I debated including this testimony. I don’t want to make this place about me. It’s not – it’s about connecting people with the Word. I am hopeful that sharing may help others relate, though, so here we go.
First, my mom. God bless her. She came from a broken home with an abusive (when present) father and six siblings, who she spent most of her childhood helping to take care of. She graduated from that just in time to adopt me from birth – I, in turn, both directly and indirectly ensured that she received not one day of peace until she was in her forties. She worked herself to the bone to take care of me, and if there are any flaws in my upbringing it is because she was busy carving us a place to survive with little more than her bare hands at times. She wasn’t perfect, but she did her very best. I am here today because of her.
My dad was not a kind man, nor a particularly good one. He was decent enough when he was sober, which ended at around noon each day, give or take. That was the problem with him; you never knew what you were going to get. He was quick with a joke and in generally good humor until he wasn’t, and things tended to come apart rapidly from there. Honestly, you’d be amazed at how fast some people can go from playing a guitar to chasing their wife with a sword.
My earliest memories were loud and often terrifying. Before starting Kindergarten, I’d seen my mom beaten more times than anyone deserves. Violence and argument were as routine as a Sunday dinner in the Bible Belt, until she left when I was five or so. This was about a decade and a half longer than she should have stayed, but better late than never. I would see him intermittently after that, a couple of weeks each summer usually, until I was 18. He didn’t change much, except to find a new wife to beat. Our relationship was nonexistent once I became an adult, although we did reunite for a couple of weeks when he got cancer and died six years later.
My mom remarried when I was 10 or so. My first stepdad was a decent man. He worked hard, drank very little, and was never abusive. Still, he was quiet and relatively cold and lived his life in his own head. I’m sure he cared about us, but I’m not certain I ever heard him say it.
You can see here the precursor to a lot of my foolish antics. My parents were factory workers, gone when I woke up and home long after I was. My mom was overwhelmed with a rebellious, unmanageable child; my stepdad was happy to pretend it wasn’t his problem; I was care free and lacking any accountability. Things played out pretty much exactly how you would expect from there. It didn’t take long for me to find the wrong crowd, and the deep end of a pool of bad decisions. I was showing up to school with hangovers before I hit my teens, in court for truancy before I hit high school, and dropping out of high school before my voice was done changing. It was a disaster.
That was about the time my stepdad got himself addicted to cocaine. It checked out. My friends and I had already been dabbling with hard drugs, after all, and we were all running around in the same circles. It is so clear to me now just how absurd that world was, but you couldn’t have convinced me at the time that we were doing anything wrong. Bills paid, no domestic violence, and toys to play with – that was about the extent of my criteria for defining stable, and we met it. For a while.
My mom eventually got savvy and figured things out. She divorced him at about the same time I left the house and started trying to figure it out on my own. My first child was born when I was 18 and working in the same factory as half my uncles, my aunt, my mom, and my future stepdad.
Speaking of him. He was a good dude. As flawed as any of us are, to be sure, but a fundamentally decent man. If he had come into my life ten years earlier, everything might have been different. He brought my mom to faith, which I thought was ridiculous at the time. Thank God she wasn’t taking advice from me. He brought me to faith, too, in a roundabout way. We’ll get to that.
When I was 21, I took a hard left on the way home from work one day and pulled into the Army recruiting station. Being Rambo was a childhood dream, but having my daughter gave me pause. Eventually, though, I realized that the best thing I was going to do for her was leave that place and give my life a hard reboot. That or spend the next 40 years throwing boards together, waiting for my ex to watch her so I could party with my friends. I was right, I think, but it did cost me a lot.
You get the point, I think. My early life was a little wild, and it didn’t improve much into my late twenties. I partied, I buried myself in the world, and I proudly upheld my own standard of decency. I was drug free, at least, but I danced with too many bottles and spent far more Sundays than I care to admit trying to recall the night before. Worse, it was all a joke; we laughed so easily then at things I dread having to explain to my children now. I am deeply ashamed of so much of what I did – and what I didn’t – do. I don’t like talking about it, but if by doing so I can encourage some of you, I consider it well worth the cost.
I was blessed with a fairly successful career. I found an interesting job that kept me on my toes and involved a lot of traveling. Unfortunately, it involved a lot of traveling. The unstable nature of it cost me custody of my daughter, and I missed out on much of her life as a result. I struggle with that every day, but I still believe the result was worth it.
I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world, working in some dozen countries across multiple continents over nearly 20 years of service; everything from combat in Afghanistan to Embassies in Africa, with plenty in between. That experience hasn’t exactly left me with a panoply of practical skills for the civilian sector, but it’s given me a lot of perspective and a pension in my early 40s. More on that later.
Between two of those trips, things took a sharp turn. My stepdad died, changing a weekend of camping into a drive to Michigan. It was a terrible time, as you might expect, but it opened my eyes for the first time to what a good Christian home could look like. I spent that week watching his family and how they carried themselves, and I found myself wondering what my life might be like if only things were a little bit different. Don’t get me wrong. I was content with my lot, happy to continue as I was. But what they had – what they were – was something else. It was magnetic.
I sat for hours one morning with two of my stepdad’s brothers, on the park bench where he had died. I had questions, and they answered them. Honestly, thoughtfully, and with an unwavering faith I would have felt compelled to criticize in my youth. And they framed that faith in a way that was new to me. I’d never had a serious conversation – not that I’d been trying, really – with someone able who was able to articulate what they believed, why they believed it, and what it meant.
That conversation lit a fire in me that just wouldn’t die. I was hungry. I needed answers. The skepticism I’d treated like a weapon all my life was now a shackle, and I wasn’t going to shake off easily. I needed facts. Data. Logic and reason. A few weeks later, I reached out to one of them and asked for some recommendations. He mailed me More Than a Carpenter and my first Bible.
With those books, he introduced me to Jesus Christ and saved my life.
