The Power of Testimony: Why Mick Wienholt’s Work Is More Than a Feel-Good Show

When I booked Mick Wienholt for Created in the Image of God, I thought I knew what I was getting.

A good guest. A moving story or two. A “feel good” episode about God showing up in people’s lives.

I did not understand the power of what he is actually doing.

I also didn’t realize that God was about to use our conversation to connect directly to a scene from my own life that I had filed away—one that I’d already written about in The Hardness of the Heart, involving a runaway bus at the corner of 34th Street in New York City on Rosh Hashanah.

What happened on the show with Mick made it clear to me:
this “testimony” work is not just nice content. It is battlefield work.
And it is very real.

“You’re My Guy for Testimonies”

Mick’s own story begins in a familiar way:

Raised in what he calls a “Christian” home (his quotes).
Plenty of talk about God and Jesus.
Plenty of discipline.
Not much felt love.

He described it with the old line:

Rules without relationship equals rebellion.

And rebel he did. Against his parents. Against God.
Despite a Christian-school education from 1st through 12th grade, his heart posture was clear:
“I wanted God and His rules as far away from my life as possible.”

At 19, full of ego and Mountain Dew, he moved from Baltimore to Colorado, threw himself into extreme outdoor sports, and nearly killed himself in an avalanche of his own making. God spared his life through a stranger named Steve—and almost nothing changed spiritually.

We’ll come back to that.

Years later, after the stillbirth of his first son Luke, he did surrender. He says now that Luke’s death is “the single most tangible blessing” of his life, because it forced him to his knees and into genuine relationship with God.

That alone would have been enough for a strong episode.

But then came the “deposit.”

Sometime around 2018, Mick began to sense a word burned into his spirit: testimonies. It didn’t feel like an idea. It felt like a thing. Something given.

He wasn’t the “I have a thing” guy. No nonprofit dreams. No ministry blueprint. Just this persistent, quiet weight: testimonies.

On a mission trip to Niger, up on a rooftop after a day of serving, with worship music playing, he went off to pray.

There, he had what he cautiously describes as a face-to-face encounter with God—not visually, but in terms of unmistakable Presence.

And he heard:

“You’re My guy for testimonies.”

His immediate response:

“I’m not Your guy.”

Again:

“You’re My guy for testimonies.”

Again:

“I’m not Your guy.”

The third time, like a Moses who’d finally run out of excuses, he said:

“Okay. I don’t know what this means, but I’ll do it.”

What followed—through multiple false starts, an app attempt, a podcast, and eventually a full pivot out of corporate life in 2025—became When You Look, a video podcast dedicated to one thing:

Ordinary people telling their extraordinary stories of what might have been coincidence—or God.

And then something happened on my show that underlined, in thick ink, how important that work really is.

One Step to the Side of the Avalanche

Mick told the avalanche story.

You may remember it if you watched the episode:

He’s climbing a steep snow couloir on Gray’s Peak in Colorado—too early in the season, unstable snowpack, solo, driven by ego.
He hears the distinctive “whumph” of snow settling and looks up to see the fracture line.
He actually thinks, for a second, that he’ll just sidestep the avalanche. He takes one step to his left and is instantly swept off his feet.
He blacks out.

When he comes to, he’s sitting on a rock at the base, somewhere between 200–300 vertical feet below.

He does a “systems check,” decides “all systems are go,” and starts hiking three miles back to the trailhead—jaw shattered on both sides, skull fractured in three places, head split from above his right eyebrow to the back of his skull, blood freezing on his jacket, no idea how bad it really is.

At the parking lot, there is one other human being: a man named Steve.

Nobody is up there midweek in early winter conditions.
But Steve, wanting to try out his relatively new 4WD truck in the snow, has driven up a remote, snow-covered road, gotten in too deep, and thought, “I’d better find a place to turn around.”
The place he finds is that parking lot—pulling in 30 seconds before Mick staggers in.

Mick is bleeding, concussed, and insists he’ll just drive himself to the hospital. Once he realises he can’t even unzip his frozen, blood-stiffened jacket, he finally yields and lets Steve drive him. He passes out, undergoes emergency brain surgery that night, and survives.

“If Steve isn’t in that parking lot,” Mick says now, “I die in that parking lot.”

On When You Look, that’s exactly the kind of moment he asks his guests—and his audience—to weigh:

Was that coincidence?
Or was it God?

As he told that story on my show, one detail snapped something awake in me:

“I took one step to my left…”

And immediately, I remembered my own “one-step” moment—one I had not planned to talk about, and had honestly forgotten I’d even written down.

