Peter’s Story

Peter grew up thinking he already knew what it meant to be a Christian, which meant simply attending church every week with his family. After high school, he set faith aside and instead built his life on the three things he was sure he could trust: himself, his work, and the money he was going to make. He thought if he worked hard enough, achieved enough, and acquired enough, he would build the life he wanted with his own two hands. Out of college, he helped start a restaurant and went chasing financial independence. He’d have called himself a Christian the whole time — but he wasn’t following Jesus. He was following the blueprint. And then the blueprint came apart in his hands. He calls them his “Job years.” In a stretch of time short enough to take your breath, Peter lost both of his parents. His older brother. All four of his grandparents. Even the family dog. The relationship he was sure would end in marriage ended. And the restaurant he’d poured himself into — the one he’d built with the very self-reliance he’d staked his whole life on — failed. Everything he’d stacked his identity on top of was pulled out from under him one beam at a time, until there was nothing holding him up but grief, and the loneliness under the grief, and the hopelessness under that.

But the bottom, it turns out, is a place God knows how to find. At the lowest point of it all — after wrestling with a despair heavy enough to make him wonder whether life was worth continuing — Peter rented a cabin in the mountains and brought exactly one thing with him. A Bible. And there, with nothing left to leverage and no strength left to perform, he prayed the most stripped-down prayer a person can pray: God, if You’re real, meet me here. And God did. For the first time in his life, Peter heard God speak through the words on the page — not because he’d finally earned it, but precisely because he’d finally run out of ways to earn anything. Soon after, his sister Kristine, who was at Passion City, asked him to read through the Bible with her. Every instinct told him to say no. He said yes. By early 2024, he was walking into Passion City and signing up for LAUNCH, and one ordinary day, sitting with Romans 12:2 and that phrase—the renewing of your mind—the whole thing finally clicked. Alone in his room, Peter surrendered his life and his plans to Jesus.

Here’s why his story belongs in a book about a limitless God: Peter spent half his life trying to build something limitless out of limited material—convinced that if he earned enough, accumulated enough, he could construct a life big enough to hold him.

But life eventually led him to the end of that equation and revealed what was waiting there. It’s Solomon’s confession lived out in one man: you can stack every resource you have, achieve everything you thought would satisfy you, and still find that it cannot contain what your soul was created to need. The limitation was never Peter’s effort.

The limitation was Peter himself—and it always will be for any of us as long as we believe we are the source. What he couldn’t manufacture in 20 years of self-reliance, God gave him freely the moment his hands were finally empty.

Today, he runs his life on surrender instead of self-reliance. Woven into the community of our House through his Connect Group and a workplace Bible study he leads, he now pours into other young men wrestling with the same questions that once nearly consumed him—offering them the hope he never could have found on his own. It’s the message this entire book quietly carries for every person who reads it: you were never meant to do life alone.

There is a better way. There is a place for you in Jesus.