My Story

My name is Chris Randall, I’m 43 and have been married for 23 years. My wife and I have three adult daughters. I grew up in pseudo Christianity. My family was good at speaking Christanese and looking very Christian around other Christians, but if you saw us at home you would have likely called CPS. From the time I was a young child I knew that I wanted God in my life, but no one ever showed me what it looked like to be an authentic follower of Jesus. When I was 18 I asked my mom why I should believe what she believed, but she had no answer. She stood there silent, motionless, shocked, her jaw dropped. There was nothing authentic about her life or the brand of Christianity she had been selling me my entire life.

I spent the next 12 years trying to figure out how to do Christianity while simultaneously living for myself. By december 2008 my life was in shambles. I had trashed every part of my life and was desperate for change. Sitting at home alone one day I cried out to God and surrendered my life to Him. Instantly I became a different person. It was like God reached into my soul, took the DNA of who I was and changed it.

The Holy Spirit began leading me and I followed in complete obedience. I asked God to give me a life that was unexplainable apart from Him and did He! In March 2009 God led me to start a nonprofit mechanic company. My full time job was fixing cars for broke people for free. I never got a paycheck or asked anyone for money or had any type of financial backing. My life became a whirlwind of God’s activity, looking like something out of the book of Acts. I kept a journal and wrote down all the God encounters I had.

This is one of my favorite stories from that journal. In March 2010 I was driving down the highway when I saw a truck on the side of the road with a flat tire. I stopped to help and found that the driver had a spare tire but no tools. He had been there for several hours and I was the first person that stopped to help him. After changing his tire I tried talking to him about Jesus, but he wasn’t really interested. On one of my business cards I wrote down the info for a local church I liked and gave it to him. Several weeks later I got a phone call from a man named Ron Loveday who attended the church I recommended. Turns out the guy I stopped to help was a drug dealer for a living. When his tire blew out he was on his way to kill the five guys he was dealing drugs with. He was so shook that the only person that stopped to help tried to talk to him about Jesus that after I fixed his truck he immediately went to the church I suggested, found Ron Loveday there, and gave his life to Jesus.