Although my family is of South Indian heritage, I was raised in Bahrain, a small country in the Middle East. Shaped by a tight-knit community, a father who was a pastor, and a faith I inherited but hadn't yet made my own, I knew about God, but I just didn't know if He cared enough to get to know me.
By the time I was a teenager, I had drifted far from anything that looked like faith. School had been a source of shame. I dropped out, started working, and somewhere in the gap between who I was supposed to be and who I actually was, I convinced myself that if my parents were disappointed in me, God probably was too.
No one told me that directly. But shame doesn't need to be spoken to be believed.
In late 1999, my dad and I had been slowly rebuilding what years of distance had broken between us. It felt like a second chance. Shortly after, he was gone. A head-on collision on a ministry trip in Kerala, India. He was the only one who didn't make it out alive.
The grief hit hard. But underneath it was something worse: guilt, regret, and a deep sense that I was the wrong one still standing. I tried a lot of what the world had to offer but nothing gave me the answer I needed. I had lost the strength to keep going.
Then one night on a beach, sitting next to a friend in silence, he looked at me and asked a simple question. "Why don't you give Jesus a chance?"
I pushed back. I told him God wouldn't want anything to do with someone like me. But he kept asking. So finally I looked up and said the words out loud. "God, if You're there and You love me, I need to hear that from You." I wasn't angry. I was empty. And I wasn't expecting anything to happen.
What happened next, I still can't fully explain. A light seemed to fall on me in the dark. And I heard a voice say the words: "You are my son, and I love you." Again, and again.
My friend heard it too. God knew I'd try to deny it later. He made sure I had a witness.
I surrendered my life to Jesus fully that night, receiving grace for the first time. And in the quiet days that followed, I asked Him: What do You want me to do? His answer was simple: Go tell the world what I did for you.
I had no platform. No credentials. No plan. Just a story and a yes.
That yes has taken me from a small island in the Middle East to churches, conferences, and leadership rooms across the United States and around the world. It led me to Life.Church, where I had the privilege of ministering to people across every continent. And it led me to Oral Roberts University, where the boy who had dropped out of high school got to earn his master's degree.
Jesus changed everything for me. And that's not something I can keep to myself. Whether I'm in a church, on a stage, or sitting across from someone in an ordinary moment, I'm really just hoping to do what my friend once did for me. Ask that simple question: Why don't you give Jesus a chance?
