Spiritual Journeys Today

God Months      

In February, 2010, I had been waiting, not very patiently I might add, for several months or more for God to give me some direction.   I participate in a number of ongoing projects at Christ United Methodist Church: the band, the choir intermittently, the Outreach committee, co-coaching one of the Lego League teams and I have helped with the Friday night movies during the last year.  These things are important to me but my participation in them is requiring little spiritual heavy lifting.  With some counseling from Ken Bauman, my spiritual director, I tried to stay patient and open to God’s word.  My five year stint of spiritual direction sessions with Ken has played a significant role in my faith journey.  My faith continues to grow in both depth and breadth under his guidance.  Thank you, Ken!

Lent 2010 was approaching. 

On reflection, this story is actually a natural progression of a number of activities and looking back I can see that God had been patiently setting the foundation for years.  February and March of this year brought dramatic and focused change, with God orchestrating the whole event.  One of the foundational underpinnings of these changes was my reading of a book called ‘Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism’ by Martha Grace Reese in August of 2009.  This book is obviously centered on evangelism, or ‘sharing your faith’, as the author puts it.  The book contains a chapter on prayer, something Ken had been urging me to explore more fully.  This chapter helped me to start building a stronger regimen of prayer.  After I read the book on my way to Boston on business last year, God sent a flurry of ideas, many of which still need to be pursued.  Beginning that night, I started to pray regularly for my church, but more specifically for the individual people who make up the church.  Some had requested prayers specifically but most were just on the list of people I know whose names came to mind when I tried to recall everyone I knew at church during my prayer times.  I had also been having difficulty sleeping and I started using these usually annoying waking moments as a time to do this prayer.  Often, during this conversation with God, I could fall back to sleep after a while.  Without a doubt, this greatly improved my sleep habits, my spiritual habits and my temperament.

The catalyst for these God months was a life event that, quite frankly, was difficult to deal with.  I found out on Wednesday, Feb 10^th, that a dear friend, Carla Behnke, had passed away the day before.  I had been praying for her and her family for some time.  Carla was a wonderful person who had been battling cancer valiantly for almost 10 years.  She was upbeat at all times and was a very positive influence on my family.  She issued my son his first library card.  The news of her passing was hardly unexpected but still my family took it hard.  I got the news that night just before I played the Wednesday night service with the band.  Apparently distracted, I made a bad rhythm mistake starting a song where I set the bass beat and we had to restart the song.  During and after the service, I intensified my prayers for the Behnke family.  Carla’s memorial service was held February 26^th and I cried my way through it while listening to the wonderful things she had been able to accomplish in her time on this earth, especially through her characterization of ‘Faith Friendly’ as part of her ministry to children.  My son, John, noticed I was crying and seemed amazed.  I explained that I had lost a friend and that it hurt.  He apparently didn’t picture me as a person who would cry.  I knew Carla fairly well, loved her hugs and awesome sense of humor but I learned a great deal about her that day.  This was another memorial service where I came away from it thinking ‘I truly wish I had known this amazing person better’.  The seed God planted around that thought and the others I will describe below have resulted in my creation of this website.  It is dedicated to God and to Carla’s memory and I hope to publish part of her wonderful story and work here soon.

On the day after the service, I left for a conference in Atlanta.  I was to stay with my cousin George for a day, catching up with him as I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.  George is a Southern Baptist preacher among other things.  He has a strong and vibrant faith but it is based on a theological position that doesn’t align very well with my moderately liberal Christian beliefs.  I have visited George before and heard him preach.  He prepares well and does so prayerfully, but quite frankly, certain areas of his theology rub me the wrong way.  We visited an uncle who also lives in that area after I arrived.  My parents showed up that night at my uncle’s house on their way back to Indiana after a month or so in Florida.  It was good to see them as I hadn’t done so since Christmas.   I prayed as I got ready for church that morning.  I asked God to help me hear his word in spite of the theological distractions that I knew would be present.  In a sentence, he did so.  As I sat in Sunday school listening to the lesson on first fruits, God’s message for me that day jumped out at me.  My family and I allocate the first fruits of our income to God and his works.  However, it occurred to me that I was not doing much at all to truly dedicate the first fruits of my time to God.  For instance, my wife, Jan and I have been talking for several years about going on a mission trip to Guatemala.  We have been trying to work it into our schedule and it just hasn’t been happening.    Then and there, I made the decision that we were going to Guatemala this coming January.  Believe me when I tell you that this is not the way such decisions are normally made in our house.   While sitting there, I determined that we needed to learn Spanish in support of this goal. George once again preached well and the altar call was done to “Amazing Grace”, one of my all time favorites.  It went on for about ten minutes with their pianist, who had also taught the adult Sunday School class that morning, playing and leading the singing wonderfully.  While learning Spanish has yet become a priority, Jan and I have signed up for, and are committed to our Guatemalan mission trip in January.  Our church is sending around 18 folks on a medical and construction mission to Lemoa, Guatemala.  I’m sure you will see and hear much more about this trip in the future.   Jan, thanks once again for your love, support and understanding as we travel this journey together.  I couldn’t imagine having a better life partner and spouse.

