This is the story of how God reached and saved me. This is a story of how an infinite God in his infinite grace and mercy came down to where I was in all my need and lifted me as a brand from the burnings. Though I was a poor wretch of a sinner, and guilty before a holy God, yet God had compassion upon me. This is a true story.
I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. However, my parents were good people with strong moral principles, and they tried their best to bring me up according to those principles. My mom came from a staunch Roman Catholic background, and in her early years she was an active member in the Catholic Church. My dad, on the other hand, came from a more protestant background (as near as I can tell, anyway).
During my childhood years I can remember going to the Catholic Church on Sundays. I was too young to get much out of it. I remember the pomp and formalism. The service was still performed almost entirely in Latin at this time. I remember the incense, the collection baskets, the “holy of holies” from which the priest would remove the wine and the wafer. I remember the congregation chanting their responses to the liturgy at the appropriate times. But none of this had any real meaning to a boy of 4 or 5 years.
During my first grade year in school, I attended St. Henry’s Catholic School in Rosebush, Michigan. There were buses from three or four different schools that came within range of our home, and for some reason that year it was decided that I would go to St. Henry’s. I was placed in a classroom made up of first and second graders, and I was taught by Sister Adelpha, a rather stern Roman Catholic nun (at least she seemed that way to me).
As part of our schooling that year, we were expected to learn the Roman Catholic catechism. I vaguely remember learning the Ten Commandments, how to genuflect before taking my place in the pew, the proper technique for receiving the wafer when it was offered to me, and how to cross myself “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” It was also at this time that I learned and memorized the Lord’s Prayer. This last item would play a role much later in my search for spiritual meaning in my life.
Shortly after my year at St. Henry’s, my parents stopped going to church on Sundays. I’m not entirely sure of the reason why, but from that time forward the only times I recall setting foot in church was for weddings or funerals or some other special event. I should mention at this point that during this part of my life, I never once recall hearing the gospel message. I learned about Jesus on the cross of Calvary, but I was never given a clear understanding of why he was there. Although I had heard of him referred to as the Son of God, I didn’t understand at that time that he was truly and fully God manifest in the flesh.
The next several years of my life didn’t include much in the way of spiritual things. I remember receiving a small Gideon’s Bible during grade school. I tried reading it once or twice, but the King James language was a bit hard to understand for a little kid, and so I gave it up.
The next event that comes to mind was the time during Junior High (I believe) when the neighbor kid invited my sisters and me to a day at his vacation bible school. This was in the Baptist church. There was a general session at the beginning, and during this session we were asked to close our eyes. They then asked us to raise our hands if we had done anything wrong recently (they may have used the word “sinned”). I was a bit of a kleptomaniac and had on more than one occasion taken things that didn’t belong to me. And so, when they asked the question, I was honest enough to raise my hand. Afterwards, they asked those that had raised their hands to stay behind, while they dismissed the rest of the kids to their classrooms.
I don’t know how many kids had raised their hands, but there was only one other kid, a boy, which ended up staying behind. The adult that was with us walked the boy through reciting the sinner’s prayer. They then did the same thing with me. Afterwards, we were told that our sins had been forgiven, and that we had a new relationship with God. However, I didn’t feel any different, and the years to come showed that there was no real change in my life.
I graduated from high school and went on to university. It was an eight-hour drive from home, and for the first time in my life I was no longer under any direct adult supervision. I was free to pick and choose the things I wanted to do and experience. Weekend “parties” with friends from school became a regular occurrence. Within a year or two I was doing just enough of my school work to get me through the week, but I would live in anticipation of the next weekend and the “fun” it would bring. The fun was only fleeting, though. Almost as soon as it started it was over and I was left with an empty, dissatisfied feeling in my soul.
It was during this time that I started searching for some meaning to life. Unfortunately, I started looking in the wrong places. I got taken up with the occult, and particularly with the Tarot. I thought the meaning of life was hidden in the “secret knowledge” that could be found through a careful, earnest, study of the occult. There was just enough there to keep me going down that path for the next few years. In the end, though, it came up just as empty as anything else I had tried up to that point.
I graduated from university and got a job as a computer programmer in 1979. Being on my own gave me more opportunity to indulge my sinful appetite, and this I proceeded to do for the next several years. But the fickle emptiness of these pleasures began to weigh down upon my soul. Life seemed to have little or no meaning to me, but I thought there had to be more to it than I was seeing.
