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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 skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories on our website at www.sidebstories.com and see more of our amazing stories on our YouTube channel. We always welcome your comments via our Facebook page, YouTube channel, or through our email at [email protected]. We love hearing from you!

We're all searching for something. Oftentimes, we think we'll find what we're looking for on our own, far from God. We think we know what is best for ourselves and work hard or play hard to find it, but despite our efforts, despite all of our pleasure-seeking quests, despite having everything the world provides and every desire seemingly met, we still come up empty. All our distractions and diversions don't seem to make it go away. And we wonder, can our deepest longings ever really be satisfied?

In today's story, Nate Sala left the religion of his parents and went his own way to live a life without God. Over the years, he lived the high life but came to see that perhaps he was looking for life where it could not be truly found, until he did. And it radically changed his life. Now, he helps others find the reality of God as not only true but deeply satisfying as well. I hope you'll come along to hear his story.

Welcome, Nate, to the Side B Stories podcast. It’s so wonderful to have you with me today! 

Yeah. Thanks, Jana. I appreciate it.

I would love to know about you, who you are now, so the listeners have an idea of just the person sitting before me before we get back into your story.

Sure. So my name is Nate Sala. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and that's still relatively new. I recently moved my family here. I’m husband to a beautiful wife. Her name's Jessica. I have two boys that are twelve and eight. And they're probably waiting for me to get this interview done, so that they can beat me up a little bit, but we have a wonderful little community out here. We recently moved from Las Vegas, so that was a big deal for us. But we're thriving here. I work for an organization called Summit Ministries during the day, which is an apologetics organization training up the youth, and then I also do—at night, I do a ministry called Wise Disciple on YouTube.

Wow! A full life. Sounds pretty wonderful, though. I’ve heard really, really good things about Summit Ministries. If you want to take just a second and describe what that is, some people might like to know.

Yeah. Summit’s been around for over 61 years, and essentially it's what Francis Schaeffer was doing in Switzerland at L’Abri. It's just maybe the American version of that. So we'll take students that are between the ages of sixteen to twenty-two to our home base in Colorado. There's also another site, actually, in Georgia. So there's two sites in the summer. And for eleven days, we'll train them up in a biblical worldview. Lots of apologetics, lots of theology, and we'll bring out the best of the best, so, Frank Turek, J. Warner Wallace, Greg Koukl, and these students will get time with them, training under them, and then they'll also be able to get a lot of their questions answered, which is key for the students. They get to circle back around and sit on the front porch of our stoop out in Colorado and just ask these people whatever they want to. And it's really a game changer for a lot of kids.

I know it was a game changer for my youngest, who went to a two-week session, to something very, very similar to Summit, but it completely transformed her confidence and compassion and courage, really. All those things in terms of understanding her faith and expressing her faith, especially in the college environment. I’m ever thankful for those kinds of ministries, so thank you for working there and for providing that. That’s awesome!

Nate, let's get back into your story. Why don’t you start us from the beginning? Your childhood, your home, your community. Did you worship God in any way. Was Christianity or religion any part of your world?

Yeah. So I was born in a very small island in the South Pacific called American Samoa. My father is Samoan. My mother, her side of the family comes from Syria. And so it's a very interesting connection. I occasionally, wherever I go, try to find somebody who's also Samoan and Syrian. And I think I’m the only one, unfortunately. So I was born there, but I came to The States very, very young. I think I was nine months old. And so, you know, it was the eighties. My parents were high school graduates. That was about as far as the education went for them, and they were just chasing jobs and pursuing where they believed the Lord wanted them to go. And so we moved around quite a bit. More than…. I think we stayed in a city a year for a stretch of time. But we would always end up going to churches, and my parents were believers. We always ended up going to Calvary Chapels. And we’d get plugged in. My father is a prolific musician, so he would jump on the worship team and get involved. And my mom is a dance instructor, and so she would get involved in putting on plays and things. And then they would do a home fellowship group. So we were always connected, always involved, wherever we went.

The problem was I was not saved. I said a lot of things to please my parents. My mom, when I was five, pulled me into her closet, I think it was her prayer closet back in the day, and just asked me to say the sinner’s prayer with her. And I did, because I just wanted to please her, but I just was not saved. And I think it became evident over time, as I got older, that I was not.

Yeah. It was just something that, even as a young child, to have, I would say, a healthy skepticism, that you had a mind of your own. It was something that your parents did, perhaps, but you didn't buy into it. So it wasn't anything really, even from five years old to preteen to early teen, it was not anything that you eventually took on as your own?

No. As a matter of fact—and I only now, at… I'm about to turn 45. Only now can I look back and articulate, I think, what was going on in my mind back then. Because these are not things that I was thinking in my mind, at the time, growing up. But my pastors did their job. They taught me what was in the Bible. We would memorize passages of the scripture. I memorized the books of the Bible in order from Genesis to Revelation. I'm really good at Bible trivia, by the way. But I realize now, somewhere along the way, my pastors forgot to explain to me that all of this was true. And so, as I got older, and my desires, as I'm getting into puberty, they start shifting, and I'm starting to desire things that the Bible says I should not pursue. That's where I started to treat the Bible as a story that was not true and then sort of compartmentalized that in my mind that way, to the point where, when I turned seventeen, I completely rejected the story.

And so there was a moment where I sat with my parents, and I looked them in the eye, and I said, “I'm not going back to church.” That devastated them.

