Unfolding Short Stories: “I left school angry on Friday. On Monday, people saw a light in me.” Walter Hill

The Unfolding

Northwestern Media

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"I left school angry on Friday. On Monday, people saw a light in me."
Walter Hill was filled with grief and resentment after losing his mother and watching his father disappear into addiction. He had no interest in faith and no patience for empty answers. But God used one faithful friend and one unexpected night to break through the bitterness. This is a story of how deep anger was transformed into lasting joy.

Walter Hill's book: Amazed Again: Reclaiming Christ’s Joy in a Fading World

Transcript

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0:00.0	just a light that I had inside. That's her words. And what it was was Jesus just coming to live
0:05.8	in my life. And it was absolutely life-changing for me. God's story, your life. Unfolding short stories.
0:19.3	Walter Hill lost his mom to cancer.
0:22.5	His dad numbed the pain with alcohol.
0:25.9	Church people vanished, and his questions to them went unanswered.
0:31.0	Walter was furious with God.
0:35.0	But there was one friend who wouldn't give up.
0:37.6	He kept inviting him to church.
0:39.5	And one night at a conference, a stranger took the stage.
0:43.7	And for Walter, it felt like he was telling his story.
0:46.8	God was showing Walter that he had been there all along.
0:51.1	My name's Walter Hill, and I have an interesting story, I believe, of walking with Jesus
0:58.3	through a life that's had a lot of ups and downs in it, but finding him at a time when things
1:04.4	were really dark and really bleak. I grew up in the desert southwest. My father was a minor, My mom was a banker, and she was the only one that had faith. She was the only Christian in the house. And we had watched her come to faith at Baptist Church. My father didn't share it. He wasn't very happy about it, but he let her come and go from church, and that was all we had really heard about.
1:30.5	When I was 14 years old, my mom began to have a lot of pain in her back, and through process of taking tests and all the medical things that go on, we were informed that she had cancer in her pancreas. We were told that she had
1:46.3	six months to live. We watched her fight for six weeks as all and then pass away. The thing that was
1:54.5	so challenging for me at that point was I had no knowledge of my mom's faith, but I saw her relying on it, and I saw her
2:04.2	Christian friends standing around the bed, praying, and doing all the things that Christians
2:10.6	do, and I was standing in the corner watching all of this. And so probably fairly predictably, I just wound up angry. God, if you're
2:21.6	real, then the only person in the house that was believing you was her. She was the best person in
2:27.2	the house and now she's dead. While I was processing that and just trying to figure out what does
2:32.7	that even look like? The ministry team of her church tried to comfort me and I had questions.
	...

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