The Road Back – Trevor Lancon’s Story

Growing up in a small town, religion was a constant yet subtle presence in Trevor Lancon’s community. Deeply involved in his church’s youth group, Trevor longed to grow closer to God, but he began questioning whether his experiences were authentic or merely emotional manipulation. Drawn to the freedom of a secular lifestyle, he eventually distanced himself from the church, and he embraced scientism, seeking tangible evidence of reality. He rejected Christianity and identified as an atheist, diving into a worldview centered on materialism and skepticism. From the outside, Trevor seemed to have it all—a home, a loving wife, two beautiful children, and a stable career. Yet, inwardly, he was burdened by feelings of dread and brokenness.  

His journey back to faith wasn’t marked by a single dramatic moment but rather by countless small, profound experiences.

Guest Bio:

Trevor Lancon is a devoted father and husband and works as an engineer at a leading tech company on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. With a deep passion for STEM, Trevor holds a Master’s degree in Health Physics and has a background in nuclear engineering. 

Connect with eX-skeptic:

Books Mentioned:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy 

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

Episode Transcript

Trevor Lancon

00:00 – 00:13

Reality has laws and science is beautiful. Now it’s the slow uncovering and discovering of how God wrote the universe into existence. And to me, that’s more beautiful than just, hey, here’s how something works.

Jana Harmon

00:17 – 02:12

Welcome to Ex Skeptic, where we hear unlikely stories of belief. We listen to stories of former atheists and skeptics who have found their way to Christianity, often against all odds. I’m your host, Jana Harmon, and I invite you to join us as we explore the journeys of those who have once wrestled with doubts and ultimately found a profound belief in that which they once rejected. In telling their stories, our guests open up about their struggles, the challenges they faced, and insights they ultimately embraced that led them to Christianity. You’ll also hear our guests give valuable advice to skeptics who are curious about truth and to Christians on how they can engage with those who don’t believe. You can discover more of our stories on our website at www.exsceptic.org or on our YouTube channel, where we welcome your comments. You can also reach out to us via email@infoxkeptic.org we’d love to hear from you. We all believe what we believe for different reasons. As author and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield says, we often come to our conclusions based on the people we trust, the relationships we’re in, and the stories that make sense to us. But what happens when our once solid beliefs begin to crumble, especially if they’re Christian beliefs, that they begin to ring shallow, disingenuous, or even false or manipulated? Today our guest is Trevor Lanson, a critical thinker who couldn’t hold on to his Christian beliefs in light of experience, exposure to other ideas, and the convincing narrative of science as the penultimate source of knowledge. But after living for 15 years as an atheist, he changed his mind about God and Christianity. How did that happen? Join us as Trevor shares his story of transformation and the unexpected path that led him back to belief.

Trevor Lancon

02:13 – 02:16

Thank you, Jana, for having me on. It’s great to be with you.

Jana Harmon

02:16 – 02:26

Terrific. I would love to know more about you, just who you are now, a little bit about your education, where you live, perhaps what you do before we get into your story.

Trevor Lancon

02:26 – 02:58

Great. Yeah. So I’m an engineer right now at a large tech company here in the outskirts of Houston, Texas. For my educational background, I went to Texas A&M. I studied nuclear engineering or radiological health engineering. It’s about six credit hours different from nuclear engineering. And then I got a master’s degree in health physics, which is like a radiation safety physics field. And Currently, the way that overlaps is I work with a microcomputed tomography scanner to do X rays of, like, electronics components and things like that.

Jana Harmon

02:58 – 03:28

You’ve got a strong STEM background. Science, engineering. That’s awesome. Okay, that’s terrific. So I would imagine you’re quite a logical, analytical guy, and I’ll be interested to see how that plays in and through your story. So, let’s get started with your story, Trevor, take us back to your childhood and talk with me. Paint a picture for us of where you grew up, your home, your family, and whether or not religion or God or spirituality was any part of that.

Trevor Lancon

03:29 – 04:44

Right. I grew up in Southeast Texas in a really small town. On the way to school every day I passed a sign that said population 84, I think. Graduated with 99 people in my graduating class of high school. My home was idyllic, I would say. I grew up great parents, an only child, didn’t really want or need for anything, if I’m honest. Religion was not like an outward part of my home or a really heavily expressed aspect of my home life, but it was always there, an undercurrent. You know, growing up where I did, it was always something that was in the background of everything. I think it would have been weird for somebody to be non religious where I grew up. So it was just kind of an accepted part of our surroundings. And that included in my home, we did have some neighbors and some people in the community that would kind of usher us to church. By us, I mean, like me and my mom, we would go to church with them. We would go off and on for a while, and I was in VBS and things like that as a kid. But mostly I was a lackadaisical Christian, I guess, until probably middle school. And then I got really heavily involved in the youth group and whatnot.

Jana Harmon

04:44 – 04:54

So this religious milieu in this small town, and I would imagine in Southeast Texas would be Christian. Expressly Christian, right?

Trevor Lancon

04:55 – 05:00

Yes. Yeah. A lot of Baptist, Catholic and Pentecostals as well.

Jana Harmon

05:01 – 05:14

Different brands of Christianity, but definitely Christian. Okay. So it was something that was around you a little part of your life. Talk with me about then what was happening towards your middle school years.

Trevor Lancon

05:14 – 06:09

So in middle school, the church I was going to was a little ways away and they planted a new church in the town that I was from. So I moved there as a local with a few other friends, and we were just there from the beginning. And, you know, I don’t know what got me so zealous so young, I guess, but I just got heavily involved with the youth group and the growing ministry there, I guess was a. I didn’t have like any official position as a leader, but I was the kid who was always at the church with some other friends as well, speaking in front of the youth group a little bit and going to church camps, youth camps, things like that. But, you know, I can’t really trace it back to like an event that made me just go from like casual Christian to on fire for Jesus. Back then the term was Jesus freak.

