Getting Here Part IV: All-American Dream Couple

When I graduated high school most of my friends went their separate ways, except for Ronald. I had met Ronald in third grade, who became one of my few friends back in that town and he had remained so even when I moved away again. Through those years we had often double-dated, including my Senior Prom when he helped me take both my girlfriends by pretending one was his. (Okay, that's another story.) Now we sometimes searched for jobs together. (Ronald is on the right in the photo. He was 6 foot 4 in case your wondering.)

I don't think either of us graduated with great prospects. My parents had told me to forget college when I entered ninth grade. They didn't understand why I took Academic, since that was college preparatory. Part of their reasoning was financial, I suppose, but they really didn't believe in higher education, unless you planned to be a doctor. My mother constantly worried because I read a lot. Reading all those books would damage my brain, she once told me. Ronald's parents had also told him to forget college.

Ronald decided early on to join the Navy. This changed by accident to the Army later. He wanted me to join with him on the "Buddy System", but again  not being 21 interfered. My parents, especially my mom, were dead set against my joining the service and wouldn't sign the papers. (At 18 I was still considered a minor in those days.)

Ronald hit a snag at his physical requiring surgery before he would be accepted. His surgery resulted in complications that almost killed him.  He eventually recovered and did join the Army. Meanwhile I went to IBM School in Philadelphia.

I had been studying Commercial Art through a correspondence course since my Junior Year. I had talked my mother into this and she paid for it on the promise we never tell my father. My dad took a dim view of both my writing and my drawing. So why did they loosen up and allow me to go to IBM School? It was because this involved running machines. To them running machines was real work; writing, art and that stuff you learned in college was not.


Florence Utt IBM School was a six week course in programming, wiring and operating everything from a 024 Keypunch to a 604 Calculator and a lot of three digit numbers in-between. I graduated at the top of the class.

This accomplishment did not get me a job. I eventually landed a position as a Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting with the Atlantic Refining Company (Later known as Atlantic-Richfield or ARCo). Why is this important in this series of my becoming a Christian? It is because it set up the next phase of my life and the events that led to that conclusion.

Not long after I began my job I began dating this little red-haired Irish lass who worked on the same floor. (When I say little, I am not talking figuratively. Pat [pictured left] was four foot ten and that may have been with heels.)  Despite this height difference, I was six foot, we seemed compatible in every other way, although there was one I overlooked as unimportant. She was Roman Catholic.

One morning I came to work and she stopped me in the hallway. She told me she couldn't see me anymore. Her parents forbade her because I wasn't Catholic. I was angry. Why should that matter, I was still "Christian". "It wasn't any of her parent's business", I told her.

She ran into the ladies' room.

A few seconds later this tall dark-haired Irish lass came out of the ladies room and approached me. (This girl was a foot taller than Pat at five foot ten.) "What's wrong with Pat," she asked me. "She's in there crying her eyes out." This girl also worked on the same floor, the sixteenth, and she always said hello to me when we passed in the hall. I always said hello back, but I was shy and a low talker and she never heard me. She told me later that she thought I was the most stuck-up guy on Earth. Her name was Lois. (Pictured right. She was only one-quarter Irish. She was two-quarters German and one-quarter Native America - Creek.) Her family was Lutheran.

None of that particularly mattered to me. She had been kind and she was good-looking and so whether that day or the next I forget, I went down the elevator with her and walked along down Broad Street. At her subway stop, just before she entered the turnstile I asked her to go out next Saturday. I figured if she said no then she would go through to the platform and I'd continue on to the train station and there would be no period of awkward embarrassing silence.

She was coming out of a rough period. Her mother and best friend both died around the time she graduated high school. She was, like me, an only child and there were some similarities in our childhood. She had been forced to go church and didn't want to and her father was constantly ridiculing her, saying she walked like an elephant or she was homely (which she wasn't and in fact had been a teenage model, left). He also told her she couldn't go to college, because college was a waste of time for girls. They only went to find a guy anyway. (She went on her own to Peirce College and earned her Associates.) Her parents were more restrictive than mine. Appearance was very important to them and she not only had to go to church and be in the proper clubs, but was constantly warned about behaviors that might reflect badly on her parents, drinking, sex, etc. This probably was part of reason she began smoking at age twelve.