I’m sure that it did. So as you're leaving Christianity behind and this God story, which was nothing more in your mind than mere myth. It wasn’t the true myth. It was just a fairy tale, I suppose. What were you moving toward? What were you embracing? Or were you thinking about that more intellectually or fully? Or were you just understanding what you didn’t believe?

That's a really good question. Again, these are not things…. I had no game plan, but looking back now, I can realize what I wanted to do immediately was go experience everything I was told not to. And so, at 17, I graduated high school early and jumped immediately into college. And so I had this freedom to—I was working, and I was going to school—to now go see all the movies I was told I should not go see, the rated R movies, and listen to all the music that I was told is bad for me, and so I went after all of that. As I got older, this spilled over into relationships with girls. I even dabbled with drugs, nothing too serious, but I just…. My one ultimate goal was, if I was told growing up, “Don’t do that,” I did it. I even dabbled in the occult, because I wanted to experience as much as possible what I was told not to. To me, the Bible to me was a set of rules, “Do this. Don’t do that.” That's what it was, and so that's where I just immediately, in the first several years, I just wanted to do all of the things that I was told not to do.

Yeah. I think that's not an uncommon tale, right? I mean, especially growing up, with peer pressure, with a culture that really screams a different kind of reality, “Come and see,” and, “It’s so much more fun over here.” The grass is always greener. Plus, I would imagine again, as a teenage boy, growing up and wanting to test the boundaries and find your own authority and freedom…. That is a very common tale, isn’t it? “I don't want this constrained, moral view of life. I want to go my own way.”

Yeah. And if you can imagine, so at this point, at 17, I'm living in Las Vegas, so the availability of every kind of vice is there. And so I got jobs that opened up vices to me. So one of the jobs that I had was I was the hotel manager at the Hard Rock. And back then, the Hard Rock Hotel was the number one party location for celebrities, and for basically everybody. To come to Vegas, that’s where they wanted to go, and for me, that opened up parties. I could go to any nightclub I wanted to, meet with anybody, and it was a free for all.

Wow! I can't imagine the things that you saw and experienced there. Everything that is brought to us as, “This is the world. This is pretty wonderful,” and here it is for you on a silver platter. It sounds like you were in the heart of all of that, just almost a decadent offering, in in a sense, that you found yourself…. I mean the manager of the Hard Rock Hotel, that you would be on the inside. You would be one of those who kind of made it in the world's eyes, in a sense. If you were hobnobbing and seeing and experiencing all the famous people. So what did that bring you?

A lot of longing and deep unsatisfaction. I realize now that, for my whole life, I have been pursuing a longing that has been inside of me since birth, and the longing that I mean, it’s almost like I can't put words to describe it. And because I couldn't describe it or articulate it, I thought that I could satisfy this longing with alcohol, with this new experience of trying some kind of novelty drug, or this relationship with this beautiful girl, and I realize now the longing is actually the thing that God put in all of us that connects to the reason why we were created in the first place.

C.S. Lewis talks about this desire, that we have desires, but these desires match things that actually exist, that can satisfy our desires. And so, when we get hungry physically, well that means that there's something that exists in the world that can satisfy that desire. It’s food. But there's something else. There is this desire that I'm trying to describe to you now, this longing, that food, that nothing physical can satisfy. But there must be something that satisfies it. And as a Christian, I recognize now it’s Jesus. But back then I didn't realize that. And so I came home every night from these quote-unquote, by the world’s standards, amazing experiences. I met all kind of celebrities during that time and had crazy, crazy nights. But I would come home to an empty apartment, and realize that, man, this was just a major distraction. And the longing that I had in my heart that I realize now is for the Lord, it just came rushing back. So actually, for me, I ended up going out every night to try to almost distract myself from that feeling.

But that’s a hard way to live, isn’t it? You’re constantly looking and longing for something, and you're not finding it, and so you're trying to numb it or distract yourself from it. Again, that's a very common tale, I think. Some of us know that there's something not right, something broken, something missing, but don't know where to go or how to solve it. And in many ways, I wonder, at that point, you had quote-unquote tried the Christianity thing. So was that off the table in terms of a potential option for you, other than what the world brought to you there?

Yes. It’s funny, I have a friend who—she was saved. We had worked together, and she was saved, and I was not. And she would, every now and then, approach me and try to talk to me about the Lord, and I would always brush her off, because I thought Christians were just a bunch of idiots. I thought that, when I left the church, I had been liberated from some kind of Jim Jones Kool-Aid-drinking cult. And I had a very high, lofty opinion of myself in that way, and so she would sometimes talk to me about the Lord, but she did it, you know, in some of the more shallow, cliched Christian ways, so she would say—I remember this one time, she said, “Do you believe in God?” and I would say, “Of course not.” And and she'd say, “Well, He believes in you.” And then I'd be like, “Oh, man! That is so irritating.”

Christianity was not an option for me at all. What I did, I think, start to recognize was that atheism—or excuse me. Materialism is not true. And that's just from me trying to figure out the world as a non-Christian, trying to make sense of things. It never made sense to me to say that there was no such thing as a soul, that there was no such thing as some kind of spiritual realm, but I tried to make sense of it through rejecting the Christian faith as well. And so that's where I started dabbling in the occult. I started messing around with Ouija boards. I tried to communicate to spirits and things. I treated it like it was a joke.

And then at some point, I landed on Buddhism. I thought Buddhism might be true. And so I started exploring that. I started practicing transcendental meditation. That was the last thing I was exploring before I got saved.