Jana Harmon

06:09 – 06:28

DC Talk. So then you had a real or you felt like your faith at that time was real and genuine. You were obviously very enthusiastic about it, almost in the leadership kind of capacity, or at least speaking in front of others and really participating wholeheartedly, it sounds like.

Trevor Lancon

06:28 – 07:35

Right, absolutely. I definitely believed all that, the gospel and everything. I don’t know if I can chalk it up to just being young, inexperienced and lacking some wisdom that just takes a little bit of time to gain. But I don’t know that I fully grasped the gravity of the gospel. But I guess you could say that about any of us that are mortal with a mortal mind. But it was, you know, it was definitely all about Jesus, all about God, all about worship and prayer. And funnily enough, my biblical insights, or my biblical reading was, was not that I didn’t read the Bible much. And actually a lot of the nitty gritty aspects of Christianity, I don’t remember, like, my theology on it much as a kid. And I don’t think I gave that much thought to that. It was much more tied to emotions and feelings. And looking back, I’m kind of blown away at some of the misconceptions I still had in that period of my life about who God was, who Jesus was, what the Bible says about things, but I kind of chalk it up to immaturity now.

Jana Harmon

07:37 – 07:56

I wonder, you spoke of the culture there being rather Christian. Were you exposed to any other alternative ideas about faith, about God, about anything other than Christianity?

Trevor Lancon

07:58 – 08:24

I don’t think so. I really liked heavy metal. Still do. And, you know, there are a lot of metal bands who are outwardly Satanic or whatever, which, you know, a lot of them say they are, but it’s just kind of like because they want satanic imagery, because it fits with the music, it’s probably not real Satanism, whatever that would be. But aside from that, I don’t remember any conflicting viewpoints in my life.

Jana Harmon

08:24 – 08:42

You say it was very unified or homogenistic in its living and thinking. It sounds like, okay, so you’re this on fire teenager, and you’re all sold out for God. So take us on from there.

Trevor Lancon

08:44 – 11:17

You know, I’m on fire for Jesus, like 13, 14, 15. It coincides with very impressionable years in a person’s life, very emotionally driven years in a person’s life. And that was fueled a lot by, I think, the church camps I attended. They got a little crazy, got a little emotional, and I think my faith was tied to that emotion quite a bit. And I had some sobering moments. I think I recall two of them. And these were kind of, you know, if the bedrock of my faith was my surroundings, these two moments kind of stand out in stark contrast. One of them, you know, we went street preaching at this county fair. I think we had, like, a church booth, and people would walk by and we’d hit them with a zinger. Like, if you died right now, are you 100% sure you go to heaven? That kind of thing. And like most people, they would just kind of politely brush us aside and be like, ‘yeah, I believe in God. Leave me alone. I just want to eat my corn dog.’ It was a horrible experience for me because nobody cared. And I just wanted people to care so bad. And that was a Saturday night. And we went to church Sunday morning, and there were probably 10 or 15 of us at the fair and it was like a rainy day. So not a lot of people went by. We saw maybe a hundred people. And the next morning, one of the prominent leaders in the church went up in the pulpit and gave a testimony. And she said, on the way to church this morning, God spoke to me and said that we saved 359 souls last night. And I was like, I think there were maybe 200 people there, tops, in my head, like, nothing adds up with reality, what you’re saying. But the whole church, the whole congregation, even the people that were there and witnessed it, started clapping and cheering. And it was this really discordant moment where I’m buying heavily into something that I’m not really getting for myself from scriptures. I’m absorbing it from these people around me, and they’re willing to believe something that, at least to me at the time, seemed to be such a blatant and obvious lie. Craziness. Right. And I really felt my faith shaken by that now, you know, Looking back on it, you know, I remember being 15 and hearing this and just thinking, well, this is insanity. And everybody’s cheering it. What else have I absorbed? That’s insanity.

Jana Harmon

11:17 – 11:20

So that was a little bit of a reality check there.

Trevor Lancon

11:21 – 12:44

Yeah, it was. And another one. I was at one of these church camps, and they do this thing where at the point of the service where they’re dishing out the Holy Spirit and walking around and laying hands on people and people are falling down. They get to me, and I think, finally, I’m going to get the Holy Spirit, not knowing what the Bible says at the time about receiving the Holy Spirit through just accepting Christ. But I thought it was this thing that this teenage camp counselor could just give me by touching my head and I’m thinking, oh, great, here it comes. And they touch my forehead and nothing happens. I don’t fall down. I don’t convulse. I’m like, am I not good enough? What’s happening? They touch my head again. They say the prayer again. Nothing happens. And then finally, the guy touching my head pushes back, and the catcher behind me, the person catching the people as they fell down, pushed in on my lower back. And I was in this pressure point wrestling move situation where without causing a ruckus, I was kind of just going down unless I really wrenched myself out of these people’s grasp. So I was like, okay, this is the Holy Spirit. And a few minutes later, I’m laying on the floor, they had passed on. They’re dishing out the Holy Spirit to other kids. And then after a few minutes of that, I realized, this. This isn’t it. I don’t know what’s happening here, but this is a wacky experience. And that was another big moment where I was, like, surrounded by people practicing these things that just. I couldn’t reconcile with reality.

Jana Harmon

12:44 – 12:57

It felt like a lie, I’m sure, very contrived. False in some ways. I can imagine that that would be very unsettling. So then what did you do with that?

