Creator of all
things!
Many of us just wander through life, enjoying ourselves,
without giving a thought to “what it’s all about?”
I don’t remember how old I was when I began to question the
origin of life. I learned early-on that death was a real thing. I shot a bird
with an air rifle and then tried to wake it up and it wouldn’t. It was never to
fly again.
I had a sister who was still-born and a second sister that
lived about three days. I went to both funerals, but at between five and six
years old, I didn’t understand it very well.
When I was in seventh grade, the recognized “smartest” kid
in my class was killed in a hunting accident, and I attended his funeral. It
was one of the saddest days of my life. While I was deeply grieved, my
classmates were laughing and joking as if nothing had happened.
I was taught by my parents that God created everything,
and I never doubted that it was true, but I really didn’t fully take it in. If
you asked me did I believe in God I would instantly say “yes.” Even so, I
wasn’t comfortable with talking about Jesus, or discussing God with anyone. I
just believed God was there because it made sense. Everything about life
screams out that there is a creator; how else could it exist. If there is a
creator, then He is God.
I was taken to church as a child, and enjoyed the music and
tolerated the preaching. I liked Sunday-school, and the fellowship of those who
came. When I was older, I taught Sunday- school at several churches, and I
studied the Bible, but I certainly didn’t understand it as well as I wanted to.
I believe, in retrospect, that I had blinders on my understanding so that I
couldn’t fully understand what was written there.
When I was about seventeen years old, the pastor’s son,
Paul, and I were out walking in the evening and the subject of belief in
“Christ,” came up. Paul said to me, “Jim, you’ve got to give your life to the
Lord.” I replied, “I want to, but how do you do it?” He answered, “You just
give it to Him.” Paul kept insisting, “You just give it to Him. I know now,
that he didn’t understand it any better than I did.
When I was thirty-nine years old, a travelling minister from
Canada came to my wife’s hometown and was teaching at a home-fellowship
meeting. He started by saying: “You must be born again.” I had heard that term
all my life, but it never penetrated my thinking, until then.
I listened to the reading of the verses in the Bible and I
decided to pray silently to accept Jesus as my Savior and I asked Him to cause
me to be born again. Nothing happened that I could recognize immediately, but
the next day, as I was going to work, I realized that my entire direction, of
what I wanted to do, had changed. I was no longer interested in just living
day-to-day for my own pleasure; instead, all I wanted to do was find out more
about God.
I read my Bible every chance I got and did a lot of deep
Bible study. I even took a course in Greek and one in Hebrew, so I could read
the verses in the original language to better understand them.
Beginning with the day after I accepted Jesus, I started
noticing things in nature that I had never seen before. I was installing a new
radio station and had to drive out 20 miles in all directions, every three
degrees and specific distances (like the spokes of a wagon wheel) to make
strength measurements. I kept coming across plants, insects, little animals and
all sorts of other things that I had never noticed before.
The night before we accepted Jesus into our lives, my wife
and I were reading a scripture in the Bible over and over and we couldn’t
understand what it meant. However, the next evening, we sat down and read the
same scripture and both of us understood it easily.
I believe that people who do not have a personal
relationship with Jesus have blinders on their minds so that they do not fully
realize that He is really there. Until one seeks for God with all
their heart, they will not find Him. We must mentally hunger and thirst
after God to really come to believe in Him. Once we exercise our faith to
believe, He will confirm it to us in so many ways. It has been almost forty
years since I accepted Christ and I am surer of Jesus today than ever before.
