I Thought I Was Saved. I Wasn't.

I was raised in the church — Sunday school, the choir, all of it. If you'd asked me back then, I would have told you I was a Christian. It took losing everything to find out I was wrong.

What actually constitutes being saved? It's a question most Christians assume they've already answered, because they grew up in church, said the right words, and would call themselves a Christian if you asked. I would have said the same thing. I was wrong — and it took a cold cell with nothing but a Bible to show me that.

"He saved me from eternal destruction. I was a detriment to myself, and He intervened. That's why I'm so on fire for Jesus Christ."

My Story

I was born and raised in the church. We went every Sunday. I sang in the choir, played tambourines, attended Sunday school — I did all the things that are supposed to mark someone as a Christian. But by the time I was an adult and out on my own, none of it stuck. I wasn't in church, wasn't in the Bible, wasn't praying. I was living the way the world lives..

That lifestyle eventually caught up with me, and I ended up incarcerated. I was placed in solitary confinement — a cold cell, a cold mattress, nothing else — after a fight with another inmate. They took everything from me except one thing: my Bible. Prison policy protected that. So there I was, with nothing to focus on but Scripture.

I started reading. Matthew straight through to Revelation, cover to cover. Somewhere in that process, things I'd never noticed before started jumping off the page. By the time I finished, I went back through a second time with colored pencils, marking up everything that had caught my attention — underlining, highlighting, taking notes. I was in it now.

Then one day, alone in that cell, something happened that I still can't fully put into words. A weight came over me — not metaphorical, physical. My body felt like lead. I sat on the edge of my bunk, put my head in my hands, and the tears started. Not a few tears — it went on long enough that there was a puddle on the concrete floor between my feet. I had no idea why I was crying. I just knew I couldn't stop it, and I stopped trying to.

It was only afterward, once I was back in general population, that I understood what had happened. The habits I'd spent years failing to break on my own — including language I'd tried and failed to clean up more times than I could count — were simply gone. Not weakened. Gone. I had to relearn how to talk without cursing, because the vocabulary I'd built my whole adult life around had disappeared overnight.

That's when it became clear: I hadn't been saved before that day in that cell. Not by growing up in church. Not by singing in the choir. Not by calling myself a Christian when someone asked. Jesus Christ intervened in that cell, and that's the day I actually became one.

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What came after

Once I was saved, I didn't do anything halfway. I was studying four, five, six hours a day — Hebrew and Greek lexicons, commentaries, everything I could get my hands on. And not long after, I was assigned a new cellmate — a man who introduced himself, only half-joking, as "Diablo." He kept a satanic Bible on his shelf next to a jar with a rosary hung upside down inside it.

Other believers around me treated him like he was untouchable. I didn't. We talked. We got along. And when one of my Christian brothers asked if I was afraid to be housed with him, I told him no — if anything, he should be more worried about his own faith than about mine, because my God had already defeated whatever Diablo was serving. That wasn't bravado. It was Matthew 10 playing out in real time: Jesus didn't come for the people who had it together. He came for the ones everyone else had written off. My job wasn't to judge Diablo. It was to plant a seed and let God do what only God can do with it.

A debt I didn't know I owed

Years before any of this — before I was saved, before that cell — I was shot with birdshot outside a corner store. It didn't kill me. Bird shot, not buckshot; my uncle said as much when he heard the story: "If that was buckshot, he wouldn't be here."

I didn't understand why that mattered until much later, sitting with Romans 9. Paul writes about Jacob and Esau — chosen before either had done anything to earn it, good or bad — and makes the case that God's choice was never about who deserved it. Looking back at how many times I should have died before I ever picked up a Bible, I can't explain that as luck. I believe I'm here because I was chosen, long before I ever chose Him back.

That conviction — that salvation isn't something we work our way into or maintain through performance, but something God does — is the foundation everything else I teach is built on.

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What I Learned - And Why It Changes Everything

Years before any of this — before I was saved, before that cell — I was shot with birdshot outside a corner store. It didn't kill me. Bird shot, not buckshot; my uncle said as much when he heard the story: "If that was buckshot, he wouldn't be here."

I didn't understand why that mattered until much later, sitting with Romans 9. Paul writes about Jacob and Esau — chosen before either had done anything to earn it, good or bad — and makes the case that God's choice was never about who deserved it. Looking back at how many times I should have died before I ever picked up a Bible, I can't explain that as luck. I believe I'm here because I was chosen, long before I ever chose Him back.

That conviction — that salvation isn't something we work our way into or maintain through performance, but something God does — is the foundation everything else I teach is built on.

What I Learned - And Why It Changes Everything

Unplugged Christianity exists to do for you what that Bible did for me in that cell: strip away the assumptions we inherit and let the text speak for itself. Not academic distance. Not tradition treated as equal to Scripture. Just: here's the passage, here's the context, here's what it actually says — and you make the determination for yourself.

That's the whole approach. Scripture over tradition. Exegesis over eisegesis. If I'm wrong about something, I'll drop it the moment Scripture shows me I'm wrong. I'd rather be corrected than comfortable.

Who This Is For

This is for Christians who sense something doesn't add up in what they've been taught — people who love Jesus but have questions their church or tradition has never really answered. You don't need a seminary degree. You don't need to already agree with me. You just need to be willing to look at the text and follow it, even somewhere uncomfortable.

Credentials & Background

In 2014, I founded a trucking company and was later recognized for it with an entrepreneurship award from a nonprofit organization. That's the "award-winning entrepreneur" behind the name — built from the ground up, not handed to me.

I spent a few semesters at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, originally there in support of a friend pursuing his degree. I didn't finish, and I didn't agree with much of the doctrine being taught — but I picked up real tools there, and I still remember Professor, who was a genuinely great teacher. Sitting in those classes and walking away unconvinced by the tradition being handed to me was its own kind of education. It's part of why I don't take inherited doctrine at face value now.

My study of Scripture in the original languages started in 2004. Within a year I had built a library of Hebrew and Greek lexicons, concordances, and Bible dictionaries — the same tools I still use to teach from today.

As a church growth strategist, I built a complete outreach and follow-up system inside GoHighLevel — prayer request intake, a "Plan Your Visit" funnel, automated follow-up sequences, and a membership "Join" pipeline, all end-to-end. I used it to build and give away free websites to smaller churches that couldn't otherwise afford one. I no longer offer the system commercially, but it still exists, and I may eventually give the whole thing to churches who need it.