From the outside, his life looked fine. On the inside, he was drowning. Depression had already taken hold, and more than once, David had thoughts of ending his life. He began to recognize there was a hole inside that for years he tried to fill the only ways he knew how: with things he could buy and nights out with friends, anything that made the silence go away.
David grew up between two worlds, and he came to the United States chasing an opportunity his own father never had. He carried his family’s expectations with him, and for a long time, he carried his emptiness quietly too.
Then came the relationship that would change everything, though not in the way he expected. For over two years, he dated a girl who called herself a Christian. At this point in his life, he had settled into a comfortable unbelief, Hindu by name only, agnostic in practice.
The unraveling came to a head on a Saturday night in January. She left. It was, in his words, the worst night of his life. He didn’t sleep for 36 hours.
The next morning, hollowed out and running on nothing, David walked into a service at Bent Tree. He doesn’t remember most of what was said that day. Depression has a way of muting the world. But near the end of the service, he heard an invitation: if anyone needed prayer, come forward. He thought, what do I have left to lose, and he went.
Libin put a hand on his shoulder. David stood there thinking the whole thing was ridiculous, bracing for nothing to happen. Then he heard the man pray something he never expected: “Lord, if it’s your will, I hope this son of yours gets baptized.” Inside, David rolled his eyes. That’s never going to happen, he thought.
That same night, still awake almost two full days, David finally fell asleep and had a dream he has never forgotten: He stood in a market he didn’t recognize, somewhere that felt Middle Eastern, though he had never been. A tall man walked toward him, dressed in a white robe with a red sash, his face soft the way faces are in dreams. David knew immediately who it was. He dropped to his knees, wrapped his arms around the man’s feet, and all he could say, over and over, was Lord, I’m sorry. Jesus lifted him up. Jesus held him. And then David woke up.
He took it as a sign. Whatever he had done, whoever he had been, it didn’t disqualify him from being loved. He started reading the Bible for the first time, discovering that the Jesus he’d dreamed about was not just a symbol, but a real man in history. Coming from a Hindu background built on myth and metaphor, that distinction mattered more than he expected.
He was baptized two months later.
Telling his parents was the hardest part. When he called home to say he had become a Christian, his father stopped speaking to him. His mother told him he was dead to her. David, an international student fully dependent on his parents, watched the money that paid his rent disappear. He came within days of losing his apartment before friends stepped in to cover the gap. Going home that summer meant hiding his Bible, sneaking out to attend a small church, and living, in his words, constantly caged.
Even his baptism put him at risk. The video of it ended up online, and David knew there was a real chance his family would eventually see it. He left it up anyway.
If you ask David what his faith has taught him most, he doesn’t hesitate: forgiveness. He used to hold onto grudges for years, wanting the people who hurt him to feel it. Then a friend at Bent Tree told him something he has never forgotten, that holding onto anger and bitterness doesn’t protect you, it only poisons the well you drink from. He thinks about that often now, about Jesus washing the feet of the man who would betray him, about turning the other cheek. He has forgiven his parents. He has forgiven the girl who broke his heart, the one whose leaving, strangely, led him straight to Jesus.
Today, David is off antidepressants and is no longer suicidal. He shows up every Sunday at Bent Tree, serves in the young adults ministry, and recently spent an afternoon on his college campus praying with strangers, the same kind of prayer that once found him at his lowest.
Come as you are, he says now, to anyone who will listen. You don’t have to be perfect to come to God. His own struggle is what finally brought him to his knees. He doesn’t wish it away anymore. He is grateful for where it led, right to the feet of Jesus and new life in him.
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