My journey begins in Omaha, Nebraska where I grew up in a Catholic family and community. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic grade school K-8th grades. I am lucky to have two parents that invested in me and my brother and sister greatly. I attended a public high school and later went to Creighton University which is a Jesuit college. I became a teacher, principal, edtech trainer, and tech director in my career over a 20 year span. During that time I always believed in God and the story of Jesus, but honestly I was disenchanted with the Catholic church and some of its traditions and rules throughout those years. During the growth of my professional career I was married, adopted a child, got divorced, and remarried the love of my life, Josie, and we have 4 children together.

When Josie and I moved our family to Kansas City for my job we knew it was important to raise our kids in faith so we tried to go to the local Catholic church and it was terribly stressful and not meeting our needs. Essentially, we were not going to church at this point and thankfully my wife Josie met a woman named Anna that invited her to attend her church, First Baptist in Blue Springs. Josie took our oldest kids for a couple months and I stayed home with our youngest child because he was still napping in the morning. I could see a remarkable change in Josie and my kids were on fire for Jesus and learning the bible. They would come home and share all kinds of bible stories that quite honestly I did not even know. They were teaching me!

Finally, I got the opportunity to start attending church with my family and I was completely moved to emotion the first several times I attended and felt like the pastors were speaking directly to me. It was incredibly moving and I was not sure what I was experiencing.

First Baptist Church has what we call “Life Groups” and we ended up attending Pastor Greg’s life group. Under Greg’s leadership, we embarked on two studies by Kyle Idleman that changed my life forever. One of them was the End of Me and the second was Not a Fan. Both were video series that inspired me to read, God’s at War and Not a Fan, both books by Kyle Idleman. It sent me on a path that made me realize I did not have a close, personal, dynamic relationship with Christ. Furthermore, I was incredibly selfish, prideful, and a broken man who lived for my own gain. Guys like Pastor Greg and my friend Bill were investing in me throughout this entire period and helping me find salvation in Jesus. To do that I had to come to the end of myself so that I could be filled by HIM. Thanks to Greg, Bill, Josie, and many others I was able to realize what I was missing in Christ and Josie and I were baptized together professing our love for HIM publicly and letting the world know JESUS would be leading our lives from this point forward. My wife Josie’s story is #530, check it out!

I blogged about my journey and particularly THE END OF ME here if you would like to read a more detailed story: http://brentcatlett.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-end-of-me.html

Thanks for reading my story and please feel free to ask me any questions you might have. In Christ Love, Brent.

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