From the Wilderness to the Desert

God was gracious to me after my two year hermitage away from his people. Once I was willing to risk trusting again, he did not fail me. Over the course of about the next seven years we were part of two different congregations and in both cases I found both to be the healing that I needed.

In the first church, I found a real genuineness in the people, their worship and their whole approach to teaching and presenting God's word. It was very restorative to my soul in so many ways and refreshing to find not only a body of believers that were in sync with what I believed and wanted, but was also part of a larger movement of churches all committed to the same principles. That said, as comfortable and as healing an experience it was for me, I never got to the place where I was ready to risk it all and reveal my whole story to the pastor. I was so afraid that what had brought me so much comfort and joy and healing was as unstable as a house of cards and had I risked anything so great I might just risk losing what I had gained. Oh how foolish I was and what an opportunity I may have robbed that pastor of to have had the chance to pour of himself into my life the way I had only dreamed of having someone in that type of authority role do for me. But, I allowed fear to cripple me and most likely cheated us both out of a richly rewarding relationship.

The second church body that we moved to was just because my father was really anxious for all of us to go to the same church together. My dad was a purchasing agent for the fire department and was accepted as an honorary fire captain and included in the Christian fraternity Firefighters for Christ. One of the captains he served invited him to come check out the church they were attending. It was in a town just a few miles away, but still close enough to be within consideration. My dad asked us to come check it out with them.

Well, we all went together for a few months and my parents eventually decided it was too contemporary for their tastes, but we had felt like we were at home from the very first Sunday we had visited and we weren't looking for a new church to attend.

Here at this church I found something that I had not experienced before. I found a pastor with a high degree of empathy and and even higher degree of steadfast tenacity. He saw that there was a great big hole in me and he was determined to get to the bottom of it, even he ran the risk of getting lost trying. I didn't risk putting my trust in him. He put himself out there and took all the risk in trying to earn my trust. He and I made a lot of breakthroughs.

Unfortunately, stubbornness and pride can make a train wreck of even the best of good efforts and even still, after all he attempted I wasn't willing to dive in deep with trust and for the first time in my life I came face-to-face with the core of the matter, my faith was at stake. I finally owned up to God that I was willing to follow his voice, I felt I had no other choice, but where I had the trouble was in believing that God would follow through once I got to where he told me to go. I had been in the wasteland for so long and still hearing God call to my heart that the purpose, the plan, and the dream are still very real, but my heart would cry back, "so, it's not like you're going to do anything about it if I keep running after them."

I was destitute. I felt as if every dream I had ever had or God had ever given me had evaporated before my very eyes while God just stood there and watched and still he would torture me by continuing to remind me that he still wanted me for that big purpose of his for my life. It made me as angry to continue to hear it as it gave me relief to know that I hadn't already blown it so bad that he still wanted to yes me. I felt like a cosmic joke, but I was beginning to feel less and less so. It was starting to turn around. My thinking and my faith were beginning to change.

During the time that we were at this church I really began to pray for a miraculous change in the relationship between my parents and myself. My parents and I had always had a strained relationship at best. We went through what I call a dance. The music and the steps never change only the venue and occasionally you just get tired of dancing and pretend you are not dancers at all. Well, this is how my parents and I related to each other. We had major issues between us that prevented us from having a healthy and close relationship with one another. Periodically, these issues would become to big to ignore and there would big a blow-up. We would have it out verbally, but we would never seriously deal with the issues raised. We would just wait until things cooled down again and just repress them once again.

After September 11th, 2001, I had a serious talk with my parents about ending this cycle for good. I asked them to commit it to prayer and be willing to work through things no matter how hard they may be to deal with or ugly to look at. They agreed, but I took it one step further. I took the issue to our church family and asked them to commit this matter to prayer with us.

This became a collective journey that we shared, as a church body, as God began to work miracles in the relationship between my parents and I. And, it culminated, in a very visible way, on a men's retreat that I got my father to attend one spring. It was such a moving experience for the men who had been praying for me on this journey that many were moved to go to great lengths to restore strained relationships with their own parents.

It was also during this time that God blessed my wife and I with our first successful pregnancy giving us a precious little girl. This too was a journey of prayer and faith that our church family walked closely with us on. A year and a half before we had experienced a very short pregnancy that ended abruptly in a miscarriage. So, for over forty weeks they very closely followed the progress of our baby and prayed for her and my wife's health and protection daily.

This was such a wonderful time of change in my life, and in my family. I had completely transitioned in my relationship with my parents from "There's no way we're moving with you when you both finally retire and leave the state. The best we ever got along was when we had two thousand miles between us." to "There's no way I want to allow that great a distance to exist between us because I am not finished seeing where God is going with this miracle.". Even though I was fresh out of another bad experience serving under this second pastor, the rest of the experience was very positive and affirming. God had finally given me at least one more child in my family. Things were good and I was in a place were I was finally ready to trust God with everything again. And we were moving to New Mexico.