Trevor Lancon

12:58 – 15:20

I guess I sat with it for a while. You know, the timeline is fuzzy to me. I don’t remember details strung out on a timeline perfectly. But when all this was happening and, you know, at that age, you’re growing and you’re starting to think for yourself a little more and think critically a little more. I also started hanging out with some friends who did not behave Christianly. I don’t know how you’d say that. Just, you know, we separate in our heads Christian behavior and Christian thought from worldly or secular behavior and thought. And these people didn’t behave as if God existed. They didn’t behave as if the gospel was calling them to act in a way, a certain way. And I was really attracted to a secular lifestyle. You know, it says in Scripture that when you were free from righteousness, you were slaves to sin. I really liked being the free from righteousness part because then I didn’t have to censor or change how I acted, and I got to act however I want. And that was whenever, you know, I would rather go hang out with my girlfriend or my friends Saturday night and stay up too late than get up and go to church early in the morning and play in the worship band or partake in church at all. And, you know, my church attendance started to decline, and I just kind of slipped away from that life. There was a separation point. I was more interested in chasing girls than chasing the Christian purity ethics, if that’s a polite enough way to say it. Yeah, you know, when you’re 17, you’ve got your hormones on one end and the Christian sexual ethic on the other, and that’s a very difficult battle. They knew I was losing it, and they said, ‘Well, you can continue here and we can fix this. We can help you. You can go on the road to redemption or there’s kind of not a place for you here.’ And I said, ‘Okay, well, then there’s no place for me here.’ And I separated from the church, and I don’t think. I didn’t believe in God right away, but, you know, without that, with my faith shaken so hard by some of the events and then that separation point, there was no recurring thought. There was no liturgy in my life leading to God. It was. It was just pure, worldly from then, and I had no interest in it anymore.

Jana Harmon

15:20 – 15:40

That makes total sense. I’m curious, on your gradual separation and then ultimate separation, did you ever ask or confront anyone in the church about the things that you perceived as false or, you know, disingenuous or contrived?

Trevor Lancon

15:42 – 16:23

I’m really glad you asked that question because it points out a shortcoming of mine, and the answer is no. I don’t know where I absorbed the idea that it wasn’t okay to question. I think I just didn’t see any opening or openly questioning people. I didn’t have that example. But, you know, I look back and these people would have. The people in the church were great. I love them. They love me. And to see somebody young and struggling with faith, I think they would have wanted to help me, but I never thought to present doubts to them or to challenge beliefs and to seek answers. And you know, it’s a real shame. I think by doing that I could have avoided a lot of misguidance in my life. But I never did think.

Jana Harmon

16:23 – 17:16

It seems to me that that’s a very common tale among those who have ‘deconstructed’ from their faith is that they were in a place that didn’t model questioning or dealing with hard issues. They didn’t feel like it was safe or to question or the questions were shut down or for whatever reason. And then you add the other component to it, just wanting to live the way that you want to live. I can see why you would move in that direction. Again, it feels like a common tale in many, in many ways. But we’re talking about your story here. So you left it, you were leaving it behind. It wasn’t the lifestyle that you wanted. You questioned its authenticity. So was that high school or moving into college.

Trevor Lancon

17:16 – 19:09

For the rest of high school and then early in college, I just didn’t want to think about it. It was a non issue to me. I think I harbored some resentment or maybe I just, you know, I remember being, I don’t know if it was an age thing or at that time and history thing, but shock humor was like all the rage. And I just remember thinking it was funny to say anti-religious or blasphemous things to people now that I didn’t feel like those were sins. I didn’t feel beholden to not being able to say those things and people would get shocked. And that was funny to me. So I became, I guess, anti-religious. And then in college, whenever I started to think more and more about it, I guess I bought into the very commonly propagated thing that, you know, science has all the answers, scientism, you know, why would I seek beyond science, what we can objectively know? And like you said earlier, you know, I’ve got a very STEM background that just made sense to me. And at that point I became, I was just kind of mean, like I was scornful of Christianity, which is something I’ve heard in your interviews quite a bit from guests. But you go through this period of just believing it’s all just garbage. I would mock friends thinking it was funny to them. And to their credit, you know, none of them ever really took the bait and got mad at me. They were just kind of like, whatever, dude. I don’t think I convinced anybody either. But you know, it, it slowly went from I’m not sure about this and I don’t, I don’t want anything to do with it to I am actively opposed to this. And that’s whenever I realized, well, I guess I’m, I guess I’m atheist. I guess I’m agnostic. I don’t, I didn’t know what I was. I think it depended on the day you asked me. But for, for the rest of college and for most of my adult life now, until a few months ago, really, I’m in my 30s, I was agnostic or atheist, depending on the day you asked me.

Jana Harmon

19:10 – 19:31

So way back when in college, when you developed a more anti-religious kind of rhetoric and perspective, there’s a difference between not believing in God and being more contemptuous of it, making fun of it, mocking people who believe it. What do you think fueled or informed that kind of contempt?

Trevor Lancon

19:31 – 21:16

I think it was, this was. This all coincided. So I’ve never heard of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism until like recently, until the last few months when I’ve been listening to podcasts about Christianity. This all coincided with that. I didn’t know who Richard Dawkins was. I didn’t know who Hitchens or Sam Harris or the other one. I didn’t know anything about these people. But their anti Christian scornful rhetoric was kind of dispersed throughout the Internet. So I’d be on Reddit or whatever website and it was just everywhere. This anti Christian, we’re smarter than that. We don’t need it. This arrogance, I guess, like this anti humility stance where people said not only do we just not know if God’s real, we just know he’s not. Because come on, who could believe that? I just kind of absorbed that, I think from the media I consumed at the time. It was kind of inescapable in those days. This was, you know, 2010 through 2012, whenever that was all the rage. So without knowing who those people were or reading their books, I just absorbed it. And that was just the world I lived in, you know, and that was also whenever smartphones became ubiquitous. So instead of looking up and around us all day, we became more and more like this all day. And you know, this is your world and if your world is only, you know, streaming anti Christian things at you, then it’s just very easy to kind of absorb that. So, you know, it’s, frankly, it’s embarrassing to look back and see that all of my until my 30s, all my worldviews, I just kind of absorbed from what was around me. And in my atheism phase, I think I thought that I was being a critical thinker or a free thinker, but in reality, I kind of wasn’t.

