I strongly recommend Unbroken. I just finished reading the book. This link is my review on Goodreads.

Here is a review by John: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1149220623

Life Changers 2

I was reminded this weekend, while spending time with my family for our Christmas celebration, that being a life-changer is usually, but not always, simply a result of being there for someone at a time they need you. I hope my daughter, Laura, does not mind that I use one of our past experiences as an example of how this simple principle opens up opportunities to be a life-changer.

A few years ago I had a medical emergency one evening when everyone, except Laura, was at Christmas parties away from our home. Laura chose to spend the evening with me, going to a movie and then hanging out at home afterwards. This was one of the pivotal events in my life. Laura had no intentions of stepping in and being a life-changer. She obviously did not set out to be a life-changer. She just wanted to spend time with her daddy. I had some kind of strange reaction to some food probably. It caused my throat to swell up to the point that I was barely able to breath. I was able to explain what was going on to Laura. She initially called my wife. Then when the breathing became more difficult, she called 911. Before the ambulance arrived I felt I might pass out. So I asked Laura if she would pray for me. She gently hugged me and said a simple prayer, "God, will you help my Daddy." God answered that prayer immediately. The swelling didn't just start to go away. It was over as if it never happened. By the time the ambulance arrived, I was back to normal. They measured my oxygen levels and they were normal. After transport to the emergency room, the ER doctor could find no problems. I believe that God did listen to Laura's prayer for me and decided to answer it.

There was preparation for this event that Laura had some control over. She had been for a long time very close to me. She always helped me whenever I ask her, if at all possible, even with hard tasks. She obviously loved me very much for a long time. And she stayed in touch with me and stayed close to the Lord. Staying in close touch with God and others may be the most important preparation anyone can do to for such life-changing opportunities. Having ongoing and healthy relationships, based on regular communication and spending time with people, is what sets us up to do life-changing actions like this.

I know that someday I will die and then live again. I am less afraid of that pending future event because of what happened when my daughter and God intervened to prevent that from happening. There are a few others who follow this blog who may remember this event as well. I know several of you were praying for me during this emergency. I thank you for doing that, for staying close to me and God. Keep on doing that with as many people as possible.

Remember the most important commands. Love God with your whole being and love others as yourself. Sounds too simple to matter. But in reality it is all that matters.

Preparing the way for the coming savior

I recently reviewed John the Baptist's sermons and the few passages about him. He was one unique preacher.

We first learn about John the baptist when he was conceived by his very old parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth after an encounter with an angel of God. This conception was an amazing story and can be read about in Luke chapter 1. This passage also makes the connection between John and Jesus Christ.

In Luke 3, as a grown man, John preaches to people, to prepare them for the coming Savior. He makes it clear that he was not the important one, just the one preparing the way. "I baptize you with water, but there is one coming who is greater than I am. I am not good enough to untie his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." As John baptized the crowds of people with water, Jesus also came, and John reluctantly baptized him.

In John 3, it says that John taught people that Jesus came from God and was given power over everything. John 3:32-36: "The One who comes from above is greater than all. The one who is from the earth belongs to the earth and talks about things on the earth. But the One who comes from heaven is greater than all. He tells what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts what he says. Whoever accepts what he says has proven that God is true. The One whom God sent speaks the words of God, because God gives him the Spirit fully. The Father loves the Son and has given him power over everything. Those who believe in the Son have eternal life, but those who do not obey the Son will never have life. God's anger stays on them."

What strikes me as amazing about John is how humbly he served God. He could have taken credit for his amazing preaching ability, his spiritual insight, the distance he traveled, the many towns he served and individuals he baptized. Instead, every day he yearned for the One to come to change history. And he continued to do God's will, preparing as many people as possible for the Savior's coming.

Faking it.

For the first thirty six years of my Christian life I lived in a fog, wanting the eternal life that Christ promised, but having only a tiny understanding of what a follower should have. A few key events began to lift the fog and now with more clarity I see that my heart is selfish, unloving and rebellious. The worst part is that for too many years I lived as a fake and as a result was unfruitful.

In 1975 I said a private prayer and became a Christian on my thirteenth birthday. It was intensely personal. I didn't tell anyone for a while. My first opportunity to share my conversion was when I brought home a bad report card from school. I hastily contrived a way to reduce my Dad's wrath for the bad grades. So I decided to tell my Dad that I had become a Christian just before I handed him the report call. The plan backfired. I could tell that he was torn between two competing responsibilities of a Dad, that of sharing God with his children and that of disciplining. I knew that what I had done was devious and mean. I went away feeling convicted, as I should have. But what happened next was even worse. When I spoke to my pastor about my decision to accept Christ, he gave me no help and in fact nobody at the church did anything to help prepare me for service as a follower of Jesus Christ. Next, at age thirteen I was baptised, which itself was an embarrassing situation that had no joy. I was at an awkward age and nervous to be in front of the church. After I came out of the water some man I didn't know, pulled off my soaked underwear in the men's dressing room and gave me a towel. So I had talked to the pastor, got wet and dried ceremoniously. Now I was going to heaven...

