by Jeff Parker, as told on the Compelled Podcast
I didn’t set out to be a white-collar criminal.
I didn’t set out to be someone who stole money from his company, stole money from his best friend.
My life was slipping away at an alarming rate.
How a Church Bus Poker Game Turned Into a Secret Gambling Habit
It’s spring of 2004. I’m 25 years old, newly married, out of church for the first time, and kind of fully starting to understand the call on my life as being a Christ follower. Still holding on to some sin that no one knows about, but all of a sudden it’s like some pieces in my life are coming into place, and it was a really exciting time.
Funny enough, I learned poker on the back of a church bus as a 17-year-old, and I’m a numbers guy. I’m competitive, and poker matched that competitive spirit with this numbers-oriented mind. And I was really good at it. We were playing penny, nickel, dime type stuff, and I made like 40 bucks. I just remember that. But I also had fun in the camaraderie of it. It was just always something that kind of dangled out there.
A couple of buddies began playing poker, so we did some home games from time to time, and that was fun. I enjoyed it; I was good at it. Everyone throws in ten bucks; someone walks home with fifty. It seemed kind of harmless from that standpoint. It probably was harmless for others, but something was brewing in me. It was not that it was harmful, and then all of a sudden you have an option to play anonymously online, and no one knows. And that was a draw. If you’re trying to keep up your facade, I don’t want to be seen at a casino. I don’t even want to play a high-stakes game with my friends, because all of a sudden that’s out in the open. But online poker was something hidden.
The Truth, But Not The Whole Truth
My wife would know; she’d hear me say, “Hey, I’m gonna stop and play a ten-dollar ante tournament.” You contribute ten dollars; that’s all you’re in for, and maybe the top twenty people take home some money. She might know about something small like that. Or a community group member might have caught wind and said, “Hey, be careful, but that seems okay.”
Before long, I was depositing more money, and I was playing at strange hours in order to hide how much I was playing. And what started as a ten-dollar tournament would turn into a fifty-dollar tournament, then a hundred-dollar tournament, a thousand-dollar tournament, that kind of thing.
Eventually, I realized I needed to shed light on this. So I shed light on it. From a poker standpoint, we decided, ” Let’s not do this anymore.” I shared my decision with my five guys. They made sure my wife knew. And then we put up precautions so I wouldn’t gamble online anymore.
I was still kind of hiding pornography at that moment, so I’m not a hundred percent in the light. When you don’t confess the full hundred percent, whatever you hold on to becomes the hundred percent.
A Devastating Diagnosis
I was vice president of Igniter Media by then — the company my friend Rob had started to help churches share the gospel, and it was up to fifteen employees. Rob and I had drifted into separate small groups but were still close.
I was about to turn 30, and in my mind, I’m like, “30…that’s like a biblical turning point for some people, right? King David became king of Israel when he was 30. Christ’s public ministry started when he was 30.” And I thought, “All these things are in place in my life this decade. This decade is going to be my gift to God.”
It was a little bit of my pride before the fall. My wife was pregnant with our second kid, and she was going into the obstetrician’s office. The OB found some troublesome cells, and it turned out they were precancerous cells, and it was caused by an STD. In that moment, I was devastated. That STD was from me, from my relationships before we had gotten married. And I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. In my mind, I was thinking, “Wait, the guy who’s going to crush his 30s just gave his wife an STD?!” I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it.
My wife was wanting to go tell others, just to kind of help others come in to pray. She was not mad at me — those previous relationships had been disclosed, so I didn’t have to clean up that side of it. We shared it with the community group, and I just wanted the conversation over as soon as possible. And she wanted to tell her parents, and I didn’t want to, or at least didn’t want to be a part of it. And so, to my shame, she had that conversation with her mom and dad, and I didn’t own that moment.
Using Gambling as an Escape from Shame
After finding out the news of the STD and the precancerous cells — which ultimately turned out to be nothing, or at least never materialized into anything — I found a place to play online poker again, and I was just playing a little bit. It was almost like a coping mechanism. It was an escape. And that’s a way of not calling it what it was. It was willful wandering into sin. So I was turning 30, my friends were like, ” Let’s go to Vegas1″ And I’m like, “That’s the last place I should go right now. I feel like sin’s not just crouching at my door — I feel like I’ve opened the door and let it in. Not a good place for me to go.”