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Location:N Main St,Roswell,United States

The Wilderness, part 3 - A Brief Foray Back into Ministry

There were a number of factors that played into the eventual closing of my online business, most of them were completely outside of my control and had nothing to do with me, but the biggest reason is that even though I had experienced nearly two years of really good success, when it hit the skids I didn't knuckle down and press through, I didn't seek the council of others who made it through this period in their businesses and succeeded, no, instead, I jumped right back into the rut, jumped off the sinking ship and ran back to familiar with my tail between my legs again.

I went back to working long-term temp jobs and doing everything I could to get rid of the remainder of my inventory.

It was during this time that a God-only miracle happened for me and my wife. Completely out of the blue we got a phone call one day offering to place a baby boy born that morning in our home for adoption. This was definitely a working of God because we had never approached an adoption agency, never done any of the preparatory work to be considered acceptable by the state to adopt, and I was working a temp job after closing a failed business and my wife was a substitute teacher.

So, no rut to jump in here. We had always planned that one of us would stay home with the kids when we had them and that one was going to be me. We firmly believed that you don't have children to put them in daycare and let someone else raise them. If you are going to commit to having children, you should commit to raising them as well. That was a Sunday that we heard about and met our son for the first time, Monday we got the news that he was definitely going to be placed with us and Tuesday we brought him home from the hospital. Monday, I had to call into my job and let them know that I very likely might not be back and I wasn't.

Over the years I worked various long-term temporary jobs and independent contracts to bring in extra money, but never went back to work full-time permanent. Even going back to work part-time was problematic. First, I had to convince a potential employer that part-time was all I was looking for and I wasn't going to be running out the door for some imagined better offer that wasn't coming because I was soliciting it. Second, the job either had to be in the evening or it had to pay enough to cover childcare and still make a significant contribution to the family budget. If it wasn't going to do that, I could solve getting out of the house by just going out one evening a week by myself. No babysitter cost and no working for a vaporous paycheck you never got to enjoy.

During this time I have also had one other excursion into professional ministry, not very dissimilar to the first, with the except that the people accepted us, worked with us and we did not experience racism for a single minute or from a single person, like we did in our previous experience. It was an inner-city, urban ministry. It was also still in a church-plant state. It was not fraught with the invisible usurping or behind the scenes manipulations that was going on in the previous church I had served, but it was very much centered around a pastor who was very much wrapped up in himself and kept upsetting the apple cart so everyone needed him to keep things together. It was a church body with a lot of potential and he was a man God had shaped with a the potential to be a great leader, but he was going to have to first get out of his own way and stop trying to be a spiritual "player" for God before it was going to come together. Not until he truly knows and understands that he doesn't have everything all together will he be able to let go of the reigns and help to maximize other people to their greatest kingdom potential rather than seeking others to raise him up to his own.

I felt like I was on an emotional and spiritual merry-go-round serving under him and I just wasn't able to keep up with every little nuance he kept chasing after and expecting us to keep up with. There was a lot of hype, a lot of promises and very little delivery. We couldn't find affordable housing in the area and were commuting an hour each way several times a week on top of my wife commuting daily to teach in the community. It eventually began to take too high a toll on us emotionally, physically, and even spiritually. We eventually had to resign so they could seek someone who could live within the community. They deserved that much.



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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States

The Wilderness, part 2 - Desperation

During the time that I was working at Office Depot the church we were going to went through a split. One of the pastors had been supplementing his lifestyle off of the church budget and burying it in a double set of books for many years. When he got caught on an undeniable sizable expenditure, he got a buddy, who was a loan officer at the bank that carried the mortgage for the church to pretend that an error had been made in the mortgage amortization during one of the times the bank had changed owners and this accounted for the exact amount of discrepancy in the church funds in question. That would have been nice, if the discrepancy had been an overpayment to the mortgage.

Well the church split and we should have just had the good sense to go somewhere else altogether, but hoping for an opportunity to step up into ministry in the forming of a new church body, I foolishly followed the pastor who had not committed the financial impropriety.

Little did I realize that he held a big grudge against me for something that had happened a few years before and he had been working against me ever since. After we had returned to California and finding no opportunities for ministry in the church I was attending and not finding any elsewhere any time soon, I decided to start holding a bible study in my home.

My Bible study had been slow going, to star, but after football season ended, Friday nights at my house became the place to be. Every Friday night my house was packed out with teenagers, eager to dig deeper into the scripture from several different parts of town, and they were from a couple of different churches than the one that I attended.

About a month into when things were really going good and I was having about fifty kids evert Friday night, I got a phone call from the youth pastor from my church ordering me to cease holding my bible studies. He did not have any reason other that it wasn't his plan and he hadn't sanctioned it. I asked him if he had heard that I was teaching some errant doctrine or something like that, he said he had heard nothing about what was being taught there. I invited him to attend, as a guest, and even offered to let him have advanced copies of my lessons, so he could set his mind at ease, if this was his concern. He just insisted that I had to stop holding my Bible studies and that he had the complete authority to do so. I told him that I respectfully disagreed with him, that if he found error with my teaching, then he had the authority to lovingly correct me, rebuke me if I refused correction and then worn those entrusted to him to stay away, but I still didn't see where he had the authority to stop me from teaching the word of God to anyone.

