Respawn: Born Again in the Digital Age

Hayden laughs when he tells me about his plan for surviving seventh grade, all those years ago: learn guitar to get girls to like him. "I grew up on '80s movies and rock music. Obviously, I need girls to like me," he explains with a self-deprecating grin. "Funny enough, you can learn guitar, but if you don't talk to girls, it doesn't matter."

The logic seemed bulletproof to a thirteen-year-old whose parents were in the middle of a devastating divorce.

This is how Hayden tells his story—with the kind of humor that comes from surviving something brutal and living to laugh about it. The divorce had turned his extended family into the Montagues and the Capulets - those warring clans from the story of Romeo and Juliet.  Everyone stopped talking to each other, and everything disappeared. A kid who had already struggled with belonging suddenly had no ground left to stand on.

So he found refuge where millions of lonely teenagers do: online gaming. Specifically, his friend Deven from school (username: BaconatorCombo5) invited him to play Halo 4 as part of an online clan. What started as a distraction quickly grew into a lifeline: for a few hours each night, while "the rest of life just sucked," Xbox Live offered something resembling friendship.

Then Robbie joined their clan, and Hayden’s story took an unexpected turn.

Though they had never met in person, Hayden learned through mid-game chatter that Robbie was a Christian. Robbie didn’t show up with a theological agenda, but casual mentions of Jesus just seemed to leak out of him, between firefights and respawns. 

“I had grown up ‘faith-adjacent’ - like, not devout, but my mom’s side of the family was Roman Catholic,” Hayden says. “So at first, I kinda just nodded along with Robbie, thinking, sure, I’m a Christian, I get it.” 

But Robbie kept talking. Not preaching—just mentioning things over the clan’s headsets like how “all of us are sinners" and "hell isn't just for murderers." When Hayden and his friends would talk about their parents' divorces (plural—this was apparently an epidemic in their gaming group), Robbie would gently offer a counter to their sadness and anger: Jesus Christ, a man of sorrows who could relate to heartbreak, a life raft to cling to in stormy seas. 

"It was this message of rest and forgiveness and unconditional love that I hadn't experienced even in my own family," Hayden says, the humor momentarily absent from his voice.

So he started reading the Bible. Not because anyone forced him, but because this kid on Xbox kept talking about something Hayden had never really heard before—genuine grace.

The crisis came on a school bus, reading the Sermon on the Mount. Christ's penetrating exposition of the law—that lust equals adultery, that anger equals murder—triggered what Hayden describes as a panic attack. 

"I just remember feeling this, like, burning feeling in my heart of condemnation and… just absolute fear,” he says, before laughing again. His response was endearingly naive: "Obviously this is a sign that God doesn't want me to listen to Metallica." 

He immediately deleted all his metal music. The conviction didn't budge. He tried to calm himself, repeating the mantra ‘think good thoughts’ - but the fear wouldn’t go away. 

That evening, back on Xbox with Robbie, Hayden confessed his terror with teenage directness: "I'm reading Matthew, but I feel like I'm doomed. Like I am definitely going to hell. I think I believe that this Jesus is God, and I believe that he's true, but I'm terrified because I know I'm not where he's saying I need to be."

This was Robbie's moment. Over the headset, he came in full force with the gospel—not as religious performance but as rescue. He explained that Hayden’s feelings were justified, that his ‘good thoughts’ and music-deleting was insufficient before God - that he was indeed failing in God’s eyes, and the only solution was to cry out for mercy and receive the righteousness that Christ offered. It was surely bad news, he told Hayden, but at the same time there is incredibly good news. 

“Suddenly, the crucifix I had seen my entire life wasn't just a picture of a dead guy we're supposed to feel bad for. I fully understood why he was up there and I understood that Christ died for me. To save me. And it was like a light went off.”

Hayden pauses, swallows. He searches for the right words, replaying the emotions of that day. 

“The gospel, for me, had two dimensions. First, I was way worse than I thought that I ever was. I thought I was killing it. I was actually way terrible,” he says, all hint of nervous laughter replaced by a steadiness, a hopeful gleam in his eye. “But second, and more powerful: I had complete forgiveness through Christ. And beyond forgiveness—adoption. Now you're my son - like, I've adopted you."

For a child of divorce, this wasn't abstract theology. It was existential rescue.

Ten years later, Hayden finds himself surrounded by the spiritual family he never thought he'd have - addressing, if not fully healing, his lifelong ache for belonging. There’s Pastor Bob, an old metal-head on the other side of the country, who actually answered a desperate teenager's email and became a lifelong mentor. Daniel, a house church pastor who discipled him. Joel Adams, who "shepherds my soul." His wife Brittany, who is actually impressed with his guitar playing - but whom he says he has learned to receive as a gift rather than an idol.

The list multiplies—he rattles off names with obvious affection: Steve Hart, Gabe Shippam, Ed Hart, Jon Schuler, Rick Green, Scott and Charissa Cooley, Peter and Melody Kind. "That's just a tiny bit of it," he says, almost embarrassed by the abundance.

Today, Hayden works with students, though he admits with characteristic self-doubt: "I didn't know how to talk to kids when I was a kid. How am I going to do this now?" But the memories of that age, and how hard it was for him, fill him with purpose and conviction.  

The redemptive arc is unmistakable. A lonely kid playing video games to escape his imploding family becomes a man surrounded by a "cloud of witnesses." The teenager who deleted Metallica to appease God discovers the finished work of the gospel and how much freedom we have in Christ. The boy who couldn't talk to girls now shares the gospel with a new generation.

You can laugh, but Jesus keeps working in unlikely ways—on the Sea of Galilee, or on the road to Damascus, or through an Xbox headset, in the most unlikely of spaces. Grace, it seems, travels through fiber optic cables as readily as it once traveled Roman roads. The gospel finds lonely kids wherever they gather, even in digital lobbies waiting for the next match to start.

In our fragmented age, God is building his church in places religious professionals would never think to look. Sometimes the voice calling you to repentance and faith doesn't come from a pulpit but from a teenager with a headset, leaking Jesus between rounds of Halo 4.