My name is Nathanael Philip Abad Mosher and together with Nehemiah Williams, we are PPDK Productions. We are two men with one story and one mission: to live a life worthy of sharing with others. We seek to redeem our gifts while embracing our sensitivity through mutual accountability and the grace of God. We were brought together because of two things: exceptional gifts at the cost of exceptional sensitivity. I entered UCLA as a biomedical engineer with secret dreams of becoming a comedian. Nehemiah went his way to the renowned Berklee College of Music to pursue God through song. As we embarked on our respective hero’s journeys, we both hid a darkness lurking underneath. The once tiny monster relegated to the corners of our life grew and ran roughshod over their lives. We both spiraled into debilitating depression as pornography decimated the integrity of our relationships. Yet when we saw nothing but death, the Light of Truth appeared and we surrendered everything to Life itself. We’re starting with our stories because that’s what we know. We can’t tell you how to live, but we can tell you how we survived our own. Tomorrow I’ll be releasing Part 1 of my sit down interview with Nehemiah, where he goes in depth into his testimony. I can’t wait for you to hear it. It’s a thrilling, wonderful, beautiful ride that I got to sit in on just last week. Our goal to is to explore how people’s calling becomes their calling card, how vocation fuels occupation, how “to work” can be to worship when we understand who we were made for. For the first episode of our first podcast series, “From Work To Worship”, I’m going to be sharing something I’ve been sitting on for a while: my testimony. I had the privilege of presenting it at a men’s retreat called Cornerstone and a brother in Christ said, “You should make it funny.” It ended up being about my relationship with humor itself, and more importantly, the creator all things, and humor itself. It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done and it’s also been the most freeing. On January 18, Nehemiah and I are going to be performing our respective testimonies through our respective storytelling forms, mine comedy, his music, and we’re going to show how our stories intersect and compound into a deep, deep well of light and life. Tickets will go live tomorrow with his podcast as well. Stay tuned and mark your calendars. Follow us as we climb the tallest mountains, slay the fiercest dragons, and pursue the highest good while confronting the greatest evil we’ve ever known. I’ll also be touring the set with a friend of mine, Sean Conrad, and we’re going to be turning our testimonies into stand-up sets. I’m thinking that I’ve created a new genre of stand-up comedy, “worship comedy”, or it’s just the oldest thing in the books, good old-fashioned, honest, authentic storytelling. This is my testimony. It's the story of how I met God through pursuing stand up comedy. I cried a lot while writing it and that's how I know it's hilarious. It's an incredible story and I can confidently say that because I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I actively resisted going through every single part of it and I'm only alive to joke about it now because of grace. So I hope you enjoy it just about as much as I hated going through so many parts of it. And I hope above all, that you know there's someone out there who wants nothing more than to know you deeply, and to love you, so that you can be set free. I hope you enjoy it. Here it is. This is the full transcript if you want to read/ share with someone later: I cried a lot while writing this, which is how I know it's hilarious. I’ll explain. See, growing up for me was easy, ‘cause I was better than everybody. At least, I thought I was. I had a superiority complex. If you don’t know what that is, you’re stupid. I was good at school, athletic, I could read at a collegiate level when I was only 6, I was good at Math too, not ‘cause I’m Asian, but because Math itself is racist and so is being good at anything at all. I entered UCLA with a perfect score on the math section of the ACT and then went on to major in English, ‘cause I’m a man who works on his weaknesses, ladies. It’s all men in this room, can we change that? At my 10 year high school reunion, Alexa Madden, one of the “pretty” nerds, told me that everyone in 3rd grade thought I was a genius ‘cause every day I’d walk into school carrying the Bible in a Ziploc bag ‘cause Man does not live off of ham and cheese sandwiches made by his Mom alone but every Word from the Bread of Life Himself. Everyone was like, “Nathan is reading the biggest book I’ve ever seen in my life. That guy is going places!” I went from Genesis to Exodus to Leviticus and then never tried reading the Bible again until twenty years later. Leviticus was confusingly boring. Faith to me was a game to be won. Every Friday we’d go to