From declaring atheism at his sophomore year retreat to proclaiming his newfound trust in Jesus senior year, Talon Fazio has had an incredible journey of faith. His story is an amazing example of how God’s unrelenting pursuit of love can change anyone. Talon explains how bowing your knee and submitting your will lets God work wonders.
This is what Talon had to say at chapel on Thursday, April 18, 2024:
Of all the people who could have been chosen to speak at chapel, I feel like I am one of the least qualified by nearly every measure I can think of. For five years I stood in opposition to Christianity. Before that, I was a Christian in name only. Above all, I’ve never been particularly open about things to anyone in the audience, aside from a handful of exceptions. Of these three things, only the first two have changed. I still feel an extreme lack of confidence when discussing who I was without God, but I have accepted Christ and committed my life to Him. I have been baptized in water and in the Holy Spirit, and I must remember that in doing so I have promised to give these stressful thoughts to God.
Despite this, there is a nervousness I cannot shake. It is a feeling that I have grown familiar with. It comes to me whenever I think about this school year, and how I never expected it to go the way it has. I had observed each senior class grow closer to each other by year-end, and then put their sentiments to words through things like the senior chapel. The impression they made was clear, and that impression became my expectation. It was exciting.
There was nothing I enjoyed more than seeing and spending time with my friends. I valued their happiness above my time, and if I knew of something troubling them, you could guarantee that the next day I would have for them a basket filled with flowers, or a polished seashell, or a letter, or art supplies, or, on some more rare occasions, a Lego set. I thought that it was compassion that drove me to do these things, and I tried my best to do them with as little selfishness as I could manage. I would never accept help or thanks, insisting that “there’s no need to thank me” and that I was doing something just because it made me happy.
Looking back though, I realize this wasn’t the case. The reason I acted the way I did was because I wanted it to be a part of my identity. I saw it as an important part of my integrity as a person. While I do genuinely care about my friends, doing things for them gave me a semblance of having things together. I convinced myself that I could lean on my own identity. But this year, I learned how little of this “having things together” was actually true and how selfish I really was.
There were three weeks in the fall where I acted in a way that was just stupid. My mistakes cascaded into greater, more serious mistakes. It’s not conjecture; people in this room witnessed them, remember them.
About a week went by before I put together that most of the people in my class were aware of my stupidity. While I didn’t know for sure the extent of what others knew, it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t see the damage I had done, but I heard about it. And each day, I could feel it. There wasn’t an identity to lean on anymore; I knew who I was through those I had hurt so carelessly. I wasn’t compassionate — I was cold. I wasn’t genuine — I was two-faced and a fake. Above all, I demonstrated the capacity to act with precise cruelty. I was the source of people’s anxiety now. Every time I was in a room, I was reminded over and over again that I was the reason other people felt uncomfortable. It felt like the less I was around, the better. The time I spent keeping to myself was broken by brief, practical conversations that left me feeling guilty, even though we hadn’t really spoken at all. The more time that went by, the more I thought about how much better the lives of others would be if I had never existed.
If anything, I felt trapped by the circumstances I put myself into. There wasn’t anything I could think to do that would help. I couldn’t even think of a meaningful way to apologize. On a few occasions, I tried to spur myself forward in spite of it all. If there was any hope of things getting better, then I needed to stay positive, but hope was a hard thing to take seriously. Whenever I was able to reinvigorate my spirit, the effects it had on my attitude did not last long. What hope I did have lacked the power it needed, because I was still trying to fix things on my own. If I was the source of the problem, then how could I possibly be the solution?
What solutions I could think of brought me further away from the restoration I wanted and shifted me closer to giving up. The lack of sleep I was known for escalated into full-blown insomnia that at its worst had me awake for nearly fifty hours. My grades dropped. I couldn’t find consistent energy and motivation to get things done, and whatever I did manage to do was either so late or so poorly put together that I considered it a failure. It didn’t matter; the work was bad, and it was bad because I wasn’t competent enough. I told myself that my past successes were a combination of overestimating my own ability combined with tolerance from others. It felt like everything had fallen apart at the seams, and no matter how I looked at it I was the one to blame.
I began to think what at the time felt right to think: I hated myself. I didn’t want to believe it. I really don’t think anyone would want to, but my actions were starting to speak louder than my words at that point. Staying up too long and thinking about the pain I caused led to bouts of self-harm. I would sneak into the attic while everyone was asleep and find my father’s swords and knives. Taking them back to the bathroom mirror, I checked to see which ones were sharp. Once I started, the only way that it would end was when every part of my body that could be hidden by clothes was thoroughly lacerated and bleeding. The worst it ever got was when I woke up early on a school day, and after walking into the restroom, I looked in the mirror. I saw cuts on my body that I didn’t remember cutting and blood on the floor that I didn’t remember spilling.
I’ll be real: when I saw that, I thought I was crazy. For a moment I snapped out of it and realized how off-the-rails bad this whole thing had gotten. I could literally see how broken I was and how much of myself was missing. There was one person, Mr. Himick, who I had spoken to through all of it. I definitely didn’t tell him everything at first, because I thought if I did he would for sure think that I was a lunatic. But I was able to talk about and process what I was thinking most days.
He knew what had happened with my friends and what was going on with my family, and my guess was that he could put the pieces together on how I felt about it all. It wasn’t daily, but every now and then I would ask if we could talk, and one way or another the conversations we had linked themselves back to God.