As the years slipped by, time and again I would come to a point where I would become fed up with my life. I was disgusted with what I had become in my heart and in my thinking. I would try to “turn over a new leaf” – try to turn my life around and head it in what I thought was the “right” direction. Whenever I did this, I might succeed for a season, but ultimately I would end up right back where I started – only I’d be more miserable than I was before. It was sometime between the end of 1985 and the beginning of 1986 when I happened to go to a movie one night. Of course, I had been to other movies before, but this one was different. The name of the movie was “The Mask”, and it was based on a true story about a boy that had a genetic disorder that caused the bones in his skull to grow out of proportion to the rest of his body. The kids in school would make fun of him and call him names. This probably hurt the boy emotionally, but rather than fighting or running away, the boy would turn the tables on his tormentors and make it sound as if it was just a joke and no harm had been done. In this way the boy made friends of many who would otherwise have been his enemies.
Towards the end of the movie, the boy happens to meet a beautiful young lady at a camp. He becomes smitten, but fears that the girl will likely have nothing to do with him because of his appearance. However, he later finds out the girl is blind, and so he takes a chance and strikes up a conversation with her. To his amazement, the girl takes a liking to him, even when he gets up enough nerve to tell her about his condition. The girl is much more concerned with the beauty of the boy’s heart, than she is about his physical appearance.
The movie has one of those bittersweet endings. The bones in the boy’s skull become too heavy and cause neural damage that eventually leads to his death at a young age. Even in death, though, the boy seems to be completely at peace with his circumstances.
The reason I’m spending so much time on this movie is that through it God was speaking loudly to my soul. When I looked at the boy in the movie, it was as though I was looking at a “photographic negative” of my own life. The boy’s outward appearance was deformed and hideous. However, his heart was pure and clean, and he had an inner joy and peace that saw him through the toughest trials. I, on the other hand, was fairly respectable looking on the outside, but inside I was a hideous mess. I did not have the peace and joy that the boy in the movie had. That boy in the movie seemed to have what I so desperately wanted in life, but hadn’t been able to find.
On the way home that night I called out to God for the first time that I can remember. I said “God, if you are really out there, please help me. I have tried to change my life and have failed miserably. I now know that if there is to be any change, you are the only one that can bring about that change. And if you don’t change me, then I’m doomed to live out the rest of my life a miserable wretch.”
It was at this time that I started going over the one thing in my mind that I remembered from first grade – the Lord’s prayer. I would think about the meaning of each part of the prayer as I would recite it to myself. “Our Father who art in heaven” – God is called “our Father”, and so he must care for us as a father cares for his children. (It wouldn’t be until later, though, that the significance of this would sink in.) “Hallowed be thy name” – our heavenly Father is holy, even his name is holy. “Forgive us our trespasses” – I have trespassed against God, and I need his forgiveness. And so I would go through the entire prayer.
This became a kind of ritual that I performed every night as I went to bed. I also tried “turning over a new leaf” one more time, with the same lack of success I had with past attempts. I decided that maybe I should look for a church to attend, but I never seemed to get around to it. The message in the movie, though, was constantly on my mind. God’s Spirit was preparing the soil that would eventually receive the good seed.
It was about a year later that a friend of mine at work invited me to some special meetings they were having at his church. You would have thought that I would have jumped at the opportunity, but there was still a part of me that was reluctant to respond to the invitation. However, I had a great deal of respect for my friend, and so I agreed to go.
It has been over 20 years now, but I still can remember what it was like that first night I heard the gospel message clearly spoken. It was Wednesday night of the first week of gospel meetings. The preachers were Norman Crawford and Walter Gustafson. (Jim Smith had to fill in for Walter for a week or two in the middle of the meetings when Walter’s wife took ill.) I couldn’t tell you which verses were spoken from, but I remember for the first time being clearly told I was a sinner in need of a Savior, and that my sins were taking me to a lost eternity in hell and the lake of fire if I didn’t get saved before I died.
I understand that some non-believers balk at being called a “sinner”. They don’t consider themselves to be all that bad, and think that they might somehow merit God’s salvation by their own good living. I, on the other hand, didn’t have any such notions. From the moment they put the name on my condition, “sinner”, I knew beyond all doubt that was what I was. I also didn’t have any problem with the revelation that I was a living soul, and my soul was going to exist in either heaven or hell after the death of my body. I know the Catholics have a belief in a purgatory which is kind of a middle ground between heaven and hell, but I never fully grasped that concept. It wasn’t hard to let that one go when I saw that the Bible clearly tells of only two final destinies — heaven or hell.