This was my start as a Christian. You might say that it was a false start.

The reason I continued to attend church was that some of my best friends attended. I tried to play the Christian game convincingly as I learned bits and pieces of scripture over the next years of my new life. But as I grew older I didn't care what God wanted and became even more rebellious. My grades didn't improve. My sins got worse. My mind got darker and I learned how to keep secrets better than anyone. But everyone thought that I was the good Christian. Just as all young men in our society must face the world, I was exposed to many sinful options and gave in to too many of them.

My conversion was mostly ceremonious. My heart was barely impacted.

The true conversion that began a few years ago is still happening. I am learning to love God. God has helped tremendously with changing my heart to love others, but I know that my love for God is lacking badly. And God is peeling back the layers of junk in my heart that I built up all those years, exposing them to God's light and showing me in many various ways how far from Christ's perfection I am.

I need you to recognize, if you don't already, that many Christians we all know had similar expriences and are in the same state as I am in. I am trying so hard to know God and His Son and to truly believe and follow Him. Mostly I am convinced that we need to follow the way of teaching that Jesus did himself. He spent three years with a small group of men, showing them how to do God's work and teaching them truths about God. He didn't ask them to do any ministry themselves until they were prepared and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Then he turned it all over to them and now it is our turn!

Let's make sure that our brothers and sisters are not faking it, as I was for so many years.

Life changing influencers

Isn't this what we all want to be? We don't want to have a pointless life. For me, there are just a few very important life-changers. Some of them don't even know it and would be surprised. I will be inviting these people to join me in a blog of life-changers. I want to do this because God has for a while been working on me. This blog is just part of the many ideas that have come to mind, for keeping in touch with these individuals.

I would like to introduce this blog using a story that I don't even know all the facts about. But in my mind, it most clearly shows how people can bring the light to others. My grandpa Collins was a self-made man who raised a family in Appalachia during the great depression on a fourth grade education. I called him "Papaw". I visited him and my grandma usually once each year. One time when I was not quite a teenager, he told me a story which I later learned more about from my mom.

One day when grandpa was retired he suffered a heart attack and passed out. In those days in that place there were no EMTs, just ambulance workers. So my grandma rode with grandpa and did what she could to message his heart until the ambulance arrived at the hospital. He ended up surviving to tell me this story. He told me that he died and left his body in the hospital surgery room. He found himself standing on a hill overlooking a beautiful green valley. Next to him was a man he knew to be Jesus Christ. Jesus told him that he was not ready to go in. The next instant he was back in his body. This was all he told me. My mom filled in the rest of the story.

My grandpa went to see a pastor from a nearby town as soon as he could after the heart attack. Pastor J. S. Bell became a very good friend to my grandpa. He explained the good news to my grandpa, who believed it and lived the rest of his life as a follower of Jesus.

There were three life changers in this story, the ambulance workers, my grandma and pastor Bell. They all had a single, important task to save my grandpa's life and to give him the chance for eternal life. But to me the star wasn't a human on earth. It was Jesus Christ, who showed himself to my grandpa and gave him another chance to have life with God.

We may not even know our part in God's work. We just need to be willing to follow God so that He can use us in whatever ways he wants.

Jesus the heart mender

I have long held it to be true that Jesus was the Christ, or Messiah, that would change the world and that his death and resurrection was part of a world-changing plan. But my understanding of how God was working in the world has undergone tremendous change. When I first believed, it was all about me for many years. Once I got dunked, my incomplete understanding about God's work stayed at the same level because I'm basically slow to get it. Now, with help from caring people who helped me get it, I realize that God wants us to be his children who help him in the world. Even though he continually works, he wants us to participate as well - like a small child helps her mother make a cake - as our pastor recently explained. God is doing the deep work of transforming hearts that we can't do very well ourselves. We are only expected to follow his directions and later enjoy the cake together.

