I’m Audy Smothers. Here’s how I’m living deeply. 

“I grew up in Pisgah, Alabama- population 750. I could name you 10 to 15 churches within five miles. But I didn’t go to any of them. I would have told you I was a Christian, though. I mean, geographically, what else was I supposed to be? I wasn’t a Buddhist or a Muslim or an atheist. I knew intellectually that people had said Jesus died on the cross for my sins. So I figured I must be good. And honestly, I was kind of THE guy in that small town. (More of a puddle than a pond, really, but I was the big fish in it.) Good athlete, decent grades, even had a baseball scholarship lined up. And I would tack on the Christian thing- go to FCA because that was the right thing to do. But on the weekends, I lived the life of someone who didn’t believe in God at all. Monday through Friday evening, I was the ideal young man- or at least came across that way to others. I was even the quarterback of our high school’s football team. If someone brought me home to meet their parents, the mom and dad would’ve generally been like, ‘Yeah, this is good.’ But later on Friday night, after a football game? A total 180. Drinking, partying, sin- all the things. Life had not been easy for me growing up, so maybe I felt entitled to let loose. My dad died when I was four years old- fell at a construction site and severed his spinal cord. He was 24. (I also lost my mom young, though her death happened after I was out of high school. COVID took her back in 2020, when she was just in her early 40s.) My stepdad came into the picture when I was nine or ten, but he and I weren’t close. And we don’t talk now. So even the picture I had of a father wasn’t a good one. What all that did was turn me into a performer. I told myself. ‘If you’re really good, you can help the people around you. They’ll look to you. You can be the glue, the helper, the one who holds it together.’ I was straining under that weight every day- for my mom, for my little sister, for everyone. And then, on weekends, partying was my release. I didn’t know yet there was a God who’d already done what I was killing myself trying to do.

My English teacher and my football coach saw through me. They were believers- and not just in name. These men genuinely loved Jesus, and it showed up in every corner of their lives. They didn’t just say they loved people- they showed it. There was no hypocrisy in them that I could see- they did what they said. I knew how serious they were about their walks with Jesus, and I remember thinking: ‘There are so many areas of my life that are untouched by this Christian life. These men call themselves Christians, too, but it touches everything. Their lives look totally different from mine.’ I knew someone was lying- and I didn’t think it was them. One day during my senior year, Sean -my football coach- pulled me aside and said, ‘Man, I think you’re confused, and I think you’re confusing a lot of people in your walk with God.’ Not condescending. Just honest, and caring. Around the same time, my English teacher Jeff did the same. Two loving confrontations- not coordinated in any way. These guys hadn’t planned it out together or anything. And Jeff even took his investment in me further. He showed up to my baseball games. He’d pull me aside in the hallway. He started taking me to breakfast and we’d open the Scriptures together. That was the first time I’d ever opened a Bible outside of church; I didn’t even know people did that! For 18 years of my life, I thought church was just where good people went to hang out with other good people and talk about God. And I knew I wasn’t a good person- so I figured I had to clean myself up before I could even walk through the door. Jeff started asking me some hard-hitting questions: Do you know why Jesus had to die? What makes someone a Christian? And then: ‘If you were to die tonight and stand before God, and he asked you why he should let you in- what would you say?’ I didn’t have a good answer. But I wasn’t put off either, because I knew Jeff cared about me. He just wanted to share the greatest news he’d ever experienced. Sean’s heart was in the same place. I needed those men. I clung to them. Like a good father, they were leading me to Jesus.