We went out that Saturday night and yadda-yadda-yadda just before we got married we bought a house.

However dysfunctional our growing up we meshed well as a couple. As adults we were the All-American Dream Couple. (Well, almost adults anyway. One hitch came up at settlement on the house when everyone discovered we were just a couple of teenagers not yet legal age. But it got resolved and we got the house.)

How many people from basically lower-middle class blue-collar families had the start we did?  We entered marriage with a new car (Studebaker Lark) and a new house (four-bedroom Cape Cod atop a hill with a great view of The Great Valley). We both had jobs that paid above average for those days, even if we were in low level positions. Together our salaries not only met our mortgage and expenses, but afford us the pleasures of eating out weekly at good restaurants and yearly vacation trips. I even had it mapped out how much money we'd have in the bank when we turned thirty.

The house was halfway between our families, so there would be no jealousy that we favored one over the other. More important to us was the distance was enough there'd be no regular pop-ins by either side either. And once married no one was going to make us go to church. Church ended when we walked up the aisle after saying our I dos. (Photo on left: Our first Christmas in our first home together, December 1961. We were both 20 years-old.)

Life was great, what more could one want? What could possibly go wrong?


TO BE CONTINUED...

Oasis in the Valley of Death

Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.  James 5:13-20

There are people who believe they are alone, helpless and hopeless because they don't know they don't have to be. That is where I was in the summer of 1975. My wife and I had been through troubles and hard times in the past, but I always got up and dusted myself off and we climbed another hill. Now I couldn't see any hilltops.

I was like a man who thought the 23rd Psalm said, Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death, instead of through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I didn't realize that moments like this were a shadow, often a very dark shadow, cast over one's life and in order to be a shadow there must be a light. The shadow is cast because something is blocking that light. My pride, my lusts and my sins had build steep canyon walls around me and blocked all rays from getting through, except a strange cross that had appeared on a wall a decade earlier that I had forgotten and dismissed.

Every possible child who had died in our life hurt, but the others had been distant in a way. When they were lost it was in a room where my wife was attended by doctors and nurses, except for the first baby, which died at home when she was completely alone and a doctor refused to come. When my wife called him, he told her she was imagining it, she couldn't possibly be going into labor.

The first child, a son, was the only one lost I actually saw and when I saw him, he was a corpse curled up in a basin in the bathroom. When the doctor finally came to our house, after he examined my wife, I asked him what we should do about the baby and he said, "you can throw it in the garbage for all I care," and he left. I was too angry to grieve.  I wanted to grab that doctor and beat him. 

But this seventh child I felt I knew. I sat near her for a week, not seeing her, but hearing that heartbeat. I was allowed some time off from my job, but would have perhaps been better served by working. My only inclination was to cry, but I couldn't do that because of the state of my wife. As much as I wanted to crawl in a hole, she was already in one. Although my wife had been in depressions before none had reached the depth of this. She wouldn't get out of bed. She talked only of being worthless and dying, of never being able to have a child. She told me she had her tubes tied after Amy died because the doctors insisted her carrying a baby to term was impossible. To get pregnant again was foolish and dangerous. No baby would survive and she could risk her own health. She said she didn't feel she was a woman and she kept apologizing for letting me down. I did not feel she had let me down at all. I had already accepted we wouldn't have children and had tried many times to convince her that was all right.

My wife had physical problems in that area. We didn't know until after we lost the second child, but she had an incompetent cervix and her womb was in the wrong way. Later, when she had her gull bladder removed in her late twenties, the surgeon also removed her appendix and he turned her womb around to the proper position. The large scar which ran down the center of her chest to her lower abdomen was bisected by a horizontal scar forming an inverted cross. We kidded she had had an autopsy.

The correction of the womb orientation did nothing to stem the problem and each subsequent loss only weakened the cervix further. One time they performed a procedure when she became pregnant called cerclage. The doctor described it as placing a drawstring at the cervix and pulling to closed. When the baby reached the point of labor, this drawstring would be loosened and the baby born. He was certain this would prevent any further loss.

