By Abigail Sanchez-Aguilar —
As he sat across his girlfriend’s father, a 6’6″ body-builder pastor who weighed 270 lbs, Nathan Penny broke him the news: “You’re daughter is pregnant.”
“He just went gray,” Nathan recalls. “He wanted to reach across and separate my head from my body.”
But future father-in-law restrained himself, choked back his rage and protective paternal instinct and remembered he was a pastor. Instead of putting his massive muscles to use tearing his future son-in-law limb from limb, he tersely smiled and tried to be presentable, polite, humane.
Nathan Penny didn’t quickly come to Christ. He had long ago abandoned any sense of God when his girlfriend from high school (different than the one who got pregnant) dumped him upon going to college.
With that heartbreak, Penny took off his wall the picture his grandparents had given him that said “With God all things are possible.”
“We’re done,” Penny announced to the God he had little familiarity with, having attending church only a smattering of times during his childhood.
“That was the moment when I decided I was an atheist because if there was a God how could he have possibly allowed this to happen in my life. Why would he cause suffering? Why would he cause pain? he says. “I didn’t want any part of a God that would allow this to take place in my life.”
Meanwhile, his dabbling with drugs deepened. What started out as experimentation in middle school became full-blown addiction in college.
“I would wake up in the morning, get high, try to sober up enough to function enough to go to class, come home from school, get high, try to sober up enough to go to work,” Nathan says. “I worked as a bartender and that whole environment was very much a party scene, so go to work and drink and get high again and then hit repeat the next day.
“I was just trying to find something that would give me some kind of comfort.”
It was at the bar that he met the pastor’s daughter. As it turns out, she had bolted from God. They hooked up. When she got pregnant, he had to face her father and break the news.
Future father-in-law went ashen.
“It looks like you’re not taking this news so good,” Nathan blurted out.
Actually, he was taking it much better than he was feeling.
Despite their rough relational start, Nathan and his eventual father-in-law developed a decent relationship.
Everytime, Nathan and his now-wife visited, they dutifully attended church, where Father-in-law preached.
“I would be the guy in the front row and arms crossed, the worship is happening, everyone around me is singing and hands up in the air, and I’m like, This is crazy!” Nathan remembers. “It was kind of fuel in me even more of a rebellion.”
Accordingly, he built up is library of atheist books.
Eventually, his father-in-law gave him Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
He politely received it but had no intention of every reading it. So it sat on his night stand for months.
On one sleepless night, he saw the book.
“It was about 11:00, 11:30. I opened my eye, saw this book sitting there and I thought, Oh what’s the harm in opening it up?” he recalls.
From page 1, he was hooked.
“I got about halfway through this book and the scales fell off my eyes and and I became absolutely convinced in a moment that Jesus Christ is exactly who he says he is,” Nathan says. “In that moment all I knew is that Jesus is Lord and that I was a sinner. I got out of my bed at about 3:30 in the morning, went into my bathroom, fell down on the floor and gave my life to Jesus Christ. I asked him to forgive me for my sins.”
When his wife woke up, Nathan was a completely different person. At first, it was quite difficult for Natasha to process. But she eventually did.
Today, Nathan and Natasha serve a Hope Bible Chapel of Oakville, near Toronto. Nathan is pastor of counseling ministries, and Natasha is director of Events, Programs & Connections.
