The first time I saw Amaris Henry, I was a senior in high school scoping out potential theatre programs to apply to. She was slated to play a female version of Prospero at the time in a Trinity Western University production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest before the show was tragically cancelled due to the abrupt emergence of a certain coronavirus.

A couple of years later, I was acting in TWU plays myself and got to know Amaris as she helped out with various aspects of the theatre’s behind-the-scenes operation — from capturing actor headshots to stage managing the occasional show — on her way to graduating with a BA in Theatre.

More recently, I had the pleasure of attending Apologetics Canada’s annual BC Leadership Summit alongside her and we have become even better friends in the weeks since.

So, naturally, when I took a look at my post archive at the end of 2025 and realized that I had not featured a woman on Testimony Tuesday since Ashley Galvin back in October, I turned to Amaris. She said she would happily be my DEI hire and proceeded to share parts of her story with me shortly thereafter.

I discovered that her journey with God began to take shape in her third summer at Stillwood Camp when she watched a pastor smear ketchup all over himself as part of an elaborate sermon illustration. Although she no longer remembers what the ketchup in question symbolized, she remembers how profoundly the image spoke to her nine year-old self. By the time her mother went to pick her up at the end that week, a switch had flipped.

“I feel different,” Amaris said to her mom.

“I can tell you’re different. Something’s changed,” her mom responded.

This affirmation of what had taken place in her spirit was priceless for the little girl. “From that moment on,” she tells me, “God really had a hold on my heart.”

Fast-forward fifteen odd years and God still has a hold on her heart.

But how did He do it?

Her theory — developed in conjunction with her mom, whom she affectionately refers to as her “sounding board” — is as follows:

There’s a really big difference between kids that stay with the Church and kids that leave the Church and that’s that their parents didn’t share stories of God’s faithfulness when they were young.

In other words, testimonies of God’s goodness — in both the big and the small ways — are essential when it comes to fostering robust faith in a child’s life. They certainly were in Amaris’s case.

One of the ways that her mom, Kerri, embodied this idea was by encouraging and training her two daughters to pray specific prayers. “Pray specifically so that you know when He does show up,” she would tell them. Amaris may not have appreciated the power of this practice as much as she now does now, but that did not prevent her from practicing it.

“When we were little,” she tells me, “we would lose our teddy bears all the time.” Her mother would then round up the whole family and they would pray together, asking God to help them find the missing bears. “Without fail,” Amaris remembers, “we would pray and then one of us would be like: I know where it is!”

As Amaris matured, however, so did her conversations with the Lord. In 2019, she would hear His voice more clearly than ever before. “You gotta go down to Virginia and take care of your aunt” was the gist of the message she believed she had received. Nevertheless, her next move was to run it by her sounding board.

“Hey, I have something kinda crazy to tell you,” she said to her mom. “I think I need to take the next semester off and go to Virginia.”

“Thank goodness!” her mother responded, having heard the same word from God about a month prior. “I told God He had to tell you Himself.”

Talk about confirmation.

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Amaris’s aunt, Sunny, had been battling brain cancer for eight years and had two young children at the time. Amaris arrived in August 2019 to assist her uncle in taking care of the family. Her presence was a real gift as Sunny’s brain deteriorated.

Sadly, Sunny was barely eating or even speaking by the time Amaris returned to BC for a voice and movement intensive in late December. It was on New Year’s Eve that she would go on to be with the Lord—a feat which Amaris is convinced her aunt had achieved on purpose, so that her family would be forced to mark her last day on earth with champagne and celebration.

Still, the impact of experiencing death in such a raw matter was not lost on Amaris. “Coming back from Virginia,” she told me, “I was a completely different person.” “Death does something,” she added.

One direct effect of her Virginia experience was that it had made it more difficult for her to relate to the friends she returned to at TWU. She is still close to some of her graduating class to this day, but by the time she completed her theatre degree, she was nonetheless desperate for community.

Drawing on the lessons she learned from her childhood, she then spent two years praying consistently that God would connect her to the kind of young adult fellowship she had enjoyed during her brief stint in America. She visited as many young adult worship services as she could discover through social media yet struggled to find the perfect fit.

Eventually, a friend invited her to Main Street Church in Chilliwack. She attended a young adults service there and immediately fell in love with the community. Her friend’s friends embraced her like a sister they had known their entire lives—something Amaris still struggles to wrap her head around to this day.

“The second I walked through those doors,” she remembers, “I was like: This is it. I found it. This is the one.” God had answered a prayer of hers yet again in a surreal, almost overwhelming manner. Stunningly, His faithfulness to her has been such that she can barely think of a prayer she has prayed that He has not yet answered.

It is now three-and-a-half years since she first began attending Main Street Church regularly and she has been intentional during that time about living out another core principle she learned from her parents:

It’s not what the church can do for you. It’s what you can do for the church.

Right now, living out the JFK-esque mantra looks like hosting a five-week deep dive at Main Street into a documentary called Truth Rising which was produced by Focus on the Family in collaboration with the Colson Center last fall. As an official Colson fellow herself, she has had the privilege of facilitating a series of important conversations with members of her church family as they engage meaningfully with the state of the world in light of their Christian faith.

This opportunity has afforded her yet another avenue through which to pour into her sphere of influence from the life God has richly blessed her with. In many ways, this is precisely what each of us is also called to.

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Testimony Tuesday with Amaris Henry