The story I never told them

My youngest son is six. We were sitting on his bed at the end of the day when he looked up and asked: ‘Dad, were you ever naughty when you were little?’. I said something vague, gave him a goodnight kiss on the forehead, told him I loved him, and walked out.

I stood in the hallway thinking: he has no idea.

What they don’t know

I have four sons—16, 14, 11 and five. All four of them are following Jesus, which is more than I deserve credit for. We go to church together, we pray as a family, and we read the Bible together. By any measure, things are going well.

But not one of them knows my story. They know me as a Christian father—they’ve never known me any other way. What they don’t know is who I was before that: the version of me that existed between 15 and 21, and the night everything changed.

I haven’t told them because it’s personal, and because I’m not proud of parts of it. And if I’m honest, I’ve simply been afraid that handing them the story hands them a template. But standing in that hallway, I started to think I’ve had it exactly backwards.

The wilderness

My parents separated when I was fifteen. My father was a leader in the church and in Christian education, and when the marriage fell apart, I stopped trusting him—and stopped trusting everything he represented. I dropped out of Year 11, spent four years going nowhere in particular, worked full-time at a pizza shop, and kept the wrong company. I was angry in a way I couldn’t fully articulate and didn’t much try to.

At 19, something shifted—not spiritual, just practical. I looked around at the people I was spending my time with and made a simple calculation: I didn’t want to end up like them. I went back to study, finished my HSC, and started pointing myself toward university.

Two Christian families had been keeping an eye on me through all of this. They didn’t preach at me or push anything—they just kept inviting me for meals. One evening they mentioned there was a young adults’ Bible study before dessert. I wasn’t interested in the Bible study, but the mother was a magnificent cook, and I wasn’t turning down dessert. I’d grown up around enough Christians to think I could get through it without really engaging.

The people in that room were not what I expected. They were ordinary and humble, with no performance and no pressure. They opened the Bible, read it carefully, talked honestly about what it meant for their lives and prayed for each other. That was it. I kept going back.

Just before my 21st birthday, we were studying 1 John Chapter 4. We reached verse 10, and it stopped me:

‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:10)

Something in me gave way. Not loudly, not dramatically—but real. I had spent six years being angry at a God I’d decided wasn’t worth trusting, and here was the love I hadn’t known I was looking for. That night I prayed for forgiveness, thanked God for sending Christ to die for my sins, and threw my lot in with Jesus as my King.

Why withholding it is the wrong call

My sons are growing up in a faith that has always simply been there. That’s a genuine gift—but it carries a real risk. Faith that has never been questioned or chosen can slowly become furniture: something inherited rather than owned.

What my story gives them is not a template for going off the rails. It’s evidence—concrete, specific, hard-to-argue-with evidence that the gospel is not abstract. That it reached into four wasted years and a young man who was genuinely, deliberately lost. That it found their father.

The parts I’ve been most reluctant to share—the anger, the drift, the things I’m not proud of—are exactly what make God’s grace make sense. Jesus said it plainly: ‘I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance’ (Luke 5:32). My sons need to understand that their father was (and is) one of those sinners, and that the grace which reached him was not incidental to the gospel—it was the whole point of it.

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To other fathers with a ‘before’

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Many Christian fathers came to faith after a period of real wandering—after failure, searching or years of active rejection. And many of us have settled for letting our children know us only as we are now, not as we were.

There’s some wisdom in that. We don’t need to burden our children with everything, and there are things they’re not ready to hear or understand. But there is a difference between wisdom and silence—and staying silent about how God found us may be the one thing we’re withholding that our children actually need to hear.

The story of how you came to faith is the most personal account of the gospel you will ever give. It doesn’t need a formal occasion or a carefully prepared moment. It just needs you to say, when the time is right: here’s who I was before Jesus found me, and here’s what changed.

To my sons

You’ve never known me without faith, and I’m glad for that. But the faith you’ve grown up with wasn’t always mine.

There was a version of your dad who was angry and going nowhere. Who walked away from God because someone he trusted let him down, and who spent years looking for something solid to stand on without much success.

Then, in an ordinary room, over an open Bible, God found him anyway.

That’s the story I should have told you earlier. I’m telling it now.

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Daniel Connor is married to Harriet and together they are raising four sons. He is an ordained Anglican minister, currently working as a Political Advisor at NSW Parliament House.

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