One Step Off 34th Street

In The Hardness of the Heart, my second autobiographical volume, I tell this story under the chapter title “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

The context in brief:

I had been a minister in the Worldwide Church of God, a group that believed we were called to warn the world about the impending collapse of civilization—the Day of the Lord, Great Tribulation, return of Christ.
We kept the biblical holy days, including the Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah), which we saw as a day picturing the trumpets of Revelation and the coming of the King.
I was in New York on business. The day happened to fall on Rosh Hashanah.
I decided to attend the holy day services of a splinter group (United Church of God) to reconnect with people from my ministerial days and show them the “new me” in the corporate world.

All that was in my head as I stood at a crosswalk on 34th Street and waited for the “Don’t Walk” sign to turn to “Walk.”

The light changed. I took one step into the street—

—and a violent crash to my right froze me in place.

A city bus had just sideswiped a taxi and was now hurtling down the street, out of control, directly toward the intersection.

Time slowed. In the second it took for that bus to reach us, I could see the driver’s face twisted in terror. It was clear: this thing was not stopping.

The sound of the bus hitting the taxi had kept me from taking a second step.
A Honda driver wasn’t so “lucky.” He entered the intersection and the bus broadsided the car, spinning it like a toy. It came to rest about twelve feet from where I now stood.

My instincts—shaped by years of apocalyptic ministry—kicked in.

My calling, I thought, was to be a warner. A voice crying out. A trumpet.

I imagined myself sprinting down the sidewalk, shouting at pedestrians that a huge bus was barreling toward them. I envisioned myself as some kind of savior, giving advance warning while this unstoppable beast chewed through people like paper.

But my thoughts had outrun my legs.

Even in adrenaline time, I realized: by the time they turned to look at me, the bus would already be on them. My warning would not save them; it would only fix their last image on this frantic stranger waving his arms. I would be, in effect, an accessory to their slaughter.

I aborted. I did nothing, frozen with everyone else, and watched the bus plow through the next intersection, miraculously missing more cars, before disappearing down the street.

I went on to the holy day services and later looked up the New York Times report to confirm what I’d seen. What I didn’t actually share on the show, but is in my book, is that the one person who was killed was a messenger on a bike.

That moment changed me. I realized:

Whatever my former role as “the one who warns the world,”
whatever I thought the Feast of Trumpets meant for my ministry—
God was not primarily calling me to scream from a distance at people about impending doom.

He was calling me to walk with them, to serve, to love, to be present, to help them see His heart—rather than to shout news of a runaway bus.

I hadn’t thought about that story in a long time.
It resurfaced in that instant on my show because Mick said, “I took one step to my left.”

Coincidence?
Or God?

Testimony as a Weapon

Up to that point in the episode, I had seen When You Look as important and needed, but I still categorized it as “inspiring content.”

Then we turned to the passage Mick said God had given him along with the “deposit” of the word testimonies:

“They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.”
—Revelation 12:11

I decided to read the surrounding context on air.

The verses just before are not small:

War in heaven.
Michael and his angels fighting the dragon.
The dragon (that ancient serpent, the devil) and his angels thrown down.
A loud voice in heaven:

“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.” (vv. 10–11)

Then:

“They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony…”

This is not a side doctrine. It’s not an optional “share time” at the end of a church service.

It’s a description of how the saints participate in the defeat of the dragon.

The blood of the Lamb is Christ’s finished work, outside of us, once for all.
The word of our testimony is how that work is proclaimed, personalized, and embodied in time and space.

The enemy’s chief job is accusation - and it has been since the Garden of Eden:

“You’re naked. You should be ashamed. You should hide.”
“God doesn’t really love you.”
“That was just luck. Coincidence. He’s not involved.”
“Your life doesn’t matter. Your story doesn’t matter.”

Testimony does the opposite:

It names God’s intervention.
It exposes lies.
It tells the truth about who He is and who we are in Him.

Sitting there with Mick, realizing that:

God had spared him with a man who had no natural reason to be in that parking lot,
years before Mick would come to faith through an entirely different tragedy,
and then had called him, explicitly, “My guy for testimonies,”
and had now orchestrated a live connection to my “one-step” story in a way I hadn’t anticipated—

I suddenly saw what When You Look actually is:

It’s a testimony factory and amplifier.
And testimony, according to Scripture, is a weapon.

When Nothing Changes… Yet

There’s another piece of this that matters.

After his avalanche, Mick didn’t become a Christian.

He did what many of us do:

He gave God intellectual credit for the miracle.
He filed it in the “amazing near-death story” drawer.
He went right back to living a life powered by ego.

