Pastor's Testimony
I was heading toward majoring in electrical engineering with a 3.8 GPA when I got bored of high school. My GPA slid to 2.78 when I graduated. After high school I moved out and decided to "experiment" with the party life. It wasn't a dramatic crash—just a slow fade from someone with a plan to someone without one.
At 21, I made a clear decision to stop the fade. Got a job, found an apartment, started rebuilding. I wasn't in crisis—I was course-correcting. That's when an old friend who'd become a Christian started inviting me to church. My family was not religious. We never went to church. I had zero interest. My experience with religious friends growing up left me convinced that church people were hypocrites who lived one way on Sunday and another way the rest of the week.
But something about this friend was different—his life had actually changed. Christmas 1982, he started inviting me to church and I refused many times. Then he came to try again and I refused as before. He was getting ready to leave, but turned and put his hand on me quietly and started to pray. No pressure, no argument. In that moment, I encountered something I couldn't explain—it was like an invitation to find out if this was real. I went.
What I found wasn't religion. It was a person. That night I understood things that had never made sense before. I walked out different—not because I needed a crutch, but because I'd encountered something true. Forty years of marriage, three kids who all chose this path themselves, thirteen grandchildren, and thirty years of ministry across four churches in three countries later—I'm still gripped by that night. I found the truth as only experience can reveal.