Charlie’s life in high school played out like a bad teen movie. When he was a freshman, he made the mistake of telling a girl that her boyfriend was cheating on her behind her back. The boyfriend, who was a popular guy in school, discovered Charlie, ratted him out, and, with some friends, made a pastime of bullying Charlie for the next four years.
He says he took the bullying and turned it into his negative identity.
“If I was going to be the weird kid, I was going to be the really weird kid,” he says. “So I did things like wear footie pajamas to school and that kind of thing. If you’re going to pick on me, I’m going to make that my identity and shock you with it.”
Of course Charlie says it didn’t help that he was president of the Japanese Club at Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie, Washington.
Isolationism increases
As the bullying increased, so did his isolationism. He found solace and community in playing the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. For 8–14 hours a day he sat in front of a computer screen to escape the outside world.
“I don’t know if it was more for individual friendship or just being part of a community that didn’t reject me,” he says. “If I were in a game, I could be whomever I wanted. I didn’t have to be the nerdy kid from Mount Si High School who was getting called names while walking through the halls. I could be Pain Weaver, the Rogue. As cheesy as that sounds, it was more appealing than reality.”
The isolationism also helped fuel his desire for pornography from a young age. He said his parents made the rookie mistake of getting him a computer when he was about 13 years old.
“Pornography was just a happenstance thing,” he says. “It was something that fell into my lap one day. It was curiosity that fueled it in the beginning, and then pure addiction kept me in and put the chain around my neck. Video games and pornography were the two things that took over a lot of my time. I’d play video games late into the night and then watch pornography and go to bed. And then just repeat over and over again.”
When he was younger, Charlie attended a legalistic church with his parents. Sunday school was about rules and how he missed the mark. His parents were Christians but he struggled with what he believed.
“I never touched my Bible, I didn’t have a prayer life, I had no knowledge or foundation in scripture or know why I believed what I believed.”
Over time, he started to question his own mortality and began to fear death.
“I’m going to die someday. It was this fear of death and a feeling of being trapped in my own mortality . . . I realized death is inescapable, it’s going to happen and there’s nothing I can do about it. Panic attacks would come in those moments of realization. I would continually have this existential panic where I would have a physiological reaction, freak out, and then get a surge of adrenaline.”
The panic attacks lasted for three years until he told his mom about the occurrences the summer after he graduated from high school. He says he finally told her because he was sick of passing off the panic attacks as sneezes or going to the bathroom where he would freak out and shake. His mom responded, “You’re going to church with me this weekend.”
And he went.
A Charismatic Moment
The church his mom belonged to was not the same legalistic church they attended years before. During the sermon, the pastor shared a metaphor of sin being like a ball of yarn that’s knotted up. He said you try to get the knot out but the next thing you know, it’s at your feet, worse than before, and it looks impossible to get untangled. The pastor said sin makes us feel like that sometimes.
“I kind of blanked out after that,” he says. “I started praying, ‘God, I feel like the most knotted up ball of yarn. I don’t think I’m ever going to get untangled.’ I felt Jesus was saying to me, ‘Charlie, I have you in the palm of my hand. My fist is clenched tightly over you. There’s nothing anybody can do to take you away from me. Not even you.’
“I didn’t grow up in a charismatic church but I felt like I was having this charismatic moment. I felt this rush, like a bucket of love being dumped on my head. I fell forward. I have no way to explain it other than the fact I was actually receiving the Holy Spirit for the first time. I was believing and admitting that I can’t do it on my own and I need Jesus’ blood. I had never had a moment like that.”
After the church service the pastor recommended apologetic books to help alleviate intellectual concerns Charlie had with Christianity. In studying apologetics he found a head knowledge, but neglected reading his Bible and thus missed much of the heart knowledge he wouldn’t realize he needed until later. The panic attacks went away that Sunday.
A fresh start
After he graduated high school, he enrolled in DigiPen Institute of Technology to study 3D animation. He now had the opportunity for a fresh start in a place where no one knew him and he no longer carried around the identity of a nerd. He says he was sick of being ignored and dismissed by people and he thought it was his time to finally be cool. So he started to rebel.
“I grew my hair out long, squeezed into skinny jeans, and started listening to death metal. I got the attention I wanted and it felt powerful.”
A new situation arose in college that he never had dealt with. A girl noticed him. He jumped into a relationship with her.
“I gave her everything I had to give without a second guess,” he says. “I worshiped her. My identity was in my devotion to her, my relational performance for her, and the fulfilling of my sinful desires through her.”
With little to no investment in the Bible, Jesus, prayer, or community, Charlie didn’t know how to deal with relationships. Looking back years later he realized his idol was marriage. His girlfriend eventually left him for another guy and Charlie didn’t handle it well. The way he saw it, his god had abandoned him and was sleeping with someone else. He was a wreck.
Finding Mars Hill Church
During his sophomore year of college, he started attending Mars Hill Ballard during the Religion Saves sermon series. He had previously visited once in high school with family friends.
“I saw the gospel presented in a way I never had before,” he says. “The pastor kept talking about Jesus and taught straight from the Bible. I learned a lot about sin and what Jesus’ death really meant. God was challenging the worldly views I held about sex, love, and relationship with him.”