He didn't like the fact that I wouldn't stop and he called the pastor, who saw him as his favored son. This pastor had hired him right out of Bible college on the high recommendation of some professors and pastors he trusted. Let's just say this youth pastor was very special to him. Well he called him up and told a bunch of lies. According to what eventually came back to me when I went to the pastor to talk to him about it was that I had initiated the phone call and that I was rubbing his nose in the fact that I could get more kids to show up at my house on a Friday night than he could at church on a Sunday morning or Wednesday night, that I was going to get him fired, that I was going to have his job and that there was no way I was going to give up this Bible study because that was how I was going to do it.

I was in shock. There was nothing in my character that even remotely came close to something, let alone someone, that could do those kinds of things, even said it should have been needless to defend myself against such charges, this man had known me for a lot longer. But there I was defending myself against something that was so contrary to my character but was exactly familiar to the fantasies of this youth pastor's insecurities.

Yet, I pressed on. I was faced with great adversity and I was determined to stick it out and try and see it through to the other side. I didn't want to just jump into the rut again. I also really didn't feel like I had anywhere to go to. I thought things got smoothed over, but in the end I think all that really happened was that they just settled down enough to be able to get along together.

Here we were in this new church venture together and I had certain talents and skills that this pastor had now had need of, by the way his favored son youth pastor took off for an even cushier position were less was probably expected of him and he would be thought even more highly of by the next boss, his father-in-law, so as long as I was willing to stay in that box, everything was cool.

I tried to assert myself for ministry consideration, but he wasn't interested. He was really trying to groom his son to follow in his footsteps and his son really didn't want to and didn't believe he had ever had a calling. I even had one real good opportunity to move away to a ministry position in a bi-lingual community. Everything looked great, the church was established and I would have been moving into a position I would have been developing rather than attempting to create anew. But, as quickly as they seemed to fall in love with my wife and I the opportunity evaporated. When I contacted the church to see if they had made a decision, they informed me that my pastor had warned them away from me.

Needless to say I was utterly devastated. It knocked me out completely. This time, instead of jumping back into the rut I just completely jumped out. I left God's people behind, I couldn't trust them.

It was a little more than two years before I even entered a church again and then it was because a customer of mine at Office Depot had tried to evangelize this very good man she had met that just couldn't stand to see go to Hell. I was taken aback by that. I hadn't turned my back on God. I was still a Christian. I just was so hurt by God's generals I didn't know if I had it within me to stand in the ranks any longer.

I decided to take a chance. I decided that if this woman was going to be so bold as to try and witness to me, I would be bold enough to tell her the truth and if she didn't run away screaming I just might give her church a chance. That was an awful lot to place on one individual. And I was really afraid she was going to regret opening that can of worms, but she didn't. She just listened and loved and we found a church home to heal in for the next three years.



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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States

The Wilderness, part1 - Office Depot

After leaving my first youth pastorate I went to work for Office Depot and was highly successful selling computer for them for over three years. I had an awful boss at the Depot. He definitely did not have any real strengths needed to manage people. He was just a bully. He had started out in the grocery business and since he had a college degree, all he had to do was stick around long enough and eventually they would put him on a management track. From there he could always produce results for about five years, just about anywhere before those in authority over him caught on that what they saw was all they were ever going to get. All he had to do was just keep moving ahead of that curve and he could keep them fooled. That eventually led him to mice from grocery to big box/ office supply retail. He never gave a compliment and was constantly tearing the people under him down.

I was determined that, even though this was not a ministry position, I was going to give this job my all for the Glory of God the same as if it was. I went above and beyond my duties and responsibilities, even though my boss repeatedly falsely accused me of slacking off and not doing my job. I went the extra mile for my customers. My approach was never about making a sell. It was always about learning the customers real needs, educating them along the way and matching them up with the choice that best met their needs, even if it honestly meant sending them to one of my competitors to achieve that end. And, always, I took care of the little guys in the store I had to depend on to get my job done. Yes, it was true they were already getting paid to be there to facilitate me, but they were getting no appreciation for the job they were doing from the boss and I have learned when working in sales jobs, you always want to take care of the people who you are dependent on to deliver your product to the customer once you have consummated the sale. You have to remember that no sale is ever truly complete until the customer has gotten home with their purchase, has put it to use, and is still as excited about it and buying it from you as they were at the time they handed over their cash or signed the credit contract. Those individuals that expedite delivery and make sure that it is loaded up or delivered undamaged and in a timely manner are almost as important a part of the process as was the salesman. I wanted those people to be excited to be helping one of my customers because they knew I was going to take care of them later.

This was one of the big reasons why I sold about two million dollars in sales the last year I was at Office Depot and was not far behind that the other years I was there. Yet, I never heard once from my boss that I was doing that great of a job. He was getting accolades for the job I was doing and I am sure he thought it was because of how effective a job of bullying me that I was doing so well. I doubt he could have had the capacity to believe the truth, that I was doing my job to the glory of God and treating his employees to the exact antithesis of him. It wasn't until I was at a quarterly sales seminar for the company and we were talking about things with our collective bosses' boss and he reacted to some comment I made with shock that I felt so insecure in my job. He assured me that if my boss were to fire me for anything short of being able to have me arrested for, he would probably get fired and I would get my job back. I was shocked to find out that I was consistently the number one salesman for the entire chain, worldwide, and on my slack months I might slip to number three, never had I been lower than number five. I was definitely king of my peers at that meeting and my view of my boss changed forever that day.