God and faith were ideas that had become so distant from what I believed. I had spent years developing and solidifying how I could be an atheist and still live a virtuous life. I thought it was a valuable part of growth (and fun) to put myself out there and speak my mind. The caveat was that I had to maintain a high level of reverence while doing so, which was never difficult to do since reverent was something I wanted to be. Building this wall made it so that I was still able to engage with the ideas of the Bible without them getting so close as to wrestle with God’s existence. I did have some practical understanding of Christianity. I once wrote in an essay that being a Christian and having faith in God takes a tremendous and unique strength of character and that I wasn’t strong enough. It was a fancy way of saying that the Christian life just wasn’t for me — that I was comfortable with what I had managed to build myself.
But the structure I had made collapsed under its own weight, and the open gap was there. I had never experienced the Holy Spirit the way I had seen so many other people describe, and it had been a long time since I gave up on ever hearing God’s voice. I knew what the essentials of being a Christian were, and they were foreign to me in a way that I couldn’t ever see myself connecting with. But what other options were there? Through trial and subsequent failure, I had come to the end of myself several times over already.
My excuses weren’t good enough to avoid at the very least giving God a try, so I did. It was against whatever expectations I had for myself at the time, but I spent the last two months of first semester reading the Gospel of John and going to church, seeking with as earnest of a mindset as I could.
At the same time that Mr. Himick pointed out that if I really wanted to solve my problems then I needed to give God a chance, he took out his Bible and made a case for why community was an important step towards doing so effectively. He offered me the chance to go to the Bible study he hosted on Wednesdays. I had no friends, a strained relationship with my parents, and a pretty serious lack of self-confidence. I refused on instinct. I knew that there were people in that Bible study who I wouldn’t do any good by showing up, people I had been cruel towards, who I hardly spoke to and who I was embarrassed to be around.
It stayed that way for two months, before I had gotten so fed up with my own inaction that in January I decided to go. I told myself to forget about making other people uncomfortable; that was not my goal or the reason I was going. Just go — go and see what happens.
So I went. There wasn’t a car available to drive myself there, so the anticipation of going to Bible study was cut short by me getting lost walking to Urbana. Mr. Himick lives in Champaign. I also live in Champaign. It was a little embarrassing to bring up why I wasn’t there the next day, but if anything it validated how resolved I was to go.
So the next week, I went — this time with a car and directions. I was reluctant to consider myself a part of the community after being there only once, but I was told that the rules were the rules, and being there and continuing to be there meant that I was a part of the community whether I liked it or not.
And to be completely honest, I liked it. I couldn’t deny the comfort I felt talking and laughing with other people after having no one to talk to for so long. I can’t speak to whether or not all of them know about some of the mental lows I had reached, but they knew about my struggles with God in the past and were willing to accept me for it anyway. The way they interacted with me was more than the respect that used to be my own standard. There was the compassion that I had lost, and if you asked any of the people there where it came from, each one would independently give you the same answer. The source of their compassion was what Jesus Christ had done for them.
Being with them helped me understand that connection between compassion and God’s grace. Compassion was something I wanted to be able to extend again but was deathly afraid of doing. “My way” was a mockery of compassion. I couldn’t stand “my way” — I hated everything about me, but what was the grace of Jesus other than the chance to do things His way? Could I really just accept it? I mean, nothing was telling me that I couldn’t, other than my own worries that I wouldn’t do it for the right reasons or that I wasn’t there yet. But look at the ground I had covered! There was a tangible difference in where I was now versus where I was before having given any of this a try. If I had made it this far, then what was really stopping me other than a few mental roadblocks? And what were those roadblocks compared to the infinite scope of God?
There was no single moment that led me into placing my complete trust in God. It was more a set of circumstances like these that continued to build on themselves — meaning that the more I trusted God, the more of a reason He gave me to trust Him. I still fell, and there were times where it felt like the hurts I caused to others and myself were repeated, but the process of seeking God gave me direction on where to look next to deepen my trust in Him. Being with a community dedicated to carefully studying the Bible and faithfully following Jesus strengthened and encouraged that trust further.
All that you and I need to know is that the culmination of all that had happened, not just this school year but my whole life, resolved itself with the simple action of me switching sides one more time to end up on the right side.
I saw the promise of service and grace and a whole host of things that I never deserved, and when I said that I wasn’t worthy and that I couldn’t keep going, my stubbornness was denied by the words of the Bible, which read back that my lack of integrity was the whole point. There was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t on any particularly special day, but on a Wednesday bus ride home from the Chicago airport, going back home to Judah, I made peace with God. He was Lord, and I was His.
God makes it so we can let go of things not because we want to leave them behind, but because there is something else to hang on to. Without Jesus I felt more alone and scared than I ever had in my life. With Him, I will never be alone again, no matter how far I might ever descend — or ascend.
I thank the chapel committee here at Judah, the community I am a part of, and above anything else, I thank God. In placing me where I stand now, God showed me where my family was all along. The swords and knives are sheathed now. They lean against my bedroom wall.
Talon’s testimony paints a vivid picture of what it means to surrender to Jesus, an image of victory rather than defeat. His speech presents not only a bold vulnerability, but also a willingness to obey the Lord he has surrendered to. His words encouraged students to look deep within their own lives and consider their relationship with Jesus. Talon’s story presents the beauty of laying down our weapons and, instead, falling into the arms of God.
—Braden Laird, class of ’25
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