An unexpected transformation happened to me about two years ago. At that time I was too shy, spoke to only a few others when needed, but didn't have any deep relationships or meaningful conversations about faith with anyone. I was far from understanding that I should do personal work to love and encourage others. Then I began meeting with a man, Roger Rockenbaugh, from my church. At the time, we started a small group and it was typically just he and I at the beginning for several months. We read a book about the commands of Christ. Each week we would discuss a new chapter. And we would talk about each other's lives and families and pray for any concerns. And it was during this time that it dawned on me that I was supposed to love other Christians and help them just like Roger was doing for me.

So I remember asking God to put His love into my heart. I knew it was missing. And his answer came very quickly by the next Sunday. And it has grown continually since then. Now, I love in a new way, and when I see others who were like the way I used to be, I even want to help them get this amazing eternal love. God carries out such transformations through the Holy Spirit. John 14 through 17 in the Bible explain the Holy Spirit's work in the transforming of hearts and how that was made possible as part of God's plan to save the world.

I realize now that I can't help people if I don't love them. They won't want my Christianity or even a relationship with me if I don't love them. I'll just give one example that makes me sad to realize that in the past I was the unloving man, very far from God's character. I was visiting my daughter and helping with some ice storm preparation work - collecting and chopping firewood in case their power went out. A new next-door neighbor, Daniel - the unloving man, introduced himself and mentioned a few others in his family, emphasizing that they were church-going people, while taking long drags from his cigarette. And he bragged that he had helped two other women with their stocks of wood, one of them also a church-going woman. I was a little slow getting what Daniel meant, but after thinking about it for about five minutes, I realized that he was trying to hide that he had judged my daughter's family as non-church-going in contrast to his church-going family and acquaintances. I have to admit that I am ashamed that I have been that unloving man in the past. I need to work on fixing those past mistakes.

God can't work through un-loving neighbors. That is why he commanded us to love God with our all and love our neighbors as ourselves. We need to tap into God's love first in order to receive the great love only He can put into our hearts - so that we can be the loving person. When God fixes our hearts then we are equipped to love everyone, even Daniel. I'm going to keep Daniel in my prayers. He needs to have God change his heart into a living heart like God's.

I truly believe that God fixes one heart at a time, by addressing their deepest needs as only the Creator of the world has the ability to do. We are too far from God's ways and too weak to do anything on our own to help ourselves, much less others. And we are living in the time between the Messiah's first coming to forgive us and the next coming to reclaim the world for God. This it the time when we can be in cooperation with God's work in this world and be amazed what He can do through us.

My Dad's Death

The circumstances of my father's death were unusual to say the least. I doubt that many families experienced such a transition in a harmonious family gathering as we did. The level of each person's participation was the correct measure to fully support each other and my Dad.

The last week of my Dad's life started off just as many other weeks leading up to it. I had visited my Dad often because he was only a few blocks away from me. I walked there in warm weather or drove in bad weather. I usually popped in without warning or plan. The last Sunday of his life I was in a particularly good mood. When I helped him to bed after he finished eating lunch he smiled at me with his usual intelligent glance. The next morning his mind was no longer working and his eyes revealed no consciousness. Between Sunday night and Friday evening he was unable to eat or drink. I spent as much time as possible during the week and especially on Thursday and Friday with my Mom and Dad, believing what my Mom said was true - that Dad was dying.

When we realized that Dad was dying we sent out the message to everyone in the family. Those who were able drove to Crawfordsville and met together in his room. On Friday, February 27 at 8:45 PM I announced to my Mom that I was going on a short walk. As I put my jacket on Mom simply said, "It's time." I immediately took my jacket off and went over to Dad. Mom calmly lead everyone through the final opportunity to say farewell to Dad. Each one went to Dad and said a few words, sometimes with a kiss or a touch on his hand. I then sat next to him on his bed and put my arm around his shoulder. I couldn't bear for him to feel alone. Then my Mom asked me to pray. I said a short prayer but my voice broke a few times with unexpected sadness.

I asked each person to talk to Dad. One at a time my children and his children said their last farewell in their own way and voice. I told my Dad that I would see him again. Mom then asked me to stand back, so I did. I stood next to her as she sat on a chair facing Dad. I asked Marcie to hold my hand and be next to me and she did. Dad's breathe became very shallow but his eyes looked remarkably blue and focused. He didn't move at all other than his breathing. Then he tried to talk, but he was so weak and his mouth so dry that he couldn't be heard. His breathing stopped about a minute later. I hit the nurse's call button and waited about half a minute. When she didn't come I went to the nurses station and told her that I thought he was gone. She came to the room immediately. Suddenly as we entered the room he breathed again and opened his eyes. So I walked back over to him. His mind must have been working well enough to want one last glance before shutting down. When the nurse shook her head a minute later we knew that his heart had stopped. The time was 8:57 pm. We did not linger in the room. He was no longer there.