Born to a lower middle class and unbelieving family in 1949, I grew up with one younger brother and an even younger sister. Because my father was enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, we moved frequently during my earliest years. By the fourth grade I had migrated from the state of Washington to southern California, Kansas, South Carolina, southern California again, back to Washington, then Florida, Colorado, and finally to northern California where we settled in the town of Fairfield for the duration of my childhood.

No one in my family knew the Lord, but one Christmas my parents gave Bibles to my brother, sister and me. I can still remember reading that Bible as a boy and weeping when I saw the love of God revealed in Jesus. Yet even though I could feel the Holy Spirit convicting me and tugging at my heart, I did not yield. Not yet.

I worked at odd jobs to earn money as I was growing up, hauled hay on my grandparents' farm in Idaho when I was twelve, and then worked in the summers picking, sorting and drying a variety of fruits that grew in the Suisun Valley. At the age of fifteen, I lied about my age and managed to get a job working as a shed hand alongside grown men in the valley's largest fruit drying yard. I was the only shed hand under eighteen and that was hard work, lifting 20-30 tons every day.

Throughout my high school years I earned enough money in the summers to buy my school clothes and to give me a sense of independence. I was active in sports during my freshman and sophomore years, but began working regularly during the school year when I was a junior. It was in those years that my mother first went to work outside the home. And that's when I started getting into trouble, growing so independent and rebellious that I quit school and left home soon after starting my senior year.

By my eighteenth birthday I had been married and divorced, with the daughter born from that marriage adopted by another couple. I quickly drifted into the hippie lifestyle, but was drafted at nineteen and served two years in the Army. In the Army I learned a lot about authority, discipline, and an appreciation for many things I had always taken for granted. But after an honorable discharge, I returned to the hippie lifestyle and continued wasting my life away.

During those years I muddled my way through an A.A. degree, attending several community colleges in the process. At the last of those schools, another student began witnessing to me about Christ, always inviting me to her church. I declined so many invitations that you would have thought she'd give up, but she persisted.

Then one day while I was alone God began dealing with me. He started showing me things he had done for me, ways that he had blessed me, the many times he had protected me and preserved my life—all under the shadow of the cross. Then he began showing me the things I had done in response to his loving mercy and grace. I was devastated, my heart was broken, and I surrendered my life to Jesus.

By his grace I have served the Lord since that day, though I have certainly stumbled many times along the way. Always, his grace has upheld me. His love has surrounded me. His word and his Spirit have guided me. How awesome and loving and merciful and gracious is our God! Now, more than thirty years after surrendering my life to Christ, the cry of my heart is that I may know him. That I may know him more and more with each passing day until at last I know my precious Savior as he knows me.

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