What God Can Do

Growing up in rural north Florida I was like every young boy in a small town where everyone knew everyone else, with a church on just about every corner, where Sunday mornings were a time to put on your Sunday best, head to your local church, and spend the afternoon with family and friends around a table set with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and all of the trimmings.

In 1966, things began to happen to me. My father was diagnosed with cancer, terminal cancer with 6 months to live. As a young boy, questions flooded my mind. Why my father? Why doesn't God heal him if He loves us so much? No answer. My father outlived the doctors prognosis by seven years, but those seven years were awful years of suffering.

I asked anyone and everyone who would listen why would God allow this? The only answers I received, " It's God's will. Your father is bearing the cross. He's suffering for Jesus." And on and on and on with answers that made no sense.

June of 1973 at the age of 17 with bloodshot eyes I stood beside my father's grave as the first shovel full of dirt was thrown onto his casket, and at that very moment I decided that this God or Jesus or whoever that I had been taught about all my life, who supposedly loved and cared for His children, was a hoax and did not exist. I turned my back and walked away.

In June of 1974, I married a young girl and in December of that same year she bore me a son. The marriage only lasted for three years, because true love was not a part of my being. Love did not exist in my world.

For the next twelve years my life belonged to me and me alone. I was an alcoholic, drug addict, in and out rehabs to numerous to count, chasing the pleasures of the flesh, heavily involved in the occult with no regard concerning whom I hurt, mistreated or threw to the side of the road in my quest to distance myself from the so called God of creation.

On a cold December day 1985 in Houston Tx. my mother called asked me to come to
church that following Sunday. You see, she had asked my son's mother several months earlier if he could come live with her in Houston, hoping it would change me. I chose to see my son only a couple times over those months and change had not come. She said over the phone "Your son has received Christ and I want you to come see him baptized" reluctantly I agreed.

I arrived that Sunday morning knowing that my last day on earth would be spent watching my son commit his life to something I could not believe in. But even in this special time for my son, my selfishness took priority. Nothing mattered to me but to get out of this church to the place I had chosen, and let the hammer fall. I was going to put and end to this awful life of selfishness, pain, agony, defeat and misery. The last knot had seemingly come undone.

At the end of the service as I was making my way to the door when an elderly lady appeared out of the crowd walked up to me. A lady I had never met, with this message ,"God has shown me you are standing on the edge of a cliff." She walked away and I never saw her again. "What a nut! She's as crazy as I am." went running through my mind. My focus was on me, my selfishness to do what needed to be done, finish it, put the period at the end of the last line of this story.

As miserable as I was, the hammer would not fall and the last knot at the end of the rope seemed to be getting tighter instead slipping loose. A call later that afternoon came from an individual who invited me to a small gathering of believers at the chapel (what we call life groups) next to the newly constructed church I had been at earlier that morning.

Since all my plans for that day had failed the hammer wouldn't fall, I was out of money, no car and they said they would pick me up, I thought, what the heck. So I went. That small group of believers did not care that I wieghed only 140lbs. They didn't care that I hadn't bathed in who knows how long. They didn't care my teeth were falling out and they didn't care that I hated God. They didn't care my clothes were ragged and my hair was long. But they did care about me, not their theology, not their doctrine, but about me.

That night in a small chapel with a small group of believers who didn't care that I was a wretch, introduced me to the one who did care about a wretch like me. The knot that night did slip loose and the God of this universe, the one who flung the stars into the heavens,who knew me before I was formed in the womb, who separated the waters from the dry land, the one who gave His only Son, the one whose arms I had ran away from, I now ran to .

It happened to me on a chilly December night in 1985 in a small chapel called Bammell Rd Baptist Church FM 1960 Houston, Tx. Jesus came into my heart, became my Lord and Savior, and delivered me instantly from drugs and alcohol.