My Two Cents For The Information Age

Please Allow me to introduce myself. I live in Denver, Colorado. My primary interest is Theological Apologetics.

I did not come from what you would call a religious family, although we did go to church. We attended a United Methodist Church. I recall the place as being quite large...almost as large as a school. They had Sunday School and they had a regular Worship Service and I recall attending youth Sunday school classes and watching some nice old lady tell us stories about Jesus. She had a little felt board, and she had a felt Jesus, a felt Mary and Joseph, and felt Angels which she stuck on the board as she told us stories from the Bible.

She was a kind old lady...never married. She had two other sisters, and they were daughters of the founder of that church back in 1919.

As a kid, I seem to recall never thinking that much about God or about Jesus or about anything spiritual...except when I watched Miss. Lydia and her felt dramas. She made the stories of the Bible come alive, and I and the other kids would watch as the young boy David fought the giant Goliath, or the baby lay in the manger wrapped in swaddling clothes while people journeyed from afar just to see him.

The church was a giant social club for my parents, and they seemed to like dressing me up in those too tight shoes and that stuffy little suit and parading me in front of their friends as if I were some little trophy!
Of course, one can never have veto power at age eight!

I once asked my Dad why we had to go to church. He replied that "It just makes you feel good." I never recall my Father talking about God. The only time he seemed religious to me was on those cold winter nights when he would sit in the living room and listen to Tennessee Ernie Ford sing How Great Thou Art or one of his other gospel songs.

I had an earthshaking event occur in my life when my Father died prematurely at age 60. I was 18 years old. I had started partying (drinking and smoking pot) with my friends when I was 18, shortly after Dad died. I guess in retrospect I wanted to kill the pain, but I believe I would have experimented with the social habits of my generation even if Dad had been alive.

I had a lot of unresolved feelings between me and my Father, although in retrospect I didn't grow up with any more emotional baggage than anyone else I know. I was unable to handle my feelings at that time, so I began to do drugs and hang out with a group of younger friends (class of 79..I was class of 77). We were quite an eclectic bunch! We would hang out at the park and talk philosophically and discuss God and Aliens and use mind expanding drugs and enjoy the wonder of feeling independent and free to think how we wanted to think. We smoked a lot of pot, experimented with acid and mushrooms, and tried cocaine..(I eventually spent $30,000.00 of my inheritance on that darn drug!)

I was an outsider to this group initially, as they had all grown up together, but I was smarter than them and knew how to make them laugh and they soon adopted me as one of their own. At this point of my life, religion was not that important, as it was just a philosophical conversation between inebriated friends. We were more interested in Pyramid Power than in God.

I was approached by a young woman who invited me to a Bible Study, and I ended up being exposed to a cult: The Way . I was not really interested in their teaching, though, and often went high on drugs to their meetings. They tried to force a series of taped lessons by the founder,Victor Paul Wierwille .

I soon quit hanging out with them and continued my philosophical druggy life, hanging out with friends and watching the world spin. I still had a layman's interest in religion, though. I read a lot of end times books that were everywhere on sale, and soon began to believe that the world would probably end by the year 2000 or shortly after.

At age 30, I began to get in shape. I rode my bicycle for an average of 25 miles a day for almost two years. I joined 3 bike tours that traveled 400+ miles through the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

One day, this girl that I knew invited me to church. I was relatively content to stay home and get stoned instead, but I went with her a few times and became fascinated with the emotional vibe of the place. I never planned on becoming religious in any way, although I was a bit tired of getting stoned all the time...still, it felt good (just expensive) I was enthralled with life, yet I felt unfulfilled at best.

It was a day in January of 1993, and I shall never forget it to this very day. I went up to pray and never expected anything unique to happen since I had prayed hundreds of times before in my life...BUT....this time, I felt a shock of electrical energy run through me and I don't know how to describe it except that I was transformed. I was different.

The next morning, upon awakening, I felt the change even greater than I had the night before. People have since suggested to me that there is no such thing as becoming Born Again and that everyone is saved, which I would believe except for the personal experience that happened to me.

I know that I was a different person...I was wired different...I was keenly aware that God was real.

The church that I was at, Disciple Fellowship, went through several transformations...(kinda like a conman changing aliases ) They changed their name twice...first from "Disciple Fellowship" to "Covenant Kingdom" after a highly publicized
news incident in which the Pastor told everyone to throw their medications away and a young boy died as an indirect result of it.

I began to question the infallibility which I had previously assumed the leaders of the church had.

I was not ready to question what I had been taught, only because so many other churches that I had attended taught basically the same stuff. (Assembly Of God, Charismatic Non-Denominational, etc)

I stopped going to church as much, mainly because I refused to blindly listen to their discipline and admonitions for me to "grow up" and quit hanging out with the teenagers and acting like I was 18.

(Thats a whole nother story in itself! )

Soon, I left that church and stopped trying so hard to earn respect and brownie points by being religious. I still believed basically everything I had been taught, coupled with the indisputable facts surrounding my initial conversion, but I also began to question God and my role in being obedient.

Around this time, I began to frequent the EvC Forum and have posting dialogues with a whole new antagonistic class of people, none of whom believed as I did.