In the very first episode of Beyond Sunday, I share my own story — the highs, lows, and lessons that shaped both my faith and my writing. From drifting away as a teenager, to a health crisis in 2012, to discovering the call to write over 65 Christian novels, this episode is about God’s faithfulness through seasons of loss, struggle, and restoration. You’ll hear how He carried me through family challenges, the grief of losing my father, and how He gave me purpose through storytelling.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

• Growing up in church, getting saved at 12, and wrestling with “Sunday-only” faith.
• The 2012 health crisis that brought me face-to-face with my need for God.
• How writing — from self-help to Christian romance — became both ministry and calling.
• The challenges of raising family in crisis and the turning point in my walk with God.
• Grieving the sudden loss of my dad, and how God slowly brought healing.
• Returning to writing with renewed purpose and trust in God’s design.

Resources & Links:

• Learn more at benjaminchapin.net
• Check out his inspirational Christian romance novels at Amazon (view them here)

Call to Action:
If this story encouraged you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with a friend. Your support helps others discover Beyond Sunday and hear stories of God’s faithfulness beyond the church walls.

Welcome to the Beyond Sunday podcast with your host, Benjamin Chapin, and today is episode one. Super excited to get started. I am a storyteller. You may or may not know that I’ve been writing for 10 years under the pen name TK Chapin as a Christian romance author, and I love stories. I love getting to know characters and books and stuff. But that translates to life too. We need to get to know each other in the body of Christ, and not talking about Sunday morning, talking about beyond Sunday. And that’s why the podcast is called Beyond Sunday. It’s because it’s centered around getting to know other Christians, having the real talks, the real conversations around the hard things. People are messy, our lives are difficult and they’re full of trials and hardships, but there’s an underpinning faith that helps us overcome whatever life has to offer, and that’s what this podcast is about. Real conversations with real people. Today’s episode will not feature any guests, but instead, I wanted to reserve this time to share my story with you.

Alright… let’s jump into my backstory, life for Benjamin Chapin. I was your typical church boy. Grew up in the church. Loved the church, went every Sunday, Wednesday with my family when I was a child. I got saved at the age of 12. And then something happened in my teen years, which, as I get to know more and more people in my life, I realize it’s a very common thread, and that’s kind of fading away through the teen years, through the early part of the 20s, kind of doing my own thing. I kept going to church, but I kept God in this separate box. It was kind of like my Sunday box. I’d pull it down when it was time to go to church. I remember very distinctly, like I would find free time to read the Bible once in a while, and when I did, I loved the Word of God. I loved what was in it, but then I would try to make a habit of reading the Word and it just wouldn’t happen. It just wouldn’t happen. And I couldn’t figure that out, but I had a sense something wasn’t right.

And then in 2012, after taking some medication to quit smoking, I had a bad reaction. The medication was Chantix, so it was crazy. But anyways, during this medication reaction, most of 2012, I couldn’t function. I couldn’t function in so much that, like I was scared I was going to die constantly. And other than describing it this way, this is the best way I could describe it, I could not feel God. I could not feel His presence. It felt like he was a million miles away. And there was this constant pain that was emotional in my soul, and it sucks so bad, and the only way I got through the days was watching sermons on this little tablet. I would just sit there and watch people like John MacArthur, and I would listen over and over again to all these different sermons to try to keep my mind preoccupied. Medical help was not sought during this time, just prayer and crying out to God. I did ultimately end up in a hospital, and they gave me a Valium, but that was the extent of any kind of medical care I got during this time, I just kept going to God. And I don’t have a problem with medication or anything like that. I just, I did not feel like that was the right thing for me. So I just kept watching those sermons and crying out to God, and then I came out of that fog towards the end of the year. And found myself the next year in 2013, but things still didn’t feel right. I didn’t have consistency in reading my Bible. I knew there was something wrong, and I found myself. I remember laying on my apartment floor, staring at the ceiling with tears running down my eyes and cheeks, and I knew that prayer in my heart at that time was God, I don’t know how to make you the center of my life. I try and I try and I try. I need your help. And it reminds me of Psalm 34:18, it says The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart and save such as have a contrite spirit. He met me in that pain, and it would take a little bit of time to really work that out, but He heard that prayer.