No one knew anything about me playing poker again. My wife didn’t know that I was playing online. There was still this sense of, “Whoa, gambling has been a thing for you in the past; do we need to be careful here? Should you go?” We kind of had those discussions. And so what we decided was I would take five hundred dollars, use it however I wanted. If I spent it on a magician or a show, that’s part of my money. If I lost it all, that’s my money — we’ll call it entertainment, and that’s it. I left my personal debit card at home, left my personal credit cards at home. I thought, “I’m spending five hundred dollars this weekend.”
What Happens in Vegas…
So we head out to Vegas for a couple of nights. Good friends, having a good time, enjoying one another. But sure enough, I’m not winning; I’m losing money. We’re down to maybe one night left, and I’ve probably only got about sixty bucks left. But again, I’m wanting to play some more. We’re out kind of celebrating — me and about nine other guys, ten total. And we go to pay for the meal, and the little machine you put your credit card into gets placed directly to my right, and it goes around the table counterclockwise. So I’m going to be the last person to get the bill, and everyone in Vegas has cash. To me, passing this thing around the table lasted a year, but it probably took five minutes. About a minute or two in, I realized I had my work credit card with me.
I could put my work credit card down, pay for the whole meal, pocket the cash, and keep playing. So that’s what I did. Put my card down and took thirty-four hundred dollars in cash. And in that moment, I thought, “I’ve stolen money from my company. Oh gosh, this is a sin you don’t come back from.” Literally minutes afterwards, we’re leaving the table, and one of my friends stopped me and goes, “Hey, are you okay?”
I said, “Yeah, I’m fine, I’m okay, I’m good!” That was that first little bit of hardening my heart toward what I was doing and the path that I was on.
I think ultimately I made my money back; I don’t really remember all the details. I went back home on the plane ride home, and I remember thinking, “I’ve got to tell people. I’ve got to tell Rob, I’ve got to tell my wife, I’ve got to tell people.”
The plane lands, and I’ve changed my mind. I’m thinking, “I can’t; that’s too big; who knows what might happen.” So I paid the company back and just kind of kept my mouth shut. I was the accountant guy, so I could slide the money back in without anyone knowing. I was the one who had created the systems and the checks and balances, which weren’t much of a deterrent from that standpoint. So I was able to control the situation entirely.
The Snare of Embezzlement
I ended up trying to figure out how to fund my sin by not using personal debit cards or credit cards, stuff that my wife could see. Fast forward to the middle of 2008, and I began using the company card again to put money into my online gambling accounts. That number started to add up.
By the end of 2008, it had probably become about three to five thousand dollars. In my mind, I’m beginning to compartmentalize it. I’m beginning to harden my heart toward sin. I can look back now and go, “What are you doing?” But back then I had lost that sensitivity from the first time I put the card down in Vegas. I had now kind of hardened myself.
That behavior continued for a couple more years. I was the number two guy at the company. I was someone who’d been in a community group for seven years at my church. I was 32, still holding up a facade of having things all together. And so I was being asked to lead different things at church — to lead a small group in student ministries specifically. And that’s tiring. It’s exhausting to almost fake being transformed by Christ, so as to be invited into leadership positions. It was an exhausting double life that was beginning to materialize.
Faking Faith
I started to compartmentalize my faith. There was no walk with Christ during this time. When we were in community groups and someone asked, “What are you learning from your Bible?” I’d pick a psalm, or just pick something random, and kind of go, “Here’s what I’m learning.” And really, I’m not — I hadn’t been really reading my Bible at all.
So I was faking what God’s doing in my life. But I was also compartmentalizing the sin, thinking, “Hey, I’m going to do what I did before: pay the company back; it’s not going to be that big of a deal.” And to be clear, it was a really big deal. I was stealing money from the company. Even if I pay it back, it was still stolen money. Paying it back didn’t change the fact that it was a sin that was not being dealt with, and no one knew anything about it, and it was piling up.
Digging a Deeper Hole
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being online gambling and turned into the stock market — day trading. I’d caution anyone against day trading, but for me it was definitely a mindset. Gambling is a mindset. At the end of the day, it’s not just something you do in a casino. You can do it in any number of ways.
