Growing up, I always believed I was special somehow. I had no idea where the feeling came from, it was just there, and it had been there for as long as I could remember.

I can picture myself in elementary school, standing in the lunch line and daydreaming about God himself coming down from the heavens and telling the other kids how I was different. Like I’d been set apart. In junior high, I'd sit in my classes staring at a pencil or eraser on my desk and trying to make them move using only the power of my mind.

Of course nothing ever happened. The heavens never parted, objects didn’t spontaneously slide across my desk, and yet the feeling remained.

Sometimes I wondered if everyone felt this way. What if feeling special wasn’t anything special at all? Maybe it was just a part of the human condition. Or maybe, it had to do with the fact that I’d lost my father to cancer when I was nine years old. Like it was some kind of coping mechanism. But at the same time, I felt like the feeling had been with me even before then.

Either way, you would think I’d have grown out of it pretty quickly. But I graduated from high school, then college, and even years after I started working, I was still convinced that my life wasn’t going to be an ordinary one.

In a way, I found this rather strange, because while there are plenty of people who dream of becoming famous, or achieving something great with their lives, I had no such ambitions. In fact, I had no clue what I wanted to do.

This is why I never told anyone about the whole feeling special thing. I knew they would think I was a fool, and justifiably so, because as far as anyone could tell, there was nothing remotely special about me.

Then as I entered my late twenties, I finally must have realized I had no choice but to face facts. I wasn’t special in the slightest, I was indeed like everyone else.

I was twenty-seven years old, stuck in a dead-end job, with no friends, no money, and no prospects for the future. While people I’d gone to school with were busy becoming doctors, or lawyers, or successful entrepreneurs, I was working the same dead end job, and living in the same apartment I’d first moved into right after college.

Where I lived was this small five-hundred-square-foot studio that sat in a kind of no-man's-land between Koreatown and downtown LA. I never bothered decorating, because when I signed the lease, I didn’t see myself living there very long. I figured it was only a matter of time before I found a better job, then a better apartment, and ultimately, a better life.

But it was like I woke up one day, five years had gone by, and the walls were still bare, and the furnishing minimal.

At the time, I worked as a low-level financial analyst at one of the big film studios in town. I may have worked in Hollywood, but my job was anything but glamorous. At least it was steady and paid the bills, which thankfully didn’t amount to much in those days. Mostly because after my last relationship I'd managed to drift away from everyone I knew. People tried reaching out at first. A text message here, a missed phone call there. But they all gave up eventually, and I was suddenly like an iceberg that had broken off from a glacier and was floating out to sea.

I told myself it was all for the best. I had no idea where my life was heading, and the last thing I wanted was to burden anyone.

It was humbling, for sure, but I wouldn’t say I was depressed. Or maybe I was and just didn’t realize it. All I knew was the days mostly blurred together. Work, dinner, Netflix, sleep. On weekends I did laundry, went to the market, maybe cleaned a little. Sometimes I would go for a long run just to make sure I still could.

This was pretty much the state of my life when everything changed one Sunday morning in March of 2017. I was sleeping when my phone started vibrating on the little table next to my bed. I tried to ignore it at first, but the ringing wouldn’t stop, so I reached over without looking and picked it up.

The room was so bright I could hardly open my eyes. I figured it was probably a wrong number, someone taking a survey maybe, or some scammer trying to steal my identity. I squinted at the screen and saw it was indeed a number I didn’t recognize. But I also couldn’t help noticing that the last four digits were the same numbers as my birthday: 1118

I decided to answer.

"Hello?" I said with my eyes still closed.

"I'm looking for Immensely Spirited," a girl's voice said. "Are you Immensely Spirited?"

I was confused by her question and had no idea what she wanted.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Immensely Spirited. I’m trying to reach Immensely Spirited,” the girl repeated.

In the end, all I could think to say was, “I’m sorry, but I think you’ve dialed the wrong number.”

“Oh,” the girl said and, after a moment's hesitation, she hung up.

I hung up as well but suddenly found myself wishing I’d kept her on the line. I asked myself what it was she was looking for. A part of me considered calling her back but I knew that would be crazy and tried to fall back asleep instead.

Except I couldn’t. I lay there and the words immensely spirited kept repeating themselves over and over in my head. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I figured it out.

I grabbed my phone again. First, I opened a browser and looked up the words “immensely spirited” on their own. But none of the search results seemed relevant. I tried again adding my phone number this time, and one of the top results included a church whose phone number was almost identical to my own. The girl had pressed a two that should have been a three, that was all. A perfectly honest mistake, nothing more, I thought.

But for whatever reason, I wasn’t satisfied. I clicked on the link and the church’s home page loaded on my screen. I thought that Immensely Spirited was a strange name for a church, but what did I know, I hadn’t stepped inside a church in years.

From the looks of the site there didn’t seem to be anything strange about the church itself. There were pictures of people singing, praying, being baptized, doing volunteer work. At the top of the page it said Immensely Spirited, and overlaid against the backdrop of images were the words: “Follow Jesus and help us change the world!”

I kept scrolling further down the page, until I could scroll no more and was met with an invitation:

Join Us For Worship!

Every Sunday at 10:00 am

Below this was a map showing their location, and I figured it was only about a fifteen minute drive from my place. I checked the time. I can still make it if I hurry, I thought, and in that moment, I knew I had to go. It was like these games I used to play when I was a kid, where I’d tell myself that if I didn’t do something right then and there, I’d miss out on something amazing. So I dragged myself out of bed, got ready, then headed out to attend my first church service in nearly a decade.

It all starts with a phone call (an excerpt) 🎧