David Alan Petrash is a submariner, pastor, businessman, and water-treatment professional whose life bridges faith, service, and leadership. He served eight years aboard U.S. Navy nuclear submarines as a nuclear engineer before embarking on a distinguished career in industrial water treatment, where he became a Certified Water Technologist and award-winning corporate trainer with Nalco Water, Solenis, and Siemens.

Alongside his technical career, David spent more than three decades as Senior Pastor of Grace Point Vineyard Church in Wolfeboro, NH and Connections Vineyard Church in Tucson, AZ, where he delivered hundreds of sermons that blend scriptural depth with everyday wisdom.

Today, David and his wife, Trina, co-own City Wide Facility Solutions of Southern Arizona, a multimillion-dollar enterprise serving regional businesses. Drawing from his unique background - from submarine hulls to the pulpit and the boardroom - David writes with both authority and compassion, inspiring readers to live with faith, courage, and purpose.

rippleoffaith.com

Welcome to 12 Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.

God chose first to have a conversation with us, his creation.

Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.

Praise God for you, David.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yep, I'm in Arizona.

It's nice and sunny and it's already 68 degrees and it's 8am in the morning.

That's amazing.

Tell me about your journey from being a professional alongside as well being a pastor, please.

I was raised Catholic.

I was always, you know, kind of intrigued watching the service and seeing all of the rogue memorization that was going on in the Catholic service, but I never saw any recognition in anybody's eyes of really what they were saying.

It's kind of like wash, rinse, repeat.

And so when I, you know, got older and I was in the military, I had a lot of time, especially on submarines, that's what I was on, to read.

And so I read just about every type of religion there was.

And I studied, you know, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, you name it, I studied it, trying to find what I felt was the truth.

And it wasn't until I was older, roughly about 36, when I was actually driving, I was living up in Washington, the state of Washington at that time.

And I was driving from Walla Walla, Washington to Seattle, Washington, which is about a five hour drive.

And about an hour into the drive, I heard an audible voice and the audible voice said, are you ready?

And I was like, what?

I thought the radio was on.

I was like, I didn't have the radio on.

And so I went to turn the radio off, but it wasn't on.

And again, I heard the voice, are you ready?

And I was like, what?

Looking around to see if there was like, you know, a car pulling up that had a loudspeaker or something.

And then the voice said, this is what you've been seeking.

This is what you've been searching for.

Are you ready to give me control?

Then it was just like a realization that this was the voice of God.

And for the first time in my life, you know, I said, yes, I'm ready to give you control.

I'm ready to surrender.

And it was just like an electric jolt of just indwelling of the Holy Spirit, just an overpowering.

I started just bawling and crying and literally about an hour of my life I have no recollection of.

I woke up or, you know, came out of this, whatever you want to call it.

About an hour later, I was down the road, an hour further down the road, have no recollection of the drive or the memory.

You know, God guided it, the Holy Spirit.

And it was just this hour of complete peace and indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

And then coming out of that, I was like, okay, what just happened?

And I'm trying to make sense of it all.

And I'm like, okay, did that really occur?

So I was just praying and seeking.

And I was like, all right, God, if that was really you, when I go to church on Sunday, let the pastor be speaking on Ephesians.

Why Ephesians?

I had a book that was based on Ephesians, and it was called He Who Thinks Must Believe.

Because I'd always, you know, like I said, everything was in my head and was trying to go from my head to my heart.

And it was a study in Ephesians called He Who Thinks Must Believe.

So anyway, I go to church on Sunday, and lo and behold, the pastor was not speaking on Ephesians.

I was like, okay, must have been bad pizza.

As I'm coming out of the church, this lady comes up to me.

It's a lady I've never saw before, a lady I never saw after that.

And I attended the church after that for quite some time.

She came up to me and she said, I don't know who you are.

I just know I'm supposed to give you this.

And she gave me a book, and it was a book on Ephesians.

And I was like, okay, not my way, but yours.

I get it.

You're giving me confirmation, but you're showing me you could give it to me the way you wanted to, not the way I, you know, it's not by my dictate.

It's by you.

So from there, it was like, okay, God, let's do this.

Make me who you need to be.

And so throughout it, He brought me through several trials and several issues and several periods of battle with Him that would take hours of its own podcast to explain.

But He slowly and deliberately broke me down from who I thought I was, so He could build me back up to make me who He wanted me to be in Him.

Were you married at that time?

Yes, I was.

I will say that was to my kid's mother.

And I am not married to that lady anymore.

One of the trials that, you know, God used to break me was my wife was on the worship team.

And this was not the church we were pastoring.

This was the church we were attending to at the time.

And she wound up having an affair with the worship pastor.

He was a married man with two kids as well.

And it wound up destroying two families.

It wound up causing a rift in the church.

And it brought me to a point where I was extremely angry at God and was ready to say, OK, God, I'll lose on my own terms than when on yours.

And that's a whole different discussion.

But God used it to finally take every ounce of pride out of me and strip me to the point where I was fully on my knees saying, OK, God, I don't get it.

I don't like it.

I don't understand it.

You could have used a different way to get to me.

And I'm sure He did.

But I was just so stubborn.

I didn't realize it.

But that's what it took to finally get me to say, OK, God, you're God, I'm not.

That was the point of complete surrender.

I love that.

When did you meet your wife?