Finally, we get into the writing.

So I’ve always loved buying and selling on eBay. So basically, that quick and dirty of that whole eBay buying and selling. You buy cheap and then you turn around and sell it for a profit on eBay. It works great if you have inventory. The biggest pain in my butt when it came to eBay was I would find awesome deals, but the product would run out.

And then in 2014 I stumbled upon something called Amazon KDP, and I figured out that people were writing books, products you could put up for sale in the Amazon store, and if someone bought it, product wouldn’t go away. I was like, I gotta try this. Because at that time, I was trying different businesses, all this kind of junk, because I’ve always kind of had that entrepreneur spirit within me. And I was like, this, this could be good. Let’s try it out. Wrote a couple books, basic books, and they were like, self help, little tiny pamphlets. But that first month, I made $50. $50 doesn’t sound like a lot, but to a guy in his 20s, it’s like 50 bucks. That’s a good deal. So I was like, I’m gonna try this. This is this is good. And I started writing more and more books that were like, how to clean your RV, that kind of thing. And my faith was still inconsistent, even though I had that moment on the floor with the tears and the prayer and everything, I still hadn’t found that change, but God was using this time in my life to draw me towards purpose. I believe that. He had a plan for my life. And I was on that path, even if it looks like it was just pure selfish. This guy just wants to make some money. So anyways, I kept making those little junk books and making a little bit of money. And I got to the point where, for one it was boring. Those kind of books suck, and nobody likes them. Nobody’s happy about them. And I started looking at fiction. I was like, this is interesting. These people will read one book by the author and then come back for another book. I was like, That makes a lot more sense, because if, if Joe Schmo buys how to clean your RV, he’s not gonna come back. He got the book about the RV, it’s one and done. But with fiction, they’re gonna keep coming back. So I began researching, and I found Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson is a super, mega fantasy author that’s created amazing works, and he’s done a lot. He. But anyways, Brandon Sanderson has a YouTube channel- Write About Dragons. And it’s like, okay, I don’t want to write about dragons. Well, maybe I do, but I want to learn writing is this helpful? So I dug into the videos, and I soon discovered he’s not teaching just about dragons. He’s teaching about world building. He’s teaching about dialog. He’s teaching in a way that’s interesting and engaging. And I consumed all his content, all his videos, and I started putting that into practice. And I started with fantasy. I tried fantasy and science fiction right out the gate. They were a blast to write. So much more fun than how to clean your RV. And I was like, okay, I can do this. I can do this. Released those books and tank, tank, nothing. And at the time, I’m thinking, this sucks. Maybe I can’t write very well, or I don’t know something isn’t right. And then I did some more research, and I started to realize that these are very competitive markets, and some of the panacea books out there, we’re talking they’re mega, mega big. So then I looked at Christian romance, I was like, I’m a Christian, and I I’m married, so maybe I got a little bit of romance. So I wrote a Christian romance at the end of 2014. That book did very well, and I was young at the time, so the next part makes more sense, if I tell you that ahead of time. But so that was December 2014 I quit my job in January 2015 that’s how confident I was that this was the direction I needed to go, and so I started writing Christian romance full time, and it sucked.