This time period also contained a number of other incidents where I have seen God working in my life and the lives of those around me.  Some of the changes are too personal for even me to mention here but listed below are some of the other ways God touched me during this time: 

My friend, Ron, and his family had been going through rough times.  His 90 year old father had some health problems in February.  Difficult decisions needed to be made so that Ron could better assist them as they adjust to the changes that life is bringing them.  I had the good fortune of being trusted to listen to his story.  God helped me to be a better listener in that situation, something I’m admittedly not always good at. 

I also reached a spiritually related goal by donating blood for the 100^th time at Mayo during Lent.   I utilized the time that morning thinking about how God was indeed working in and around me.  I’ll tell you more about the spiritual ties that I have developed around blood donation in another portion of my story.

Our associate pastor, Amanda Larson, was unable to attend and lead her Lenten book study class one week. I was a part of the study group and she asked me to lead the class in her absence.   It went extremely well as the discussion closely followed her outline while I only occasionally had to dip a paddle in the water to guide us to the next talking point.  The book we were reading was the one I mentioned above, Martha Grace Reese’s ‘Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism’.  I would certainly recommend reading the book; I personally found even more new inspiration as I read it a second time.  It starts a little slow in my opinion but it has been a blessing to me, giving me insight and encouragement, especially as I contemplated making this website a reality.  The whole group had some doubts about whether this book is right for our congregation as a whole.  Having said that, I will state here and now that seven very different people who have very diverse theological positions and backgrounds had indeed gotten together and started to discuss their interactions with God.  One complaint about the book study is that we didn’t have enough time to tell each other about our journeys. Participation in this group also led me to think about leading ‘Prayer and Share’ sessions where people will be asked to come and pray together and to share their faith stories.  I have opened discussions with our pastors on the topic.  One of my concerns about sharing my story with others also came to light in that meeting.  The group discussed ‘God moments’ and it became apparent that those who say they haven’t had God moments are at times almost resentful of those who will say they have had them.  In my opinion, all those who lead active lives in Christ have these moments if they will only recognize them for what they are.  How do we make that happen?  And how do people such as me, who have indeed had God moments, make sure others understand that our only purpose in sharing these moments with them is to glorify and praise God? 

I also took a step forward and asked the band to let me present one of my original songs, “All I Am” to them for consideration as a performance piece.  I had been hesitant to do so but the message I have been receiving from God is very clear:  I have a story that God wants me to tell.  The song hasn’t been performed yet but only God knows what the future holds.

The music, the telling of faith stories and the blood donations all seem to be bound up together in these posibilities that God is making me aware of.  I am being nudged insistently to let the world know what God has done for me.  I feel I am clearly being called to tell others about what God has done for me so that they will know that God can and will do the same for them.  On a Monday and Tuesday late in Lent, I woke up with the word “Testify” hammering in my brain.  Truthfully, it clearly was being stated as an imperitive, a command.  I heard no great and distinctive voice and had no vision or dream.  This was clearly a waking moment but was also clearly a ‘God moment’.  It filled me with wonder and a certainty about what God was asking me to do.  On that Tuesday, while this was happening, I told Jan to be prepared because God was clearly moving in and around my life…now.  On the following Monday, I had received a message from Ken, my spiritual director, stating that he had some things to talk about in our session on Tuesday.  I sent him back a note saying I also had a number of items to discuss.  I wondered as I replied how we were going to get through all of this in an hour.  We met that morning and I told Ken that I thought I should go through my list first, thinking that I needed to “testify”!  I did so, relating the story above.  As you can imagine, it took most of the hour to do so.  I then asked Ken to go through his list shown below. 

