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About The Author As a child my mother and father took us (my three sisters, my brother and I) to church every time the doors were open. I praise God every day for them doing this; had they not, I might still be lost. I went to the First Church of the Nazarene on Shore Ave. in Elkhart, Indiana. At the age of twelve, I accepted the Lord as my Savior. At the age of fifteen I was turning the other direction. My direction seemed to turn when I was in High School and involved in sports. I started associating with the wrong group of friends. I also had a hard time believing that I could be good enough to get into heaven. There were so many people I thought were Christians, yet by seeing their actions I considered them not to be Christian. For the next thirty years or so I did not go to church nor did I get into God's Word. I believed in the god of this world, "Money," and I worked as hard and as much as I could to do what I thought was for the benefit of my family. By the age of twenty-eight I was the president of a corporation that had sales in excess of three million dollars annually. Not much by to days standards, but a sizeable amount for the 1970's. |
After all that hard work my life was still empty. I ended up selling out and starting a corporation which I would own myself. "All mine!", I said. I believed this would give me what I needed. I struggled with that company until it was on the road to making a profit. I had a very successful business going, but God had something else in mind for me. The high interest rates of the early eighties took their toll on my business. With interest rates of more than 18% we could not sell enough to function, and closed the doors. All this time I was away from the Lord, not recalling who he was or how important he should be in our lives. The Lord, though I had forgotten him, never forgot me or gave up on me. He knew that one day I would be back. I was in situations where I could have been killed and he alerted me or made the situation not as bad as it could have been. Drinking was a big part of my life then. I was not living my life right. |