Tyler Keele Learns ‘What it Means to Follow Jesus’ Through Chance Encounter
By Movieguide® Contributor
It’s easy to follow the typical “church” rules as you grow up attending every Sunday and that was the case for Tyler Keele. Keele knew who Jesus was and he had accepted Jesus as his savior, but Keele was still longing for more.
Keele grew up attending church, however, his home life didn’t fit the mold of the typical church family.
“We were still going to church,” Keele stated on the Sports Spectrum Podcast. “We were viewed as a good Christian family. And so, from the outside, we had a white picket fence — but inside, our house was burning on fire.”
Keele continued, “I knew Jesus, but I wanted someone to show me what that looked like. The chaos of my home — just didn’t see that happening. Baseball couldn’t fix it. I didn’t know what else to seek, so I was kind of walking in this loneliness and this dark place for a long time.”
Then one day as Keele encountered a homeless man in Montana everything changed.
Tyler Keele pitched for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Often Keele would sit beside a river near Missoula Osprey ballpark and read. One day he encountered a homeless man and the man asked Keele what he was reading. To which Keele replied, a book about Christianity. The man then began reciting Bible verses and asked if they were in the book. When Keele asked where the man was from, the man told Keele he was from above.
The following day Keele went back to the river to read, and the same homeless man was there again. Keele and the homeless man spoke for six hours. During the six-hour conversation, Keele finally found what he had been searching so hard for.
“‘Tyler, Jesus has been sitting with you in the fire of your house your entire life,’” Keele remembered the man telling him, “‘and He’s ready to walk out the door with you.’ That hit me so strong … that Jesus was with me through the entire [time of] pain. … He was waiting for me to walk out to show me what it means to actually follow Him.”
“I went home to my apartment and just started reading the gospels with a whole new profound paradigm of what it means to follow Jesus,” Keele continued. “It was like it clicked. … Understanding God and Jesus as Father and Friend has taken me such a long time to understand. I finally got that — at least a taste of that — for the first time.”
Keele finished playing for the Diamondbacks in 2018 and then found himself in ministry in 2020.
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