There was one area where I did struggle, though. I heard verses like “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved”, “whosoever believes in the Son will be saved”, “he that has the Son has life”, “by grace you are saved through faith”, and many others. I could understand the message. Salvation came through belief in the Savior and his finished work upon the cross. However, how did one “believe”, and what exactly did “faith” entail, and what did it mean to “have” the Son? Looking back on this, I think there were two factors contributing to the struggle that was going on in my mind. First, I have the mixed blessing of a fairly analytical mind. I like to reason things out. More specifically, I try to fit things into the framework that I have built up over the years of my life. In other words, my reasoning begins with the framework (my pre-existing belief system) and tries to analyze and categorize new concepts and fit them into the existing framework. After all, this is how I had built up this framework in the first place. When it came to the new concepts of being “saved” or “born again”, belief in a Savior who was “God manifest in the flesh”, and “faith” in a man who arose from the grave after his death, the concepts just wouldn’t fit anything I already knew.
The second contributing factor is closely linked to the first. I was in my 30s and was becoming set in my thinking and attitude towards things. Up till now I thought I had things pretty much figured out. I took for granted that the universe came into being through a “big bang”, and that life had evolved slowly on the earth over millions of years. After all, didn’t the leading scientists of the day proclaim these things as established, unquestionable “facts”? It wouldn’t be until sometime after I was saved that I would see through these lies and realize that any supposed evidence to support these ideas was nothing more than “smoke and mirrors” with no real substance. I still remember the impression that first meeting left on me. I saw the ladies in their hats and dresses, and the men in their suites, getting up out of their seats with smiles, handshaking, and happy conversation as they made their way to the exit.
There seemed to be a peace and joy about them — the same peace and joy that had eluded me for years. Somewhere down deep in my being I knew that they had that “something”, that purpose in life, which had so eluded me over the years. I thought to myself that these people must possess the salvation that I had heard about that night, and if it brings that kind of joy and peace, then I wanted it too. That was the first of what was to be five weeks of gospel meetings. After that meeting my friend and I spent some time talking in the parking lot of the gospel hall. My friend asked me what I thought about the things I had heard. He tried to answer my questions and explain things more clearly. This became almost a nightly occurrence. We would often still be talking after the other people had all gone home. In spite of my friend’s best efforts, though, I just couldn’t figure out this thing called “being saved”. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to “believe” the “correct” way. The harder I tried, the farther away salvation seemed to be.
I see now that this was all part of God’s plan. I had to come to the point where I realized that my understanding and my trying, whatever effort I put forth, was not going to get me one hair’s-breadth closer to heaven. But it was hard to let go of the baggage that I had been carrying around for years. Old beliefs and preconceptions aren’t easily displaced, no matter how misplaced and unsound they are. Until I was willing to let go, though, I would not be able to fully grasp the gospel message.
I was made acutely aware of this fact during the gospel series. As I sat under the sound of the gospel, I would be going over what I heard in my mind. At times I would get so involved in my thinking about the gospel message that for a moment I would forget about my old preconceptions. At those times, the gospel would almost make sense. It was as if I was standing at an open door ready to take a step over the threshold. But then at the last second my old thoughts would kick into gear again, and the door would slam shut in my face. This happened on maybe seven or eight nights during the gospel series. Each time the same hymn would be given at the end of the meeting — number seven in the hymn book. The chorus of the hymn was “almost persuaded — almost… but LOST”. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but God was dealing graciously with me; preparing the soil to receive the good seed.
The gospel series was originally scheduled to go for three weeks. I didn’t know this at the time. It was primarily because of the interest that I was showing that the meetings were extended another two weeks. However when it was getting on towards the end of the fifth week and I still hadn’t gotten saved, the announcement was made that Friday, March 13, 1987 would be the last night of the meetings. This concerned me greatly because I really did want to be saved. I became more desperate in my attempts to “believe”, to figure out this thing called “faith”, and what it meant to be “born again”. But as before, all my trying was to no avail.
It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I arrived at that last gospel meeting. The thought going through my mind was “if I don’t get saved tonight, I probably never will get saved”. I couldn’t tell you now the order of the speakers or what their message was. The previous night I had been reading in Luke 18. The Holy Spirit kept bringing before my mind the words “except you receive the kingdom of God as a little child you shall in no wise enter therein”. I started thinking about the relationship between a little child and his father. There is much that the little child doesn’t understand about the world. But the child knows his father loves him, and whatever the child asks, the father will provide what he knows is best for the child. And because of this, the child can trust fully in the father, even though the child doesn’t understand all the answers. It’s enough that the father knows and can be trusted.
It was at this juncture in my thinking that the light dawned on my darkened soul. I realized that I had a much bigger Father than a mere mortal man is to a little child. I had a God who knows all things and who created all things. One intimately acquainted with all my deep need, and who was more than willing to meet that need; One who had the power, resources and ability to meet that need. I didn’t need to know all the answers. It was enough that God knew all the answers. When God says in his word that his Son came to seek and to save the lost, I can believe that I was the lost one he came to save. When he tells me that his Son bore the full penalty due my sin and now I am free, I can fully trust his word because he is an all-knowing God and he can never lie.
D.S.