Part 1

My story actually starts back with my maternal grandfather, Earl, or “Pucka,” as I called him, though nobody ever knew why. I can remember him staying up late on Saturday nights preparing the Sunday School lesson for the “seniors” class. I can remember him rattling the change in his pockets as he greeted people at Castle United Methodist Church of Elkhart, Indiana. Though the church is gone now and has merged with another church, the building is still there, and I can still almost smell the musty air of the ground floor. Anyway, it was in this church that my parents met. (Isn’t a church the only place to meet your spouse?) I suppose it was this quiet respect that first began to teach me about God.

From there my story moves to Scipio Presbyterian Church in — where else — Scipio, Indiana. Scipio is still a very small church, typically running 30 on Sunday, but it was here that I formed some stabilizing friendships and found my first love, Sherri. (She never quite returned the favor, though we were good friends for years.) I’ll never get over the goodness of God in providing such a small church with so many young people for me to be friends with: the Rose’s, the Kinnear’s, the Bennett’s. My mother got intensely involved with the church summer bible school that was a joint effort between our church and the local Methodist church. It was through this involvement that I developed a personal relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. See, my mother would buy bible school supplies from Nelson’s Bible Bookstore in Columbus. I would go with her, and, while she was doing her thing, I would peruse Chick bible tracts. Now these are crudely drawn tracts that cover a variety of ways that one can live apart from God, but they always end the same way: someone is “deep in sin” and is witnessed to by a “Christian.” This Christian then has the sinner repeat the “sinner’s prayer” that basically says that you are a sinner, that you want to stop sinning, and that you want Jesus to “come into your heart.” It is at this point — according to these tracts — that you are saved, or “born again.” Well, one day, I prayed that prayer and…

I felt nothing.

But the point is that it started me talking to God, and, believe me, that’s exactly what this whole thing is about. This whole existence. I started praying for people, and meaning it. And I started reading bits and pieces of the bible. I didn’t understand it, but God was there and working through it.

Around this time, I struck a friendship with Mr. Moir, one of the five strongest influences in my life. He was a contractor who had, with his two brothers, built the subdivision that I lived in. (He also had built and attended the aforementioned Methodist church in Scipio.) He continued to build houses in the area, and, when I was about 14, he built a house two doors down from me. Now, being the engineer that I would become, I would go and watch him after school and on Saturdays. After a time, he began to talk with me, being a gregarious type of guy, and we found that we had a common interest: playing the harmonica. My sister happened to be with me one day, and somehow the subject came up, and Mr. Moir asked if I would play for him. Laura, my sister, encouraged me to go get my harp. So I went and got it and my song book and played “When the Saints go Marchin’ In.” Then Mr. Moir stood there with a smile on his face. I caught the look, noticed that he had a harmonica too, and he told me to play again. Tentatively, I started, and he did too. After the first few notes, I was hooked. He was amazing. One of the all-time best non-blues harp players to have ever lived. We would sit on his back porch, with the crickets and bullfrogs as backup, as we played harps for hours. He used to play with his two brothers, but they had moved away. I became a sort of surrogate grandchild to him. He of course never said anything like that, but I know that’s how he felt. And, in a way, he became a sort of grandfather figure to me as well, having lost my Pucka when I was in fifth grade. Anyway, Mr. Moir talked to me one night about faith healing. He told me that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer, and that they had prayed for healing and, instead of continuing to pray about it, had thanked God every day for 30 days afterwards. After that time, she went back to the doctor and he couldn’t find a trace of cancer! Now I had heard about healing in the bible, but this was the first time that I had ever heard about it in modern day.

I have to explain here that in my youth I was extremely allergic to poison ivy. I could catch it in the air. I would break out 3 or 4 times a year. Once a year, it usually got bad enough that I had blisters between my fingers that would get to be as big as my fingers themselves. I began to break out not long after Mr. Moir had witnessed to me. Right then I prayed that God would heal me, and I began to thank Him for that healing. Well, I didn’t develop blisters. Ever. Since that day, I have never broken out. Many people say that they believe that people were healed by Jesus in the bible, then say that they believe the same thing could happen today. But then, in the next sentence, they will find a way to dismiss healing when it is presented to them. I have just as hard a time of keeping faith in my heart as the next guy, but there comes a time when you have to realize that according to God’s rules, sometimes things have to be believed to be seen.

Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Needless to say, God started becoming real to me around this time. I can remember going to my church and listening to the sermons. I would sit and feel a power moving on me that I had never felt before. I would want to cry. I would get teary eyed. I would wonder if everyone else felt what I was feeling. I would want to release my feelings. I would want to cry out to God. What was going on here? The minister of that church had good messages, but he wasn’t a tremendous speaker. The music, though performed with heart and feeling, wasn’t professional. It wasn’t even amplified! (Imagine…) But there I would sit and wonder: what was I feeling?

It wasn’t all that long after that that my father developed kidney stones. I can still remember the morning we got up early to take him to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. As I was getting dressed, while Dad was across the hall in the bathroom…

God spoke to me.

As Mr. Moir had witnessed to me about the laying on of hands that had healed a friend of his, so God told me to lay hands on my father. It was just as plain as reading the words on this page. I knew that if I would just go into the bathroom, lay hands on my dad, and pronounce that in the name of Jesus he was healed, he would be. I still have no doubt that it would have happened if I had done it, but I argued it away. I thought that since my dad didn’t believe in that, it wouldn’t work. (The bible tells different stories though…) It took a long time for me to forgive myself for not doing it, but it did finally bring together the feeling of the Spirit and the Word of God. I then understood how God speaks to people. Just like in the bible. Still today.

Now I became really fervent about God. I would turn every conversation I could into a discussion about the Lord. I remember witnessing a lot on the school bus. I am amazed today at how many receptive ears I had at that young age. The majority of grown-ups think that they have it all figured out, but young people are open, not having “heard it all before.” No wonder Jesus said:

Matthew 18:3, “And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

About this time, I began to develop an very close friendship with a girl named Mary. It would be the best of times, and the worst of times…

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