Ardent God Hater Throws Out Own Theory

“I believed that there was a God, but I also believed that He wasn't good. Because, you know, I felt like how could an all-powerful, all good being let so many bad things happen in my life?”     

Lukas Allison was molested by a neighbor when he was a young boy. The resulting pain and confusion set the trajectory for his life. “I don't think I really had any idea that it was wrong or that anything was off about it until I started getting older, and then we started learning about those sorts of things in school,” he says. “I was angry about a lot of things. I was depressed and sort of suicidal. One of the first kind of experiences I had with like an attempted suicide was when I was probably 12 or 13 years old.”

His father had suffered a traumatic brain injury from a fall, which made it difficult to have a relationship with him. Lukas says. “My dad was never really emotionally available. After he and my mom divorced, my dad, he changed a lot.”

Lukas turned to drugs and alcohol at an early age, and sought friends in the world of heavy metal and goth music. “I really resonated with a lot of the darker themes and music that was really about pain and abandonment and things like that,” he says. “So I didn't really have a lot friends elsewhere. But we were kind of like the outcasts together."

Feeling disconnected from his family, and unsure of a direction for his life, Lukas enlisted in the army and was stationed in Iraq. “The first time that I had been in an IED attack, I just remember thinking to myself like, ‘If there is a God and He's doing this to me, then He's a jerk and I don't want any part of Him.’ I still believed in God; I just hated Him.”

Lukas loved to debate Christians and mock their beliefs. “I would just sit there and poke holes in anything that I heard and anything people were talking about. I felt really bad about myself and wanted to kind of tear them down so that they felt as bad as I did.”

After his discharge, Lukas drifted for a while and had a brief failed marriage. Then he met Ciarra who was raised a Christian, but had felt wounded and judged by the church and had walked away.

“When I met Lukas, I didn't want anything to do with God or any of the people who claimed to love God,” she says. “I wanted to be as far away from God and His ‘so-called’ people, in my mind at that point, as I possibly could. And Lukas seemed to check all the boxes.”

Ciarra’s mother had encouraged her to write a letter to her former pastor, who asked to meet with her. “He wanted to meet with me. He wanted to hear my story. He wanted to encourage me and meet me where I was. Just the kindness of him being willing to meet there was what turned everything for me and changed my heart.”  

To Lukas’ displeasure, Ciarra began attending church again. Lukas decided to attend with her so he could monitor her. “I was worried that she was being brainwashed. Because I couldn't fathom in my head, like how could she just like let them apologize to her and then all of a sudden, she's a Christian again. I'd be taking notes, just listening to everything that the pastor was saying, and just trying to find inconsistencies and find reasons why it wasn't good information, and I couldn't. Attending church regularly and listening to the message and just reading a lot, He really started to kind of soften my heart.”    

A pastor at the church encouraged him to attend a three-day silent retreat, and Lukas reluctantly agreed. “I did a lot of journaling while I was at the retreat. I would read for a little bit. And then maybe I would find a passage and I would just kind of look at it. I would put down all my thoughts as if I were having a conversation with Jesus. And the more I did that, and the more that I journaled during that time, the more I just kind of had this overwhelming feeling of acceptance.” 

Lukas came back from the retreat a different person. “I had definitely said, ‘Okay, I'm ready to follow Jesus, and I'm ready to, you know, give my life to serving.' I was given a very performance-based picture of God when I, you know, realized that Jesus isn't like that. He doesn't – He doesn't ask us to perform for Him. He just willingly gives us salvation and love, and all we have to do is accept it. I started to be able to forgive my dad. I started to realize that really it wasn't even my dad's fault. And so I was able to start looking deeper into my past and really addressing some of the things that were kind of unresolved.”

Lukas went on to get a teaching degree. Today, the Allison's have a family and are serving God faithfully at their church in Kentucky. Ciarra says, “When I think about how God used not only my hurt--when I see how God used that to reach my husband, the redemption of that, Him healing not just him, but He healed me--it's just, it's amazing.”
  
Lukas adds, “I'm blessed to have such a huge ministry field. I can’t actually share the gospel with my students, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t minister to them. That doesn’t mean that I can’t love them by example. It doesn’t mean I can’t live my life in a Christ-centered way. Faith is difficult for a lot of people. But when you actually experience God, when you actually experience Jesus, then it just – it makes faith impossibly easy.”