He was wrong and in the fifth month we lost Michael. It was then I told her we should give up, adopt if it was so important, but she wanted "our" baby.   She said there were only three things she wanted in life. Me to be happy in my job, her own house and our own baby.

Now we came to summer 1975 and I could say I was happy in my job, nothing else. We were living in an apartment, a very nice apartment indeed, but we didn't have any real savings sufficient to buy another house. And it certainly seemed our own baby was out of the picture, especially if she had her tubes tied.

But listening to that heartbeat, I had come to believe in God. I didn't know what to do with that, but it was at least a twig to grasp when you're trying to scale a steep canyon wall.  

Down our road and just up the main highway was a new church just build. I passed it everyday going back and forth to work. Maybe if you are trying to climb toward God, a church could provide a good toehold to start. Of course, I knew nothing about the church except it was new and clean-looking and convenient. I suggested to my wife we give it a try.

I can't say she was enthusiastic about the idea. How many times had we failed in the church-going thing? Yet even going to church might be better than slashing your wrists, so on Sunday we went.

People from the door to the pew greeted us with smiles and welcomes. That was a nice change from our past experiences, if not a little unnerving. I was handed a bulletin and when I glanced down the first thing I saw were the words, "Laurel Hill Bible Church: An Independent FUNDAMENTALIST Church". No, "Fundamentalist" wasn't capitalized and emboldened on the bulletin, but that was the way I saw that word.

I'd never been in a fundamentalist church in my life. I'd been taught as a child to stay away from those nuts. I knew what fundamentalists were: Holy-Rolling, Bible-Thumping, Snake-Kissing, Body-Shaking, Faith-Healing, Book-Burning, Intolerant fruitcakes.  My desire was to get up and get out, but the service had started and my wife looked a little uplifted by the music and the smiles we had received. I would endure. I didn't want to walk up the aisle with everyone staring at me anyway. But you can make book, we wouldn't be back next week.

When the Pastor came out in an ill-fitting toupee and dark green leisure suit, it didn't raise my comfort any. Then he did his sermon. It was on suffering and his text came from James, the passage at the top of this post. I was suddenly alone in that sanctuary. No one else existed. Every word he said was directed at me. He was preaching my life and preaching my state-of-mind. And when he talked about Elijah being a man just like me I felt like a sword had sliced through me and cut out despair.  

At the end of the service, when he asked if anyone wanted prayer, I raised my hand.

On the Tuesday following, I knelt down by my desk and I prayed for forgiveness and I prayed for Jesus as best I could. When I stood up, everything was different.

To be continued: What's in a Name: Service and Miracles.   

What's in a Name; Service and Miracles

Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. Romans 1:28-32

And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:11

No other name but Jesus,

No other name can save,

With Him His peace possessing,

No other good I crave,

'Tis he who heals my sorrow,

And bids my soul rejoice;

And, of, the sweetest music

Is my redeemer's voice.

              by Henry V. Neal

On a Tuesday in September 1975 I had prayed the prayer of salvation. When I got up everything

was different. Oh, not the world around me, but inside me. I knew it at once. It is difficult to explain. You want to say you had to be there, it had to happen to you, then you would understand, and if you have never been there it would be difficult to grasp.

I want to go back to the "Why me?" in the first post of this confessional. I said there were those verses in Romans 1 I thought meant you could go far enough that God left you to your own devices and you had no way back. But I came to realize those verses spoke of mankind in general. Otherwise, why wasn't I lost forever? Hadn't I turned 180 degrees away from God? Hadn't I stopped seeking?

But I wondered, when I declared myself an Atheist and I began arguing with those ministers was it their faith I was trying to destroy or was I trying to find mine? Was I hoping that one of those men would say the thing proving me wrong? 

It doesn't matter, God for whatever reason He had, drew me to Him, even me.

