Sweet kid isn’t he?  Yeah, it’s really old school, but that is me. (the little one not the big one; that’s my mom.)  I grew up in a very rural setting and with a huge family.  My mom and my dad each had 7 brothers or sisters, all of them lived close by, and each of them had families.  We were the typical 60’s family. I remember the first TV set we ever owned.  Everything was in black and white.  Cable, video, computer gaming, pay per view, flat screens and so much of our daily technology that we take for granted today were still years away.  That’s the world I grew up in.  I was a 60’s teenager and went through the killing of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., 50,000 of my peers in Vietnam, the landing on the moon, and the Beatles. 

 
Times have certainly changed. 

 However, my story isn’t about living in those days it is about the one thing that I’ve carried with me since the late 1960’s.  I grew up in church!  I mean, in those days I didn’t know very many people who simply weren’t religious.  I just didn’t know what it was like to not be in church.  My wife and I used to laugh about the fact that we never saw the end of the Wizard of Oz until we were almost grown because it only came on once a year and only on a Sunday night.  We always went to church on Sunday nights and never got past the parade in the Emerald City…

 
I’ve said all of that simply to say this…during all of my ‘church’ days I never got it!  I mean, I went because it was what we did.  I just thought church was like school. It was what you were supposed to do.  As a teenager I began to understand there had to be more than simply ‘going to church’ or I was wasting my time.  At 15 years old, I was sitting in a service like so many I had been to before, when something I knew in my head became a reality to my heart.  I was in spiritual trouble.  I knew I wasn’t perfect, I was a typical 60’s teen growing up in a small town, but I wasn’t a bad person either.  However, that night an understanding of how God viewed me became crystal clear.  He didn’t judge me based on my performance, good or bad!  He didn’t accept me based upon any set of parameters or guidelines imaginable.  God had a much higher standard, one I simply could not attain on my own.  Not even if I sold all of my rock and roll albums, quit racing my hotrod, didn’t drink any more beer or make out with my girlfriend when her parents weren’t home, not even if I got good grades in Algebra and Spanish.  I had an ‘imperfection’ that was so fatal, I was beyond help.  It was a spiritual problem.  A problem that was inherent to my nature as a human being. 

God deems anything short of perfection as unacceptable, and I was imperfect.  I needed something beyond me, my abilities, or my achievements to reach Him.  I had heard the term since I was a baby but it never stuck until that night.  I was a ‘sinner’.  One who has a spiritually fatal flaw.  It required something beyond me to ‘fix’.  That night, I realized God had provided the answer and it was available to me.  More vital than that was the cost.  It was free!  The Bible says, “God so loved every person in the entire existence of humanity that He provided a provision for all our sins.  It was the price of His only son, Jesus Christ.  Any person who comes to acknowledge this gift, not something we earn, and by faith, trusting without seeing, will be given, will inherit, will be provided, the ‘cure’ for their spiritual flaw.” 

I knew I was guilty of imperfection.  I understood the standard God held to 100% of the time and I had come to the place where I was desperate for the remedy.  In a small room in the back of our church building in Hobbs, New Mexico, I admitted my failure to God.  I believed His promise in Christ, confessed my desire for Him to become my Savior, and invited Jesus into my heart.  At that moment my eternity changed.  It became perfectly clear that the promise of God was valid and real. 

 
I wish I could tell you after that time I never messed up again!  However, my story contains so many mess-ups over the years.  Yet because of that night, God has always kept His promise to me. 

                                            . . . Yeah, this is me now!  No cool car like the other picture.  No really cool dressed mom holding me in her arms.  The only similarities between this picture and the first one, I have the same amount of hair!  However, there is another thing that has remained constant…It was true when I was a small child and it is true today…God loves you and He loves me!  That is the heart of my story.  There have been so many failures, successes, up’s and down’s, good times and really hard times, but in all of those He has remained faithful.  Having Jesus doesn’t mean we never have any more troubles; it means when we have troubles we’re never alone. 

If you’d like to have more information about the faith my story contains please contact me.  Thanks for allowing me to share my story with you and I hope my story will become your story!