Jana Harmon

21:17 – 22:35

Yeah. So you, in a sense, absorbed your atheism as well, from obviously what you were studying. You were in the STEM track, engineering, science, hard, hard facts. This is reality. And then it’s the icing on top of that was fueled by all of this rhetoric that surrounded you through culture and technology and social media. And so you lived, it sounds like, from college on, for several years, as in this agnostic, atheistic perspective, right, or got a career in that, continued to work in the STEM world. And you mentioned the word scientism earlier. Is that the worldview or the water in which you swim in that culture in which science is everything. It’s how you know things. We don’t need anything else or beyond that, or that’s seen as a form of weakness to believe in something beyond the natural beyond what is provable, repeatable, all of those kinds of things. What does that world look like?

Trevor Lancon

22:36 – 24:52

Pretty much just as you described. In that world, somebody says they believe in God, and you kind of look at them funny, like, what. Why do you feel the need to believe that? You know, when I was really young, I remember going to Colorado for the first time and being from southeast Texas. Any change in elevation that’s more than like six feet was a mountain to me. So I go to Colorado and there’s just mountains reaching to the heavens. And I just remember being like, of course there’s a God. But then you learn, then you go through this process of, oh, well, science has an explanation for that. And over the course of millennia, plates and rocks rise and everything. So then you say, okay, well, when I was younger, I lacked knowledge, and whatever knowledge I lacked, I ascribed to God. Now that I’m older, I have more knowledge. I don’t need God to describe that anymore. I can extrapolate that as I get older, there will be more things that I learn. And if I lived forever, I would eventually know everything. Therefore, there’s kind of no reason for God, because it seems like everything would be knowable at some point. And yeah, it was just the waters, like I said, somebody, a scientist would say they believe in God and I don’t. It wasn’t like everybody in the room dropped glass and things shattered and they all went. But it was very, to me it was jarring. Like, why do you need to believe that? I wasn’t just surrounded by stem minded people. I mean, I had a girlfriend at the time, she became my fiance. Now she’s my wife. She’s always been a Christian. Her whole family, they’ve always been Christian. I’m surrounded by, in my life by people that I know and love who hold this belief in God. And that was something really difficult to hold in tension was on one hand, I think people who need to believe in God are weak or I had like a scornful opinion of that. But also I love a lot of these people and I don’t think they’re idiots. So on one hand, well, they’re dumb. On the other hand, these people are smart and respectable. How do you, you can’t really marry that. That’s directly opposed of each other. So, it wasn’t completely godless, but it was definitely just a back burner possibility.

Jana Harmon

24:52 – 25:33

Yeah. It is interesting that you married a woman who called herself a Christian with those two conflicting worldviews. Essentially in terms of your own atheism, agnosticism, you were comfortable in your scientism. You inferred it was something that you absorbed, obviously you thought about, but did you think about the implications of your own worldview in terms of where it led logically, rationally as well as in your own life, what it meant for your own humanity and how you perceived the self? Those are two very different things.

Trevor Lancon

25:33 – 27:43

Yes, that’s where the dread of it comes in, in the end with that worldview, everything’s random, everything’s pointless. I’m pointless. Everybody I know and love is pointless. I would feel very existential about things quite often and over time. It’s weird. I had this lack, lack of concern about God in the beginning. It turned into like this fiery scorn for all things Christianity. And over time it would wane and I would feel, I would think like, man, I wish I could pray right now. I miss prayer. I’m like, wait, prayer is dumb. I can’t pray, it’s pointless. So I’m not going to do that. Anti religious zeal really waned over time and I would actually find myself envious of Christians. There are some dark moments where I would just be mired in kind of an existential dread or hopelessness that comes from lack of belief in a higher power or eternity or anything and a lack of hope. And it would be crushing. I mean, I don’t have like a juicy testimony like somebody hits rock bottom because they almost die from a drug overdose or something and then an angel lifts them and hoists them up in the air. I don’t have anything like that. But I’ve got a house, I’ve got a wife, I’ve got, at the time when I started thinking about this more, I had one kid, now I have two. I’ve got two beautiful young boys. I’ve got everything I could ask for materially. And sometimes I’d be washing dishes at night, I’d be looking out over my house, everybody’s peaceful and fed and the bills are paid and all this and everybody’s asleep. And I would have every reason materially by my own worldview to be content and happy. And I would just feel dread and feel broken and I wouldn’t know where it came from. I wouldn’t have an explanation for that. And it was crushing at times. I’m not going to say I was depressed or anything because that’s a pretty lofty statement. But I don’t think I had clinical depression over it. But I would absolutely go through periods of the emotion depression, if that makes sense.

Jana Harmon

27:44 – 28:12

Yeah, there’s a difference between believing in atheism or a godless worldview or agnosticism and living it. Those are two very different things and not easy, I think, when you are sober minded about what that is and what that means. So what is it then that caused you to turn the corner or become open or reconsider the possibility of God in your life?