I quickly realized as I was putting these stories together, I didn’t want to focus on the romance. I wanted to focus on the faith element. So these stories of faith and people overcoming hard times with faith, I started to realize is I tried to piece these together. I don’t have the best relationship with God. It was like a very strong reminder of that moment on the apartment floor. And I was like, Oh no. So I was just kind of scatterbrain, trying to figure things out, struggling very hard. Few months later… So I quit in January, and then in April, 2015 a situation happened with my sister in law, where she was homeless, and my two nephews needed a place to stay, and long story short, they came to stay with us, and it was difficult. So we had Emma part time, and then we got these two little boys, age one and two coming to live with us. They were feral cats, is the way I like to phrase it, because that’s the only way it makes sense. They were running all over the house or ripping stuff off the shelves. It was just pure chaos in our home. And I’m trying to write, trying to figure out how to take care of these kids, how to teach them how to go to bed, how to eat chicken, normal food they came from a hard place. Keep it at that. And anyways, so the pressure is mounting. And then, for reasons I won’t go into we had to restrict visitation from the biological mother, because situations were escalating, and that created drama with her, and it created drama with my in laws, so I’m struggling to write. Got two new kids in the house, and everybody’s mad in my wife’s family at what we’re doing. And it was crazy how intense everything was. But looking back? at my life? I realized it’s exactly the pressure, the hardship, the difficulty, that God used as a catalyst to drive me to him. Because what happened next was I went to God because I couldn’t do it on my own. My parents were very supportive of what we were doing at the time and but they didn’t have answers to all these difficulties and questions about the boys and about the drama and the relationships and everything. So I begged God. I went to Him. I was like, Lord, everything’s a mess. I’m trying to write. I’m trying to take care of these kids. I’m trying, trying, trying.

I realized through prayer and through talking to God that I need to get to know Him, and so what I did was I took my Bible and I started reading from page one, cover to cover, and every time I had questions. I’d go look them up. I needed to get to know God before I could implement what He teaches in His Word, I had to read His Word. And really, that was a turning point in my life, and more importantly, in my relationship with God. Through this one act of obedience and going to him, reading His word and getting to know him, it changed everything in my life. It realigned my life, and it made the heart to heart connection with God. Previously, I knew about God. Knew lots of stuff about God. I’ve been in church my entire life, but I didn’t carry a love inside my heart for Him, and who He is, and that reshaping through that difficult time gave me the fuel and the energy I needed, not only to write, but to care for the new children in my life, to take care of my wife, navigate marriage, navigate the difficulties in the relationships. The Lord blessed me with growth in every area of my life, and I went on to publish 65 total books in those next seven years. And it wasn’t always easy, but it was beneficial, and it was, it was a great time. And it reminds me of the feeding of the 5000 that miracle was awesome. And you know, a little boy with the sack lunch brought it to Jesus, and he turned it around. He turned the situation around just by somebody coming to Him with the little they had. And that’s how it felt in my life at that time, was I got nothing. I don’t even know anything about fiction, and I don’t have much of a relationship with You (God). But please help. God. Please help. He said, I’ll help you. Just come to Me, and I’ll be honest, all the books weren’t number one best sellers. Okay, books don’t just fly off the bookshelves once you hit publish. And in fact, a lot of them didn’t sell incredibly well. And the motivation to keep going forward is not purely financial. It cannot be because some of the creative work that we do in the kingdom of God is not something that we see in the here and now. I would argue that most the benefit that these books produce touch eternity, and the reviews help confirm that reality, because people, people say that the books aren’t preachy. But you know what, I’ve been reading my Bible more. Like, who knows how many threads in that person’s life, for example, is impacted by their one act of obedience from reading a story I wrote. And it’s not to brag, it’s to highlight a reality that we never see the full picture. The Word reminds us that His thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways are not our ways. When things happen in life, good or bad, a seed is sown, and just like with an apple seed, you throw that seed in the ground and water it. You’re not getting one apple. You’re getting an apple tree. And when we do good works that have been prepared for us by God, there is harvest that goes on. And if you’re in it for the money, it’s not a good, good way to live. And that was also part of the realignment, I believe, during that time in my life, it was like, hey, do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to make a lot of money? Because you can’t do both. And, you know, there, there was a moment when I was writing fiction, where I was tempted to go write secular stories, to go write what sells. But in those moments of temptation, we have a choice. We have to either choose God’s way or our way. And God’s way is always better.

So I wrote full time from 2015 until 2022.