Charlie was baptized at Mars Hill Ballard in 2008 and participated in the life of the church for eight months before the busyness of college distracted him and he stopped attending. He found another girlfriend and worshiped her the same way he’d done with his first girlfriend. He says he told himself he was being like a husband to her by sleeping with her and spending all his time and money on her.
“My idol of marriage was manifesting in a strange game of ‘playing house’ where I was already fulfilling what I thought a good husband does for the woman he loves. I didn’t realize I was leading her and myself to darkness and my relationship with her was toxic.”
The relationship dissolved into nothing more than sex and she left him.
Depression and guilt took over. Charlie stayed away from God and community because it was too hard to face his sin. In the summer of 2009, Charlie was looking at an online dating site and he found a girl he wanted to meet. She told him, “I’m not going to date you, but you can come to my church.” The church was Mars Hill Bellevue and he started going with her every week. He was also introduced to community again through her friends.
“I started actually learning who Jesus was,” he says. “I wasn’t just learning about him, I was getting to know him in a real relationship. Jesus was revealing himself to me in a way that destroyed the Jesus I’d known in the past. He was teaching me my effort, my work, and my fight to be good enough was unnecessary because he was good enough for me. He convicted me of my past sin and empowered me to apologize to the girls I abused in the name of ‘being a good guy.’ He also attacked the secret sin of pornography that had been present all those years.”
Charlie says he fell in love with Jesus and the Bible. He loved learning about Jesus and praying. He says this is the season of his life when Jesus had his head and his heart. It lasted until January of 2011 when he got a job in sales at a car dealership.
Back down sinful paths
The dealership required that he put in a lot of hours, including Sundays, so he stopped going to church and community group. Isolation set in again. The men he worked with mocked him for not getting drunk and sleeping around with women. His boss called him a “goody two shoes” and other, more vulgar things. Charlie became frustrated because the guys he worked with seemed like they were living a great life.
“I was feeling joyless,” he says. “I wasn’t in my Bible and wasn’t praying. I got angry at God and asked him, ‘Why are these guys so happy when they’re doing things you say are wrong? Why do I feel no joy when I’m one of yours?’”
This was the low point in Charlie’s life with Jesus. The isolation got worse and he started viewing pornography again for the first time in a year and a half.
A real turning point
Six months later he woke up one Saturday morning, looked around his room and started to cry. The only thing he could think was, “I miss Jesus.”
This was a huge turning point in Charlie’s life.
“Jesus showed me what the things I was pursuing really did for me,” he says. “I was not happier or more joy-filled after pursuing these things. They didn’t deliver. They didn’t fulfill me. They were never enough. He let me pursue them to show me how weak they are. It was after my lowest that I could appreciate what Jesus had done for me and I realized he’s the only reason I’m here on this planet. I’m here to bring glory to Jesus. That’s where meaning and fulfillment is, in Jesus Christ.”
Charlie started getting out of the house again. He attended Mars Hill Bellevue and reconnected with old friends and a community group. It was then that he realized he had never served the church before. He says he remembers Pastor Mark saying in a sermon, “You already know what God has called you to do. Stop making excuses and go do it.” He felt like God was calling him to teach his people so he began teaching in children’s ministry. For the first time in his life, Charlie gave Jesus his head, heart, and finally, his hands.
Finding a wife
The next week, the woman who was the children’s ministry director at the time asked him to think about being an intern. He prayed about it and felt like it was something God was calling him to do. So he started an internship for 7–12 year olds in early 2012. While working numerous jobs and interning, he finally came to the point in his life where he was able to tell God, “I don’t care if you have somebody for me to marry. You have other things you have called me to so I’m going to do them.” Four months later he met his future wife.
About a year before meeting his wife, Charlie signed up to create a free profile on eHarmony, the online dating website. When he discovered he would have to pay he decided to scrap it and never finished the profile. A year later they contacted him to say they were running a promo for a free weekend. Out of curiosity and boredom, he logged in and the first woman he saw was Jess. He messaged her and they talked on the phone for four to five hours a night for the first week. At the end of the week they met for Thai food and talked for seven hours.
Six months after meeting online, Charlie asked Jess’ dad if he could marry her. Four months later they were married. What seems like a fast timeline wasn’t fast for Charlie. He had given up the idol of marriage and was finally at a place in his life with Jesus where he was happy.
Faithfulness is the theme
Charlie and Jess were married October 5, 2013 in the same church where God told Charlie that he had him in the palm of his hand.
“To marry my best friend who also loves Jesus, in the church where I received the Holy Spirit—it was just a cool moment. The Charlie that married Jess is not the Charlie that I’ve known historically. I’m a different guy, and it shows the power Jesus has. He can change a nerdy shut-in with a pornography addiction into a man that loves his wife and is faithful.”
Charlie says the theme that has pervaded his entire life has been God’s faithfulness.
“God’s just been extremely faithful. I think the biggest thing in my story is that I’ve proven time and time again to be unfaithful, but God has always been faithful despite my unfaithfulness. He has always pursued me.
“I found ways to mess it up and isolate myself or get distracted with a girl or something like that, but Jesus always brought me back to him. Now my faith is as strong as it’s ever been. It’s all because of him. It’s not because of me. I can’t take credit for it. I’m not perfect, but Jesus is working on me. I’ve definitely grown.”