Okay. So what were you finding when you were exploring? When you even ventured, you took your adventure through occultism, did you encounter any kind of darkness or spirituality that confirmed your understanding that perhaps there is something more than this material world or nature itself? And/or, when you moved into Buddhism were you experiencing kind of a metaphysical reality through those explorations?

Well, I quickly realized, messing around with Ouija boards and things, that something's happening. I don't think I allowed myself to, I guess, connect all of the dots and draw the conclusions that make the most sense, which to me now is the Christian explanation of what's going on in the spiritual realm. But there were manifestations of spirits that happened. The most dark moment…. In my opinion, it’s not too dramatic, but the most dark moment that happened was friends of mine said, one day in a conversation, “Hey, there's a house that we know of that we think is haunted, and so let's go there and let's communicate with whatever's there, and so let's bring the Ouija board.”

I brought a video camera, because I wanted to capture it all on tape. I’m one of those guys. And so we went out there. One of my friends fancied himself as being very sensitive to spirits, and so he was really trying to move around every room of that house when we went in there. At the time, it was being sold, and so it was completely empty, and this was at night. So we were just moving from room to room, and he was like trying to feel the presence of spirits or something. And then he suggested we go in this one room and try to communicate in this one room. Well, anyway, we start talking to something. And one of my friends—It was a group of us. There were maybe like six of us. One of my friends, this big bodybuilder guy, very manly, screamed and ran out of the room. And we ran after him. It interrupted our session essentially, and so we ran after him, and we were like, “Hey, what's going on?” And he's just bawling. I've never seen a guy cry this way before. and he refused to come back into the house. Eventually it came out—we asked him later. He said an old lady came, walked into the room, and sat right in front of his face and just stared at him, and it just really frightened him. Yeah. And I didn't see anything. My cameras didn't pick anything up. But I didn't really think anything of it, and we left.

Well, I felt disappointed. I wanted to capture something, and so I tried to convince my friends, “Let’s go back.” And so we did. It was about maybe two weeks later, or a week later or something. And we went back into the same house. And, Jana, I don't know how to describe it. There were dead insects over every inch of the floor in the entire house.

How strange!

It was really bizarre, and it creeped me out. And I can't remember if we did another Ouija session then, but sort of the final aspect of this story is, shortly after that, the friend of mine who was sensitive, and he was going from room to room and feeling all of these things, he committed suicide.

I am so sorry.

And, you know, again, even then, it just didn't… it didn’t dawn on me that these things are all connected. But dabbling in the occult, I treated it like it was a joke. It’s not a joke. And it made me realize that something is happening. But even then, I refused to acknowledge that the Bible is true, that what it says about the spiritual world is true. I think I just tried to explain some of these things away.

And what did you find in your tour through Buddhism? Did it seem to hit you at this deep level of longing? Was it answering questions, satisfying any of those curiosities?

So I was, I feel like, at the beginning of a journey down the path of understanding, truly understanding Buddhism. I had really only started to get into it to the level that I feel comfortable understanding anything. It was only maybe two years. And so, I say all of that just to qualify what I’m about to say. This is my sort of experience with Buddhism. I think Buddhism plays into pride, especially for me, because what Buddhism does is it tells you what you’ve alluded to, that really the reason for human suffering is an enlightenment problem, and so, if you just get enlightenment, if you just recognize at base what is actually true, Just shift your perspective, then that's how you'll be free of suffering. I go into Buddhism trying to solve the longing that's in my heart, and Buddhism told me that, “Well, just understand that, at base, you have no enduring mind. There is no enduring soul. There is nothing.” That’s really what it is. You're a form. You’re a construct. And so, once you realize that, then you can be free from this suffering, from the longing that you feel, from the pain.

And so, to me, that scratched an itch in terms of my pride. Because I'm like—here I go again. Me leaving the Christian faith and thinking, “Oh, you Christians, you’re a bunch of idiots.” It's sort of the same thing. Now I'm a Buddhist and I go, “Oh, yeah. I totally understand. Most of the people out here, they don't understand what's going on, but me, I'm enlightened, and so therefore I know what's happening, and here's the solution.” So to me, Buddhism really was a very prideful thing.

But at the end of the day, it still didn't do anything for me. And so here I am practicing transcendental meditation, really trying to empty myself and become one with everything, and it did absolutely nothing, because I'm still going out at night and drinking and getting drunk. And I'm still pursuing relationships, but then, I'm, at the same time practicing, TM and thinking everything is getting solved in some sense. And it wasn't. So Buddhism was not the solution either for me.

Yeah. That’s hard. I mean, the goal is to get rid of all of your desires that are the source of the suffering, though what do you do with your longing? Or your desire to get rid of your desire? It’s a never-ending quest, too. It's a very hard way to live. So whatever was going underneath the surface was still there for you. Those deep longings despite your pleasure seeking, despite your meditation and attempt to get rid of yourself, and all of those things. So did you feel stuck? What happened?

