my first solo in-person visit to this church. Following the worship service, the church held a meet and greet event where I got to formally meet the lead pastor there as well as some of the staff. I'm not going to lie, the first time I visited this church (on my own), I was incredibly scared and my anxiety was at an all-time high because I didn't know anybody there and was visiting as an outsider. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was welcomed with open arms.

August 27th, 2023: I got baptized at this church and publicly declared Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Since then, I have called CrossWay Church home, served at the church, made some amazing new relationships there and most importantly: deepen my relationship with Christ. God is so good!

My Testimony:

“Before I was saved, I lived a very empty and nihilistic life for many years that was filled with consistent feelings of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. I believed that nothing in life mattered, including my own life.

Throughout the years, I went searching for anyone out there who could pull me out of total chaos. I often took the words of people, whether positive or negative as scripture. It was through these actions that I was broken-hearted, burdened and beaten down for many years. That was until I discovered Jesus Christ.

It was through Him that I learned to forgive quickly, love freely, and to walk courageously through life and I declare that there is no better teacher out there who gave me anywhere near the peace that Jesus Christ did.

It was only after being saved did I finally discover that God is truth itself.

I stand here today knowing that His promise is peace and my testimony is my healing, and I’m here to publicly declare Him as my Lord and Savior."