In my teenage years I was well engrossed in an unorganized agnosticism. For a short while, I hung with a small group of high schoolers that professed to believe that humanity had been placed on earth by benevolent space aliens that had crash-landed on this planet. So help me it’s true. Didn’t say I believed it! But it made a really cool story for a geeky high school kid. By the way, the original man’s name (via the space interlopers) was Clyde. There. You learned something new by reading this blog.
Yet even in those days I admired the few people that came into my life (as I look back now, people whom a pursuing God placed in my life) that were committed Christians. My first full-time job was at a department store, and there I was witnessed to by two of the kindest and gentlest people you could ever want to meet. One of them had been in a Hell’s Angel’s type gang in his younger days. I knew him as he eased into his mid 50’s; he was just an amazing irenic gentleman. Faithfully, God had used them both to plant seeds (I can so relate to Paul’s discussion about this in 1 Cor. 3). I can remember, as I went through some difficult times (mainly with relationships), praying basically out of hopelessness to a God that may or may not exist. Now that is true desperation. And I can remember, especially with a little retrospection, how those prayers were so vividly answered, and yet I was still blinded to the truth. God was after me, but I fought Him off as long as I could. Until…
In early 1980 (at age 23) I started attending a tiny Free Methodist Church about 35 miles east of Los Angeles; I like to joke that I attended a Free Methodist congregation because I didn’t want to pay to go to one. I can’t remember the sermon, nothing about the worship, I can’t recall the preacher’s name and the church itself has long since been closed. But at the conclusion of worship the pastor gave a gospel presentation that finally made both the emotional and intellectual connection that apparently I needed. Jesus Christ became real to me, my Lord and Savior. Even if I did not comprehend at that moment what it did then and what it eventually would mean to me, I knew that my life had been restored and revived, and that God’s face was shining upon me; that I had been saved. Although I was not about to walk forward for the pastor’s altar call, I knew at that time that God had pursued me and finally caught me. I was His, although the reality is I had been all along.
About a month later I met a fine Christian who happened to be a member of a great evangelical Presbyterian church (God’s providence again). Two years later Susie and I were married in the same Methodist church that we both had attended as youths (the one in which “The Graduate” was filmed), although we did not know each other way back then. Point of trivia: our wedding was officiated by Vic Pentz, Susie’s pastor at the time. He now is the senior pastor at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, the largest church in the denomination. We gave him his start.
