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e-mail: j
David Trammell
This is the story of how God
changed my life…
I was raised in a fairly good
household, but my family was apathetic towards God. My mother was a rarely practicing Catholic,
and my father simply doesn’t seem to think about God much. My mother made the choice of what school my
brothers and I would go to, and that turned out to be a Catholic school. So I was indoctrinated into Catholicism at
school while my parents basically ignored God at home. Since my parents rarely went to church, as
soon as I left Catholic middle school for a public high school, my weak faith
was in trouble. It hit a brick wall when
I was faced with the realities of high school life combined with the scientific
teachings of evolution and the big bang.
Sometime in the 10th grade I decided (while talking to a girl on the
phone no less) that God clearly didn’t exist.
So I became an atheist, and the girl incidentally thought that was very
cool. As I crystallized my beliefs, I
was very quick to try and spread them to others. It wasn’t very difficult in some cases since
many people already live as if God doesn’t exist. I never found many other people with beliefs
as strong as mine on the subject, but whenever the religion came up, I was
always quick to assert my atheism and spread it to anyone who was a willing
recipient.
About the time I entered high
school in 1994, I had been playing guitar and drums for a year and was becoming
quite good at both. In the early part of
1996, I started a heavy metal band with another guitarist from school (I was to
be the drummer). This guitarist wasn’t
nearly serious enough to be in a band at the time, but before he vanished
completely, he introduced me to a guy who would become the singer in our
band. His name was Brian, and as I found
out over the years, he’s quite gifted in many different areas, but not so gifted
at singing. By the time I realized that
he wasn’t going to work out as a singer, he was already far too good a friend
to kick out of the band. If ever there
were a person that fits neatly into some stereotype, Brian would be the exact
opposite of that. He’s extremely intelligent, yet he dropped out of high school (for various
reasons). Even so, he can easily find
some common ground with, and thus hold a lively conversation with, just about
anyone. Yet like me, he’s always been
very far from the “in-crowd”. When I
first met him he was very obnoxious, and used his quick wit at every
opportunity wherever it served him (often in the belittling of other
people). Fortunately that part of him
has become quite subdued now. In any
case, if it isn’t clear by now, I looked up to the guy, for various reasons, as
a sort of mentor. I think he respected
my ability to play various musical instruments, while I respected is ability to
think on his feet and immediately take control of any conversation no matter
how compromising or difficult the situation may be. So, our band shifted into various
configurations over the years since I could play drums just as well as guitar,
but Brian and I were always a part of the band.
In April or May of 1997 my dad
informed my family that the power company he worked for was transferring him
sixty miles west of our home near
The turning point for me came in September
of 1999. Little did I know, everyone
else in my band, with the exception of my atheistic younger brother, were
Christians (in belief if not in action).
The incident began when, out of the blue, my younger brother admitted
that he was a Christian while I was preaching atheism to the band one
night. How he became a Christian is an
entirely different story, but at this point I was a lone atheist in a band of
Christians. Now we had a gig scheduled
for the next day. A few gigs before
this, the singer started organizing us into a prayer circle for a quick prayer
before going on stage. I always stood in
the circle out of respect, but naturally didn’t believe in what was being done. On this particular night though, prompted by
the events of the previous day, I said a quick and silent prayer to the God
that I didn’t believe in. It was more of
a really brief thought rather than what one would normally think of as a prayer
though. In essence it went like
this: “If You’re
real, then show me.” It wasn’t a
challenge but simply a plea. After all,
a person would have to be fairly hardheaded to disregard God if he truly did
exist. Unbeknownst to me at the time,
the other guys in the band were saying silent prayers for me as well. After the circle I immediately withdrew back
into my atheistic world and played the show as if nothing had happened. I would have certainly forgotten about it if
not for what happened the next day. We
packed up after the show and my brother and I drove the 60 miles back to our
house. We got home at about
The next morning, we got up and
unloaded the equipment from the van. I
took a shower afterwards and after getting dressed I decided to put away the
CD's I had taken with us the night before.
It was only five CDs in one of those traveling cases that hold twenty
four CDs in pages like a photo album with a zipper around the outside. I had set it on a chest of drawers in my room
the night before. So I unzipped the CD
case and flipped it open. My jaw dropped
when I saw that a disk had been shattered into pieces as if someone had broken
it in half. The CD was split into three
pieces. A straight line separated two
large halves roughly down the middle, with the crack diverging just a little at
one end to the right and left creating a third paperclip-sized fragment. I was even more shocked because this was the
exact CD that we were listening to as we pulled into the driveway at
Naturally, my scientific mind
required an explanation. My younger
brother had taken the CD from the player as we pulled into the drive. He put it directly into the CD Book, zipped
it up and handed it to me. I tucked the
case under my arm and went directly into my room where I set it on top of the
chest of drawers (which is about four and a half feet tall). I went to sleep shortly after that, then woke
up and found them as described above.