Trevor Lancon

28:12 – 31:40

It was a very slow thing. Like I said, my anti-religious scorn slowly dulled over time and I actually found myself having like a positive view of Christians over the course of the 10 to 15 years I went through this arc, being envious of them, like I said, wishing I could pray about things, wishing I had hope. And I found myself instead of wanting to mock religion, I actually envied people who could believe it and I would not want to convert them away from it because why would I want to take that beautiful thing away from somebody? And I would just have this thought sometimes, like, well, if you think it’s so beautiful or if you think it’s so good, just do it. And I’m like, I can’t do that. And I had this falsehood in my head that I can’t believe, I can’t do it. Whenever it comes down to it, I just can’t make that leap to say God’s real. I chalked it all up to my weakness. So I was really softened over time. Meanwhile, my wife has this church camp, this family church camp. It wasn’t crazy like the church camps I went to as a kid, but a very, just a loving community of people who came together to learn about and celebrate God. And they’re great people. And I didn’t want to like if she wants to go to church camp, there was this, my favorite place on earth, Caddo Lake was right next to it. So she would go to church camp, I’d go camping in the swamp and we’d come back together at the end of it and we’d go home and I would support that. Our sons come along and my wife has never been handy or heavy handed at all about, hey, you know, why don’t you believe I’m a Christian? You’re not. I can’t believe unequally yoked or anything. She would just plant tiny seeds here and there deliberately I think and she would be unyielding in her own faith. The only time she was absolutely resolute was she came to me once and said our boys are going to be baptized. And she said it in a way that was like I couldn’t argue with it. Not that I would have wanted to at that point, but she had seen me more scornful earlier in our relationship. So I think she maybe thought I might be combative against it. But I was and I said okay, I didn’t think anything about it. We go to the church camp, we bring our two boys into the baptism. I think at the time my, my one year old is screaming mad about something. So it’s this chaotic setting where I’m holding this screaming baby who doesn’t want to be there and trying to find a way to occupy him. But also we’re in this beautiful little chapel. We’re surrounded by. There’s just a peace there, I can’t describe it. We’re surrounded by people we love. It’s very small, intimate setting. And the guy who’s doing the baptism is doing this ritual and he’s got a bowl of water and he’s running his hands through it. He’s saying some beautiful words. I don’t even remember what they are. But he came over and he. Before he did it, there was a part that I wasn’t prepared for. And he said, I don’t remember the exact words. I’m going to paraphrase. It was basically, we’re doing this as a sign that you are going to lead your children in a life that follows Christ. And to do that, you must do the same. Will you do that? And I said, I will. And immediately, a split second after that, pardon my French, but my thought was, damn it, what have I done? Because I didn’t want to. I don’t want to say that, but I just said it. I can’t be a liar. I wasn’t, you know, amoral, completely willing to just live with a lie that I had spoken plainly in front of all these people.

Jana Harmon

31:40 – 31:43

I bet your wife was a little bit stunned.

Trevor Lancon

31:46 – 33:53

I don’t know in that moment what she felt I should ask her. Surprised, I’m sure. I’m sure she thought I was just going along to get along and not cause a scene. Like I had this picture in my head of, whenever I first, I felt like my whole foundation of all my belief had been shaken by those experiences whenever I was younger, which now if I look at it with a fair view, like you said, I could have asked people about it. I could have reconciled all that. None of these people set out to harm me. Maybe they made mistakes, but we all make mistakes. That’s the whole point of Jesus, right? But I felt like my faith had been so shaken long ago, and I became scornful. And then that slow decline in my scorn towards Christianity and my growing acceptance of it and jealousy of people who were Christians. I think whenever I was in that chapel, I still pictured that I had this fortress built around me. This impenetrable, logical fortress where nobody can penetrate it. I’m a safe little atheist in here. Keep your God out. Whatever. It wasn’t like a moment where the walls came tumbling down and God was there and angels saying, and the light blinded me. It was. It was like God had been there the whole time with a little chisel. And every now and then in my life, I would feel something that felt like a little hammer strike on just one little rock. And I’d hear tink. And that would be it. And I realized, man, over the last 10, 15 years, God had dismantled that fortress I’d built up around me without me realizing it. So then all he had to do to get me back was, Jesus could just show up and be like, will you follow me? And I would just say yes, I’d be powerless against it. And I know that’s kind of from a STEM person who based his worldview on such a logical, objective, science driven reasoning. This line of thought to me is kind of alien. Like I’m saying weird, woo woo Christian things now that a year ago I would have been like, that’s just weird talk. But I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s no other way to describe it, I don’t think.

Jana Harmon

33:53 – 35:26

Well, when God intervenes in your life, even in subtle or incremental ways, it’s often indescribable. If he’s real and supernatural reality is real, and we’re spiritual beings that we’re holistic. We’re more than just as crudely saying brains on sticks as rational people. We are spirit and mind and bodies and emotion and all of those things that make us who we are in the image of God. We are in the image of God and God can work in, as you said earlier the little idiom can work in mysterious ways to soften us towards the reality of himself. So when you found yourself saying yes, that was a serious commitment to raise your children in the ways of God and Christ. So you felt that was another ding with the hammer or was that a decisive moment? Or was that just another small moment of okay, I just made a commitment here, what am I going to do with that? I mean, what did you do with that? Yeah, that’s a real point of cognitive dissonance there.

Trevor Lancon

35:27 – 37:20

Yeah. So I was a Christian for a week and now I’m not. No, I’m just kidding. It wasn’t like it wasn’t another dink of the hammer, that the walls had been dismantled. I was powerless to say no. I couldn’t really say no. Whenever I said yes, I realized, I didn’t want to realize it, but I knew that I had just made a commitment. And I knew it’s because of what I wanted. Nothing in my skeptical days, nothing can get through. Nothing could get through to me. In the Road by Cormac McCarthy, the author is describing this godless fictional world, but he uses the word godless and it’s a post apocalyptic hellscape. And this father has to guide his child through it. And there’s one point where the father’s reflecting on the child and he thinks if he isn’t the voice of God, God never spoke. And that line is just so true to my own walk, I think, where nothing could get me more tenderhearted than my children. And I know that’s probably cliche, like, that’s true of any parent, right? But, you know, thinking about my children have to go through this world, am I going to offer them a worldview that is hopeless, or am I going to offer one that I’ve actually been very surprised to found is very robust, very hopeful, that offers reasons for joy? And that was a big part of why I said yes, but the surprising part was whenever I realized it was true for me, too, and that I was kind of powerless against it. But, yeah, it was like I said yes, and I was like, oh, what have I done? Because I knew from earlier in my life the kind of changes that would require in my life, and I didn’t want to make those changes. But we started making those changes, and it’s only been great. There’s no drawbacks, really.

