Dan Gaynor had heard it many times before, the idea that a creator was behind all we see and experience, but he didn’t believe it. In fact, Dan spent the first 30 years of his life believing God didn’t exist.
But a career-defining encounter on an elevator began to change his thinking.
At the time, Dan had applied for an advertising sales position at the Edmonton Journal. It was a job he very much wanted, but he had no idea of his chances. Then he met a woman on the elevator who just happened to be best friends with the Journal’s vice president of human resources. She put in a good word for him, and that led to a 22-year career with Southam, the company that owned the Journal and many other Canadian newspapers.
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“At that moment, I knew there was a God who knew me and cared about me,” said the 66-year-old southern Alberta husband, father, and grandfather.
“I didn’t reason it, I just knew.”
The fateful elevator encounter could not have been a coincidence, Dan said. But the realization that God existed and cared about him didn’t immediately lead to him committing his life to Jesus Christ.
“Every church experience I’d had in my life had been lousy, so I went on this New Age walk and spent the better part of the next 10 years on that path,” he said, while relaxing in the living room of his rural prairie home. “During all that time, God was incredibly gracious with me.”
Three years after the elevator encounter, Dan was discouraged with his sales job and the negative culture at the Journal. One day during that time, he went for lunch at a shopping mall and had another interesting encounter.
“All I was thinking about was getting a ham sandwich, but then I heard a voice telling me, ‘Focus on the work, and I’ll take care of the rest.’”
Dan thought it was the voice of his deceased father and wrote it off. But just days later, the Journal’s publisher was fired, and his replacement became a friend, supporter, and mentor to Dan. Dan’s career took off to the point where he eventually became publisher of Southam’s Calgary Herald newspaper.
Looking back, Dan notes, “All that time, God was putting these signposts in front of me, telling me I’m where He wants me to be.”
The Lord put another signpost in Dan’s path when, in 2002, Southam announced it was selling the Herald and all its other newspapers. This was bad news for Dan because he believed he was in line to eventually become president of the company.
“I prayed about this, and God gave me a clear direction that my newspaper career was an apprenticeship for what’s next,” he remembers. “So I was totally at peace.”
Dan left Southam in 2003 and started marketing himself as a corporate trainer and leadership educator.
Through all this, however, he still wasn’t putting the pieces together and realizing the most important part of this faith journey was missing: trusting in Jesus Christ for his salvation.
That started to change when he received a call about students at a local school getting caught in a Rocky Mountain avalanche. One of those students was Marissa, a close friend of his family. She did not survive.
While attending her funeral at Calgary’s First Alliance Church, Dan “got this saturating sense of God’s presence.”
“I’d never had this kind of church experience,” he says. “It wasn’t about religion and ritual, it was about relationship.”
He realized the need to get a Bible. “I started to read it, and I couldn’t put it down. It was like the words were jumping off the pages and I understood the message.”
Finally realizing that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12, ESV), Dan met with a First Alliance pastor and committed his life to Christ in the church parking lot.
It was a tumultuous time for his family. Walking away from the comfortable security of his newspaper career and becoming a Christian created several years of family and marital tensions. But with God’s help, Dan stayed true to his new faith. Eventually, his wife, Sarah, committed her life to the Lord, followed by Haley, one of their daughters.
In his role as a corporate trainer and leadership educator, he published “The Heart and Hands of Leadership: Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders” in 2014.
As he has learned what it means to be a Christ follower in a world opposed to Christianity, Dan has seen changes in how he thinks about himself and those around him.
“I’ve learned a lot about loving others and being loved by God,” he says. “I think I’m more patient and self-controlled.”
In 2018, Dan and Sarah had to lean hard on their faith to support Haley as she suffered through the tragedy of losing her daughter, Piper, in stillbirth.
A crisis like this can drive people away from Christ, but he had been through too much with God to walk away.
“And I believe in God’s sovereign plan,” he says quietly, thinking back on that awful time.
“While I might not understand why we lost Piper, the separation is only temporary, and one day we’ll be running through fields in Heaven with her.”
Thankfully, the loss strengthened Haley’s faith in Christ. It also gave her an informal ministry, reaching out to other mothers in the same situation.
Through all these ups and downs, Dan has stuck with John 6:45 as his life verse: “It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me,” (ESV).
“That’s my story,” Dan maintains. “That’s what happened to me. I had read it many times in the past, but when I watched the movie ‘The Gospel of John,’ and I saw Jesus speak it, then it was ‘Oh, wow!’”
As he thinks about loved ones who still don’t know the Lord, Dan concludes: “I didn’t find God. I didn’t figure it out. It was God saying, ‘This one is mine.’ I take great comfort in that.”
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