Chapter 1: A Heart Lost
Michael Presson was only seven years old when he first encountered God, or at least the idea of Him. But before that day, the concept of church, prayer, or any higher power was completely foreign to him. He spent his days absorbed in childhood pleasures—the latest action figures, video games, and neighborhood games of hide-and-seek. Religion wasn’t part of his world. His family didn’t go to church. It wasn’t that they were openly against faith, they just didn’t practice it.
Life was simple. Or so it seemed. Michael had no idea how empty he truly felt until that Sunday morning. His mother, in a rare moment of inspiration, decided to take him to a church down the road. She had no specific reason for doing it; she just felt it might be something good for them. That morning, Michael sat in the pew of a small church, the unfamiliar feeling of the space wrapping around him. The air smelled like incense, and people sang songs he had never heard before, in a language he couldn’t quite understand. But there was something soothing about it. Something comforting. Something he couldn’t name.
That day, a seed was planted. But Michael didn’t know it at the time. It was just a feeling, a tiny seed in the back of his mind, that maybe—just maybe—there was more to life than he knew. At that moment, he looked at the people around him and wondered: Could this be what they were talking about? God? The Bible? He didn’t know what any of it meant, but something had sparked inside of him.