All Workmen are Not Ashamed, otherwise known as AWANA and we’d play games, memorize Bible Verses, do Bible trivia, AWANA games, AWANA Olympics, Bible verse reciting competitions, we’d get AWANA bucks, spend them at the AWANA store, it was like Chuck E. Cheese for Christians. It was Chuck E. Cheesus. We’d do pinewood derby competitions and my Dad would replicate Hot Wheels using his carpentry, engineering, and physics knowledge to crush the competition, always winning my sister and I a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in the design and speed category. We were winners in Christ, except occasionally to the Altobellis. Their Mom and Dad were both engineers. What I’m trying to say is, I wanted to want to want you, Jesus, but most of the time, I wanted a toy nerf gun at the AWANA store more. What I wanted the most was to win. What I really wanted to win was the heart of my Father. When I was young, I was afraid to go to bed alone ‘cause I was too creeped out by this villain from Bible Man, the TV show. Bible Man was like Batman for Christians. He would fight villains with scripture, like “1st John 5:4 says through our faith comes victory,’” and the villain would be like, “Curse you Bible Man, if it wasn’t for your knowledge of scripture you’d be nothing, ahhhh.” He’d hit him with a lightsaber and the villain would explode. His sidekick would be like, “Perfect timing to end the wining,” and there was Bible Girl too. She was a white girl, cause they’re the holiest of all girls. He would fight against villains like, “The Cheater” who would kidnap kids and give them answers to exams, which is like the most helpful pedophile ever. “Are you gonna molest us?” “No, but I will help you get into Harvard.” There was the Fibbler, Master Misery, Dr. Fear, the Prince of Pride, and the worst of all, the Gossip Queen. She would get kids to gossip, singing, “Come a little closer, have I got news for you, a tiny morsel of gossip, it’s very juicy too, this harmless information flows from me just like a faucet, but what else can you do when you’re the Queen of Gossip?” She was a blue-haired witch that looked like her makeup was done by a 5-year-old Play-Doh maestro with a budget of 5 dollars. She was frighteningly disgusting! I would get nightmares and my Dad would tuck me in, staying with me until I fell asleep, and when I would get afraid he would remind me that I was his buddy. He’d whisper, “Buddy buddy. Buddy buddy”. As I fell more and more asleep he’d whisper it ever so slightly, lightly aspirating like a heartbeat, “B-ddy B-ddy”. I’d say it back like a satellite call, “B-ddy B-ddy. B-ddy B-ddy”. Next thing I knew, I was asleep and Gossip Queen would melt away like the wicked witch she was! In sports, I became a star pitcher and my Dad would train me. We’d throw night and day wherever and whenever we could until when I was 12, as a closing All Star Level B-Team pitcher, I averaged 2.2 strikeouts an inning, until I threw out my arm and was never the same. Metaphorically and literally, my balls dropped. My Mom, my sister, and my longtime haircutter, Priya, told me to get the Bieber-Sheckler-Beatles combo flippy haircut, and as my hair went to and fro, I got turned upside down by Lust. My middle school best friend Jaimal and I were sitting in the backseat of his Mom’s car on the way to a math competition and I said, “Jaimal, don’t get a girlfriend. Focus on school. Women are a distraction.” A few months later, his Mom said, “What’s up with Nathan?” Jaimal said, “Nathan got a girlfriend. He’s not so into math anymore.” Jaimal went on to Harvard. I went on to lose my virginity at age 16. He focused on hidden figures. I focused on curves. He was the loser. I was the winner. I built a new identity as the kid in AP class who smoked weed on the weekends and partied, but still got solid A minuses, weighted of course. I made new friends with the kids of “Blanco Way”, a horseshoe-shaped street off of Sepulveda and Sawtelle that I still live on to this day and every weekend we’d get invited to anywhere from seven to eight different high school parties at different schools. My sophomore year there was even a little chart in the girl’s bathroom, titled “Cutest guys in 10th grade” and I was on that list. I was top 20 in grades, but more importantly I was top 10 in looks. I met a girl one weekend at a quinceanera and we made out and the next week she came over and said, “I’m sorry we didn’t go all the way.” A few months later my friend Henry let me lose my virginity in his guest house while his parents were away and my heart walloped for two hours as I panicked about the shame and guilt I accrued by disobeying the principles I had learned growing up in a Christian household. I was disobeying my parents. I was going to Hell. A few months later I found out she was cheating on me and I was devastated. For her, I had written poetry, with her I had felt close t