Things happened quickly afterwards. My wife and I became members of that church I said we wouldn't be back to the next week. We were soon involved up to our eyeballs. I found myself doing things I would never have thought it was in me to do, such as cold-call evangelism, being the regional publicity coordinator for a national revival campaign, speaking from the pulpit, understanding passages in the Bible which had never made sense before and in 1976 my wife and I became youth pastors at the church. That is some of the youth group in the picture as we set out to wash car windows at a shopping center. I am standing third from the left wearing sunglasses and my wife is the dark-haired lady leaning her head on my shoulder. This was a Christian Service outing. We went about washing the windows of the cars in the shopping center parking lot and leaving a tract. Sometimes someone came as we did this and offered money, which we refused. It was our policy on all Christian Service to never take money. 

We were very busy those years, especially I. It takes a lot of hours to properly lead young people. (We had the junior high aged kids.) Plus I was adding to my duties at work. In 1976, I was named Systems Manager as well as being over the accounting functions. Now I was on call all the time in case the computer hit a snag. It usually hit those snags about dinner time.

I was writing again. I wrote a play which was performed by the youth group at venues such as retirement homes and other churches. I was editing a Christian magazine. 

Some of our old friends left us, finding our new outlook at odds with the lifestyle we had shared with them. We made new friends. We were doing well. The Pastor talked to us about our lost children and we came to accept what had happened. Then...

Then one day in 1977 my wife says to me, "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again."

"Whoa, now, how? You said you had your tubes tied?"

"I lied."

Immediately we had a problem. No doctor would take her case. Not her old doctors and seemingly no new doctor. They said her history showed it was impossible. We had been fools to let this happen. It was a terrible risk and there was no hope of a successful birth. I guess they feared malpractice suits if they took her case. 

But there was a Doctor who belonged to our church and he agreed to attend her. then the members of the church formed a special group to pray for us. My wife was put to bed for the term. I rearranged the living room for her, pulled the TV to within easy reach of the sofa, placed a cooler by her so she would have some cold drink and food at hand while I was at work. She was allowed to get up to go to the bathroom and to bed at night. 

The people at church began to stop by to help clean and especially to bring dinners for us. But mostly to pray for us.

Snow came in late February. My wife had made it into the dreaded fifth month. Then the signs came and in a blinding snow storm I drove her several miles to the hospital.

It was deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra put it. We were in a labor room with her hooked to an IV drip designed to stall off labor. There was another monitor, another beat-beat-beat and another week of waiting and expecting the usual dead end. 

The doctor asked if he could inject my wife with an experimental drug, something called steroids, in hope this would strengthen the babies lungs. We said yes. After a week, they said once more any longer delay was dangerous, they had to induce labor now.

And on March 1, our baby girl was born weighing in at 5 pounds. The steroids must have worked on those lungs because she came out protesting loudly. 

We named her Laurel. Many people assume this was after me, since my name comes from the same root and both Larry and Laurel mean Victory. This is not the case at all. We named her in honor of the members of Laurel Hill Bible Church who prayed constantly for her delivery. We gave her a middle name meaning "Little Christian", because Christ was now central in our lives. 

My wife assured me that this time she did have her tubes tied. 

Those gentle readers who have been regular followers of this Blog know God wasn't through proving what man couldn't do, He could.

   

One autumn day in 1980, as we walked along a chill street going to an early Christmas party, my wife says to me, says she: "Honey..."

"Ut oh."

"I think I'm pregnant again."

"But your tubes..."

"Lied...again."

"How long?"

"I don't think long. Maybe I'm in the second month."

A couple weeks later I am sitting in the waiting room of a hospital waiting to hear she had a miscarriage when a doctor comes out saying, "Congratulations, you have a daughter."

There was no human hand this time, no prayer circle, no laying in wait in bed, no steroids. My wife who could never have a baby and had that proved wrong now had it proved wrong medical aid was needed to do so. In a couple more years, we had a third, a son...and then she really did have her tubes tied. (More about these children next time.)

Today I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. I believe the Bible is God's Word. I believe all the promises God has made and that Jesus is coming again, perhaps very, very soon. I believe anyone can be saved if God draws them to Him. I don't believe it is ever too late until you die. In September of 1975, I was 34 years old. I had been spiritually dead a long time. I was a sinner who though he was a good guy, who didn't think the things he did were sins. Now next September I will be a Christian for 34 years. Half a life of sin, half a life of Salvation, half a life of growth in the Lord to go (using Yogi Berra logic again; I know fractions better than that).

