#2125 (11/3) TODAY is My 44th RE-BIRTHday

November 3, 2017 - TODAY is My 44th RE-BIRTHday! - Stan

Today,  marks 44 years since the evening when I prayed to receive Christ as my Savior and Lord.

     I grew up in a nominal Buddhist home, nominal in the sense that my parents were Buddhist as far as my father having had a miniature shrine in our home to the memory (spirits?) of his deceased parents and that all the funerals I remember attending growing up were always Buddhist. Oh yes, we did have a  Bible that an aunt had given us that was kept out of sight on the top of our tallest book case. (I remember once taking it down to look at but being frustrated by the King James translation it was in.) And, for some reason, I grew up always thinking that we were somehow still Christians because we were Americans and all Americans were somehow Christians - whatever that meant.

    And so, into my early adult years God was merely a religious concept that had nothing to do with what really mattered in life. As I entered my teen years, what matters was achieving so as to earn the admiration of my peers and the pleasure of my parents. And so, in all honesty, the real “religion” I observed growing up was that of doing whatever I could to please, not God, but my parents. As I entered middle school, it became obvious that my main chance of being successful was in the area of academics. That's not  to say I was ever very smart but I was determined to get the best grades possible and so spent all my spare time not on developing relationships (something for which I suffered for till this day) but in trying to get mostly A’s on my report cards, and with a lot of hard work I was usually successful doing just that. Sadly, I learned over time that what I was once praised for became something that was soon just expected of me and so after awhile even getting all A’s didn’t get much attention.

     Nevertheless, my life focus through college continued to be earning A’s and I usually succeeded in doing so. (As I look back on my years of academic achievement, I regret I did not make my focus to actually learn the material I studied rather than getting A’s as I now realize there is too often quite a difference.) In what was supposed to be my final semester in college, I was doing student teaching (preparing to graduate with a degree in Education and then go on to study Educational Psychology in order to one day become a middle school counselor. (Curiously, my passion has become reaching out to middle school students as though my life has gone full circle.) I spent the entire semester assisting at a public elementary school.
   
    Unexpectedly, I ended up not able to handle the pressures and was forced to drop out of the program and to leave school at mid-semester. My last day at the school was very depressing as for the first time I had failed miserably in school, the one area in my life I had always experienced success.

    On that last day, as I was leaving the campus, another student doing student teaching “just happened” to see me leaving and drove up to me on his motorcycle. Whenever he had seen me that semester, he had handed me a gospel tract,, which I had always politely accepted but never bothered reading. Well, this time he told me that his cousin was speaking at a student meeting two days later at the university campus. Though I told him I would try to attend, I really had my heart set on seeing my high school team play a football game that same evening. 

   But that night, as I drove down the road heading for the sports stadium, I came to a stop at an intersection where a right turn would instead take me to the university campus. Suddenly, for a reason I’ve never understood, I just turned the car to the right and headed for the campus. The next thing I remember was standing in front of the room where the student meeting was being held. Realizing that I would not make the start of the game at that point, I decided to attend the meeting.

   While the music and the speaker were nice enough, at the end of the meeting I was still unsure of what the meeting was about. Just as I might have left, a student named Leonard walked up to me and asked if he could get my opinion of what was explained in a small booklet called The Four Spiritual  Laws.  After about 10 minutes, he described the difference between a self-controlled life and a Christ-controlled life and asked which kind of life I would like to have. It just made sense as he explained it that the better life was a Christ-controlled life. And so, as he led me through a simple prayer, I made the commitment to receive Jesus Christ into my life.

    To be sure, there were many things I didn’t understand that night when I prayed that prayer.st. But in the months that followed, I grew in my understanding and experienced incredible love and companionship from the Christians God placed in my life. After returning to school  and finally graduating from college the following semester, I was challenged to consider entering full-time ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ, the ministry that had impacted me so greatly. As I became aware that my heart desire was to do whatever I could to help others know the gospel of Jesus Christ, I applied for and was accepted into full-time Christian ministry, which by God's grace I served in for 33 years! 

    As I look back on the journey that's been my Christian life these past 44 years, I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had gone to that football game. Having had no one in my life who was a Christian, and with no motivation to attend a Christian church or seek to understand the gospel on my own, I greatly doubt I would have become a Christian. 

    Today, I enjoy a life of incredible peace in the midst of what can be difficult times as I continue to rest in God's sovereignty and power moment by moment. I live with a confidence that one day my journey will allow me to dwell in Heaven with my Heavenly Father for eternity. I seek to live each day wanting to please HIM even though I don't need to do anything to be assured of his infinite love and leading. It's a life I live by faith and one in which I hope every day to see others come to want for themselves as I look for opportunities to tell them about not a religion but a relationship with God that cannot be found apart from the person of Jesus Christ. 
   
   I live each day to SEEK Jesus, BE(come like) Jesus, and to SHARE Jesus. My prayer is that if YOU have not entered into that relationship, you will contact me about how to do so.