It was more than a decade later—when the doctor told him, “Your baby no longer has a heartbeat”—that he finally collapsed and cried out, “I need You.”

Looking back, he now sees the avalanche with different eyes. He can see:

God’s mercy in saving his life through Steve.
God’s patience in loving him while he “hated God.”
God’s sovereign ability to bank that experience for later, so that when the crisis came, he knew enough to run toward God instead of away.

That pattern matters because many of us have “avalanche moments” or “34th Street moments” in our past that, at the time, didn’t seem to change us spiritually.

We shrug, move on, and assume they were one-off lucky breaks.

Later, often much later, God invites us to look again.

When we do, testimony is born:

Not just, “I survived.”
But, “He spared me when I wasn’t interested in Him at all.”
Not just, “I dodged a bus.”
But, “He used that moment to change my understanding of my calling.”

In that sense, testimony is not only weaponized speech; it is also healed sight.

When You Look

Mick named his show intentionally.

When You Look.

Not “If you look.”
Not “If you’re spiritual enough.”
Simply: When you look.

Because:

When you look back over your life with God’s help, you start to see patterns you missed.
When you look carefully at what felt like “random” good timing, you start to notice how much had to line up.
When you look at your own heart, you start to see that some of the biggest miracles are not external escapes but internal transformations.

On his show, he and his guests regularly revisit moments like:

A couple who “just happen” to feel led to house-hunt, “just happen” to be offered a much bigger house at cost by friends, “just happen” to have a friend dream of their daughter holding a sign with the exact house number—and weeks later “just happen” to be offered a sibling group of three to adopt from Colombia.
A man who “just happens” to have a heart attack on a group ride, surrounded by people who know CPR, “just happens” to be given chest compressions nonstop for 38 minutes, and walks out of the hospital six days later with full brain function, winning his age group in the same ride a year later.

And Mick always ends with the same invitation:

Was that coincidence?
Or was it God?

Half the people in the heart attack story said, “Right place, right time, coincidence.”
Half said, “100% God.”

He lets that stand.

Because a true testimony is not coercion. It is offered, not forced.

It is a witness, not a verdict.

Coincidence or God?

So let’s come back to where we started.

Mick takes one step to his left, is swept into an avalanche, and is saved by a stranger who arrives in a parking lot 30 seconds before him.
Years later, his stillborn son’s death leads him to true surrender.
God tells him, “You’re My guy for testimonies,” and sets him up to amplify dozens of such stories.
On my show, Mick mentions that one step, and a story I hadn’t thought about in years surfaces—a bus, a step off 34th Street, a reevaluation of my entire calling.
The Scripture that guided Mick’s call—Revelation 12:11—turns out, in context, to be about the cosmic defeat of the dragon by the blood of the Lamb and the word of testimony.

Is all that just narrative pattern-seeking?
Is it all coincidence?

Or is it God?

I’ve made my decision. I believe:

God saved Mick’s life through Steve.
God spared mine at that crosswalk.
God is using Mick’s show to arm ordinary believers with the weapon of honest testimony.
God orchestrated even our on-air convergence to remind me—and perhaps you—how much He cares about our stories.

But this isn’t about convincing you of my conclusion.

It’s an invitation for you to look at your own life.

Were there “one step” moments where, if something had been different by 30 seconds or 3 feet, your story would have ended?
Have there been “I can’t fix this” moments where you either ran from God or ran toward Him?
Are there stories you’ve always filed under “luck” that, in the light of who Jesus is and what you now know, might deserve a re-reading?

Take some time this week to sit with one of those memories.

Ask, quietly:
“Lord, where were You in that?”

Then, if you dare, tell someone what you see.

Not to glorify yourself.
Not to win an argument.

But to bear witness.
To join, in your own small way, the company of those who “overcame by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”

And if you’re willing, I’d love to hear from you:

Do you see what happened on my show with Mick as coincidence, or as God weaving threads together?
Is there a “When You Look” moment from your own life that you’re now rethinking?

You can share in the comments, or simply sit with it before God.

Either way, remember:

You are created in the image of God.
Your story matters more than you think.

Sneak Peek for next week

Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be joined by Scorpio Lamonte, a keynote speaker and founder of Hope Elevation, who specializes in helping men reclaim confidence and live from their true God-given identity. Scorpio calls mediocrity a “social disease” and works as an identity mentor—someone who walks with men, educators, and youth as they move beyond herd mentality, victimhood, and playing it safe, into a life of purpose, resilience, and integrity. We’ll explore what it really means for men to live as image-bearers in a culture that often confuses strength with bluster and authenticity with weakness. If you or someone you love is wrestling with who they are and what they’re here for, you won’t want to miss this conversation.