So when I got saved I never faced any troubles again.  Yeah...right!

To be Continued: A Fairy-Tale Ending?                                              

The First Nominee is...

How many times after enjoying an activity have I said that was the best day of my life? Was it? Did I compare it to all the days of my life? What made it the best day? Was it truly the best or just one of the better? Could my whole perception of best and worst be off?

Thinking about the calendar of my existence, what date would I pick as the best?

How about the day I was born? Egotistically speaking that has to rank way up there.

Except I don't remember the day I was born. How could the best day of my life be one of which I have absolutely no recollection? Frankly, I can't recall anything in the first months of my life. I have no internal images of life in my first two homes, of lying in a crib or my first steps, my first words. Those may have been great days for someone, my mother or father, but they left no impression on me.

I had very little to do with it at all. My birth resulted from an act of love between my parents. In the design of God a seed joined an egg and in that instant I was. After that God formed me as I was carried within my mother's womb until I was delivered into the hands of doctors and nurses, who spanked breath into my lungs, cleaned me and cared for me until my parents brought me home.
I remember none of this.

My earliest memory is of fright at the sound of a siren, people scurrying about, shades pulled, being suddenly surrounded in pitch darkness and hushed whispering. That scene comes vividly to mind. Perhaps I wasn't born, but burst to existence in the piercing whine of an air raid siren.

How can I prove otherwise, that siren is the first thing I remember, so maybe I didn't exist before then.

All the evidence I have of my birth is a piece of paper saying so, some photos before and after the fact that may be of me, and the stories of my mother and father and a few other eyewitnesses. I understand human biology and how it works, having had three children of my own, but that doesn't prove I was created the same way. With talk of clones, existing doesn't prove birth. I can only accept I was born in the normal way on faith and trust in those who told me about it.

And I suppose I can eliminate a day I have no memory of as the best day of my life. I will have to nominate some other time, but I thank the Lord for that first day even if it has been disqualified for consideration as my best.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. --Psalm 139: 13-16 NIV

Some Further Nominees

Perhaps the best day of my life was graduation from high school. It was an exciting and anticipated day. I was very happy when it happened and to top off the glorious event, I met a beautiful girl at a celebratory dinner afterward.

But why was I happy?

It was because I didn’t like school. Graduation was escaping what I disliked, not a step toward anything. I graduated with very few prospects for my future. My parents had told me years earlier I wasn’t going to college and I was ignorant to other ways to further one’s education than one’s parents paying the bill. I left high school looking for any old job I might scrounge up, but jobs were scarce that year. I would say high school graduation really wasn’t the best day of my life.

Yes, but what about that beautiful girl? I did begin dating her. I was madly in love with that beautiful girl, but at the end of summer she dropped me with the falling leaves of fall. She broke my heart. With all the pain at the end of that relationship, I can hardly count meeting her the best day of my life.

What about these days: getting my first job, buying my first house and the first time my wife got pregnant. These seem like reasonable candidates for my better days, yet each came with a “but”. The jobwasn’t what I had trained or applied for so was a let down, the first house bought turned into the first home we lost leaving us financially worse off and the first pregnancy delivered a dead child.

What were my real best Days? Certainly I would list my wedding to the woman who has been my wife and closest friend these last 47 years. I would count equally the births of my three children as best days. Almost everyone would probably say the birth of a child was one of their best days, but there were circumstances surrounding these births making them more best. (Sometime I will tell that story.)

To paraphrase Charles Dickens: My best times were my worst times. It stands to reason, my worst times will prove to be my best times.

Well, we'll see.

And the Winners are...

When I was a young man, many eons ago, I was walking home from work one winter night in the snow. The flakes had been falling all day. Even though it was dark, the white covering over all seemed to give off its own light. The sidewalks were tricky, some deep with drifts making the legs weary with the effort to walk and then would come patches where someone had shoveled earlier in the day. These had been recovered and slick underfoot. At the end of one of these nearly cleared paths I slipped. It was jolting as I tried to catch my balance, but I failed and fell face down on the pavement. Most of my body landed where snow had been once or twice removed leaving no cushion for my body. My face fell just beyond where the next door neighbor had not shoveled and was buried in cold mush.


