The Search — How This Encounter With Jesus Testimony Began

I grew up in a small town in southern Manitoba where everything centered around church. I knew the routines, the rules, the expectations. But by the time I was sixteen, I had a question that no one around me could answer for me: Is God actually real?

Not the God of Sunday mornings. Not the God of tradition. I needed to know if he was real the way the ground under my feet was real.

So one evening in early June, I drove out to a remote dirt road outside of town. Flat prairie in every direction. No houses. No farms. Just open sky and mud. And I told God I wasn’t leaving until I knew.

Five hours passed. It got dark. It started to rain. I was on my knees in a muddy ditch, soaking wet, and I didn’t care. I said, “I’m not leaving until I know you’re real.”

And then a ball of light came out of the sky.

It fell toward me and stopped about five feet off the ground. Just a small orb of pure white light, maybe the size of a fist, hovering right in front of me. I watched it. And then it disappeared.

I said, “Okay. That’s all I needed. I just wanted to know if you were real.” And I got back in my car and drove home.

I spent the next twenty-eight years in religion. Church every week. Did everything I was told. But something was deeply wrong.

My family was falling apart. I had gone into business with my father, and a betrayal of trust had left our relationship cold and distant. And I realized something I had never seen before: I had taken the broken way I related to my earthly father and put it directly onto God. In my mind, they were the same person. I couldn’t trust either of them.

Two months before Cuba, I had a conversation with God that changed everything. I said, “I’m done. I’m walking away from every religious teaching, every system, everything I’ve been told. But I’m not walking away from you. I know you’re real. I know Jesus is real. But something is missing, and I can’t see it.”

And then a thought hit me that I’d never had before. It arrived fully formed: I don’t trust God the same way I don’t trust my earthly father. And I said “Oh” out loud, because in that instant I realized I had been looking at two completely different people as if they were one. And for the first time, I saw that they weren’t.

Three Days Before Cuba

The day before I flew to Havana, my friend Paul came to see me. Paul and I had been friends for over thirty years. The day we first met as friends, we took a two-hour drive together, and at the end of it, I prayed. While I did, both of our chests—our hearts—burned with an intense physical heat. Not painful. Just unmistakably real. Paul told me the only other time that had happened to him was the day he had invited Jesus into his life, years before. I told Paul I believed God had joined us together for a lifetime of friendship.

Now, three decades later, Paul showed up at my house with a story I had never heard him tell.

He told me that years ago, his marriage and family had completely fallen apart. His wife had said to him, “Why don’t you just love me?” And Paul had told her the truth: “I don’t love you because I don’t know how to love. My father never showed me.”

He got in his truck to drive away, and in that truck, God overwhelmed him with a love so powerful that he couldn’t drive. He had to pull over. Tears were pouring from his eyes and he finally asked God to stop because his body couldn’t take any more of it. And everything in Paul’s life—his marriage, his children, all of it—began to heal from that moment.

Paul put his hand on my shoulder and asked God to give me the same experience.

Three days later, He did.

Havana, Cuba — November 17, 2012

What follows is the heart of this encounter with Jesus testimony — three visions that revealed the love of God in ways that words can barely describe.

I was staying in a thirty-dollar Cuban rental. A plain, whitewashed room with a heavy wooden bed, a still ceiling fan, and old curtains over the window. The kind of room where nothing remarkable is supposed to happen.

I woke up early. A Bible lay across my stomach—I had fallen asleep reading it the night before. I didn’t understand a word of what I’d been reading. I was just searching. Desperately. Reading the Bible like a drowning man reaching for anything solid.

I looked at the clock and decided to keep reading. I reached down to lift the Bible from my chest.

And then the visions came.

And then all of humanity flashed before my eyes. Every person who has ever lived, from the richest to the poorest. A line stretching as far as the mind could reach. It began with a person surrounded by opulent wealth and scrolled at light speed, past every face that has ever existed, past, present, and future, and it ended with the poorest—an old man, withered to nothing, dying alone.

And God told me: The same way I love you is the same way I love every single one of them.

The Scream

And then everything vanished.

I was lying in my bed in that plain white room in Havana. In shock. There was a pause—one second, two seconds—and then I screamed as loud as a man could scream.

My head said to my heart, “Why are you screaming?”

Tears were flowing like a river. Within seconds, the team leader who had brought me to Cuba knocked at my door. An older man, white-haired, gentle. He came and sat on my bed while I tried to explain through the weeping what had just happened.

I was experiencing the love of God, the forgiveness of God, and the grace of God in a way that made me feel loved and accepted like I had never felt in my entire life. I realized that God was fascinated with me. That He found me interesting. That He had an infinite love for me—not for my works, not despite my sin, but for me. Kevin Penner. He had set aside everything I had done and achieved, and He simply loved me for who I was.

The Church

That evening I had been asked to give the keynote address at a small local church. About a hundred people in a plain white building—nothing fancy. I had been asked to speak about finances.

But when I stood up, I realized I needed to share what I had experienced that morning. I spoke in a metaphor. I felt as if God was speaking through me in a way I had never experienced before. After sharing my experience, I went on to deliver the teaching on finances I had been asked to give.

Little John had been traveling with our group but hadn’t seen me for twenty-four hours. He had no idea what had happened that morning. But he could see that something had fundamentally changed.