I was allowed by God to feel the full weight of what I was doing in my life. So I'm living for myself. Again, everything at my fingertips. Whatever I want. It’s Vegas. Nothing's closed, by the way, in Vegas. You can go anywhere. It's always 24 hours open. So all of that is readily available to me. And then one day, I'm 27 years old, and my cousin, who was more of a brother that I looked up to. I don't have any brothers. So I always wanted one. And he was like that for me. He was very wise. He was, I think, maybe ten years older. He had been there before me. He was the one that would always, “Watch out for that!” “Don't do that,” kind of a thing. So I looked up to him. We all did. He had brothers himself, my other cousins. Well, he got cancer. And it started out as just something like a mole on his back. And so, in the beginning, it was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s just got to go get chemo.” This is what I'm thinking, like, “No big deal.” And we would all take turns, as a family, to drive him down to the hospital. It was like two-week stays at a time so he could get chemo, and it graduated to radiation therapy. And I had my turn. I went and I slept in the hospital cot next to him in the hospital room for two weeks while he got his treatments. I thought everything was going to be fine. I didn't take it seriously. And then I would just fly home and go back to Vegas and do my life and live for me.

Well, he tried that for a couple of years, but the cancer just went throughout his entire body. And it got into every organ and finally the brain. And I got a phone call from my parents. And they said, “Hey, you need to go and say goodbye to your cousin Steve.” And that's when it finally hit me, like, “Oh, shoot! He’s not gonna make it.” So I just remember flying out there and thinking of some joke I can tell him, because we were both very sarcastic, and we liked to tell each other jokes. “When I see him, I'm going to tell him this joke, and he's going to laugh.” And I remember walking into the hospital room with my bags. I had just come from airport. And I didn't even recognize who I was looking at, Jana. He was so underweight he didn't even look human. And it really was very, very shocking. And five minutes later, he died. And I held him in my arms, and I watched him, I watched him die, and it was extremely ugly.

And that was the very beginning of the end of me. Because here I am again, late twenties, living for myself, and now I'm confronted with death for the very first time in a way that I can't ignore it. I mean, other people in my life had died, but now I held somebody I cared about in my arms, and I watched him go. And so that messed me up. I, for a year, had nightmares of my own death, of people coming up and just shooting me in the face and killing me. And I’d wake up. I couldn't sleep for a year. Or family members of mine dying. It was a really, really difficult time. I talked about this to William Lane Craig once, and he said that what it is is I was feeling the weight of my mortality, and most people don't.

Most people, they just push it out of their heads. But they’ll say things like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not afraid to die. No problem,” right? But they're not really feeling what it feels like, the weight of it, the reality that, “Yeah, I'm going to die. All my family members are gonna die. Everybody I know, we're going to be gone.”

That's what the Lord allowed me to feel, and it felt crushing. And that happened for about a year, and I figured out how to not deal with that properly.

The way that I interpreted it and filtered my experience and all the things that were going on was to panic, recognizing that we're going to die. Which, as an atheist, as somebody who rejected the Lord, is extremely frightening. I can't overstate how frightening that feeling is, to really, truly realize that, if it's true that God does not exist, and most people under that category of atheism, too, are materialists. Well, then, this life is the only one you get. And once that's over, it's over. There’s no second round. That’s it. And that's what I was sort of feeling, was the finality of death. It’s over.

So from the time in Buddhism, I presume that there was some sense that you weren't finding what you were looking for there, and then you were still haunted, it sounds like, by this idea of death. So then walk us forward from there.

Yeah. So I would sort of swallow everything down, figuratively speaking, and move on. And my nightmares kind of went away, and I went back to my life. And then my father—a couple of years later, my father was in a tragic accident and broke his neck. And we thought he was going to die. And it was at that moment that all of those things that I'd swallowed down came flooding back to the surface, to the point where I really felt so overwhelmed I couldn't even talk. And I just remember talking to the neurosurgeon at the hospital where my father was. And they had performed initial surgery to understand the extent of the damage to my father's injury. And he was explaining this, and I just remember watching his lips move, but not hearing him at all, and then thanking him and going outside to the front area of the hospital and falling into the bushes and just weeping. And it was really…. There were two reasons. And one that is just truly, truly—it reveals my problem.

But the first reason was obviously because of my father, because I love my father. But the other one was because the reality of the situation is I'm going to die, and I'm literally mourning that, which is very self-centered and narcissistic, really. And that's exactly what I was meant to feel. Now, that I look back, I recognize, “This is it.” Because everything I did, from 17 to now I'm 30, when my father got…. When he broke his neck, I'm 30 years old And I realized that everything that I had done was a big exercise in ultimately nothing. Because at the end of the day I'm going to die. And everything that I experienced and everything that I did, it really doesn't have ultimate meaning. And that was crushing.

And so, in that moment, something like—I don't know—came to me, which is, “I should pray.” So I’m like, “Okay, I don't know what else to do.” So I literally prayed. This was for the very first time, Jana, and it was the realest prayer I've ever prayed in my entire life, and it was one word, and it was just, “Help.” That's all I could get out, because I was choking I was weeping so much. And in that moment, I felt peace. Or calm. It just went through me. It started at the top of my head, and it went all the way through me. And I knew in that moment that God was real. It's an immediate awareness. I don't know how else to describe it.

And I got back up, and I realized, “Okay, now I need to go to my mom's probably. I left her. She’s probably weeping, too. So I went back into the hospital, and I just set about helping my dad and helping my mom. But in that moment, that was it. That was the light switch that went off, or went on, for me. And I knew I had to go to church and understand what this meant for me moving forward.

So there’s a presumption there that you're, when you say, “Help,” that you're praying to—because at this point you had explored different realities, but I presume that you were praying to the God of the Bible?

I was.

When you…. This sudden knowledge or actually experience of peace, there was a profound presumption that it was from God of the Bible, Jesus Christ. That that was the source. It sounds as if you didn’t question that at all. I can-

I did, actually.