Office Depot was the one exception to the rut rule. I stuck it out here through thick and thin, good and bad, pretty and ugly. There was no running back to comfortable from there. I remained at Office Depot until I had started an online mail-order business that was making more money and demanding more time than the Depot afforded.

But, there was two things that happened during my tenure in the office supply wasteland. The first was that I had the opportunity to positively impact many of my coworkers lives for Jesus Christ. The second was that my wife and I came face-to-face with the ugly sting of infertility and the reality that our dream of being parents may not ever come true. I turned thirty while working at Office Depot and probably could have had a large party with work friends and church friends, but I just didn't feel like celebrating anything. I had reached the first major milestone in my life and I judged my life an utter failure. This deep feeling of failure had nothing to do with the big occupational or achievement dreams that still seemed to evade my grasp, it had everything to do with the fatherhood element that looked like it had turned to ash in my hands and would like never have a Phoenix like miraculous rising in the future. I wanted four children and expected to have some, most or all of them by now and all I had were broken dreams.

I really began to feel like every aspect of my life, not just the pursuit of purpose and ministry was wandering aimlessly in the wilderness.


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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States

Getting Stuck in a Rut

And it was off to the races with the pattern I had set for myself. Instead of trying to move forward I was repeatedly getting to a point of setback and instead of pressing through or just going around the obstacle and moving on, I started just running home and wallowing in my wounded and victimized state.

After returning to California I decided that, if I wasn't going to be in school then I needed to be going to work. I also decided to start pursuing ministry opportunities. It wasn't easy doing either. Interested parties saw my failure to complete college as a flaw in my character and made them hesitant to involve themselves with me. If I wasn't able to see something through to completion, when I was so close and doing pretty good at it, then how much more could they expect me to follow through for them.

I can't blame them. On paper I would probably look at someone with the same set of circumstances with the same level of skepticism. It took a lot of effort and the submitting of nearly a thousand copies of my resume, but a few churches did eventually show some interest. And, I had a few great interviews with some great and some really kookie churches. Some of those that seemed really promising, and I know that this has been true on a repeated basis over the years, have in the end selected a candidate who had letters to place after their names over me with more years of ministry experience. In some of those cases, I know from individuals that have attended those churches, that the decisions made were quickly regretted and those youth pastors had to be let go. This doesn't mean that they would have been guaranteed an opposite experience with me or someone like me, just that paper based decisions are not always the wisest course of action.

There was one church in particular that responded that, after interviewing with the pastor, I just fell in love with. It was an inner-city church that was still in the stage that it would be considered a church plant. Church planting and urban ministries is something that is in my family history and something that God has always placed close to my heart.

We accepted the position of youth pastor and went off with a heart full of God inspired dreams for this community. It seemed, at first, that we were making a good connection with the kids and really making headway. But, our presence in the church and the community caused some very ugly things that had been operating in secret and behind the scenes to be exposed and be brought out into the light of day. It really stirred things up and certain individuals who had long enjoyed usurping authority and more or less running a church within a church were exposed for the workers of deception that they were.

We experienced everything from lies and gossip to outright racism directed at us and it appeared that there was going to be no end in sight and the pastor I was working under was neither man nor man of God enough to stand up for me or even himself and bring an end to the chaos that had been brewing for far longer than we had been there. Eventually God just told me one night while I was praying that it was time to go. I had dinner with the pastor before we left and he chewed me out for not allowing him the opportunity to help me find another ministry opportunity. I was really kind of angry by the notion that after all I had suffered through because he wouldn't stand up and defend me and the work God had given him, he honestly expected me to trust him to do that for me. But, now, after all of the time that has past, even if he didn't deserve my trust, he was right about one thing, I should have continued moving forward and secured another ministry position before leaving the one that I had. But I was feeling spiritually whipped and I did what I knew best, I tucked my tail between my legs and ran back to what was comfortable and familiar.

It would be several years before I returned to a professional role in ministry, but this practice would become a rut I would get stuck in many areas of my life. And, worse, I would begin to try and hide out there as well.

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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States

Getting Whipped and Running Home With My Tail Between My Legs

After the horrible experience with the job in Oklahoma City I ran all the way home with my tail between my legs, back to California, and licked my wounds and felt sorry for myself. Looking back now I can see that this started a pattern that even now that I have recognized it, it is taking an awful lot of painful effort to break out of.

It is interesting when you talk to both my wife and I about our experience of living in OKC, we will both recount it as one of the worst experiences in our lives, but of all the big cities we have ever lived in, if God asked us to move back there, we would go in a heartbeat. There were a lot of things about our time in OKC that we really loved. There was just this one horrible experience with my job that was all consuming and overshadowed everything else. It is what comes up first whenever try to remember our time there.