This seemed a dirty trick after working a long day. I knew from the way I wrenched my body I would feel it tomorrow and it was uncomfortable with snow under my collar and sliding beneath my coat and shirt. This was bad.


Wait, no, this was good. As I pushed myself off the ground I felt paper beneath scratch my cheek. I picked it up and saw several bills totaling twenty dollars. Someone else had had the bad day, perhaps falling at this very spot when they lost this money. I felt sorry for them, but it was lost money with no identification. I tucked it in my pocket, got back on my feet and headed home whistling a happy tune. Twenty dollars had real value in the early 'sixties. You could go to a "fancy" restaurant then and buy a steak dinner for two, with cocktails and desert for $12.

Sometimes when we think we've taken a bad fall, we get rewarded instead. Other times, as shown in my last two posts, what we take as one of our best days, turns out to be one of our worst. It works the other way as well. Here are what I consider some of my best days.

Best Day Number 3: The day we lost our seventh child. That’s right, our seventh. How in the world could that be a best day? Here is the scene. My wife was in her fifth month of pregnancy lying in a maternity room with a drip in her arm to impede labor. She was to be this way for a week. I was at her side every moment after work. There was a monitor nearby recording the heart of the baby inside her. All that time, beep, beep, beep on that machine, the beat of a life fighting to continue living. It was a strong beat, but it was doomed.

One day a doctor called me aside to say it was dangerous to my wife to stall labor longer. Now the drip in the arm was inducing labor. Beep, beep, beep, drip, drip, drip, this was the sound of an execution. Although the baby had a strong heart, her lungs weren’t ready for the outside world and Amy never lived to hear her name.

I heard something more than her heart beat. I heard proof that something existed I didn’t believe in – God. The life desire in the beating of my unborn child’s heart was more than a bodily function of accidental animals.

There was depression and malaise following this seventh tiny death. It was such a devastation to my wife, such a depth of suffering to her, that I could not selfishly brood over my own despair. As a desperate attempt to resurrect something within us I suggested we try church again. There was a brand new church just opened near us and we went there. The sermon, taken from James, "Elijah was a man just like Us" James 5:17, spoke directly to my pain and a few days later I turned my life over to Christ.

Best Day Number 2: This is a sequence stretching from September 2001 through January 2006. Two days after my 21st anniversary with them, my employer terminated me for having the audacity to turn 60 years old. (My interview with the Outsourcing Agency in the tallest building of the city was cancelled for some reason on September 11, 2001.) In the opening days of 2006, I went to the annual congregational meeting of my church only to discover I had been erased from the rolls. The minister pointed to a group of us, called us goats that needed to be separated from the sheep. In less than five years I had lost my long time job and my long time church.

These are two of my best days? Losing a job, suddenly unemployed, my savings quickly drying up, thrown into debt to the IRS by circumstance? Yes. Being branded a heretic to be driven from my place of sanctuary and comfort? Yes.

It made me examine how far I had wandered away since I first came to the Lord. How complacent I had become. How willing to drift along with the world I was. But before I discovered the truth about myself I had to deal with the anger. I was angry and distraught about what the church had done. I wanted to prove them wrong. This drove me back into the Bible looking for their error. Instead I discovered my error. It was not that they were right in what they did to a lot of people that January evening. It was it didn't matter. We were better off cut off from what our old church had become.

More importantly it was a good slap upside my head, my "coulda had a V-8 moment". Like a dousing in cold water awakes a dreamer, I was shocked out of my lethargy. My spirit was revived and my priorities were set in the proper order. This made those days the better ones of my life.

What will be my Number One Best Day? Easy! The day I die will be the best day of my life. I get to worship God where he dwells and live forever in the new Heaven and Earth.

Does this mean I want to die right this minute? Absolutely not. I may be of service yet here on earth and there is much I enjoy about this life. I expect there will be down days and up days for many years to come. All it means is I don’t fear living and I don’t fear dying. And I know events are not always what they seem, that sometimes good is bad and bad is good, but in the end good wins.