I'm thinking somebody listening might say, “Well, how do you know? How do you know? That was just how you grew up.” So are you kind of reaching back to that? You were at a point of distress. How did you know?

That's a really great question. And one that I actually… I wrestled with that, too. I think everybody should that question when they hear that story. And so, for me, especially, I was thinking, “Oh, maybe that was a moment of weakness. Maybe I had too many beans. Maybe….” Or if something more akin to Buddhism is true or The Secret or whatever other pagan nonsense is going on out there, where I just triggered something inside myself, and my own inner strength unlocked, and that's what all that was, right? What it caused me to do—because again, what I did was I prayed to the God of the Bible. I like how you put that. I prayed to the God of the Bible, and I was—if I can just say it this way—given a response, just put it that way.

And so what that caused me to do was go investigate Christianity for the very first time, only now as a skeptic. And so, for the next couple of months, I jumped head first into understanding the historicity of the scriptures, to understanding the minimal facts of the resurrection, to understanding all of these things, so that I could understand what happened to me. And what I’ve discovered was that actually Christianity is true, that the best explanation for my experience is that I actually spoke to the One Who made me, and He reached out and responded in kind.

And what I've learned over time, so in my journey, and this is sort of the Cliff Notes, is that He’s continued to reach out and communicate to me in unmistakable ways. Dreams. Things that I can't explain unless Christianity is true. And so that was kind of the thing was: What is the best explanation for the experience that I just had? The number one reason why I thought any other explanation is not correct is because, when you start to go pagan and start to say, “Hey, maybe I prayed to the universe. Maybe I did something else,” there is no intentionality that can explain my communication and then response. There is nothing that can explain that in a way that… in a cause-and-effect scenario, which is the one that I experienced, that can make sense of all of that. The only thing that, in my opinion, is the best explanation is that I communicated to something, and something communicated back. But that automatically enters in this idea of intentionality, and then when you start thinking of intentionality, now you've got to start thinking of a mind that's out there somewhere, that has intentions, has thoughts, has desires, actually cares that I reached out, and so then, because of that, did something in response back. And that, again, is…. Once you sort of land in that general area, so to speak, you’re in the door of Christianity, because Christianity, I mean that is the explanation, is that there is a mind Who created all things. He stands apart from all of us, but is immanent in creation, genuinely cares about us, wants the best for us, and will respond when we pray. So anyway.

So you had this extraordinary experience, and then you wanted to find out really, to see whether or not the myth was true. So you, as C.S. Lewis discovered the true myth, that it was not just a story, but a story grounded in history and in reality and something you could verify in some ways. And so you went on this search to see whether or not the bible, the things that you were reading were reliable texts from worthy eyewitnesses and all, that you could trust what it was saying. You commented there that you believed in some regard that even the resurrection was a historical event that was believable. So you were coming to grips with the experience, you were grounding it historically, intellectually, that when you looked at the biblical worldview and at the Bible itself, that it seemed to make sense of your reality, of all of reality, of your experience within reality. So the pieces, it sounds like, were coming together for you, both your experience and through your mind, your head, your heart. And I wonder, too…. Through your pathway through this, it sounded like you had a very strong existential longing for more. How was that puzzle piece coming into play as you were turning the corner and pursuing God and Christ in a more intentional way?

The easiest way I can put it is that, on the other side of that day outside the hospital, I still had that lacking, that longing. Some Christians call it like the hole, the God-shaped hole in your heart. It's cliche. But once the light bulb came on for me and I recognized that God is real, I've never had it since. And it's not something like, “Oh, let me purpose to get rid of it.” It just… it is gone. The way that it feels to me, having a relationship with the Creator of the universe, is that I seek Him, He pours into me, and out of the overflow of my intimate relationship with Him, I then do everything else. And of course, now there's no lacking. There’s no hole. It's not there anymore because everything I do comes out of the overflow of my relationship with the Lord. And yeah. It’s an amazing experience.

And I don't want people to hear that, “Oh, everything is wonderful now. There's no suffering anymore. Everything, all problems are solved.” That's not at all what I'm saying. I guess what I'm saying, in my own words, is John 15. Jesus says, “Abide in Me, and I in you. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me, you can do nothing. It's that overflow relationship that’s also touched on in Galatians 2:20 as well. That's everything. That's how I get up in the morning. That's how I move throughout the day. That's how I go to bed at night. And that provides meaning, purpose. It gives me guidance and wisdom to move forward, to make decisions throughout the day. Because I recognize what I'm doing here and why I was put here in the first place.

That’s beautiful. That reminds me of Augustine’s comment that our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Him. And it sounds as if, from the moment that you were seen. It reminds me of Hagar out in the desert, and God sees her and her son is about to die, and she names God “the one who sees.” It sounds like God saw you in that moment where you reached out. You were willing to say, “Help.” In a place of humility and surrender, and He came. In terms of understanding Who Christ is and what He did for us, we call the gospel, would you say your point of belief came at that response of help? Or would you say that, once the pieces started coming together, then you believed, “No. This is not only God is real, but this is true and worthy of my life.” I know sometimes conversion is a process of surrender, even till the time that we die. But was your confidence in the biblical God at that moment where He responded? Or was it, “Okay, I'm going to check this out now based upon my experience,” and then you came to a place of belief a little bit later, or surrender rather.