In 2022 I started to feel burnt out and I was losing steam. And the thing about my journey and experience with writing and doing all this is it’s not me, it’s God that blesses me and equips me to do this work. And it honestly felt as if God lifted His hand away from me in 2022. And I did not have the drive and the passion and the joy in my heart to keep writing. Yes, I wrote 65 books. So it seemed like I had been busy, but I suddenly lost my drive in 2022 and I found a job in IT back in, you know, what I was doing before I started writing, and so I got that job, and I was excited to have a steady paycheck, because, you know, for seven, eight years, I didn’t have one, so it was like consistent income. And I was excited. My wife was everybody was excited, but one person. That was my dad, my earthly father, Joseph Chapin, had always believed in my writing, he always encouraged me. And even though he didn’t have a lot of advice with, you know, prose and character arcs and all that kind of stuff, he did have the most helpful piece of advice, he would disperse to me every time I would talk to him about different ideas I had, he would say, just keep writing. Just keep writing. And I told him about the job, and he wasn’t happy, but he said, Hey, don’t stop writing. Don’t stop writing. I was like, Dan, I’m just taking a little break. It’ll be fine. Come on. So that happened in September 2022 I got that job, I was working, and things were going along. And then march 2023 my father passed away.

It was sudden. It was tragic. It was some health complication, stuff I don’t need to go into, but that was one of those moments in life that changed you and it changed me.

Up until this point, I was writing on the side still, while I was doing IT. After he passed, a darkness of grief descended upon my life, and suddenly I couldn’t write a word.

And looking back it was like up until this point, God had taught me through His scripture and through the stories he blessed me to write. He taught me. This is how people overcome difficulty with faith when they come to me. And then in 2023 God took me by the hand, and he walked me through my own story.

During that time I was super sad that my dad was dead and that he was gone and I couldn’t talk to him anymore, but the joy of the Lord was there. I found myself often retreating to my room to go pray, and it was like drops of Heaven dripping into my soul. The worst experience of my life was losing my father, but God’s comfort eclipsed all the pain, and I realized through that experience that the stories I’ve been telling that were fictitious, that were just made up, inspirational in my mind, based on Scripture. I realized in that moment that it’s true.

It’s all true.

There is a joy that the Lord gives us through our grief, through our difficulties, and we can be glad for he has overcome the world, no matter what happens, no matter what happens.

Anyways.

Back to my backstory. I didn’t write in 2023. I tried. I sat down quite a few times and tried. Still didn’t feel that hand returned to me, and that grief cloud of darkness, I guess that’s what you can call it. I don’t know it was thick and it hung out. I kept working. I couldn’t write, so I decided, You know what, I’m never gonna write again. And I enrolled in school, and in a six month block, I took 16 classes and passed them at WGU. Which is basically a school where you just got to study and then take the test and you can pass a class. And I, I thought for sure, this is my life now. I’m back in IT. I’m done with books. I’ll never write again.

And then near the end of 2023, I saw my mom struggling. At the time, she was living in Odessa, Texas, where her and my father lived, but she had been a housewife her entire marriage, so she didn’t have skill set and ability to take care of the mortgage. So I was like, hey, I’ll help. So after my IT job in Idaho, we packed up and we moved to Odessa. Luckily, my brother in the next town over Midland, he worked for the city, and they had an IT position open for system administrator, and I applied. We drove down to Odessa, not knowing if I would get that job, but trusting that God had a plan through this. And then we got to Odessa, and we, uh, unpacked, and we got settled in. And then about, I think it was a couple weeks after we got there, I got the phone call that I did indeed get the job. So then I got to work with my brother and live with my mother, which was part of the plan, I think, because that, that dark grief cloud started to dissipate. And by the spring, late spring of 2024, God’s hand returned to me and equipped me to be able to write again. And I wrote Echoes of Eternity, the only connected element to my father’s death is the fact that the main character lost his dad. And yeah, that book was difficult to write. It was a painful process. It required a lot of tears, a lot of pain and heartache as I pieced together that story. And yeah, I also, at that time, was dealing with the fact that the house was still in my dad’s name, not my mom’s, and she was backed up on payments, so we couldn’t make a payment, and we couldn’t get.. we were trying to get things moved over into her name, that way we could restart the payments. But everything we did was like hitting a brick wall.

