A military man finds God: the story of Jon Wilke

There’s something extraordinary about a dramatic life change. When someone’s before looks radically different than their after, we lean in, and we want to know what happened. In the case of religious conversion from atheism to Christianity, you typically find an observable change in the way that someone thinks and lives. Former atheist Jon Wilke says that his life today is hardly recognisable from the man he was before he met Jesus Christ, compared to the man of God he has become. 

Childhood faith

Jon grew up the next-to-youngest of eleven children in Western Kentucky.  A giant bible rested upon the coffee table in his home, an ever-present reminder of his southern Christian heritage.  Grace was spoken around the dinner table, and he occasionally attended church and vacation bible school. He grew up understanding that there was such thing as right and wrong, and was baptised when he was seven years old.  But he says: ‘it didn’t stick.  There was nothing really there.’  His childhood faith didn’t relieve his angst and concern felt during the Cold War as he tried to subdue his fear of death from a threatened nuclear holocaust. On top of that, a photograph hung on the wall of his home reminding him of the brevity of life: the picture of his mother’s first husband who had suffered an early death.  In Jon’s boyhood eyes, ‘There was always this ghost of a person in our home who was talked about often, a presence of death and a taste of afterlife that flavoured my childhood.’

A poor family struggling to survive, Jon’s mother worked two jobs to support the family.  They moved 19 times before Jon graduated from high school.  Despite the hardships, Jon spoke fondly of his mother, and his sweet, loving relationship with her. His childhood was good, filled with family, friends and the simple pleasures of life. He was happy, contented amid constant challenges and transitions. 

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Teenage rebellion

By his teenage years, Jon became “a hell raiser,” drinking at a young age, getting into fights at school, stealing his sister’s car to make mischief around town.  Yet, he knew deep down his choices weren’t right, telling himself he needed to change the way he was living. He accumulated a past he wasn’t proud of. Around that time, he left his childhood faith behind because he “didn’t want God to exist.  I didn’t want anybody to tell me what I could or couldn’t do.”

After high school, Jon tried college but fell into the wrong crowd and got arrested for drugs.  Despite his distaste for authority, he joined the Marine Corps to avoid charges. It changed the trajectory of his life. That’s where his career as a journalist began, telling the Marine Corp story.  But it was also there that he confirmed his identity, imprinting ‘atheist’ on his dog tag.  

A surprising turn 

Ironically, Jon also began going to military chapel, a safe haven from his drill instructors’ constant demands. They left him alone there. It also gave him time away from work, time to sit and doze in the cooled space. He also began to carry a Bible in his pocket during boot camp. It gave him something to read during mandated periods of silence, giving him a sense of comfort and mental escape into what he saw at the time as fictional stories, nothing more. 

After a few years, Jon left the Marine Corps and joined the Army National Guard on September 7, 2001, to pay for planned college tuition. Two days later the world changed on September 11.  He was immediately deployed back to military service, commissioned to go to Afghanistan. Jon was given another Bible and he placed it in his pocket as a superstitious protection over his heart, to potentially stop a bullet.

A way forward

Now 24 years old and sergeant in charge, Jon felt the emotional pain of the men under his command.  One soldier was obviously broken, struggling with the loss of his marriage. Another man was homesick and angry, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Still another experienced the devastating sudden loss of his teenage son. As much as Jon wanted to help them, he had ‘no idea how to fix them’. Desperate, Jon pulled out his Bible, began reading in the book of Ecclesiastes and reflected:

“Hey, everything you’ve done is in vain. All those women you chased. That’s not worth anything. The money that you’ve had, it’s not worth anything. There’s nothing new under the sun. So, it was like, ‘Whoa! I’ve done the same thing other people have done, and there’s nothing new about that.’ But it’s all fruitless. It’s all vanity.”

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Who is Jesus?

After this sobering realisation about his life, he then turned to read the stories about Jesus. It was there he “experienced Christ for the first time in a real way.” He began to see how Jesus interacted with all kinds of people, that he seemed “to understand the hearts of people.” This realisation pulled on Jon’s own heart and placed in him the desire to know more. After all, he wanted to help those men who were hurting. Perhaps Jesus provided a way forward after all, but Jesus didn’t claim to be ‘a way’ but rather ‘the way’ forward (John 14:6). He remembered thinking:

“That is the most exclusive sentence I’ve ever heard in my life. You have these definitive articles. Either this is true or it’s not true. This guy lived in early days in Jerusalem and walked around. Was he real? Was he who he said he was? God had begun to draw me in through some of these scriptures. I remember reading Jesus asking his disciples, ‘Well, who do you say that I am?’ Peter said, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ That doesn’t get any more exclusive. ‘You are,’ which is like the present, ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ These verses really stuck in my head and just caused me to think, ‘Okay. Maybe there’s something to this.’”