One Sunday morning that year, I walked into Jeff’s church and the pastor was preaching on Revelation 3- about being lukewarm. And I thought, ‘I am Captain Lukewarm. I am the poster child for this.’ My heart was beating so fast. It felt like God was speaking directly to me- because He was. They had an altar call at the end of the service and I headed up to the front, where Jeff walked through the gospel with me one more time. He reminded me that it’s not what you do- it’s a surrendering to what God has already done. That you don’t have a perfect record- but Jesus does, and it’s yours if you’ll trust him. It felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders; a weight I’d been carrying for so long, I’d forgotten it was there. I’d spent my whole life performing, trying to be enough, trying to earn love by being useful. And here was the news that I didn’t have to earn it. That I was a beloved son before I was anything else. The way God the Father looks at Jesus, that’s how he looks at me. When I finally started diving into Scripture and seeing what a good Father looked like, it changed everything for me, even up until today: How I see my marriage. How I’m raising our baby daughter. How I look at the college students I spend my days with now, serving as UTK campus director for Campus Outreach. And the first guys to really reflect that to me in a deep, intentional way were Sean and Jeff. Which brings me to an important point about my story: the people through whom God changed my eternity were not pastors. They were not on any church payroll. (Jeff did serve as a youth pastor on the side, but he wasn’t getting paid. He just did it because he cared.) They were laypeople who genuinely loved Jesus and stepped outside the walls of the church to find me. Nothing about it was flashy. Nothing about it seemed complicated. They just invited me into their lives, gained my trust, and shared the things of God with me. There were times I’d sinned against these men, and they’d still be the first to apologize, the first to extend grace. I kept thinking- that’s supernatural. That showed me something real.

The first person I told about my salvation was my grandfather on my dad’s side. Probably the godliest man I’ve ever met in my life. I’d watched him my whole childhood and never understood how he loved my grandmother so well, how I’d never once seen him raise his voice. But when I became a Christian, it all started to click. I came home and told him what had happened. He just looked at me and said, ‘It’s about time, man. I’ve been praying for you for so long.’ And here I was thinking I had everyone fooled. He knew the whole time! And even though his influence was quieter than Sean or Jeff’s, God used his prayers along with those men’s words -all of it together- to draw me into eternal life. I went off that fall on a baseball scholarship to Marion Military Institute, a small junior college outside Tuscaloosa. I was a very average college baseball player- pitched midweek games and played second base. But baseball wasn’t really what excited me about college anymore- I was much more interested in how God might be at work in that setting. So almost immediately I tried to start a Bible study with my teammates. I knew really nothing about Scripture besides what someone else had told me. I was fumbling all over my words, but guys were showing up anyway, and some of them came to faith. I felt like the woman at the well: I’d had an encounter with Christ, he’d changed my life, and all I could do was go tell people. But I knew I needed to learn how to do it better. I also knew it was time to be honest with myself about something else: I wasn’t good enough to play baseball at the next level, and I needed to let that dream go. So in 2018, I did. I transferred to MTSU, where a good friend of mine had gotten plugged into Campus Outreach- and where I knew I was going to grow. That led me to the Orlando Project, an eight-week evangelism and discipleship training trip. I didn’t even go to the school that ran it- I just called the director and asked him to let me in. He took a chance on me. It was like a spiritual boot camp, and also the most fun I’d ever had. The guys I met that summer were in my wedding. And the things I learned then, I’m still using now.

As I wrapped up college, I wrestled hard with whether to go into full-time ministry. Like I said, the people who changed my life weren’t ministers- and that made me think I could be just as faithful as a teacher or a coach. But a mentor reframed it for me. He asked, ‘What if -instead of being one laborer out there- you helped raise up a whole bunch of them? Teachers, coaches, businesspeople- men and women sent out to reach people you’ll never get to reach yourself.’ He had a point: The University of Tennessee has all 50 states and 125 countries represented in its student body. That picture -of UT as a launching pad for laborers sent out all over the world- is why I went into ministry with Campus Outreach. Anyone can do this work. It’s just my full-time job now, which means I simply have more time to do it. (It also made CSPC, the hub church for UTK Campus Outreach, a natural choice for our home church- though I think we’d have ended up here anyway!) People ask me if I have the gift of evangelism. And actually, I don’t- I’m not a natural. What I do have are compassion and curiosity- and a little boldness. I think about what especially Jeff did for me, and I try to do the same thing. Get curious about someone’s story. Befriend them. Win their smile. And at some point, you have to get from talking about the Red Sox to talking about Jesus. So I’ll ask where someone grew up, what the spiritual climate was like. A line or two like that that opens the door, and then I let the curiosity take over. You don’t have to be specially trained or gifted to share the gospel. You just have to care. The gospel came to me on its way to somebody else- and it climbed up my family tree. My mom came to faith before she passed. My little sister, too. All praise to God! And all because of one English teacher and one football coach who were compassionate and curious enough to step into the life of a kid who was performing for everyone and running from God. They simply said, ‘Lord, do with this what you will’ and dove in. A kid with no dad, in a town of 750 people- and God sent two men out of their way to find him. That’s not an accident. That’s a good Father.”