Jana Harmon

37:21 – 38:16

I presume you started attending church as a family, kind of participating as a family, but this intermittent regret, oh, what have I done? turned into, oh, I know what I’ve done. I believe and I believe. So, you started moving forward, I guess, from there as someone who believed in God and you were leading the family, and I’m sure there’s a great responsibility of that of. your belief. But how can I say this again, as a STEM person, as someone who wants to believe what’s true and real? You did believe what was true and real, but perhaps you didn’t have the more analytical grounding for it. Did you pursue that path? Okay, talk to me about that.

Trevor Lancon

38:16 – 44:01

So let me come back to that. Let me back up, because that was a big thing, was my main objection towards the end was I can’t believe. I want to believe. I can’t. You know, you talked about how God works. We’re talking about God works in mysterious ways. I had developed towards the end of that softening period of my atheism, a real love for reading. And, it developed into from ‘I like fantasy novels’ to now I’m reading these books that people call literature and they analyze it. I’ve developed a real love for reading. So I knew whenever I came back to Christ, I knew I could approach the Bible more soberly and with a better mind for it. A more fertile garden, I guess, for those seeds to be planted. And man, that’s been really rewarding. And something that was really interesting in that week at church camp, that was the first day. So then I was there for a few more days beyond that and surrounded by this community. And the first sermon or talk I went to was on Jonah. And Jonah’s famous for this whale somehow swallows this guy, somehow survives in this whale for three days, and then the whale spits him out like, what is this? At least to my materialist worldview, what is this? But I go to this talk and I’m surrounded in this room by, you know, 60 or so people who I, only a few years back, I would have scorned for believing something so silly. And this guy starts talking about Jonah, and these people are completely looking past this fact that says in scripture about the whale swallowing him, and they’re looking deeper into the story. And it wasn’t so much of a talk where this guy talked from the stage at us. He engaged us. And people from all over the room, all walks of life, academic people, very like blue collar type people, all coming together and explaining how this story is impactful to them. And I was amazed at how these people who I would have in a previous life maybe scorned for being so silly for believing in something. They were all very wise, wiser than I was. And here I am, thinking I’m all high mighty with my degrees or whatever, and I was kind of flabbergasted. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can read the Bible critically and I can get rid of that Sunday school theology that I had, which was very shallow and actually approached this like a very robust library like it is. And that was one thing that helped me come over, that. And, God giving me a love for books and then giving me this book that’s his word. And now I can get rid of that Sunday school theology where the whole point of Jonah is the whale. And now I can look beyond that and see all the deeper meaning that’s in this. This one story and then all the others with it. And there was another thing. So you talked about how did I reckon with this unbelief? Because I thought I couldn’t believe. Around the same time I started reading books again, I got into weightlifting. And I don’t mean like lifting weights. I’ve done that since high school, my whole life. I mean, the specific sport of weightlifting. And I won’t go into the details of it, but this is something you train for and you, you go into the sport with the understanding that the lifts you do in it take years to get good at, to get good at and master the technique of. So whenever I went into sport a few years before this experience where I came back to Christ, it was the first thing I’d really gone into in my life and been extremely intentional about. I know this will only, I know this will take a few years to do. And in this sport, in the sport of weightlifting, most days you don’t want to work out, most days you don’t want to lift. In fact, it’s five or six days a week of all lifts are squat based. So you’re squatting five or six days a week. That’s just brutal. I’d go through months at a time of just having extreme tendonitis in my knees and every day hating lifting. But that’s just what you do if you want to be this good in a few years at it. And what weightlifting taught me was how you feel is a lie. And that sounds pessimistic, but the fact that I could go into the gym and just be absolutely dreading it because my body feels horrible, but then actually do well in the gym that day. And then other days I go in the gym and I feel amazing, but I perform very poorly. But seeing the fact that those individual days didn’t matter, what mattered was that I stuck with it and I believed in the long term effects of it. Once I saw, I started to see the fruit from that. Well, then Jesus came back and was like, hey, will you follow me? I said, yes. And then I immediately had this objection like, I can’t, I can’t do that. Well, I had been practicing this liturgy for years where almost every day of the week I’m going out in my garage, in my gym, saying I can’t do this today. And then just doing it anyway and it working out fine and over the course of many years, that being very fulfilling. So I had this, I believe that God put a love of weightlifting in my life so that whenever he did come back to me, I had this analogy to look back at and it sounds very meatheady or shallow or whatever to relate following Christ to lifting weights. And obviously every analogy breaks down at some point, but man, the number of times that I’ve thought I can’t do this, I can’t believe. But then thinking about, well, if I act as if I do believe, what are the fruits that come from that? I mean, I think that all the time about following Christ and it’s Only been good. There’s no negatives to it to me.

Jana Harmon

44:01 – 45:45

Right, no, yeah, I can completely see that, how that would be. In a sense, you fix your eyes on Christ, the author and the perfector of your faith and he deepened your belief and he deepened your faith and it’s a beautiful thing. And for those who know him and are known by him, it is real and it’s palpable and it’s powerful. And like you say, that daily walk, it is a relationship as well, of trust and walking with and beside. And I don’t mean to push back, but I’m going to on you, Trevor, because, because I hear it from skeptics and you know yourself as an ex-skeptic, someone who might be listening to your story may say, oh, he wanted to believe, he was pleasing his, he found himself committed and oops, he said yes. And then he willed himself to believe. Of course there’s the whole William James idea of willing yourself to believe and there’s something to be said about that. We tend to move towards those things that we want to be true and there’s a reality to that. And that’s true for atheists as well and skeptics. But if someone was listening and they just go, he’s not as analytical or logical as he once thought he was. He’s moved from the realm of science and into the realm of whatever you want to desire. How would you respond to someone like that?