1. Prayer – need further exploration, listening.
2. God’s call – how do we hear it?
3. Spiritual Direction – will it be a “God” experience?
   • Where have you noticed/felt God? (God’s presence)
4. Life – rated it a C+ in April of 2005.

Unbeknownst to me, Ken had gone back through our interactions in spiritual direction, reviewing his notes from 2005 until now.  These were his thoughts, topics and questions for me.  It felt as if God had already helped me to live out the answers to Ken’s questions before he even had a chance to ask them.  He and I shared our wonder at this demonstration of God’s power and amazing ability to move in our lives.

Later that day I asked him to send me this list and he closed his message with the following words:

 “I am still overcome with the connections that were made this morning. God is pretty amazing, as you know.  Have a safe journey and look and listen for the Holy One.

Ken”

 February and March 2010 were indeed God months for me, a spiritual rating of A+.  In the space of forty days, my faith deepened and my spiritual journey took me in directions I could never have imagined.  God’s hand, working in and through these events, is directly responsible for the development of this site.  The mission I have been given is to tell my story and to encourage, assist and enable others to tell their stories.  Please help me as I do so.  Submit your stories of God’s wonder and greatness, of his daily care and healing touch…Testify!

My life started over after those once again traumatic moments in 1993.  I had hit bottom and things have been improving ever since.  As my step-daughter, Kim, lived with my wife, LouAnn, I moved out of the house when I was asked to do so.  This didn’t come without hurt, without pain, without a realization that my odds of ever returning to live there were small.  Some of those around me recommended that I make LouAnn move as this was her idea, but it seemed like the right thing to do as Kim might have been forced to change schools again if I had done things differently.  I continued to talk with LouAnn for several months, trying to get her to see that we did need to get back together again.  I was making little, if any, headway.  I did get to see Kim, she spent weekends with me on a regular basis, which was also good for me.

I was fortunate to have some very dear friends that were living in Kalamazoo.  I had met Mike during my first day on the job at Commercial National Bank in Peoria back in my college days.  He was my best friend in those days and we remain close yet today.  His wife, Tina, worked for the same bank as LouAnn did and they moved to Kalamazoo several months after we did.  He and his wife, Tina, invited me to stay at their place while I found an apartment.  This wasn’t the first time Mike and Tina had done this for me as they have supported me through all my difficult years with alcohol.  Their home is still a place where I feel almost as comfortable as I do in my own house and we still stay there whenever we are in Kalamazoo.  Seeing them is my only real reason to return to Kalamazoo.  But I am getting ahead of myself again.

        One Sunday morning, I woke up and decided I was going to church, something they normally did not do and something I had not done of my own volition for many years.  I told them I was going to go, picked up the phonebook and chose a Church from the Methodist listings there because my initial roots were Evangelical United Brethren which merged with the Methodist church in the 60’s.  Oakwood United Methodist Church, a couple of miles from their house, was my selection.  They promptly told me there was a United Methodist Church about 3 blocks from their house, suggesting I should go there.  I believe, to this day that God helped me to choose to go to Oakwood that day.  This was one of the first nudges from God that I received and acted on during this critical point in my life but I certainly did not recognize this until well after the fact.

        Oakwood was a small neighborhood church, with a small group of regular, mostly older attendees.  In those days, I wore cowboy boots almost everywhere and I’m sure people noticed.  On the other hand, one of the people working to become a leader in the church was a large younger man, Steve, with a Mohawk haircut, so there was some diversity and acceptance of diversity here.  Truthfully, I was looking for answers.  I wanted to get back together with LouAnn and was hoping that God might help me to do so.  I don’t remember much about the service, I can’t recall if the band played that Sunday or not, but there was a great deal of music, which is very important to me.  God didn’t waste any time before hitting me right between the eyes during the sermon.  Pastor Bud Buchner worked a reference to a country song, Alan Jackson’s “Tonight I Climbed the Wall”, into the sermon.  I don’t even recall what his sermon topic was and hence what made him tie the song into the topic, but this was the sign that I needed to know that God had noticed that I was back and that he had a plan for me.  The song is written from the perspective of a man in a relationship that isn’t working too well.  He decides that rather than to let the relationship fail, he will make the effort to work it out.  Parts of the verses stress more of the physical aspects of the encounter than I remember but it was the chorus that struck me.  Here are those words:

Tonight I climbed the wall
And took her by the hand
We’d come too far to fall
Couldn’t stand to see it end
So tonight I climbed the wall

I was sure these words meant that I needed to go back to LouAnn, tell her how much I loved her, that I had quit drinking and that God would make life turn out fine after all.  I was right…kind of.