Jon began to seriously consider who Jesus is for his own life, especially for the things he wasn’t proud of. And, he had seen other Christian men who had lived differently, who lived more wholesome lives, seemingly less burdened by the conflict and pain that comes from a life apart from God. Their lives were attractive to him, showing him “a different way to live that doesn’t come with trouble and drama.” 

A final turn

A few days later, Jon became angry with his superior officer, erupting into a verbal rage against him.  With tensions high, Jon was walking back to his barracks, and he began recalling songs he had once heard at chapel. An old southern gospel hymn came to mind, reminding him to ‘have a little talk with Jesus.’ At that point, Jon prayed:

“‘God, I am 6,000 miles away from home. I’m a bad guy. I am not happy with where I am in life. I’m a paycheck to paycheck drunk. I’m fighting my best friends. I am just a mess.  if you’re real, I need you, and I need you now. This is it. I need you to show up if you’re real.’

“I’m crying. Snotty, messy bawling. I’m walking down the street in uniform and the sergeant major comes out, and he said, ‘What’s going on with you, Wilke?’ And I knew he was a Christian, you know? Everybody did because they always made fun of him. And I said, ‘I’m just having a little talk with Jesus, and I’m telling him about my troubles.’ I have no idea what he said to me, but he encouraged me.”

A few minutes later, one of the other Christian men asked him if he was alright. Soon back at the barracks, crying and upset, still another Christian man, Russ, knocked on his door and said, “God told me to come talk to you.” This, too, was surprising because he hadn’t talked with the other men. It made Jon think that perhaps Jesus saw him too. He recalled:

“When Russ left, I said, ‘Wait a second, the God of the universe just heard my prayers, stopped what he was doing and showed me he was real.’ And he didn’t send a flash of lightning. There were no unicorns running through the heavens. There was nothing crazy. It was three people who I knew were Christians and respected as Christians that he had put in my path within moments, minutes, after I had prayed, ‘God if you’re real, I need you, and I need you now.’ And God showed up in his people, and that was all the proof I needed.

Read more:

When atheism isn’t enough – an intellectual’s search for meaning

Fighting against God – a staunch atheist encounters God after a suicide attempt

Running from God – a Jehovah’s Witness’ journey away from and back towards God

Anything But God: Adrienne Johnson’s unlikely conversion to Christianity

“At that point I knew God was real, and if God was real, those things I’d been reading in scripture had to be true, and if that was true, then obviously I was feeling convicted as a sinner. And so, my knees hit the floor, and I said, ‘God, I’m so sorry. I’ve done a horrible job at living, and so I’m done. I can’t do this my way. You’re obviously real. You obviously care about me.’ It was his love that he gave me. It was this overwhelming love of God, that he would stop and notice me of all people. That broke me and I said, ‘God, I’m done. I can’t live this life like this anymore. However, you want me to live, I’ll do it.’ And then that was it.”

From there, Jon’s next question was “What does it mean to be a Christian?” He learned to love God, to love others, to see others as he had been seen, to make God real to others as was made known to him. He learned to forgive himself and others because he had been deeply forgiven.  He found a different way to live, like the men who had shown him what life in Christ was like.  His was a life truly changed.

If you’d like to listen to Jon Wilke tell his full story, tune into the Side B Stories Episode #81, 24  November, 2023.  You can find it on the Side B Stories YouTube channel or website  www.sidebstories.com.

Jana Harmon hosts the Side B Stories podcast where former atheists and sceptics talk about their turn from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. She is a teaching fellow for the CS Lewis Institute of Atlanta and former adjunct professor in cultural apologetics at Biola University where she received an MA in Christian apologetics. Jana also holds a PhD in religion and theology from the University of Birmingham in England. Her research focused on religious conversion of atheists to Christianity and related book is entitled Atheists Finding God: Unlikely Stories of Conversions to Christianity in the Contemporary West.