We were there for seven months and then, because we got notice of foreclosure, and because my mother relocated to Houston, I was like, I don’t know what to do here, and the kids and my wife and I… we were missing our life in Idaho. We had spent our entire marriage there, and we had friends and we had relationships, and the town was just better than Odessa, Texas, if you’ve been there, you know what I mean. So we packed up and we went back to Idaho. We thought that’s where we needed to go. I’ll pause here and go ahead and talk about something. It is related. You ever wonder if you’re in God’s will or not? Yeah, I’ve there’s been multiple times I wonder, is this really God’s will? Is this so God’s will, I think often includes times where you’re like, oh, no, this isn’t right here. Let me explain. So we got back to Idaho, we ended up in a house we couldn’t afford. I couldn’t find work. Well, I found some jobs, but it they weren’t gonna pay rent like it was… Here. Here’s the low point. You ready for this?

I was working in Walmart, pushing a cart to fill it with groceries and stuff, and we only have one car, so crystal needed it to take the kids to school and stuff, and it was 3:30 in the morning, and I’m walking to work,

and I tripped going up a curb, and I fell face first into somebody’s yard. It was in that moment

that I truly realized that . . . this was not, this was not God’s will, or at least, I really hope it wasn’t. But you know, as I move forward, I would eventually realize I needed to fall face first, because in the following months, couldn’t find work that paid the bills. And then my sister said, Hey, why don’t you come to Waco, Texas, you can come live rent free till you find work. And we’re like, Okay, let’s go. And we went down there. And I gotta tell you when someone shows you hospitality, kindness, love in the way she showed us it . . . it is like the sweetest aroma in life. It was such a peaceful time. And it, it was intensified because I fell in that yard, because I just went through what we did in Idaho. There’s a lot more to that story, but the fact is, it was a difficult time, and the intensity of that difficulty made the relief of Waco so much better. And I just, I thank God for that. I thank my sister Miriam for that, and I’ll probably try to have her on the podcast. Sometimes she’s sweet lady, and . . . that makes her sound old, doesn’t it? She’s not a lady. She’s my sister. Anyways, all right, let’s move on here. So I got down to Texas, and I found work pretty quickly. And then at the end of 2024. See, we’re almost here. We’re almost to the here, now. So in 2024 towards the end, I started writing more. I felt relaxed. I felt like I could breathe. So I started writing a new series, and I wrote and published two more books, and now I’m working on book three of that same series, plus some non fiction. And yeah, things are going great. Right now I’m in the process of stepping away from my full time it job here in Waco and transitioning back into full time writing.

So that’s my story, and now, hopefully you feel like you have a better sense of who I am, what I’m about, what I’ve been through a little bit, and hopefully it’s helpful. And as we wrap this up, I just I think the takeaway here is God’s people aren’t immune to difficulty in this life. In a lot of ways. I personally believe it’s amplified because we’re not just out there doing jobs and living life. If you’re a Christian, whether you’re creative or not, if you’re walking and following in the steps of Christ, you’re doing battle with darkness every single day. You are shining a light in the darkness, and there’s going to be resistance, there’s going to be difficulty, and it’s just part of the package deal. Jesus tells us to count the costs, and he tells us to be of good cheer, because he has overcome the world, and we can take comfort in these facts, in these realities.

Thank you for listening to today’s podcast. I know it was a little unconventional and a little different, but I hope that this story has blessed you, and I think it’s important that our stories are told no matter who you are and what you’ve been through.

I do want to ask if this story has encouraged you, please share it with someone who needs hope and encouragement and follow the show so you don’t miss what is in the next episode.

You’ve been listening to the Beyond Sunday podcast with Benjamin Chapin.

Remember faith was never meant to stay inside church walls. See you next time. Benjamin.