What if the church you’ve been searching for all along is the one you didn’t know existed? Kyle David shares how a lifetime of sincere belief still left him split between Sunday performance and weekday drift—until a medical collapse forced brutal honesty about faith, pride, and the limits of self-reliance. The story begins with restless church-hopping across megachurch stages and traditional pews, and moves through a pandemic-era return to the sanctuary that felt more like rebellion than routine.

We trace Kyle’s path from church fatigue and a divided life to a near-death crisis that reawakened faith, reverence, and daily discipline. The journey lands in Orthodoxy, where mystery is honored, repentance is central, and community finally feels like home.

• Protestant upbringing across multiple denominations
• dissatisfaction with casual worship and lack of reverence
• gap years from church without renouncing belief
• pandemic as a catalyst to reexplore tradition
• medical collapse, surgery, and dependence on grace
• honoring science while affirming providence
• music as a metaphor for spiritual discipline
• Eastern sense of mystery aligning with Orthodoxy
• finding belonging at St. Anthony the Great
• repentance and Christ as the physician of souls

That restlessness turns into a reckoning when COVID pneumonia, a hurricane evacuation, and months in hospitals strip away pretense. Kyle talks candidly about respecting modern medicine and still seeing providence at work: surgeons and science as channels, not the source, of healing. From that edge of life, he stops “presenting” as Christian and starts practicing one—daily prayer, Scripture, repentance, and a slower, steadier walk. We explore how Orthodoxy’s humility before mystery resonates with his Korean heritage and why the Church as a “hospital for the soul” shifted his understanding of mercy, sin, and healing.

Music threads through the conversation as a living metaphor. As a drummer, Kyle learned to keep time within and adjust to the room without losing the beat. That’s how he approaches faith now—discipline that makes space for grace. The turning point came at St. Anthony the Great in San Diego, where belonging finally felt honest: fewer smoke machines, more reverence; less hype, more healing. If you’ve felt the gap between head knowledge and a changed life, this story will meet you where you are and invite you deeper into a faith that doesn’t explain away mystery but teaches you to stand before it.

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