The stock market was a mechanism by which I gambled. And it went from the stock market to selling and reselling sports tickets. This was from 2009 to 2011. I was starting to use the company credit card however I wanted to. I was using it to fund gambling, but I was also using it to buy me a meal, buy me a shirt, pay for an expense I just didn’t want to use my personal card for. That number was just starting to add up. I didn’t know exactly what it was. I was justifying it in any number of ways in my head, but in reality, there was no justification for it.
Six Figures in Stolen Money: Hitting Rock Bottom
We’d bought a second home as an investment back in 2008, and part of me was hoping online poker could help cover the mortgage. When that didn’t pan out, along with other losses, I went right back to the same well.
I remember one time sitting at the ATM, and I was literally cashing a fifty-thousand-dollar check, and I was even thinking, “I’m going to get caught right now — like the police are just going to come right now.” There’s a proverb that talks about how the wicked flee when no one’s pursuing them. I felt like people were pursuing me; people were closing in on me; I was dead meat. In that moment, there was no denying that it was just blatant embezzlement. This was true white-collar crime. This was stealing from my best friend. This was deceiving my wife. This was ruining my family. At that time, I had three kids, and the amount I had taken was six figures’ worth of stolen money.
I did have genuine feelings about some things even in the midst of so much deceit. One was that I loved our company. We were sharing the gospel, and it had gone well beyond the United States at this point. The mission of Igniter is really awesome, and I loved it, and I still do. I loved the employees we were working with, and it was awesome. And in a way, I think I was helpful to the company at times — Rob would, I think, say the same thing. And at the same time, I acknowledged I may be the end of this company. It started as three hundred dollars in Vegas in 2008; six years later it was over a hundred thousand. I had no idea it would ever get to that level. I didn’t set out to be a white-collar criminal. I didn’t set out to be someone who stole money from his company, stole money from his best friend. My life was slipping away at an alarming rate.
The Day I Didn’t Confess
I remember October 28th, 2013. I was desperate to confess. I’d been watching people at my church live in freedom, watching people who had confessed their sin be transformed by Christ in powerful ways, and it made me think, “Lord, I want that. That’s what I want.” It would have been nice to have confessed the full hundred percent a long, long time ago — when I was eighteen, back to my youth pastor. It would have been nice to confess a hundred percent to my wife and Rob one year into marriage. It would have been nice to confess a hundred percent three or four years later. But now the hundred percent felt like a thousand percent. And I didn’t know what to do.
And I remember writing down October 28th, 2013: this is who I want to be, this is who I want to be. And I just wrote down this huge, long list. I think I titled it, “I want this list to be true of me at the time of my funeral.” It was like I was living with my end in mind, and I wrote down all that I wanted to become. And in my mind, I knew what I needed to do. I needed to confess.
In that moment, as I was writing, there was a guy who came walking by — his name’s Jim, who was just kind of a hero of the faith at our church. Older man, that is, just awesome. And really, the Spirit of God said, “Tell him right now, just get it in the light, tell someone right now.”
And there’s Jim. And time just slowed down, and my mind is screaming, “Tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him!”
And I didn’t tell him.
I was convinced my best plan of action — as I quenched the Spirit of God in that moment — was to keep my mouth shut, pay the company back, and brace for eternity, so to speak, brace for judgment. A horrible plan. But in that instance, I feared man more than I feared God. I feared what man might think of me as opposed to doing the faithful thing in God’s eyes.
To Be Continued…
Jeff’s story is difficult to read because, if we’re honest, the pattern is probably more familiar than we’d like to admit. Most of us have never gambled away six figures or stolen money, but most of us do know what it’s like to carry something that we’re afraid to bring into the light. Maybe a sin we’ve kept hidden or a decision we regret. We’re afraid that if people really knew, they might see us differently.
Jeff said something in a story that’s worth repeating. He said, “When you don’t confess the full 100%, whatever you hold on to becomes the 100%.” That’s the danger of secret sin. It rarely stays contained.
You don’t want to miss part two of this story, and you can go ahead and listen to it right now on the Compelled Podcast (https://compelledpodcast.com/listen) anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thank you, Paul, for sharing part of Jeff’s story with us!
