Testimony

I grew up in the small town of Hutchinson, Minnesota. Population 7,283. My religious history includes the Lutheran and Methodist denominations. Neither of which led me to an experience with Jesus. I went through “confirmation” classes in the Lutheran church and the main thing I learned was where all the books of the bible were.

At sixteen years old, I had enough of organized religion that seemed to always condemn and put demands on people. I knew then there was something wrong. Basically, my church going days ended and I went another way.

For the next 22 years I lived, what could be described as a moral life. I was a good person. Spent eight years on active duty in the Air Force, finished a 30 year career with the government as a civil servant, and then retired and began another career with a major defense contractor. Somewhere in there, in 1987, I surrendered my life to receive what the Lord was offering. Up until that day, my life was measured by how any beers it took to get from one place to another. Honky tonks and dance halls were the order of the weekend. Throw in there, chili cook offs, strawberry festivals, watermelon thumps, county fairs and other excuses to drink beer and have a good ole time with the boys.Then something happened on 19 December 1987. Here’s that story.

Jeanie (my girlfriend at the time and now my wife) and I lived in San Antonio, Texas. We had a good friend who lived in the country who needed someone to take care of his pets while he visited his mother in Alabama for Christmas. We said sure. So on this beautiful Saturday morning we packed up the cooler with beer and headed out to our friends place. After completing the task of feeding and watering the animals, we decided to stop off in one of our familiar haunts for a beer. When we walked in, there were about six or seven people there. The jukebox was in rare form, cranking out those good ole drinking songs. The air was filled with smoke. The sawdust on the floor was moist with spilled beer. The smell in the air was distinctive of a country honky tonk.

We walked over to a table where a few acquaintances of ours were sitting. Took a seat at a scratched up, paint chipped, table with no matching chairs and ordered a long neck. Since I had two beers on the drive out, this would be my third beer. As is the custom in these places, they are always having some kind of forum to keep the drinkers attention. So that evening, they had decided to have amateur hour. I was a guitar player and had been since my teens when I was part of a rock and roll band.

Someone at the table announced that it was going to be amateur night at the bar. Jeanie hearing this looked at me and said “We should go home and get your guitar and come back”. At which time, everything mysteriously changed. I could see the record turning on the jukebox and I could see the mouths of the people moving, but I couldn’t hear the music, nor could I hear the people. I could no longer smell the smoke in the air or the scent of stale beer. My senses had been interrupted. My right elbow was resting on the table with a long neck beer in my hand about eight inches above the table. Jeanie asked me again “We can come back right”? Her voice was the only one I could hear. I did not answer her which is uncharacteristic of me. Usually I would have said “we’ll see” or “sounds good” or something like that. Now she asked me a third time “We can come back right”? At that moment, my bent arm slowly retreated toward the top of the table. As soon as the bottom of that bottle hit the table, everything came back. I looked at Jeanie and in front of everyone said “No, we won’t come back. We’re going home and getting up tomorrow and going to church”.

There is much more that we discovered about who was praying for me, things people had said that dropped seed into my life, but that will be revealed in the writings on this blog. For now, I still remain curious about the fact that Jeanie asked me three times if we could come back, I was on my third beer, and when I said to her we’re going home and then to church in the morning, it was….yep you guessed it three o’clock in the afternoon. There’s something about the number three.

God’s great love and grace is so vast and wonderful that it’s no task for him to take a good ole redneck honky tonk and turn it into an altar of blessing and salvation. The revelation of Romans 5:17 became a reality in my life on 19 December 1987 where it says “those who receive the ABUNDANCE of Grace and the gift of righteousness shall reign in this life in Christ Jesus”.