I totally understand the question, and I don't even know that I can answer it. I feel like I want to say it's two sides of the same coin. Like I think on some real level it dawned on me that God is real the moment that I felt peace. But then, for the next, like I said, I don't know, six months to a year or however long it took, there were these little, smaller moments where I'm doing my research, and I'm trying to understand whether or not Christianity is true. Because I don't know if I said this, but just because I sense that God is real, like maybe it's not the Yahweh of Christianity. Maybe it's the God of Judaism, which is—that's a whole separate conversation. But maybe it's the god of Mormonism or something else. And so I was fully prepared to pursue whatever that looked like, whichever one had the best explanation. But as I got into my studies, I recognized it was the God of the Bible, the Christian God. And so it was—I feel like it's both. Yeah.

It’s been an amazing journey for somebody like me. I was very, very, very prideful in the fact that I'm very logical. And it’s funny because that's actually not my testimony. I don't know if you caught that. My testimony is not, “Oh, I figured it out.” My testimony actually cuts against what I find to be most proud of as a human being, which is my intellect, and so I just find that mean that God has a sense of humor.

Yes, He does! He does. He does. He puts us in our place, right? So that we know Who He is and we know who we are and our need of Him. Everything that you were experiencing in the world, did fall away fairly easily? It sounds like you were pretty engrossed. Was that a process of letting one life go and embracing the other?

For some of these things, the wheel had already begun turning. I was no longer at the Hard Rock at the time that my father had his accident, but I was still in that scene. I still had friends in that environment. And what’s interesting is, because of my father's accident, it was so dramatic that I immediately moved back home and wanted to spend time helping. My mom's a little… she’s a little thing, so… and my dad's—as I said, he's Samoan, so you know, he needed help. He's a quadriplegic now.

Oh, I’m so sorry.

So from the neck down he cannot move. And so my mom—thank you. My mom needed a lot of help back then to move him around and things, so it’s like my new reality—and I didn't know how long this was going to last—was a hundred percent being my dad's caretaker. So all of those things were sort of taken care of. I didn't have time to hang out with my friends anymore. I was dating a girl at the time who now is my wife, but she—her story is also wonderful, but she stuck around. We were both unsaved, watched my dad get hurt. She saw my transformation, and she leaned in, and she wanted to help as much as possible, too. So that was the only relationship that I was navigating, other than taking care of my father. All those other things easily fell away.

Yeah. Just logistically, physically. You weren't in a place where that life was thriving anymore, and so it was easy probably to let some of that die very naturally and very quickly.

Yeah.

How wonderful. But now you're sitting here. There’s a difference between, “Okay. I believe that God is real, and this is true and you accept Christ in your life,” and then becoming a pastor. That's a big jump! Where you now spend your life helping other people know what you couldn't find for a long time. So how did that transition happen?

Okay. So that's a really great question. I'm usually slow on the uptake. I'm very perceptive when it has nothing to do with me, and then when the arrow is pointed at me, I'm very slow. Like I said, I started immediately into my research on Christianity and all those things, just to understand what was going on. Shortly after that, it dawned on me…. I can't remember the moment that it was just like, “Wow! Christianity is actually true,” but at that point I'm going to church. I’m studying the scriptures and all that. I get an opportunity to get up in front of some youth at the church that I was attending back in Las Vegas and I caught the bug. And I was like, “Man, this is really cool,” so I created Wise Disciple, which is the ministry that I'm doing now.

People sort of wanted to put into this ministry that I had created online, and so one day, I'm sitting with one of my team members, and I'm just pouring into him and just hearing about his life and praying with him. And he said, “Hey! Have you ever considered the pastoral call that God has placed on your life?” And I said, “Say what?” And he said, “Man, what you're doing with me is very pastoral. Would you ever really consider doing that?” And then I laughed and I was like, “Man, if you knew what I've done in my life, nobody would ever make me a pastor in a million years,” but shortly after that, an opportunity arose, and I was sitting across from a senior pastor, who offered me an internship, unrelated, and I go, “Uh oh! I think maybe the Lord is telling me something.” So I accepted and became a pastor.

And you’ve been on that road ever since.

Yeah. So I now am working for an apologetics organization, and so I've stepped away from the pastorate at the church that I was at, but I find myself constantly stepping into the role to continue to shepherd. There are a lot of people out there, Jana. They are in desperate need of healing. They’re hurt, they're broken, and they need answers. They’ve get a lot of questions. And so I find myself still slipping into that role even now.

Yeah. I don't think you can really separate the two, can you? Because the questions that everyone has are not merely intellectual. And oftentimes, they're coming from a very deep place, as you say, from a brokenness, and we need to see people as human beings, not just an isolated question that's just purely rational. But it sounds like you have a very deep understanding of the holistic nature of ministry, really. So that's amazing! I'm so encouraged to know that you work with people who are actually looking for answers, trying to figure it out, like you were for so long, and I can imagine that your history can only make you a stronger ambassador, because you understand what it's like to live without Christ and then how He fulfills your deepest longings. And not only existentially but intellectually as well. Things just make sense, right? With the Creator of the universe, especially in charge, which we all fight against.

But for those… I'm just thinking of those who may be listening, they're like, “Wow! I wish I could believe like that. I’m a skeptic.” Or maybe, “I did call out to God, and I didn't get the kind of answer that you did. I'm not really sure. I don't know that it's true. I don't know that God’s real. What would be a good first step? Or what advice could you give to someone who perhaps is curious enough or open enough to consider it in a serious way?