My brother had touched it last so
I immediately tried to form some kind of case against him since I didn’t do
anything that possibly could have broken the CD. I started thinking that it was somehow broken
when he ejected it from the CD player, and he put it in the case without
telling me (as stupid as that sounds, I had to think of something; he was
certainly far to old to do anything juvenile like break them out of spite not
to mention he was a Christian at that point).
I contemplated the relative absurdity of the CD being ejected from the
player in pieces as I flipped a page in the CD album and found another CD
broken! Amazingly, the second CD was
from the same two-CD-set that the first CD was from. This one was also split right down the middle
though in a direction not parallel to the first split! It had two small fragments, one on each end
of the split, instead of one like the first.
The broken CDs weren’t even right next to each other in the case
though! It also happened to be the
second to last CD that we listened to on the way home the night before!
When I was younger, I had friends
with mischievous siblings that broke things, but that kind of thing didn’t
happen in my house which also says nothing of the fact that we were eighteen
and nineteen at this time! I immediately
checked for more broken CDs, but the other three were just fine. My pool of explanations had just shrunk
significantly. If a random accident had
broken two CDs out of five, the chance of those two specific CDs breaking was
slim (one in ten to be exact). I quickly
became convinced that the destruction was likely deliberate. The only problem with that was that the only
human being I could pin it on was my younger brother and band mate Brad. My parents were home, but rarely even entered
my room.
I really wanted to think that
Brad did it, but considering he only had about ten minutes to pull it off while
I was in the shower that morning, no reason to do it and quite a few reasons
not to, I really could not believe that.
Of course I asked him to be certain, and he said he didn’t do it. In fact, he was just as shocked as I was. What choice was left? I would soon examine all of the natural
explanations I could think of in extreme detail, but at that moment I knew that
I wouldn’t come up with any sensible answer.
So, I allowed myself to entertain
the possibility that God did it. As
absurd as it sounded, it was also the most logical explanation left in light of
the evidence. I sat down at my PC and
began typing my thoughts furiously in a journal that I happened to begin
keeping just a few days before (hence the reason why I still remember all of
the little details today). I was typing
all the facts and my thoughts on them in intricate detail when it suddenly hit
me. The CD's had collectively been
broken into seven pieces.
As I mentioned above, my
Christian friend Brian, our band’s singer, had convinced me to read the Bible
before. I’m not sure where I picked up
on it, but numerology had certain appeals to people like myself, and so I knew
about the number of completion/perfection; seven.
I then knew that I had two CD's
that were broken by nobody into seven pieces. I was shocked anew. I began examining the CD's closely. I started playing with them. I had already broken two fragments off of one
of the big halves when I first found the original CD and later I broke one of
the big halves in half testing it for brittleness. It wasn't brittle. I came up with a lot of tests to find an
alternative explanation. I dreamed up a
really foolish idea that the resonant frequency of the two CD's might have been
the same since they were from the same set, never mind the fact that there was
no opera singer to produce a strong resonant note to break them. However, that idea became even more unlikely
when I used my highly trained musical ear to discover that CD pairs in each
double CD set that I could test had different resonant frequencies anyway. As I was looking for ways to preserve my
comfortable atheism, my brother pointed out that there were little metal
fragments in the case where the two CD's had been. The fragments of foil from the label appeared
exclusively along the breakage lines strongly indicating that the CDs were
broken while inside the case. Even
though I already had strong reasons to discount an intentional human cause,
this made them still stronger. Surely
another person would have taken them out of the case to break them in
half. I also examined them more closely
and found fingerprints on all but one of the four main broken halves. I never touch my CDs so as to get
finger prints on them so I didn’t expect to find any, however, my younger
brother and our singer had handled the CDs the day before not to mention the
fact that I had been examining them. If
a human had broken them out of the case, there would have been fingerprints on
each of the four main fragments. Breaking
them in the case (using the flimsy plastic sleeves to avoid finger prints)
would have been possible, except that the sleeves would probably have been
damaged. That was final in my
opinion. It wasn’t impossible, but it
was exceedingly unlikely that another person intentionally broke the CDs.
The only remaining natural explanations
were of the accidental, physical type.
These had to overcome the odds of occurring in the first place, the odds
of breaking two specific CDs in five (a 10% chance), the odds of breaking the
CDs into seven pieces (along two non-parallel fracture lines) and the odds of
happening on the morning after I prayed in seriousness for the first time in my
life. In truth though, there simply
aren’t any known natural explanations.
Even if an extremely rare natural cause could be determined, the
religious circumstances surrounding and following the event are still in favor
of my final conclusion that God did it.
