I believe!

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Hebrews 11:6

People I talk to assume that I am a Christian because my family was Christian and I grew up in it. Nothing could be further from the truth. More about that later... First let me tell a little about myself now. I am 53 years old, married, with two grown children and three grandchildren (still counting). I am a customer service representative for a major manufacturer of airport ground service equipment. In my life I have completed three apprenticeships, electrical, millwright, and machinist. I am working on completing a degree in applied science.

I started out working in electric generation plants, where I learned every aspect of the process of generating electricity, from where the fuel and water come in one end to where the kilowatts go out the other end. I can sit down and write out all the formulas for how electricity works, and draw diagrams from memory of all of the equipment involved in the process. I can tell you why the light bulb comes on when you flip the switch on the wall and name several reasons why it also may not. You might say I have faith that electricity exists, even though you can't see it or touch it or smell it.

All the things that I have learned about electricity and how it works are not the reason that I believe that it exists. That goes back further than any training and education I have received, all the way back to when I was four years old. I found one of my mother's bobby pins on the floor and decided that a good place for it to go was into the electrical outlet on the wall. When I woke up and could breath again and stopped blubbering, I found that I had an everlasting faith in the existence of electricity. I had moved from just believing that I was not supposed to play with the electrical cords and outlets like my mother had repeatedly told me to an absolute faith that I could get hurt doing so. All the things I have learned about electricity since then have just reinforced that faith.

Now about my faith in God...

I grew up a child of divorce- my parents split when I was four years old also. Coming up in a good Southern Baptist background, I had a hard time reconciling what I heard in Sunday School with the reality of my home situation, where I was shuttled back and forth between two households at different times of the year and different ends of the continent. A further complication was my mother returning to college to finish her degree and forsaking her Christian upbringing to search through other religions for "enlightenment".

I was dragged through various different cultic and occultic explorations through most of my school years. We had seances with the "table knockers", peote dances with the Hopis, Joined the LDS (Mormon) church when I was eight, then the Unitarian Church five years later. By the time my mother and stepfather came back to their Christian roots and really got saved in my high school years, I was desperate to get away from anything religious. My father was no help because he is a lifetime member of the Odd Fellows Lodge, a "service order" with secret ceremonies of their own that they claim are not religious- but are. More about secrets later...

I went off to college with the intent in my head to get away from anything religious and do some "living". My lifestyle degraded over the next few months to where I had dropped out of school, taken a job and worked 12 hour days to support my "party time" evenings of dancing and drinking. Then I found methamphetamine pills to help me get through the days so I could party all night.

On November 18th, 1972, I came home at 3:00 am and sat down on the couch to try to wind down from the marijuana,speed, and alcohol that I had consumed all night. To keep my thoughts from suicide, something that had started popping up quite regularly ( If this was all there was to "living" why bother?), I picked up my Bible from the end table. Yes, I still had one. I opened it up to the first place the pages fell open and this is what I read:


1But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.
6They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. 2Timothy 3:1-7

I felt like I had run full tilt, face first into a mirror! Nobody but God could have written as accurate of a description of me at that moment. I was so distressed by my condition that I fell to my knees and cried out for God to forgive me. When I got up, I was stone cold sober and straight. I went to bed for four hours and felt like I had slept for a week. I got up in the morning and knew that I had to talk to somebody who could explain what happened to me, so I went to church at the place where my parents had taken me when they were in town. The pastor there prayed with me and advised me to go home for a while and grow up in Christ, so I did. What I have learned from the Bible in the last thirty six years has only reinforced my faith in the God who loves me.

In later blogs I will share more about what I have learned and how anyone who honestly seeks God can find Him and have faith also.