When we left there we really needed a respite, but we did not, or at least what I really did not need was to retreat back to what was familiar. I have been plagued, literally with nightmares of my need to return to Springfield and finish what I started, prove to myself that I have the right stuff to have seen it through, and see life through on that path that I once committed everything to. But, I aborted that and ran home. It would have been very easy for me to have returned to Evangel after being gone for a year and finished the three semesters I needed to complete two bachelor degrees and and emphasis in secondary education.

But, that is not what I have done and the nightmare has been my companion for over eighteen years now. And, trust me, it would be a nightmare to me to have to return to Springfield for any reason. That is not a chapter in my life I want to revisit for any reason other than to see family and frien


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Location:W Mescalero Rd,Roswell,United States

The In-Between Times

In the time that followed leaving college, which at the time I believed was only for a year until I regained my health and returned to Evangel to finish my studies.

During that time I took a full-time job in the evening on the janitorial crew for the General Council of the Assemblies of God. I had already been working for the General Council on a freelance basis, writing and editing for their various publications while attending Central Bible College and had experienced a good working relationship with them up to that point, so I was not prepared for what was to follow. My experience working as a full-time regular employee of General Council just proved the rest of my experiences working for "Christian" organizations to be true: I have had some of my worst on the job experiences working for large companies and non-profit organizations that proudly wave the banner of "Christian" for all to see.

In most states non-profit organizations get special exemptions and protections under and from the law that other businesses don't enjoy. And, even though the right, moral, just, or even biblical thing to do would be to do the opposite, these companies and organizations choose to let the the law of the land be their dictate of what is right and wrong rather than the principles laid forth in the Word of God they supposedly represent as the infallible guide for faith and practice. General Council was no less guilty of choosing the law first than many others.

I got chewed up and spit out because a supervisor was too proud to admit that he could have missed something in training me. It should have been obvious when I meticulously performed every one of the duties given to me every day, above and beyond as they were prescribed to me, but I never once did the duty that was in dispute as to never having been given to me orally or in writing to perform. But, he falsified notes that he had told me to do it on a certain date, reprimanded me for not doing it on another and then fired me for still not doing it on a third meeting. He was a good ole boy around the place so, even though he had a track record of doing this, he was to be believed because he documented it. I was actually told I might have been more believable had I kept similar notes. To which I responded, "Notes of what? I didn't even know there was something to be concerned about to begin with. How could I have taken notes?"

Because of their non-profit status they were even protected from federal fair labor practices and they knew it. Basically, they knew they were free to treat people in any way that they chose and they would get away with it. Yes, they were concerned about the possibility that an employee could be treated poorly by a supervisor, but since they were in no danger of repercussions from within or without of their organization they didn't see any reason to give the matter any consideration at all and just take my supervisor at his word and, no this considerable pattern of habit did not concern them, these were unreliable college students we were talking about and he had worked for them for several decades.

For me this really was the final straw with the Assemblies of God. I had many chances to have exposure to top leadership during my tenure at CBC and working on various writing projects. That combined with being at their flagship preacher's indoctrination institute I had a pretty good finger on the pulse of where they were headed and what they were hanging their hopes for the future on and I really felt that God was leading me in a completely different direction.

As a denomination, the Assemblies of God is so fascinated with the era of the Azusa Street Pentecostal revival that swept the United States in the early 1900s. It is where they, as a denomination were born from. And they have spent their entire existence looking back to those "glory days", grasping after anything they think might resurrect them. They have tried desperately to force revival in reverse to reignite Azusa all over again to no avail. They have lunged after every movement that had the appearance of being like Azusa with a "bear hug" like grip.

Being a student of history I know that God has never continued to work in the same way that he did before. He definitely doesn't work in reverse. In the collective movements of God that we have recorded in scripture and history there is a continual progression forward. My experience working within the Assemblies of God was that it had become a dinosaur primarily perpetuating its own existence. This left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to be where God was moving, I wanted to be headed in the direction he was going and it just felt like they were moving in the opposite direction. So, when I got burned by them as an official employee, especially the way I did, I knew I really wanted to break ties with them and go another direction.

Shortly after that I took a retail management job where I was able to hold onto my integrity as a Christian, an employer, and a businessman, even though I was now working for a man who made the wickedness of the "Christian" organizations I had worked look like child's play.

God showed me that there were worse people to work for and that even in those environments one person could make a difference. Boy was I ever miserable though. I had to exist as a very large buffer between my employees and the owner of the company.

I took a Christmas job working for a holiday kiosk in the mall in Springfield after leaving General Council. The owner of that kiosk also owned one of my favorite at ores in the mall and was about to open one in Oklahoma City but his manager had just quit, unexpectedly, a week before the store was to open.

My wife was in her last year of school and would soon be finishing her last on-campus semester. The only thing she had left was student teaching. Taking this job meant moving immediately and being apart for two months. My wife had family in Oklahoma City and a cousin on one of the school boards who was fairly certain they could secure her a student teaching position. So, off I went to OKC alone.

