Chris Ostberg

Chris Ostberg grew up homeschooled in a small town in Massachusetts, the son of a Harvard-educated mother and an architect father who traveled overseas frequently. His childhood faith, shaped by a small Episcopalian church, always felt more like a set of rules than a relationship, something he could read in Leviticus and conclude didn't leave much room for anyone. He enlisted in the Army at 18 wanting to be an infantryman, rose quickly through the ranks of the 82nd Airborne, and led a squad into the 2003 invasion of Iraq at 21 years old, but not before making a private, half-serious bargain with God on a rooftop in Kuwait, promising to go to church every Sunday if he survived. He survived. He did not go to church again for twenty years.

What followed was a long stretch of disillusionment and self-inflicted damage. Chris came home from Iraq uncertain what the war had actually accomplished, left active duty for a relationship with a woman he barely knew, and spent sixteen years married to her marked by heavy drinking and repeated infidelity. He later transitioned into Civil Affairs, learned Arabic, and deployed again during the fight against ISIS, but an affair with a servicemember he worked alongside ended both his marriage and, after a lengthy investigation, his sixteen-year Army career, just short of retirement. He describes the identity collapse that followed as the hardest thing that ever happened to him, and in the same breath, the best.

Struggling to find steady work, Chris took a job roofing historic buildings on Fort Bragg, a season he found humbling and unexpectedly healing. It was during this stretch of rebuilding that his life pivoted again. On the day his marriage effectively ended, he looked up a girlfriend from his early twenties on Facebook and noticed she had been posting about her church. He sent her a simple message, "Hey, I see you still like Jesus," and she wrote back immediately, astonished he was even alive. They reconnected, and during a nine-month deployment to Somalia that followed, Chris began quietly re-engaging with his faith, watching sermons and reading scripture largely so he could talk it through with her.

Near the end of that deployment, in a moment of fear rather than conviction, Chris nearly destroyed the relationship, telling her he would never share her faith or build a family with her, even though he had already decided in private that was exactly what he wanted. They reconciled. He came home, they married, and roughly two years before this conversation, he was baptized, not as a single dramatic turning point, but as the next honest step in a faith he had spent two decades avoiding.

Today Chris works as a civilian connected to the military at Fort Bragg, raising a family with his wife. He remains unusually candid about the parts of faith that still don't come easily: a persistent uncertainty about whether he has enough of it, a gap between who he is at work and who he is at home, and an ongoing wrestling match between reading scripture for knowledge and actually living it out as wisdom.