Testimony Tuesdays: Belief defeats doubt

By Bella Agnello

(Photo: Donnie (left) at summer camp in 2018)

Christian summer camps create many emotional, spiritual and worshipful experiences. There is nothing like freely worshiping Jesus in a crowd of young adults.

This shocked Donnie Gardiner, a sophomore Management student at Cedarville University, in 2018 when he went to a Christian summer camp for the first time. A native from the Turks and Caicos Islands, he never saw a group of people his age raising their hands in total surrender to Jesus. For years, knowing God deeply and intimately as a young person was a foreign concept.

Gardiner grew up in Turks and Caicos with unmarried parents. He never met his dad, who died when he was three years old. Around that time Gardiner’s mom became a Christian and began attending church with Gardiner and his two older sisters.

Gardiner grew up knowing about God and listening to devotionals every morning in school. He even went around preaching as a kid. However, in high school it became clear to Gardiner that he was not serious about church or Christianity.

“I really wanted to do my own thing,” Gardiner said. “I saw my friends having fun, I was falling asleep in church – it just didn’t interest me anymore. I just wanted to be like whoever I saw on TV, whoever I saw online. And that got me stuck in a cycle of sin.”

Gardiner began to hang out with friends who led him farther away from the Christian world he grew up in. Misusing 1 John 4:8’s “God is love”, Gardiner affirmed his friends’ pornography addictions, alcohol addictions and LGBTQ+ lifestyles.

“My image of God was one I created,” Gardiner said. “I constructed what that love looked like rather than seeking, ‘What does God say that love looks like?’”

In 2017, a friend invited a 14-year-old Gardiner to a youth group. At this point, Gardiner completely stopped going to church, but he attended the youth group to hang out with friends.

“I was causing trouble,” Gardiner said. “I had to sit in the back a number of times because I wasn’t focused and I was distracting other people as well.”

Though he didn’t want to be there, he still admired how the youth director poured into the young men of the group.

“Whether it was a sin we were struggling with or things that we didn’t realize were even sins, he was really intentional about helping us grow,” Gardiner said. “That led me towards faith but I wouldn’t say I was saved yet.”

In March, 2018, a pastor and a group of students from the Chicago branch of his church visited his church on the Turks and Caicos Islands on a mission trip. The pastor preached Isaiah 64:6, “But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags.”

“That was the first time I really felt the weight of my sin,” Gardiner said. “I remember I was sitting in the back and I prayed and repented.”

Yet Gardiner still didn’t know how to express that faith.

In August, 2018, Gardiner went to his church’s summer camp in Michigan. Astonished, he saw other high school students worshiping God and talking about God.

“In my culture back home, people don’t expect young people , once they encounter Jesus, to stay on fire for Jesus,” Gardiner said. “Seeing that in Michigan was really refreshing.”

His time in Michigan also gave Gardiner the spiritual rest he needed. He often struggled with doubting his faith and wondering if everything in the Bible was true. That summer, he heard a sermon on Doubting Thomas and about how belief defeats doubt every time.

“When I came to faith, I wanted to become more apologetic because I was into debating,” Gardiner said. “So, I took that approach into my faith, but with faith you can’t always reason things out as you’d like. It’s just a choice to believe and quiet that doubt. You weren’t there, you just have this book. All the facts line up, everything’s true, and that will conquer every doubt I have.”

After camp, Gardiner went back home with a heart confident and excited to worship.

“The Sunday I got back, I lifted my hands in worship,” Gardiner said. “I was really involved in a way I wasn’t comfortable with before. This is all I can give back to God.”

Gardiner began to take his faith more seriously. He dove into devotionals on a Bible app and in December 2018, Gardiner got baptized as a public declaration of his faith and sang for the first time in his church choir.

“I think I’ve learned just how much using my gift could lead someone to want to know more about Christ,” Gardiner said. “Obviously people go to church all the time but may not really have encountered Jesus yet. I haven’t lived life yet, I haven’t experienced some of the tougher temptations yet, and there I am singing to God, emotional in worship as if I’ve experienced so much. I think that really brought people to ponder, ‘why am I not there yet?’ but I wasn’t even there yet! God still used that to minister to people.”

His youth director challenged Gardiner to seek God in private rather than simply serving him in public, so he gave Gardiner a student study Bible.

“I think when that fire comes in, you’re just quick to do this: ‘I wanna serve on the worship team, I wanna serve on the student ministry team,’” Gardiner said. “I was doing things for God and had not paid close attention to actually living for him as well and having quiet time with him.”

Gardiner graduated high school in 2021, and from January, 2021 to January, 2022 he took over as the youth director of his youth group. Still, Gardiner continued to go to parties with friends.

“God revealed to me over time how that was detrimental to my faith,” Gardiner said. “You can’t serve two masters. I believed that what I was doing was ok, but I was also trying to believe that what God’s Word says was true. And these two things contradict each other. I may not be indulging in the things that happen at these parties, but me being there was a stamp of approval on them.”

Gardiner prayed for God to give him strong Christian friends. In March, 2023, God answered his prayers by first removing his old ones. Back to square one, Gardiner stopped going to parties and started reading his Bible. In April, Gardiner created a group chat with a few strong Christians in his area.

“I just reached out to people I knew and was like, ‘Hey, I know it’s not easy to be a Christian at our age,’” Gardiner said. “‘I see you doing your thing, we should meet together and start this group chat and do what we can to help each other grow.’”

The first day they met, eight people showed up. Before he left for Cedarville University in August of 2023, 25 joined the group.

“That is something I prayed about and just watched it happen,” Gardiner said.

Now Gardiner is pursuing his God like never before. He is learning how to minister to both Christians and non-Christians in any leadership position he has in the future.

As last year’s Freshman President, Gardiner learned how to lead by building relationships with those under him. Pursuing aviation management, God is teaching Gardiner how to treat his future career as a ministry opportunity.

“Through being here at Cedarville, I have learned what the godly manager looks like,” Gardiner said “I didn’t even know it could exist. I hadn’t meshed the two before.”

Wherever God takes Gardiner in the future, Gardiner is learning to simply have faith, knowing that belief defeats doubt every time.

*Photo courtesy of Donnie Gardiner

Bella Agnello is a junior Broadcasting, Digital Media and Journalism major with a concentration in Journalism. She enjoys thrifting, listening to records and reading classic Russian literature in her spare time.