Listening to a teacher speak at chapel is not unusual at Judah, nor is listening to a student share their testimony. But a teacher sharing their testimony at chapel is something we see less frequently. Mr. Hallett, the high school history teacher, shared his story of faith at chapel on February 27. Specifically, he shared how he gained a purpose in life by finding a passion for God. Here is what he said:
Recently my testimony has been on my heart. Every time I sit and really engage with God, whether it is prayer, or sitting in church, or listening to chapel speakers here at Judah, my testimony enters my thoughts, and I cannot escape the feeling that God is telling me it needs to be heard.
But this is a difficult thing for me, not because my testimony is so painful, but because I am not naturally an initiative taker. In fact, one might call me lazy — slothful even. I spend a lot of my time and thought trying to avoid discomfort of any kind.
So when the idea of speaking at chapel first came up, I had a small selfish hope that maybe all I needed to get rid of this persistent call from God was to just speak with some other teachers about it. I mean, is there anything less comfortable than public speaking? And yet, here I am.
As time went on, I found all the old excuses to not do what God had clearly placed on my heart. You see, over my life I have concocted all sorts of excuses for why it wasn’t necessary for me to share.
I said, my faith is really personal to me, and I am very awkward in talking about it. God could easily find someone more qualified than myself to speak. God’s plan is durable enough to get on without me.
Or I said, there are others whose testimonies are much more valuable than my own. There hadn’t been a moment in my life when I fell to my knees and wept. My story wasn’t interesting or engaging. Some of these seem like reasonably good excuses to not speak, right?
But no, if I am being brutally honest with myself, when I hear God’s call, my first thought is “what a pain.” All those other things were just cover — good enough excuses for me to not be part of God’s plan while still “having faith” in Him.
Put another way, I use the sin of sloth to justify my sin of pride. I tell myself that being passive is having faith, but really it is just me thinking I know better than God.
It is amazing the excuses we make when God calls us to something. The Bible is replete with examples of people doing this, whether it is Moses telling God that he was not competent to speak to Pharaoh or Jonah having a very reasonable fear of the Ninevites (they hung their enemies’ skin on the city walls) and using that as an excuse to flee. We all come up with “good” excuses to deny the path God has set before us.
So what is my testimony that I have been so hesitant to share? How did I come to know Christ?
Well, a friend once asked me, who in the Bible did I identify with most? Whose story resonated greatly with me? I found this to be an interesting and revealing thought experiment. The person you choose will reflect at least some of your underlying sins and flaws. I could have chosen a New Testament figure, but none of those really seemed to fit. I thought about Moses; we are both great at coming up with “good” excuses for our behavior. But I settled on King Solomon.
Now my friend, who knew me really well, was slightly confused. He said to me, “You mean the really wealthy and wise guy with a bunch of wives.” But I told him to bear with me as I explained. From the perspective of the ancient world, Solomon had everything a man could ever want: wealth, fame, power, wisdom, peace — all these things were rare in the ancient world, and they were all things that Solomon had. But this is the man who wrote Ecclesiastes, a book that starts with these words: “Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless.”
The battle for Solomon's soul did not take place physically. He had no worldly reason to feel the way he did. The battle took place in his mind. Looking at my own early life, there are key similarities with Solomon's experiences.
I did not encounter any significant hardship until late in high school. I was raised in a loving household with two parents, one of whom was a doctor, so money was never a problem. Both are strong Christians who raised me in the church. In all things they were firm but fair, and they knew that my faith had to be my own, so they didn’t force it on me. But they did introduce me to all sorts of Bible studies and biblical thought.
I had a few close friends, and I was generally content in my relationship with others. I wasn’t a great student, but I was smart enough to get all Bs in school without much studying at all. Besides, I saw little point in getting the top grades anyway. Like Solomon I had no earthly reason to be dissatisfied with my life. And yet. . . .
I spent much of my time pondering the lives of others. I went to Central, a big public school, and I watched what my peers pursued. I saw all kinds of life pursuits, grades, sports, arts, relationships, charity, or even just hedonistic pleasure (doing what you want, when you want). I began to ask myself (and God) if any of those things were ultimately worth putting effort into.
