Finding the Lord of the Woods

How Praying in the Wild Saved My Faith 2 Decades Ago Over Online Debates

In the last few days, I announced that I was becoming Orthodox. Immediately, people assumed that I was going to become some kind of online Orthodox debater who was going to disprove the “Vatican 1 Papacy’ and other contentious issues from the opening gate. Although I have my reasons rooted in Scripture, the Fathers, and the Orthodox tradition of the Church for doing what I am doing, it isn’t in my personality or passion to be an online debater. I am much more of a father, husband, gardener, story teller, catechist, and fellow pilgrim than crusader. I enjoy narrating the Gospel in a way that people have never quite heard it before, and I enjoy sharing a pint (barrel aged?) with a spiritual seeker on how Christ pioneered a whole new way of being human for us all.

The reason why I am ultimately not a debater or crusader is because it wasn’t through debate that my faith was saved and renewed over two decades ago. Instead, it was through very raw prayer time with God out in the woods that I began to hear “His still, small voice.”

Facing Doubt & Intellectual Disorientation

I grew up in a devout, evangelical home where I woke up with my mother studying Scripture every morning. My father always took us to church 2 to 3 times a week, and we often hosted our pastor and his family over at our home. Christ was all around me in so many ways of which I am eternally grateful!

However, as I entered high school, I began to significantly question and doubt my own faith. In the early 2000s, the online world was just beginning to explode with ideas from around the globe in a way that my parents nor grandparents ever experienced as teenagers. I began exploring atheism, western religions such as Judaism and Islam, eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and pluralistic visions of religion such as Baháʼí. I was left feeling intellectually overwhelmed.

How could I ever know which is true? Why couldn’t they all be true? Or maybe they are all simply just wrong? I was beginning to conclude that maybe we have no way of knowing if God is really there at all. Hopeless agnosticism was becoming my religion like so many religiously unaffiliated or ‘nones’ today.

Facing the Lord of the Wood

I decided I needed more fresh air to ponder these questions (no more computer screens and books!), and so I went to the woods near my house and began hiking there nearly everyday after school. My hiking gradually turned into praying and asking these difficult questions with God rather than just by myself. I didn’t really receive any complex, theological answers from the sky, but I learned that God’s presence and peace arrive through prayer, which is a different type of evidence for God. It isn’t simply through systematic theology or statement of believe, but rather, through an experience of Him that we can know He is there.

These experiences were always profound for me in the woods. Holy silence was all around even if the birds were singing to their Maker in the background. This was My Father’s world, and I was walking with Him through it like Adam in the cool of the evening.

Those woods awoken me to the reality of God, but they also led me to consider how Creation fits into reality. Is the created world a mere illusion? Is the cosmos ultimately meaningless? Or is Creation a Temple for God? And will the Creator someday renew and renovate this Creation for His glory?

I was very happy to find that, at the end of the Bible, Christ is not found destroying His own Creation but rather saying, “Behold, I am make all things new!” (Revelation 21:5).

The Wild Lord of the Gospels

The more I discovered the Christ of the Gospels, the more I was surprised about how much time he spent in nature with His Father. He begins preparing for His ministry by going into the wild for 40 days. He spent a great deal of time walking along the Sea of Galilee and rugged, mountain trails. After ministering to large crowds all day, he had to flee to secluded places to be in prayer. Right before His trial, he needed to be with His Father in a simple olive grove.

Seeing Christ live this way among his disciples and those seeking after him left a great impression on me. Eventually, it led me to decide that I wanted to become an overseas missionary and share the Gospels in the rugged places of the world. I was going to pursue dual degrees in theology and environmental science so that I could teach people about Jesus who had never heard of him while installing solar panels and drilling wells in their remote villages. And since I was going to become a missionary, I began taking college courses on world missions. I never completed a degree in environmental science, but I did complete degrees in Christian Educational Ministries and Biblical studies with a minor in world missions to prepare for this ‘wild’ future of serving our Lord.

The Wild Adventure of Ancient Christianity

I also began studying some of the first missionaries of Christian history such as St. Paul the Apostle and St. Patrick of Ireland. After spending time in the seclusion of Arabia, many scholars estimate that Paul traveled over 10,000 miles (mostly by foot) throughout the rugged terrain of the Mediterranean world. This discovery in my research was a great inspiration to me! St. Paul was no longer simply a theologian who described profound doctrines that we can see in the Book of Romans, but he was a missionary who journeyed far and wide for the Kingdom of God.

St. Patrick was also a great inspiration to me. He discovered Christ in the wilderness of Ireland, which is beautiful but also a harsh and cold place. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. Although he escaped from his captors and made it back to England, he eventually returned to Ireland as a ‘missionary Bishop’ of the Church. I wanted to imitate St. Patrick’s radical forgiveness and faith-filled spirit, but I was also intrigued by his ecclesial affiliations. Can bishops and missionaries go together? Can caves and altars live in the same universe? My rugged, missionary mentality and ‘forest’ spirituality was beginning to pair with a sacramental understanding of the Church and universe.

I didn’t initially study the church fathers and saints of old to look for the Orthodox Catholic Church. I studied them so that I knew how I must behave as someone who prayed and served the Lord through missions. However, I began to discover that the wild lives of the saints were often influenced by wild ideas about Christianity itself. I discovered the mystical doctrine of the Eucharist and sacraments as well as those monks who lived celibate lives for the Kingdom of God such as St. Anthony the Great.

I then the discovered the beautiful letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, student of the disciples, on the way to his martyrdom. I then discovered that St. Basil started the world’s first hospital system. I then discovered the prophetic sermons of St. John Chrysostom and the poetry of St. Ephrem of Syria. I also discovered that there was a global Christianity from Spain to India that looked different than what I expected.

I eventually left evangelical Protestantism not because I fell in love with an institutional type of Christianity that was highly intellectual, predictable and controllable, but rather, because I discovered the blood of the martyrs, monks living in caves, and wild saints who went out to the ends of the earth. They all seemed to believe in the same thing that Christ had handed down.

I never became an oversees missionary. Instead, I started a coffee shop and taproom in order to reach out to spiritual seekers in my own area. I also worked with high-risk youth who had been abused and neglected by their families. I was eventually hired as a Catholic high school theology teacher and parish Youth Minister/Catechetical Coordinator for the last 6 years, which was a time filled with many warm memories.

A Fellow Pilgrim

My life so far has been filled with many turns and unexpected surprises, and I am now on a journey with my wonderful wife and 6 children into the Orthodox Church. But I am not doing this to be some kind of online debater or keyboard crusader. I am simply a fellow pilgrim who loves the wild world of Sacred Scripture and the Saints. I ultimately want to help people, especially my own children, discover Christ in the caves, the woods, and seaside monasteries as well as within the altar of the Orthodox Church.

This is why I love J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis so much. I learned a great deal about God and theology through the woods and wild places of Middle Earth and Narnia. Even though they are imaginative lands, they taught me a great deal about who God is and how Creation itself is a type of Temple or Cosmic Cathedral, which is why I focus so much on them through the Barrel Aged Faith.

To conclude, this article does not mean that I will never explain the deeper theological reasons for why I am becoming Orthodox through film and writing, but that these reasons will always be within the context of prayer, friendship, dialogue, sharing the Gospel story, and inviting others into the adventure of Christian discipleship.

Please keep me and my family in your prayers.

Be entirely His,
Kyle