Trevor Lancon

45:45 – 47:35

Two pronged. Number one, the Case for Christ by Lestrobel. Okay, I mean, that’s the crux of it all, right? Christ is the crux of it all and specifically the historicity of his death and resurrection. And whether or not we can consider that historical fact is probably the most important apologetic. You being somebody that would know about apologetics, maybe a thing or two. That was amazing to see the historical evidence of this. I set out, I wanted to believe, but I read this book and I said, I mean he makes a pretty bulletproof argument that among historical facts, this is about as grounded of a historical fact as you get without actually witnessing it yourself, and recognizing also that it still takes a leap of faith at the end of the day to believe and knowing that. And then the second thing I would say is I haven’t been a lifelong skeptic. I was a bought in Jesus following believer whenever I was younger. And I’ve seen the fruit of both worldviews. The fruit of the Christian worldview is true and good and the fruit of the atheist worldview is not good. I mean, I don’t know how else to say it other than that, but whenever it comes down to having a scientific mindset, I did two experiments side by side. I had a control and then I had an experimental phase and I didn’t like the experimental phase compared to the control. So I went back to the control because to me it was experientially better. And I understand that that is not going to appeal to everybody, or it’s not going to. That argument isn’t going to satisfy everybody. But I mean, that would be the main two things that I would say.

Jana Harmon

47:35 – 49:15

Yeah, I think what you’re saying is very important here is that belief is not just merely rational and it’s not an equation that you put together, but yet there are facts grounding reality. And the Christian explanation of the worldview gives in a sense the best explanation for Christ and his historicity, his resurrection, and really for all of reality. But I think there’s a different kind of truth. Just because it’s experiential doesn’t mean that it’s not true. And that is what I mean by that, is that it is through belief in God and the grounding of God that we are given the experience of life and joy and meaning and purpose and value and dignity and all those things that we in our own humanity crave that are not available through a godless worldview. So it is truth, and I am a strong proponent of that. There’s this existential truth that comes with belief that is that it is a different kind of truth and it is truth nevertheless. So you have found a fully orbed view of reality and of your life and your own humanity that fits experientially as well as rationally. And I love that it is a very holistic understanding of who you are and who God is and everything. It gives you everything that you’re looking for. So I just think that’s amazing.

Trevor Lancon

49:17 – 50:17

Thank you. I think a great illustration of that is I talked about the crux of Christianity as the historicity of Christ and by the grace of God, that’s very believable. Even though it still takes a leap of faith to fully believe it. The rest of it, once you get that right, you’re a Christian, the rest of it can be much more challenging to believe. Sheer observable fact is not the only truth, like you’re saying, there are things that ring true. Outside of that, a question I think of is how do we know that beauty exists? You know, I’ve got a table right here. I can touch it and feel it, and I see light bounce off of it, and I know the table exists. How do we know that beauty exists? It’s not something that’s scientifically testable, but we’re affected by beauty. And it might be in the eye of the beholder what’s beautiful, but we’re still affected by it. You can’t deny its existence. And like you said, there’s just so much more to truth than what’s scientific.

Jana Harmon

50:17 – 50:28

For the scientist or the STEM person out there. Science and faith, are they complementary? Are they contradictory? How do you make sense of all of that?

Trevor Lancon

50:29 – 51:39

I think they’re complementary. I think it’s very easy, but maybe a little lazy to, a lot of people will say they’re not complimentary because they’ll open the Bible, they’ll see some supernatural thing happening, and they’ll say that’s obviously false. So then they’ll just close it and throw it away. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. You have to read scripture with an understanding that it’s going to take a bit of wrestling to reconcile some of this with reality. And this is an ancient document written by people from cultures that we don’t think like them at all anymore. So, you know, if you feel a conflict between science and faith, which I often do, I now have faith, I guess that that’s reconcilable some way, right? It said God made the world, but it didn’t say how he made it. I mean, reality has laws and science is beautiful now. It’s the slow uncovering and discovering of how God wrote the universe into existence. And to me, that’s more beautiful than just, hey, here’s how something works, you know?

Jana Harmon

51:39 – 52:01

Yes, wonderful. If there is someone, a skeptic out there saying, I know I will never believe, I wish I could, but I can’t. I think you’ve given us almost through your own life story, some practical ways forward. But what would you suggest for that person who wishes they were where you are now?

Trevor Lancon

52:02 – 53:45

I bounce around on this a lot, it goes back to what I learned through weightlifting. How you feel is a lie. You don’t know the truth of something until you see it through. You can’t base it on how you feel right now. I heard one of your guests, she said, I’m going to try Christianity for 30 days, and I’m just going to actually try it. And I think that’s great. Something like that, where you act as if you believe. And I’m not saying you’ve got to be careful because you could act as if you believe and you feel like nothing happens at the end of 30 days. But I think acting as if you believe, saying, if you really want to do it, try it, find a church, plug into the people, live the life. I don’t know that somebody can kind of flirt with approaching Christ without at some point Christ drawing them in. And I think when that happens, you’ll realize the truth of it and also realize that you can reason and logic your way toward Christ, but at the end of the day, you’re going to believe something based on faith. Like I said earlier, I studied nuclear engineering. You take a bunch of neutrons and you split them, or you split atoms with neutrons and they create energy. Whenever I just said the word neutron, you pictured a little green sphere from a notebook in high school or something. Right? Nobody knows what a neutron looks like. It doesn’t even make sense to think about what a neutron looks like. Yet we have illustrations of it, and great things come from us having this conceptual illustration of it. So at the end of the day, our faith in science has produced great works. I think people should do a good earnest searching for Christ and trying to have faith in Christ and see the works or seeing the fruit that comes from it.