And the answer I came to time and time again was no, everything was a waste of effort. As I watched friends stress about grades, or drama unfold about romantic relationships, or people becoming dumber and dumber as they smoked more and more weed, it all seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I was already gripped by the sin of sloth. I had a lack of effort and motivation that would become so profound that it would hurt me in deep ways no one could see.
As I observed all these lives, and yes, judged the choices of those around me, I began to grow more and more apathetic. I became cynical and pessimistic. There was very little that could actually move my heart; there was no motivation in me. The overriding question on my mind was always “what’s the point?”
My pervasive attitude was, how do I put in the least amount of effort necessary to keep people from bothering me? I got really good at hiding my apathy behind a facade of resilience and rolling with the punches. Something bad would happen, and my friends already knew that I would just shrug and say, “I can live with that.” Sometimes the true depths of my apathy would come out. One time a friend who was upset with me said, “Maybe we just won’t be friends anymore.” And I said, without missing a beat, “I can live with that.” Yes, I was that much of a jerk.
It was all a deeper indication of how broken my heart was. I was living, but in reality, I wasn’t thriving. There I was with every reason to be happy, to be content with my life, and I wasn’t. I had no purpose, but more scary than that, I had begun to adapt to that lack of purpose. I was getting comfortable with it.
Some people are thrown into a pit of hopelessness by circumstance, but I had dug my pit, and now I had no way out. So I just sat in the pit and made myself “comfortable.”
But then it happened, and I swear this is the only time in my life this has ever happened to me. I heard a voice in my head that was not mine. I know it wasn’t mine because it asked me a question other than “what’s the point?” It was God, and He asked me a question I had never truly considered: “what did I promise you?”
God, in his infinite wisdom, had responded to my questions ― with another question. It suddenly struck me: I should read my Bible. I had never quite stopped believing in God, but I had made no real effort to understand Him or what He had in store for me. I had of course read large parts of the Bible. But I hadn’t applied those things to myself. I had treated it like it was a thought experiment, a theory to be discussed and debated but not actually applied and lived.
I was like a man sitting on the edge of a well, looking out over the desert trying to find water, when it was right there the entire time.
So I began to read, and where did I start? Did I start in the Gospels? I did not. Did I start in Genesis? I did not. I started with what many find to be one of the most difficult books of the Bible: Ecclesiastes.
I started there on a hunch. If the beginning of the book could sum up my feelings so well, then perhaps the end of the book would hold the solution to those feelings. It didn’t seem like much, but it was my real starting point. I had finally moved to the starting line for my walk with God.
As I spent more time reading my Bible, and I read more and more passages, suddenly it became clearer and clearer to me. I had spent too much time in my own thoughts. I had arrogantly rested on my own judgment. I had taken the efforts of others and silently spat upon them as meaningless. I had thought my sin to be sloth, but truly it was pride.
I had paralyzed myself with apathy and somehow convinced myself that I was better for it. I had not bothered to really absorb the message the Bible had for me, and when I finally did so, I realized how awful my heart had really been. But God knew all that, and still He had given a promise, guaranteed by Christ, that if I followed Him, pursued Him with that same twisted heart, He would transform it.
All I had to do was move toward Him step by step. I didn’t have to worry about whether my efforts were “worthy or not.” If I just put in the effort, I would gain what he promised, something that I so desperately craved but had never felt: purpose. I read Ecclesiastes with new eyes, or to be more accurate, I finally understood the end of Ecclesiastes.
Solomon’s conclusion starts, “The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails — given by one shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”
This spoke to me in a deep way given what my attitude had been. It is a reminder of two important bits of wisdom. The Lord’s wisdom is like a goad. It changes my direction when I am going the wrong way and drives me forward when I need to move. It also taught me that adding to the Lord's words is something to be careful of, because looking too closely at worldly wisdom wears you out, something I was all too familiar with by this point.
Solomon’s conclusion then made my complex thoughts and emotions simple, by reminding me that my role is to keep God’s commandments and that judgment of good and evil is in God’s hands alone:
Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.
