Teenage Crush Starts 37-Year Trip From Atheist to Adventist

A remarkable series of events convince a Canadian that God is real.

By Andrew McChesney, adventistmission.org

It took Dave Beaven only an hour to believe in Jesus — but 37 years to be baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Dave first considered whether Jesus is real as he drove a girl on a first date from their hometown on Vancouver Island to the Canadian mainland.

As he drove, the girl, Laurie, abruptly said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Dave said.

“What do you think about Jesus?” she said.

Dave thought for a moment and carelessly waved a hand. “That’s OK for those Christian people,” he said. “But I’m not interested. I don’t know what I think.”

“Can I tell you about Him?” Laurie said.

Dave didn’t want to listen, but he agreed.

Laurie spoke of a loving Savior who wanted to know Dave personally. She shared Luke 11:9, where Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you” (NKJV).

Dave drove without saying a word, but he was raging inside. He wished that Laurie would stop talking about Jesus. Laurie noticed the tension.

“Just like there is God and heaven, there also is the devil and hell,” she said. “The devil cannot control our thoughts, but he can put thoughts into our minds. He might be doing that now by causing you to feel angry.”

The notion shocked Dave, and he carefully weighed her words. Suddenly, his anger vanished. Shocked again, he thought, “What just happened? Why was I so angry moments ago about hearing about this Guy who only did good?”

At the end of the evening, Laurie announced that she planned to move to another town to live with a Christian uncle. She said she had lived a worldly lifestyle and wanted to draw closer to Jesus.

Dave didn’t want to end the new friendship, and he asked whether he could visit her once she moved.

A few Saturdays later, Dave spent the day with Laurie in her new town. That night, he stayed at a relative’s home in the same town. As he stood at the window, gazing at the moon and dark mountains, he thought about Jesus and conversation in the car. He prayed, “Jesus, I heard that if you knock, the door will be opened, and if you seek, you will find. Jesus, if You are there, reveal Yourself to me.”

Turning toward the bed, he felt overwhelmingly convicted that he needed to have faith. He thought, “How do I do faith?” He remembered that he had just prayed, “If You are there, reveal Yourself” and realized that “if” showed that he lacked faith. So, he prayed, “Jesus, You are there. Reveal Yourself to me.”

Repeating the Sinner’s Prayer

The next day, Dave went to church with Laurie. After the sermon, Laurie went up front during the altar call. Not wanting to be left alone, Dave followed her up. Laurie’s uncle, who served as a church elder, quickly realized that Dave knew little about Christ and offered to lead him in the Sinner’s Prayer. The uncle gathered a group of church members around Dave, placed his hands on Dave’s shoulders, and told him to repeat after him.

“Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness,” the uncle said.

Dave casually repeated the words. Then he thought, “This is serious. I have to mean it from the heart and not just say it to have faith.” He started focusing intently on what the uncle was saying and making sure that he agreed before repeating the words.

“I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead,” he said, repeating the uncle. “I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. In Your Name. Amen.”

Dave felt the sensation that he was falling forward. Opening his eyes, he found that he actually had fallen backward and was lying atop a small, elderly woman. The force of the fall had knocked off her wig, and she was flailing in embarrassment on the floor.

Dave awkwardly got off the blushing woman, and several church members scrambled to help her up. The other church members shouted, “It’s the power of God! Praise God!”

The incident — which happened just a day after Dave had prayed for Jesus to reveal Himself — convinced him that Jesus is real.

“Before that prayer, I didn’t know if Jesus was real,” he said in an interview. “But the night before, I had taken out a step of faith. After that incident, I just knew that Jesus was the Son of God.”

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Cementing His Faith

But something else was about to happen that would cement Dave’s faith in Jesus.

After the church service, he took Laurie home. The uncle welcomed Dave into his home and remarked, “I heard that you broke your knee.”

Three months earlier, Dave had fallen on a steel shaft at work and broken his pelvis.

Dave explained to the uncle that the broken section of his pelvic bone and rotated in the opposite direction. The doctor had declined to operate, saying the bone would shatter irreparably if he did and Dave later fell on ice or concrete. So, with Dave’s permission, he had left the bone to heal in the wrong direction.

The uncle listened to the story and said, “Do you believe God can heal you?”

Dave said he believed. The uncle called his family to the living room, placed his hands on Dave’s shoulders, and prayed, “You know David, and You made him whole. Please help him and make him whole again.”

As the uncle prayed, Dave believed with all his heart that God can do anything.

“Right then and there, I felt a sensation between my knees and hips,” Dave said. “I felt a little heat at the bottom of my tail bone and a swish. I said, ‘Oh, wow! I felt that!’”

The next day, on Monday, Dave had an appointment with a new doctor to examine his injury in connection with work compensation payments. After taking X-rays, the doctor charged into the waiting room where Dave was sitting. He held the X-rays in one hand and used the other to point an accusing finger at Dave.

“I don’t know what you did, but you’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he roared. “There isn’t even a crack in your pelvis!”

It was a miracle, Dave said.

Over the next 37 years, Dave got married and divorced, and he attended various churches as he wondered how to recognize Christ’s true church. In 2015, he met a single Seventh-day Adventist woman, Debbie. Through her influence, he accepted the Sabbath and was baptized into the Adventist Church. They were married a week after his baptism.

Today, Dave, 57, designs water filtration equipment in the Hope, British Columbia, and enthusiastically tells his conversion story to anyone who will listen.

“Nobody in my family is a Christian,” Dave said. “This is the power of Jesus.”