Jana Harmon

53:46 – 54:36

I think that’s really wonderful. And when I think of how Christians helped you along in your journey and how we can best help others. And of course, the first thing I think of is your wife. Of course, she tried to plant a few seeds here and there, but I’m wondering really two things. First of all, what was the best thing that your wife did or did not do? As your spouse, as your partner who would really want you to believe, but allowed you to take your own journey? So speak to me about your wife and then speak to me in terms of what we, as Christians, how we can best engage with those who don’t believe.

Trevor Lancon

54:36 – 57:51

Yeah, I mean, I think back my style when I was a kid of trying to evangelize was very on fire in your face. And I said that the fruit from that could be there. It could be there in the world today or later. But I didn’t see the fruit of it, to be honest. My wife, I don’t know if I could do the same thing for her that she did for me. It took incredible strength and resilience, her steadfastness and her faith, despite me just railing against Christianity sometimes. The fact that even though she’s incredibly intelligent, she still believed in Christ and was unwilling to yield to my arguments. Over time, I took my view of myself changed from somebody having the moral high ground or the theological high ground, and it changed to that of a toddler screaming at his mother, beating her, saying, no, no, no, but her knowing the answer and saying yes and just being unyielding. And then eventually me growing up and realizing, oh, mommy was right, right. Just the fact that my wife was steadfast, she didn’t waver ever, and that she still practiced it and was a model to me without me realizing it of what God was doing. I think, you know, I was saved when I was young. I had my period of being the lost sheep. But I think Jesus was looking for me the whole time. And he was patient. God did not come and hit me in the head with himself or anything like that. He was just patient and was just there for whenever I was willing to come back for him. And, you know, my wife really modeled that. And I think if she would have been more aggressive, I don’t know if I would be where I am. And I just, I’m so grateful to her for modeling that to me. I guess for people with loved ones in the same situation, you know, it says, I love the Bible, but I haven’t been reading it long enough to be one of those people who just rattles off like references and memorize scripture. Yet somewhere in one of the Corinthians, I know that’s vague, it says that the spouse of the unbeliever sanctifies their spouse and that if you’re married to somebody and they are not a believer, and that’s just how it is. Don’t change. Stay with them. Paul writes that somewhere and it’s. And she modeled that to a T. And I think that’s a good tactic. I guess it really depends on the person. Like, you know, I don’t. Whoever I’m speaking to now, I don’t know who in their life they would want to be a follower like them. But every person’s different. And if you hear some tactic on YouTube about use this to convert 90% of people to Christianity, don’t, don’t follow that stuff. You’ve got to prayerfully consider it. Read scripture. If you’re a believer, you have the Holy Spirit. I know that’s one of the big woo woo words that Christians use. I don’t know how to describe it other than experiencing that myself. You have the Holy Spirit. You have guidance. You know how to do it. And you can, I guess, but it might take a lot of patience in a case like mine.

Jana Harmon

57:52 – 57:59

She definitely was patient. I imagine she was prayerful, not pushy. She persevered.

Trevor Lancon

58:00 – 58:00

Right.

Jana Harmon

58:00 – 58:19

She modeled. Yeah. Like you say, what a Christlike life looks like and was yet unyielding in her belief. And I think that that is very important is it’s tempting to compromise, you know, in the face of rejection, in a sense.

Trevor Lancon

58:20 – 58:21

Right.

Jana Harmon

58:21 – 01:00:25

But good for her. She was steadfast and unmovable in her faith. She stood on the rock, and now you’re there with her and your two lovely little boys who will now grow up with you as their leader, as the one who’s leading them to Christ and how beautiful that is. I mean, truly, that he has brought your family together and in this way that’s so solid and especially today, there’s so many shifting sands of culture. But yet you are there as their leader and will guide them to their own salvation. So that’s really, really wonderful. Trevor, I love your story. I love that you were very honest. You’ve been very honest with it throughout, and it seems that you. You understand your story very clearly, the reasons why you even rejected. Or why you came to faith to begin with, how and why you rejected it, and. And the beauty of even despite being away, that you perceive yourself now as the one who was lost, but yet who was found again by Jesus, the one who knows you and loves you and revealed himself really to you in that moment of decision. Sometimes those decisions come upon us? Right. We’re not necessarily looking for them, but you’re in a place of really it sounds like strong belief now. If this is how solid you are relatively early on, I can imagine just really wonderful things to come for you, for your life and the life that you found in Christ. Thank you so much, Trevor, for coming on board and telling your story today.

Trevor Lancon

01:00:26 – 01:00:33

Yeah, thank you, Jana. I appreciate you having me on and I just really appreciate you doing this podcast as well. It’s very encouraging to people like that.

Jana Harmon

01:00:33 – 01:00:35

Terrific. Thanks so much.

Thanks for tuning into eX-skeptic to hear Trevor Lancon’s story. To learn more about him and his recommended resources be sure to check out the show notes if you have any questions or feedback about today’s episode we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out via email at info@exkeptic.org. For those who may be skeptics or atheists wanting to connect with a former guest to explore your questions, we’re here for you. You can reach out through email or our website exskeptic.org and we’ll get you connected. This podcast is part of the C.S. Lewis Institute podcast network. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, we would appreciate it if you could give us a good rating and share it with your friends on social media. Your support helps us reach more listeners with these powerful stories of transformation. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll share another unlikely story of belief.