For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14
That final realization moved me, it motivated me, it pushed me forward. It was rather stunning to realize that, in perspective, I had been kind of right. That everything right here, right now, was meaningless. But not in the way that I had always meant it. This life was only meaningless in comparison to the promises God had in store for me. Any suffering in this life, any hardship, any sorrow, was temporary and paled in comparison to what God would give me — and give anyone else who followed Him.
God had given me the end of the story, but He had also given me instructions, a guide for life for right here, right now. If I follow God, then I am heading closer to that perfect place that He has promised.
But more immediately, He lifted a weight off my shoulders I had not even known I had been carrying: the weight of feeling like I had to figure out how it all worked, how His plan all fit together, how others fit in, what right and wrong were.
That is, quite simply, not my role. I need only trust in God’s assurance that in the end all will work out as it should and do my best to faithfully follow His will in every moment. And when I fail, I get up, reorient myself on Jesus, and keep going.
Suffering in this life did come for me eventually, as it is bound to happen to anyone. My family just after junior year suffered a tragic loss, a beloved grandfather who had given me so much wisdom and whom I could not fathom not being around. And around the same time, a cousin died tragically young. But when those and other sufferings came to me, I found that I had been given strength to handle them. I knew that at the end of it all, everything will work out as it should, because I have faith in God.
So we’ve reached the end of it, my testimony, and you know what? As I was writing this for chapel, God gave me a new comfort, a new boast in Him. My testimony isn’t mundane, it’s miraculous.
God took a problem that no one could see and solved it perfectly. There is celebration in heaven when even one lost soul is saved. My seemingly mundane story did not get just a piddly “whoop-di-do,” but a roar of celebration that would shake the foundations of the largest stadium. They celebrated in heaven just as loudly when I was saved as they did for every other saved soul. They will celebrate in heaven just as loudly for you.
Every testimony, big or small, is a miracle worthy of celebration and sharing. It was this comfort that gave me the courage to actually stand here today and tell you my testimony. I am not comfortable in front of large crowds. I have never done it before. I do not like drawing too much attention to myself, and I will probably look back on me speaking here and feel that same discomfort all over again. But once again, God gave me what I needed, when I needed it.
So we have come full circle. God transformed me. He gave me life in a way that is sometimes difficult for me to fully appreciate. I have faith, meaning, and purpose. I strive to do God’s will in my life.
Of course, I have found that easier said than done at times. The old me will creep back in. I will feel the motivation drain from me. All the old excuses will rear their ugly head. God will call me to speak or act, and my first thought will be “what a pain.” But I’ll always know I make excuses because I just don’t want to do whatever God is calling me to.
In times such as that, when I feel my old self resurging, I stop and I remind myself that there is but one thing in this life that fills me with motivation, energy, and purpose. That is God’s promise, and if I am losing sight of that, then I need to live out my faith, not sit and think about it but do the good things God had called me to: to earnestly ask God for wisdom, guidance, and comfort, to be a part of a church community. I need to not just read my Bible but live it. I can know all the verses, I can go to church, I can pray, but without an earnest effort to apply those things to my life, I am not really moving closer to God or putting faith in Him. I am just wasting my efforts.
I haven’t heard a direct message from God since that first question, but when I do these things and really seek to apply them to my life, I more fully know Him, and my purpose becomes renewed. Otherwise, I will start sliding back into that old comfortable pit of apathy.
I leave this as my last challenge and encouragement to anyone who needs to hear it. If you feel the way that I did (and sometimes still do), you can look out over the desert all you want, but you won’t find the water. The well is right behind you. All you need to do is turn around and drink.
Mr. Hallett shared a testimony unlike any heard at chapel before. He didn’t capture the audience with numerous powerful encounters of God. He didn’t reel people in with a tearful emotional story. Instead, he connected to everyone by describing a feeling we all have felt: not the overwhelming power of God but the flat, dull feeling of too little God in our lives.
Mr. Hallett reminded us that God is always there for us and that He will always have the tools we need. We just have to turn to Him. Mr. Hallett showed us the importance of knowing that Jesus is the living water and that we never have to thirst, even in the driest deserts. We can find His divinity in our discomfort.
—Braden Laird, class of ’25
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