My current wife, because like I said, it's not my kid's mom.

I met we've been married for 15 years now.

And we met on actually a dating site, ChristianCafe.com.

And so I had been divorced from my kid's mom for about 10 years.

And so I had decided to get back into the dating scene.

And so I went on to Christian Cafe.

And at that time, I was pastoring a church in New Hampshire, a Grace Point Vineyard Church in New Hampshire.

And I was a single pastor.

And so she happened to be an associate pastor at another church in New Hampshire.

And we had traveled a lot in the same circles and knew a lot of the same people, but we had never met.

And so when we met that first time for coffee in Concord, New Hampshire, we were like, oh, you're that person.

Oh, you're that person.

OK.

And it was kind of interesting the way.

And I always say God is amazing because He knew what it'd take to make one good pastor.

She was an associate pastor at a church.

And I was a pastor at another church.

And then when we got married and we started to pastor together, we made one good pastor.

Because I tell everybody, she had the true shepherd's heart.

She's the one who truly loves and embraces and cares and just embodies that aspect of what people think when they think of a pastor.

I have the true senior pastor's heart, so to speak.

I always tell everybody I was the one who get kicked on, spit on, stomped on, yelled at, screamed at, because people didn't like what you were doing or disagreed with how it was being done.

I don't like the music.

I don't like the color of the carpet.

And I was the one who got to say, thank you very much.

I appreciate you sharing that.

But this is what I feel God calling us to do.

So this is what we're going to do.

Whereas if she was the one who had to absorb all of that, it would just crush her because she takes everything personal.

She internalizes everything because she's got the true shepherd's heart.

So together, God made one good pastor.

Two questions.

How did you get from Walla Walla to the other side of the country?

And then where did you grow in the capacity of the insight that you're talking about, which is you're actively analyzing who's around you?

I was a military brat.

My dad was in the Air Force.

So I was raised in the military.

I was born in Bangor, Maine, but I lived in, gosh, by the time I was in high school, 13 different places, like Okinawa, Taiwan, Hawaii.

He retired out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base here in Tucson.

So when I graduated from high school, I wound up in the military on submarines as a nuclear engineer.

So I traveled a variety of different places as a nuclear engineer.

And then when I got out, one of the places that I was working at was in Walla Walla, Washington.

That's where I lived.

But in the Tri-Cities area, there was WNP2, which is a nuclear power plant.

And so I was working, doing work at the nuclear power plant, as well as doing some consulting work in the power industry.

And then my wife at the time, my kid's mother, was from New Hampshire.

And I met her when I was in the Navy, stationed in New Hampshire, up there at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire.

That's where I met her.

That's where we got married.

We were having difficulties with our marriage, and she wanted to move back to New Hampshire, where she was from.

So we moved back to New Hampshire, and I took a job with a company out there, a power plant.

And I eventually became director of training at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant back east.

And that's where we wound up going to a church there.

And that's where that whole situation happened, where she had the affair.

We got divorced in New Hampshire, and I stayed there because that's where my kids were.

And so we had a custody arrangements where I had the kids for one week, and she had the kids for one week.

And so then when my kids were all grown and adults and out on their own, by that time I had married Trina, my current wife, her kids were in New Hampshire as well.

So I figured we would always stay in New Hampshire.

But she came to me one day and she said, you know, your kids are all grown.

My kids are all grown.

My parents aren't getting any younger.

Would you ever consider relocating out west?

Because her parents lived, her father lived in San Diego, and her mother lived in Prescott, Arizona.

And I had always wanted to move back to Arizona because my dad retired out of Tucson, and I love Tucson.

And that's where my family was.

And I was like, you know, for you, the kind of guy I am, I would sacrifice and move to Arizona for you so you could be close to your parents.

That's just the kind of guy, you know.

And so it just so happened, the way God works, the company I was working for at the time, I was working for a company as they did consulting work to the power industry, and I was working as the northeast power team leader.

The CEO of the company called me up and he said, hey Dave, you ever think about relocating and maybe taking over a territory out west?

And anyway, long story short, where I was thinking I was going to have to quit my job and pay to move out to Arizona and find a job out at Arizona, which I didn't think would be hard.

I could go to work at, you know, any of the power plants.

God orchestrated it to where the company I was working for asked me to take over the west, and they relocated me.

And I asked them, does it matter where I live in the west?

And they're like, no, as long as you're near an airport, because my region was, you know, six states in the west.

So I was like, do you mind if I move to Tucson?

And they're like, no, is there an airport?

And I'm like, yeah.

And they're like, great.

So my company relocated me to Tucson and we've been here ever since.

Five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

What's a message you'd leave for future you?

I hope the future...

Pastor David, this has been an amazing conversation.

I appreciate you tremendously.

I appreciate you showing us the flip of your life as well, yeah?

Driving all the way from Walla Walla and then experiencing what you did for that one hour, yeah, where the focus was on you, but then giving your life to focus on others.

In closing, is there anything else you'd like to share?

If people want to, they can go to RippleOfFaith.com or they can, you know, Google search Ripple of Faith Leadership, and there they'll find other resources and articles that hopefully can help them understand the importance of getting off the E-mountain and flipping the focus.

Pastor David, a pleasure.

I treasure it.

Thank you for being on What Is Inspired by 12 Minute Convoys.