It was one of the most awful, miserable things I have ever done in my whole life. I loved the store I managed and the people who worked for me, but I just could not take working for the man I worked for or the unethical, immoral, and illegal things he did as a regular practice of doing business. Eventually, I just couldn't handle being in the middle of all the stuff he was trying to get me to help him get away with and he went too far in screwing over my staff one day in a way that I could make up for or recover the damage and I had no choice but to quit or sacrifice my public integrity. That job lasted just about long enough for my wife to finish her student teaching, return to Evangel for Graduation and then we moved back to California.

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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States

Evangel

Even though I don't regret the time I spent at Central Bible College, I can't help but wonder if I hadn't started out at Evangel College, now Evangel University, if I wouldn't have been healthy enough to finish school.

At the end of my sophomore year at CBC I decided to transfer to Evangel and go to the same school as my wife. I had been wrestling with the need to change schools for some time. It was quite obvious that CBC was not the right fit for me and I needed to make a change. I also had some idea that God was leading me away from CBC as well.

During my last semester at CBC I got an unexpected phone call from the Air Force recruiting office on the campus of the University of Missouri (Mizzou) offering me an ROTC scholarship if I would transfer there and finish out a chaplaincy program there. At the time I felt like I would be asking my wife to give up too much and I had gone to CBC to become a lifelong youth pastor. But, my wife was willing to follow me wherever I felt God leading, and, in retrospect, it might have been God opening a door. Since I would have been transferring in mid-program, the Air Force would have paid off my existing student loans and then I would have had the same six year post-graduate commitment like anyone who had spent four years in an ROTC program. The only regret I have in my adult life is that I didn't serve in the military. Here I was given an opportunity to finish school without debt, a guarantee to enter ministry, and I would have been serving in the military too. I should have given it more consideration and prayed about it more. It may have been the direction God wanted me to go with my life.

The following Fall I entered Evangel College as a junior and was immediately much more at ease academically than I ever could have been at Central Bible College. Where free thinking and the challenging of ideas had been discouraged at CBC it was openly encouraged at Evangel. Where popular culture was banned at CBC at Evangel it was encouraged to embrace it with moderation and discretion. (At CBC even popular Christian culture was taboo, if it didn't meet their standards for preferable acceptance. During my first semester there the Christian metal group Stryper came to town. A few students almost got expelled because they were photographed praying with the band before the concert.)

Academically I continued to excel. At Evangel the Bible department was part of the Philosophy department. So, to get a Bible degree at Evangel, I had to take more than just an intro course to Philosophy. I discovered that this was a subject I didn't need to fear. I excelled here as well. I made the dean's list my first semester at Evangel.

But, being married, in college and constantly strapped for cash, looking for more work, and trying to find a balance between school work and home life, added to the stress of not fitting in for two years at CBC began to take its toll on my health. I had already started out with the deck stacked slightly against me. I suffered from recurrent ulcers, migraines and irritable bowel syndrome that could cause cramps so severe they were known to trigger seizures. Two years of heightened stress on top of that pushed these donations over the edge and created some new ones.

During my second semester at Evangel I became so sick that I missed about sixty percent of my classes. This gave my teachers no choice but to fail me for lack of attendance.

I still remember the day that I got the letter in the mail from the academic dean telling me that I was on academic probation and that I couldn't return for at least three semesters. I remember that it wasn't even five minutes after I read that letter that my phone rang and it was the academic dean apologizing that I had even received the letter. It was supposed to have been intercepted and not sent out. I was told that they knew about my situation and about how sick I had been. He told me that my teachers had all plead my case and asked that I not be placed on academic probation. He said the school looked at my previous semester's grades and was changing my grades to incomplete. He even said they had worked out an extension of finical aid with the state of California, so that there wouldn't be an interruption in my financial aid. In short, they had taken care of everything for me. The only problem was I honestly felt like if I didn't drop out for the short term, I was literally going to die.


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Central Bible College

Bible college was definitely a mixed bag of tricks when it came to good and bad experiences. I know that God led me to Central Bible College and there were definitely some good experiences I had there. For one thing, I flourished academically for the first time in my life there. I made friendships that have impacted and continue to impact my life. In the midst of what was not the best environment for me there were a few professors who were unique for where they were and they recognized my unique talents and abilities and encouraged them, even when it meant breaking their rules to accommodate them.

But, that said, I was as about as out of place at CBC as a roast pig at a kosher wedding. Central Bible College was and is primarily a denominational preacher's college. Their main purpose is to produce pulpit preachers who tow the line, positionally speaking, according to denominational theology. I, on the other hand, didn't go to college to study and memorize denominational position papers and put the denominations particular spin on biblical interpretation on a pedestal above genuine scholarship. I went to college to learn the skills and gain the knowledge and tools necessary to test, challenge and own my beliefs.

I am not the kind of person who can just accept something as factual just because I am told it is the truth. God did not wire me that way. I don't care if you are the foremost expert in your field in the entire world, I am not going to just take you at your word. I want to be presented with the evidence or the facts, so that I can test it for myself. Only then, once I have seen the proof and decided for myself can I own the knowledge or belief as my own. Up until that time it was just heresy evidence that belonged to somebody else. This is something that has served me very well all my life. It has kept me from rushing in to things that were completely foolish and it has forced me to examine things that initially my first reaction was to reject, but on further examination found to be true.