That’s a really tough question, because—and you brought this up, so I’ll just reiterate, I think, what you’ve already said, but this kind of question, or I don’t know if we could characterize it as a challenge, has two components: The first one is obviously the logical content of the challenge, which is perhaps, “I did something, and God did not answer.” Or, “Something bad happened, and God allowed it.” But then on the other hand, there's the emotional aspect of the challenge. And I usually am up front when I talk to people about this. I have no answer to the emotional component of the question, because there is no logical answer that can emotionally satisfy. If people have reached out at some point, if there's been a moment in time where somebody has reached out genuinely and they were met with silence or what they perceived as silence, that’s a very, very difficult experience. And so I guess I'm just trying to be sensitive to the fact that I can't string together a couple of sentences and just solve that. I don't think anybody can. I think the only thing I can do is say, number one, I know what that feels like. And number two, I really do care, and I really do feel for the person that has had that struggle and that experience.

There is a logical aspect to the answer. And all I can say is, for somebody who has… they’re on this journey, is the only thing I think that they should do and focus on right in this very moment is to stay open. It’s almost like cultivate your own soil. So I’m a pastor. So the problem with pastors is concision. So rein me in, Jana, if I go too long. but Jesus gives a parable. And from my perspective and my own opinion, I think it's largely misunderstood, but it's the parable of the four soils, essentially, where Jesus talks about a man going out, scattering seed everywhere, and there's different types of soils that the seed falls on. The point of the old four soils thing is you want to be the last soil. You want to be the soil that is so fertile that when the seed of the Word of God falls into your soil, in your heart, there is fruit that just comes up, it shoots up, and the roots run deep. And that's the point.

And that's, I guess, my advice. When you're questioning things, when you're uncertain about something, and you, in your mind, you said to God, “Hey, help,” and you didn't hear anything. Stay. Keep your soil fertile, because I promise that God won't leave you in silence. In the book of Jeremiah, the Lord says, “If you seek me with all of your heart, you will find me.” And so I would encourage whoever's listening, if there was a moment in time where something that they wanted to happen didn’t happen, keep your heart open. Keep your soil fertile. And all you have to do is just keep fertilizing that soil, keep your mind open to possibilities. Understand that every moment, every day you live is an opportunity for you to experience something and to learn something that the Lord is doing around you and perhaps through you. But for some people it's not one moment. Like you said, it's a process, and that requires changing our hearts, changing our minds, and that takes time. So I would just say stay open and see what the Lord does.

Yeah. That’s really beautiful and extremely important advice. It’s hard to move forward or to receive when you're not open, really, to what’s being given to you or shown to you. There was a reason He said, “For those of you who have ears, come here. Come and listen.” So our obstinance can sometimes get in the way of our really seeing God.

But for those of us who are Christians, you work as a Christian minister and apologist. You’re working with kids, teenagers all the time. You are out there. You’re in the mix, as it were, and there are a lot of us Christians who would love to engage meaningfully, in a way that really does help others see Christ in perhaps a fresh, new way, where they would become open. How can we as Christians better prepare or better live or…. I think, there was one Christian, right, who you worked with that… you weren't real open at that point, when they were trying to point you in the direction of Jesus. So I know there are ways that we can still try, I guess, even with those who seem to be closed off. I don't know where you want to go with this, but what advice would you give to Christians?

So this is the $6 million question. We Christians in the church have grown up on a large diet of secularism, and so unfortunately in that balance that Jesus provides us of being in the world but not of the world, we've veered too far over, into being more like the world. And what I mean there is the tribalism, the adversarialism, the disputation that we see, more so probably on mainstream and social media, but also in person, at the dinner table, or wherever that is. And so all of this trades on a bad paradigm of communicating that we've just sort of, I think, inculcated. We haven't really thought about it. And it’s this: There’s a dynamic of communication where, if I want to say something to you as a Christian from my convictions, I'm just going to say it. I'm just going to throw nine bullet points at you, and you need to be quiet and sit back and listen to me as I rant. And then, when I'm done, it's understood that you get a chance to throw nine bullet points at me, and then that's a conversation. That's not really great. That's actually a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for talking around each other and getting into arguments, which is what is happening.

Before I was a pastor, I was a debate teacher, and so what I advocate for—and you'll see this at my ministry as well—is a way of gentle cross examination, essentially, which is very simple. I say treat your interactions like you're on a first date with somebody, which is when you’re on a first date, and you don't know. Maybe this potential marriage material, right? This could be a potential important relationship moving forward for the rest of your life. So put the focus on the person you're talking to. Don't lead off with your nine bullet points about why this person is wrong, but instead, do actually what you're doing, Jana, which is put the focus on the person in front of you, ask them questions about themselves, seek to understand them, show that you care, and what's going to happen is, when you continue to do that, you'll hear worldview spill out. It's just natural. You want to know why? Because we're all religious. That’s the interesting thing about people, is everyone has a worldview. And we have all been designed in a certain way to worship something, so it's always going to come out if you just listen for it.

And so when that happens, when you're a Christian, and you're just saying, “Hey, tell me your story. Tell me about you. What do you believe? Why do you believe that?” And then when you hear something that doesn't quite match with your Christian worldview, that's when you say, “Hey, would you mind if I ask you a little bit more about that? Tell me about this. Tell me about Buddhism. Tell me more about that.” That is, by far, a way more effective method of communicating. It's a way better effective of challenging somebody. And it's also still you get to maintain relationship with people. It's just way better. You don't even have to know all there is to know about Christianity, either, because you don't have to defend yourself. You're putting the focus on the other person. That's probably the number one answer I would give to Christians.