Assuming I didn’t crush the CDs
under my arm as I took them in at three in the morning, and they did truly sit
still on my chest of drawers all night until I opened them in the morning, what
could have happened? I certainly don’t
remember dropping them on the ground any time on the way in (even if I had,
when’s the last time that two specific CDs shattered from being dropped on the
ground in a cushioned case among three other CDs that remained unharmed?). I didn’t put much pressure on them as I
carried the case under my arm into the house (even so, I tested other CDs with
extreme amounts of pressure; CDs are very resistant to that type of stress because
of their shape). The remote possibility
of those two CDs shattering due to rapid heating (from being played) then
cooling was defeated by the warm fall night in
Interestingly enough, even if a
reasonable natural explanation can be found some day, my prayer was still
answered as I indicated above. An
atheist might accuse me of being “tainted” in that my friends were leaning me towards
Christianity, but it is not really true.
Yes I had become more sympathetic towards Christians considering my very
best friends were among them (though they were far from fundamentalist), but I
was still an avowed atheist with no other reason to believe in God. It took me a few days to admit to myself that
God did it, and even after that point I had many doubts. I read a lot of books (such as the Case for
Christ) to try and deal with various intellectual protests, and honestly didn’t
even succeed. After six months of ups
and downs (saying or even thinking I was a Christian and then seeing
indications that I wasn’t), I gave up being a Christian and slipped into
agnosticism for two and a half years.
Over those years my younger
brother never did lose faith. The CD
incident increased his faith just as much as or more than my own. We started going to churches together, but
soon I was spending more time reading books from both sides of the street than
doing anything else. Eventually he told
me how he was filled with the Holy Spirit, but I was oblivious to the various
miracle stories he told me. I decided
that I just couldn’t have the kind of faith described in the Gospels and
latched onto the difficulty of believing in eternal torment for good measure. Towards the end of that two-plus year period,
I was sinning just as badly or worse than I ever had as an atheist, though I
would inform anyone on a message boards that felt the need to attack religion
or Christianity that the case against it wasn’t nearly as conclusive as they
thought.
That period ended about two
months ago when I read James BeauSeigneur’s Christ
Clone trilogy. The title sounded
blasphemous enough, so I figured it was some non-Christian’s spin on end time
events. It seemed to be getting much
better reviews than the popular Left Behind series that I hadn’t taken to. At one point in the trilogy, a dialogue
between a Christian and non-Christian character turned into an all out
apologetics fest. It’s not that any new
idea or evidence was brought to my mind, but all of the apologetics that I had
read two and a half years before came back to me. I thought about my brother who had claimed
many miraculous things since then and marveled that I had been able to ignore
it all for so long. Most importantly, my
brother came to realize that the Bible is far from conclusive on the idea of
eternal torment. So I cautiously began
attending church again in the first days of August 2002. It took me a while to realize it, but I had
never truly accepted Jesus.
I had accepted much of his
teachings on sin and love, but ultimately I hadn’t accepted him as savior. I couldn’t because I did not truly
believe. In the following months I learned
more than enough to believe that Jesus did everything attributed to him in the
Gospels, and that the Bible is (barring copying and translation errors) the
inspired word of God, but somehow I was not able to make the final leap and
believe. Every time I tried, I know that
I’ve failed because nothing changes. The
prime example seemed to be my brother, who, after receiving the Spirit, got rid
of all his old secular music. Though I
had already stopped listening to it and didn’t really care about it, I refused
to destroy them until I fully believed.
It took a few months, but on
Looking back, I can see that in
both cases, God led me to a point where I had to make a decision as to whether
I was going to step out in faith or not.
How can someone build faith if they aren’t forced to step out in faith? When I stepped out in faith by finishing what
God started (in more ways than one) my faith was somehow confirmed. Now I look back and wonder what took me so
long. One day I was mired in unbelief
trying to figure out how I would ever come to have a solid faith and the next
day I have complete conviction. Those
are the ways of God apparently.
Addendum
============================================================================
Days after the incident, I
scanned the CDs on my scanner. Disc 1
below was actually the second disc that I found. The right half is the one that I broke into
quarters to test the CD for brittleness.
That makes disc 2 on the bottom the first one that I found. The lower half of that with the two fragments
split off was originally in one piece but with fracture lines where those two
fragments are broken off. I broke the
two chips off along the fracture lines when I first found the CD (imagine me
holding the half in disbelief, slowly breaking the two chips off one by one). Thus the original fragments (separated by
larger spaces from the groups that were initially together) numbered seven
(God’s number of completion).
Incidentally, the final number of pieces happens to be twelve, which
also has significance in the Bible. If
you can think of a natural explanation, feel free to inform me (though even if
it was very good, I don’t think it would affect my faith at this point
considering other things that I have seen).
Click here to see broken discs.
e-mail: j
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