This practice put me at real odds at CBC. They didn't want someone who thought that way. They expected you to just trust them and memorize their positions then go forth and regurgitate them. They didn't like their positions being challenged, especially when some of them were only loosely based on scripture, at best, and were based more on a few men's preferences. And when it came to doctrine, they really didn't want a critical thinker operating there. Being Pentecostal, there were certain areas were practice had trumped scripture and they were not interested in open dialogue that challenged those positions. Learning was obviously intended to be a one way street designed to strip away individualism and replace it with denominational collectivism. I am sure if you completely agree with their views, your opinion would be quite different.

All tolled this added up to a less than satisfying experience for me at Central Bible College. Although, in retrospect, had I not gone there I never would have discovered my talent for writing or how creative a thinker I really am, I never would have made the friendships that I made, I never would have had professors I respected acknowledge in me an advanced aptitude for biblical scholarship, I would never have begun to really understand what it means to be uniquely created as an individual by God, I would never have had my first teaching experiences as an English teacher, and so many more things that God did for me and through me that would not have happened had I not gone to CBC.


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Early Walls and Breakthroughs

Leaving for Bible College was a great leap of faith. My wife and I were headed half-way across the country to a place neither of us were familiar with. She had an aunt and uncle who lived there and had visited there once, but knew Springfield, Missouri no better than I did. Yet, we both embraced this big step as the greatest adventure either of us had ever embarked upon and were awaiting God's miraculous reminders that we were following his path for our lives and not just the whims of our fancy.

Opposition seemed to greet us rather than fortune. Our home church had a custom of having a special time of prayer and taking up a special offering whenever someone went away to Bible college. We were informed a few days before our departure that they were not going to do that for us. They hoped we understood that another person was also leaving for Bible college almost two months later and they wanted to wait and pray for both of us and hold one offering for the both of us at that time. Needless to say I was kind of hurt. I had been serving this church, in many capacities, since I was twelve years old and they weren't even going to pray over me before I left. It was devastating. Later, after they had the big send off for the other person they sent me a check in the mail for $25. This was a very large church and they had never taken that small of an offering for a stranger. Not quite the send off I had hoped to receive. I didn't need heroic accolades, but to be slighted like that cut to the core.

I did have a much better send off than I expected from my father-in-law's church that same weekend. Since the church we grew up in was passing us over for the customary send off I accepted their invitation to preach for them one last time before heading off to college. This congregation prayed over us, sending us out, and took up an offering for us. I think the church board even added to the offering because after the service I was handed an envelope with over three hundred dollars in it.

We left California that day with a very different sense of who our home church was. Over the years when we came home to visit it was this church body we came to visit, it was there I went to preach and give a report of how things were going.

Thankfully, we left California with glad hearts, though we were soon to feel like we were plagued with as many troubles as the settlers who first came West in covered wagons.

Our poor little Volkswagen Bus was loaded down way over its weight limit. It had no problem handling highway speeds in flat-out territory, but it became rather problematic whenever our flight plan required us to climb the slightest grade. I think our top speed climbing any hill was about fifteen miles per hour and considering we had to cross the Sierras, the Rockies and climb our way into the Ozarks and several smaller hills and ranges in between, this made our trip considerably longer and more costly than we had expected.

We had a family reunion to stop at on our way on our way there and almost didn't make it. Older Volkswagens have lug bolts instead of lug nuts and our over burdened bus decided to throw several lug bolts an hour outside of the town we were meeting in for the reunion. Quite a scary thing to pull over and realize you are just a few threads away from losing a wheel and rolling at highway speeds with your wife and the last of your possessions trusted to your driving ability.

Unexpected delays in travel, unexpected vehicle repairs, and greater fuel and travel expenses than we expected nearly wiped out our resources before we ever arrived in Springfield. Had it not been for our stopping over in Oklahoma with family for a week and preaching some and the congregations taking up offerings for us, we wouldn't have made it without having to call back home and ask for help, but God worked it out and we made it to Springfield on exactly what we had. We had to sell plasma that first week just to have some cash for gas and basic necessities, but we knew we were where God wanted us and we were excited about where God wanted to lead us and Satan was so interested in discouraging us from getting to,

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Borderlands

I could talk about all of the opposition I faced after embracing my calling, my family thought I would better invest my life in other career interests, my pastor thought it was wonderful but I didn't rise on the level of political expediency to do anything to help or guide me on my quest. I really had only two mentors early on in my quest, two men who believed in me, invested in me and gave me my first opportunities to preach and teach: my youth pastor and my future father-in-law.

I struggled over the next few years after high school because I didn't have the money to go to Bible college and I had little support for pursuing other pathways to ministry. So, I did the only thing I knew to, I just went to work, took some courses at the local junior college and took advantage of every ministry opportunity afforded to me and just sought the Lord and prayed for direction.

In that time I started on a career path, was highly successful, got fired not for anything I had done, but to pave the way for someone else's ambition, got engaged, nearly lost my fiancé in a severe auto accident that left her mother in the hospital for three months and her sister in a full body cast for six months, got married, got my car repossessed, sold most of my worldly possessions and packed the rest into a Volkswagen Bus and headed half-way across the country with my bride to go to Bible college.