Yeah, that’s really very instructive, very wise, I think, and highly relational. It’s looking at the person. And pulling them out and showing that you care about them and what they believe and listening and all of those wonderful things. Thank you for those beautiful reminders. If you don’t mind, I'm going to ask you one more question. If it's too much, just let me know.

Okay.

I’m thinking of the parents out there who have children who reject. They are Christians, and they have a child, just like you. At 17, when you sat down with your parents and said, “Okay, I’m done. I don’t believe this.” And I wondered about your relationship with your parents after that point. It sounds as if you loved your father and you maintained a relationship through those years of kind of being a prodigal, as it were. How did that relationship work out? And were there things that they did that encouraged that open door? Or were there things that you would have liked to have been different between you relationally?

Yeah. That’s a really great question. My parents, I think, realized that, when I get something in my head, you really can't deter me. Not in the moment, anyway. You can't determine from pursuing it. And I think they recognized that when I was 17, that there was going to be no talking me out of leaving the church. And so they really took a hands-off approach. Every now and then, my mom—I know I must killed…. I mean, being a parent now, I look back, and I see it must have killed her. So every now and then, she would make these comments that probably were a little passive-aggressive, but I think…. So with the beginning of the premise that you introduced with the question like, what about parents who are in similar situations? It's extremely difficult to watch your child appear to fall away, because you don't know what the future is going to be. And I think many people—grandparents, too. Grandparents are going through this, too. They’re seeing their children and grandchildren do some interesting things that are clearly unbiblical. And now I'm even thinking of LGBTQ and the latest trends and things. But there's a balance that I think often, with your feet, if I can use this illustration, that Christians need to learn. And so sometimes you're going to need to lead off with one foot over the other, and then sometimes you're going to have to switch and lead off with another foot, but it's the balance of truth and love.

And so I would encourage parents everywhere to learn the balance, learn the dance, so to speak. Not to downplay the importance or anything or trivialize this at all. It's not a dance. It’s not fun. But I mean, sometimes, as a parent, you're going to have to lead in truth. Sometimes you're going to have to say the difficult thing, no matter what happens, whatever the consequence is. But when you have a child that you might potentially never see again because they are telling you something that, in their minds, is incredibly important: “Hey, I don't believe this stuff anymore, Dad. I don't believe this, Mom.” Or even more than that, “I'm trans. I’m something.” Whatever that is, right? If you lead off in truth and you pull back, that means your other foot is back here in love, that's going to cause a problem, and so I think this is where we struggle as parents is I think what we need to do is lead off in love and not just say, “But you know what the Bible says.” That will come, it absolutely will come, if you maintain your relationship with your child.

The perfect example of this is a friend of mine, Sean McDowell. His father, Josh McDowell, who is one of the greatest apologists ever. Sean did the same thing. Sean doubted. I don't think it was too dramatic, but Sean came to his father and said, “Hey, I don't know if I believe this stuff anymore, about Christianity.” And his dad said, “That’s great, Son.” And you’re like, “What?” But what Sean did not hear was, “Well, you know the Bible says you're going to hell, son. You know if you continue down this path, you know what this all leads to.” That's not what his father did. What his father said was, “If you continue to pursue truth, which I know you will, I believe you will end up right back here with me.” And that's what children, I think, need to hear. I think that's what I could have heard. My parents didn't say that to me. But I really do believe that that's what parents should be communicating. And then they should pick their battles and choose which one and which scenario over time as they maintain trust and relationship with their children, which foot to lead off with.

Yeah. Again, that’s very wise. I can understand, having spoken with you for this past hour why your ministry is called Wise Disciple. And I think this is just a wonderful little nugget, a glimpse, really, of the riches that someone can find through listening to your teaching through that channel, so I hope that more people are drawn to your work, to your ministry, Nate, and all that you do, and coming from obviously a heart for the Lord and a heart for others and someone who's actively engaged in ministry. What a beautiful story. I think there are so many wonderful things in your story, but I do appreciate the honesty and that you knew that there was something not right about your life, and you were willing to go on a search to find the Person Who actually found you, Who responded immediately when you called for help. It’s a beautiful story, it’s an honest story, and I know that so many people are going to be blessed by listening and I hope encouraged, despite some times there’s felt hiddenness but yet there are some times when God responds so quickly that you just know it’s Him. And I hope that they pray for eyes to see and ears to hear and for good soil, that they would be ones to receive what you have obviously received. I just appreciate you so much, Nate. And thanks for coming and telling your story.

Thank you, Jana. I really do appreciate it, and I'm just…. I recognize the benefit of your ministry as well. There are so many people, as we mentioned, that are broken, they're hurting, and your podcast is really providing a lot of healing for people who have a lot of unspoken questions and things, so I'm just cheering you on from the sidelines, and I'm very grateful to be here. Thank you.

Ah, fantastic! Thanks so much, Nate.

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Nate Sala's story. You can find out more about his ministry with Summit [1:19:23]. Thanks for tuning in Side B Stories to hear Nate Sala's story. You can find out more about his YouTube channel, Wise Disciple, his ministry at Summit, and his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email. Again, that is [email protected]. Also, if you're a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist or skeptic with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website or through our email, and we’ll get you connected.

This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute through the wonderful help of our producer Ashley Decker, audio engineer Mark Rosera, and ministry assistant Lori Burleson. You can also see these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel through the excellent work of our video editor Kyle Polk. Jordan Harmon is our graphic designer. If you enjoyed it, I hope you'll follow, rate, review and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.