I was born in 1945 and grew up on a dairy farm in northeast Kansas. I went to church with my parents and I feared God. I mean I really feared God. I thought he was out to zap me. I did not know who God was.
When I went to school, I could not learn. School was a nightmare for me. I couldn’t understand anything. Nothing made sense to me. I felt like the dumbest kid in school.
When I was 12 years old, I lost my left eye in an accident and thought my life was going to become even more difficult.
I was sprinkled (baptized) in a Methodist church when I was 16 years old. The main thing I remember about it was that when the water came down my face it ticked and it made me laugh.
When I was 18, my high school counselor told me I needed to go work with my hands because I didn’t have what it took to go to college. I started barber school right after graduation. I purchased my first house at age 19. I married a year later. I bought my first farm in 1972 and started raising cattle and farming. I quit barbering in 1973 and got a real estate license.
About two years later, I had 69 head of cattle. That same year I lost my corn crop and had to hand carry the silage to the cattle in a tub. One day I was going to feed my cattle and I stopped at the doorway and told God, “If this is life, you can have it.”
I’d never known who Jesus Christ was all the years I’d gone to church. But I’d heard Billy Graham continue to talk about asking Jesus into your life. So I asked Jesus to come into my life. I went up and fed my cattle and came back and opened up the Bible. I could never understand anything I read. I opened it up to John 14:1, and Jesus said to me, “Let not your heart be troubled, you are trusting God, now trust in me.” And as I began to read, God took the veil off of my mind. I became a new creature and I got a new mind.
In 1979, I took a new job in Waco, Texas, with Success Motivation Institute. I thought I was going to fulfill my dream. That was the beginning of a disastrous season in my life. My wife of 15 years took our two younger kids back home and left me in Texas with the two older boys. Two months later, she decided to come back and when I saw her, I couldn’t believe how bad she looked.
We moved her and the younger kids back to Texas and that same week she went into the hospital. She was operated on for breast cancer. After the operation, the doctor told me that it was the worst cancer he had seen in a 33-year-old woman. He said she had one to three years to live. We were both Christians and I knew God was going to heal her. I called all of my friends around the country to start praying for her.
People laid hands on her and anointed her with oil and I knew she was going to be healed. But around July of 1980, I realized that she was not going to get better, so I packed up my belongings and moved the six of us in with my parents, a broken man.
I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a house. I was deeply in debt. I had four little kids and a dying wife. I thought my life was over. I didn’t know how I would survive.
On December 24, 1980, my wife died. Creditors were calling and harassing me. I later got a job as money broker and began to make enough money to pay my debts. I remarried four years later and it lasted 8 months. I remained single for the next 16 years.
Ephesians 4:23 says, “To be made new in the attitude of your minds and put on the new self, created to be like God, in true righteousness and holiness.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old is gone and the new has come. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”
God has given me a new mind of understanding. He (the Holy Spirit) teaches me all things and brings to my remembrance all that He has taught me. (John 14:25-26) God is now my source. He is my counselor and my teacher. He shows me great and mighty things that I don’t know and I love to teach others what He has taught me.
My wife, Mary, and I have been in ministry since 1994. Many of these years have been spent in ministry to the separated and divorced (the single-again) and single parents. We have ministered to hundreds of individuals and many couples. God has allowed us to witness miracles in the lives of those who follow Him.