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Initial Surrender

At this stage in my life, in the eighth grade, at the age of thirteen, when God called me to full-time ministry and I rejected it because I wanted fame and fortune instead, I began to make a series of bad in which I lit ally tried to split my personality in two and live my life God's way and my way at the same time. Long before Hannah Montana I tried to have the best of both worlds, spiritually speaking that is.

I began to live this spiritual duality where I wanted to embrace the life God wanted me to live while at the same time running as far away from the calling on my life as I could. The ironic thing was that while I was running from committing to a life of full-time service I was filling up my free time with ministry. I was involved in bus ministry, the leadership of my church youth group, the youth choir at my church, participating in many short-term missions projects, and taking advantage of every opportunity to preach that was offered to me. But during this time, I also had a completely second life I lived as well.

During my high school years I experimented with drugs and alcohol and participated in many foolish and ungodly things in attempts to be popular and accepted. I am not proud of what I did during these years and my heart breaks over the damage done to my testimony with friends from that time in my life who will not even listen to the Gospel from my lips today.

I remember very clearly one Christmas Eve getting high with some buddies from church, who were also double-lifers, behind a porn shop we had just been hanging out in, even none of us were old enough to legally enter, and the Holy Spirit showed up. Now, this wasn't a total shock to me. It was my senior year of high school and I was really beginning to examine my life, what I had been doing, where I was heading, and more importantly, what I really wanted out of life. I had even gone to my youth pastor and voluntarily removed myself from my leadership roles because I wasn't living up to the criteria for a good leader.

That night the Holy Spirit showed up and just took my high away. I know people talk about things sobering them up, but I went from baked to stone sober in the blink of an eye. I think God really wanted me to know that he was talking to me and that it wasn't just some experience I write off on having been high. I remember very clearly hearing God ask me why I was always trying to play it safe. Why I never wanted to stray into darkness beyond the point where I could still see his light. I remember answering that I was afraid of losing myself and my heart not wanting to find its way back to him. Then I remember his voice, not filled with anger or judgement, but with love, compassion, and desire asking me, "If you know where the light is, and you know where the banquet is prepared for you, and that is where you really want to be, then why are you standing here in the dark? Can't you see that I have been moving the light to keep it close to you? You don't have that far to go to come back to me."

You might think that would have been enough. I wish it had been enough and had I been alone it might have been. Yet, I was wrestling with one major issue, I knew that surrender is never a halfway proposition. I knew that surrendering my life completely to
God meant accepting his callings on my life.

That year, 1982, Christmas just happened to be a Sunday. That Sunday evening was a pretty special communion service at church. Aside from the comical fact that somebody got the bright idea to set up for communion early in the week so it would not interfere with parties and family gatherings and wound up fermenting the grape juice, it was quite meaningful. A Christmas communion on a Sunday and I was in the throws of great decisions. But, once again, the Holy Spirit showed up.

Like the night before God presented me with the same set of questions, but this time he made it clear that he wasn't going to keep hounding me forever. I needed to make a decision if I was going to surrender to him or take over my life completely. I knew that I was screwing my life up terribly and needed to surrender control completely to God, no matter what that meant or where that decision lead to.

I plunged in deep and I am extremely happy to report that on that Christmas night I got one of the best Christmas gifts I have ever received. The moment I surrendered everything Christ showed up in such a dynamic way I will never be able to deny the reality of the existence of God and his desire to be actively involved in my life for as long as I live.


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The Beginning

The best place to start any story or conversation is at the beginning. For me the beginning of this story goes back to when I was in junior high school in Modesto, California.

I was in eighth grade when God first tapped me on the shoulder and said that he wanted something more from my life: he was calling me to full-time ministry. Now, for a lot of thirteen year olds who spent their entire lives in church receiving such a calling might be one of the most exciting things in their lives up to that point. This was not the case for me.

You have to understand that there was a legacy of preaching in my family that I was fairly certain I didn't want to follow in the footsteps of. It's not like you have heard in some stories where a family patriarch neglected his family for his ministry to the point where his descendants hate anything associated with ministry. My great-grandfather was church planter during the early to mid 1900s. He began birthing pentecostal congregations in the mid-west and kept working his way across the western United States until he eventually retired in Hayward, California.

Throughout my childhood Grandaddy told me stories about his early days as a pioneering pastor. He told me all about his good and bad experiences, the times where God worked great miracles and the times of great struggle and opposition. He held nothing back. It wasn't until several years after his death that I discovered that Grandaddy had given me a rare gift through these stories that he gave to no one else, not even his own children, but at thirteen when God first called me to full-time service the knowledge gathered from these stories led me to say, "No way Lord!".

I knew about how hard a life it had been for my Grandaddy, I knew how rewarding it had been too, but I knew about how hard he had had to work just to be a poor bi-vocational pastor. And then, quite often, a large portion of the community literally hated him. That, at the time was not a road I wanted to walk down. I wanted to be rich.


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Location:Carver Dr,Roswell,United States