I found God in a pool hall.

I wasn't raised in a religious family. While I had been exposed to the Word in various forms throughout my life, Christianity was never at the center of my life, and I had never truly given myself to Christ. As I grew older and found success, I drifted even further away.

Like many fools before me, I fell into the trappings of this world. The cool new title at work, the pay raise, the expensive toys—it all called out to me, and I devoured it without much regard for anything else. There was always something else to achieve, something else to buy, something else to chase.

Then one day, I was at work and was informed that my services would no longer be needed. The company was "downsizing the workforce," and my senior development position had been added to the chopping block.

As someone who had spent so much of his life chasing the next thing, I found this to be an incredibly difficult time to navigate. So much of what I had used to measure my success and, in some ways, my worth was suddenly gone. During that time, I began to seriously reflect on what was actually important in my life.

More than anything, I started to reflect on the emptiness I felt.

Thankfully, I have a support system in my life that I trust. During this period of struggle, I reached out to the people closest to me, and the answer that kept coming back was the same: find your way to Christ. Give your life to Him. Let Him lead you.

But as someone who had always had a shaky relationship with religion, I wasn't sure how to do that. I wasn't even sure there was a God out there. And if there was, I wasn't sure He cared about me.

That began to change over the course of about a week.

I started encountering references to Scripture that seemed to speak directly to what I was going through. I felt myself being drawn toward things that led me closer to Him, but I was still holding on to my uncertainty and fear.

Two questions kept coming back to me:

Does He exist?

And if He does, does He know I exist?

I felt disconnected.

Then it happened.

I play pool several nights a week in various pool leagues. The pool hall where I play doesn't have the best air conditioning, so I tend to get pretty hot while playing. Usually, I just deal with it and try to enjoy the night as much as possible.

This particular night, though, I was hotter than usual. For perhaps the first time, I actually had to leave the building and sit in my truck with the air conditioning running just to cool off.

As I sat there, I prayed.

It wasn't an eloquent prayer. It wasn't profound. I didn't ask God for some great sign or miracle.

I simply asked Him to cool me off enough that I could go back inside and enjoy the rest of my evening.

Just a simple prayer.

When I had left the building, my team had been playing on some tables near the middle of the pool hall, where there wasn't a good source of air. But while I was outside, there was an issue with the scheduling. The team we were supposed to play changed, and my team ended up moving to a different section of the pool hall.

When I came back inside and found them, I walked over and saw an empty chair.

Right next to that chair was a table.

And sitting on that table was a little fan.

I asked if anyone was sitting there and whether anyone minded if I pointed the fan toward myself.

No one did.

The simplest of prayers, with the most obvious of answers.

To anyone else in that pool hall, it was probably just an empty chair and a little fan. But they hadn't been sitting in my truck a few minutes earlier. They hadn't heard the prayer I had just prayed. They hadn't spent the previous week wrestling with the same two questions over and over:

Does He exist?

Does He know I exist?

In that moment, I had my answer.

I knew I was not alone. I knew that I had been heard. I knew that I was loved.

And I knew that I was going to be okay.

That little fan didn't suddenly answer every question I had about faith. What it did was break through the wall I had built between myself and God. I had spent years trying to direct my own life, chasing the things I thought would make me successful and fulfilled. Sitting there in that pool hall, I realized I didn't want to do that anymore.

I wanted Christ.

Within the next day or two, I finally said the words. I acknowledged that I needed Him. I asked for forgiveness, surrendered my life to Christ, and chose to trust Him with wherever my life would go from there.

From that moment on, I have felt a peace that I had never known before.

That doesn't mean every problem disappeared. I still struggle. I still worry. I still sometimes catch myself being drawn toward the same flashy things that once consumed so much of my attention.

But I am no longer bound by them.

I am no longer defined by them.

I walk a different path now—one with God at the center instead of myself.

I still have a long way to go in my journey toward Him. I have a great deal to learn, and I know there will be times when I stumble. But every day, I try to take another step in the right direction.

My goal now is to live a life of service and gratitude. I want the grace of God to fill my life so completely that it overflows into the lives of the people around me.

And most of all, I want anyone who feels as lost, empty, or disconnected as I once did to know that they can seek Him too.

Because sometimes the answer you're looking for doesn't arrive with thunder or some great miracle.

Sometimes it's just an empty chair and a little fan in a pool hall.