When people ask how I was raised I often reply "American heathen."  It usually raises a chuckle.  But, it's the most accurate answer I can give.  My family never attended a church unless there was a funeral.  In my entire childhood I can recall going to church less than ten times, and none of those were after I was about ten years old.  We had no religion.

     As I grew older I became less and less interested in religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Around age 15 I became interested things like UFOs and ancient astronauts.  A man by the name of Erich von Daniken had published a book called Chariots of the Gods, and I was starting to buy into the idea that an advanced civilization from another planet must have visited the earth thousands of years ago and sped up evolution by genetically improving the apes.

     I think that God started reaching out to me as early as age six, when a next door neighbor's boy told me, rather bluntly, one day that, unless I "ask Jesus into my heart" I will go to hell.  Now I didn't even know where hell was, although my parents often told other people to go there.  I figured it had to be a bad place.  So, I can remember myself standing outside and crying and asking Jesus to come into my heart.  That was it though.  I didn't go to church afterward.

     By the time I was 15 years old I had become pretty resistant to the entire church and God scene.  There were quite a few "Jesus people" on my high school campus, and I steered clear of most of them.  The teenaged boy who lived down the hill invited me to come to his Baptist church a couple of times, and I told him I didn't want to.  I avoided all forms of religion, except for my own "New Age" ideas.  (Nobody was talking much yet about the New Age movement.  But, the ideas were definitely already around in abundance when I was a teenager.)

     This same pattern continued right up until I was 21 years old.  Then I began to be lonely.  I had made few friends as a teenager, and I had lost those because my parents moved around a lot.  I found myself living alone in an apartment in Carmichael (Sacramento), California one summer.  I was heavily into the UFO phenomenon.  I had a big stack of UFO Report magazines that I had read.  I began to want to see a UFO and meet its occupants in the hope that they would take me somewhere better (abduct me.)  This was my attempt at religion.

     My parents had moved back to Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona and I followed them a few months later.  I need to explain here that my father and mother had been separated several times from the time I was 18 because my mother had suffered a "nervous breakdown" when I was 16 and she would sometimes lapse back into the same psychotic behavior.  My father, who didn't know what else to do, would separate from her for a for a months at a time, then get back together with her.  This went on for several years.  They were back together when I was 21.

     I was still feeling lonely.  I went to the public library and checked out some books about Christianity.  I could have checked out books on Buddhism or any other religion.  But, somehow I knew that Christianity was the right place to to be.  I read books about church denominations and Christianity.  They were mostly boring.  My sister had been attending an Assembly of God church in Glendale.  So, I visited it a couple of times.  I felt really awkward going there.  Yet I could tell there was something authentic about what these people believed.  I bought myself a paperback version of the Living Bible called The Way.  (It was a youth version.)  I tried reading that.  I started at Genesis and made it all the way to the middle of Leviticus before I gave up out of boredom.  I was clearly seeking God, or rather He was seeking me, but I didn't know how to go about it.

     I had only one friend at the time.  He was a backslidden Christian who had started out as a Roman Catholic.  He and I had discussed UFOs at length and moved on to other subjects.  He told me how he had stumbled onto a Satanic worship site out in the desert a few years earlier, when he was a teenaged boy.  I asked him to show me where it was.  I went and bought myself a pewter cross first (as if I needed to scare off vampires or something.)  Then we drove out to the area in his pickup truck one day, parked it, and walked the rest of the way on foot.  We found the site exactly as he had described it.  The paint had faded some.  But, the big boulders were still covered with Satanic symbols and phrases.  It had obviously been a Satanic worship spot (probably for teenaged Satanists) at one time.

     This caused me to think about the reality of a Satan and God even more.  My friend had also loaned me a couple of books about the "New World Order."  (It wasn't called that yet.)  One of the books was called None Dare Call It Conspiracy.  I read that book cover to cover and came to realize that things, in the government, were not what they were portrayed to be.  It all scared me really bad, and made me worry about where we were all headed.  I began to see things the way they really are.

     Then my father and mother separated again and my father asked me to go along with him back to his hometown in central Texas for a Christmas visit.  The visit turned into a permanent move.  One night a couple of months later we were at my aunt's and uncle's house sitting around the dinner table and talking.  Somehow we got onto th subject of world government and Satanism.  Then my uncle brought out a cassette tape recording of the testimony of an ex-Satanist who was telling how he had been involved at a high level and how there was a world government movement under way that was being orchestrated by Satan through his followers.  That scared me even more.

     It might have been that same night.  I can't recall now.  But, I do remember my aunt and uncle saying that to go to heaven a person has to ask Jesus to forgive his sins.  I can remember sitting on their sofa and crying one night and asking Jesus to forgive me.  That was when I became "born again" I believe.  I visited the same Baptist church that my aunt and uncle went to, and I made my confession of faith there.  Then I became a member and started attending church regularly.  That was how I became a Christian.

     That was 27 years ago.  My story doesn't end there.  But, I need to keep this short.  If you are seeking to know God, then I recommend that you read our How to Know God page next.

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