I did go back and make the effort to “climb the wall”.  I tried hard to convince LouAnn to change her mind.  In truth, she had had enough.  She was determined to get a divorce and move on.  That’s just what she did. In addition to going to church and talking to Pastor Bud about my life challenges, I saw a Psychologist a few times during that time.  I was trying to be sure I was thinking clearly and making good overall decisions.  The part of ‘climbing the wall’ that I got right was that I did need to go back.  Not because God was going to make that effort successful but so that I knew in my heart of hearts that there was no going back and no getting back together.  It was time to move on, so I did.

For the next year, life was full of change.  I had no idea what was in store for me.  I found an apartment, kept it organized and clean.  I started to attend Oakwood regularly and got involved with the church band and choir, singing and playing trumpet.  I became reacquainted with my extensive stamp collection, played quite a bit of pool and golf (without drinking, I was truly great at testing my willpower in those days), and signed up for a fall college course on the Civil War, another area of intense interest for me.

I started to look for another job, interviewing and getting an offer from a hospital in Grand Rapids, MI.  I turned it down due to concerns about the management there combined with a one hour commute each way.

The fourth quarter of 1993 proved to be an important and incredible time for me.  I had my first date with Jan in October.  We’ve now been married 12 years.  She is truly one of the greatest gifts that God has given me in my life.  I tell her this on a regular basis and I am so fortunate to recognize her for the angel that she is.  You’ll hear lots more about my life with Jan as my journey continues. 

Another significant thing happened in that time frame.  I was walking out of my Civil War class one night and saw one of the nurses I knew from the hospital , Marie, coming out of a classroom. She was a user of some of the Information Technology (IT) systems and data that I worked on and I had done some assignments for her.  She said she was learning to speak Russian and was going back to Russia in December.  She and her husband were associated with Kalamazoo’s sister city efforts with the city of Pushkin, near St. Petersburg, Russia.  We talked for about half an hour and before the conversation was finished, she asked me to come on the trip.  Of course, I turned her down.  I had a hundred reasons why I couldn’t go, including the fact that I was more or less broke and going through a divorce.

I called her the next morning, saying that all the reasons I couldn’t go were also the reasons that there might never be a better time for me to go.  I had credit cards and could pay for the trip when I got back.  I didn’t have the necessary shots, a passport or visa but somehow she helped me get everything ready in about a month.   The trip was awesome, full of sights and stories that were new and incredible, at least to me.  One of my most amazing memories of that trip occurred when Marie and I trudged about half a mile though several inches of newly fallen snow before sunrise to attend mass at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Pushkin.  This building had been used as an ammunition dump by the Germans attempting to capture St. Petersburg in World War II.  The building was ransacked and gutted when they left town. Major parts of it were just starting to be restored in 1993.  Obviously the service was Russian Orthodox, in a language I couldn’t speak, incense was utilized and people moved from place to place in no apparent pattern, lighting candles at treasured icons affixed to temporary walls during the Mass.  I understood almost nothing and yet I could feel the overwhelming presence of God in that place.  I took no pictures inside the cathedral out of respect for the service so the memories must always come from within my mind.  I purchased some crucifixes and a Russian Bible there in the Sanctuary to support the restoration.  I still have them and they too bring the memories of that place flooding back.  I arranged for roses to be sent to Jan while I was gone.  This trip led Jan and me to an intensified and incredible love of travel.  We have visited many domestic and several international destinations together so far.  She and I are planning to combine that love of travel with doing the work of God in the near future.

Life continued to move at a frenetic pace for quite some time and God continued to help me work to improve myself and my situation.  The divorce was finalized.  Our attendance and involvement at Oakwood UMC increased.  While our time there ended up being relatively short, church life and activities soon became a part of who Jan and I were, as a couple.  She grew up Catholic so there were significant changes that she, at times, struggled with.  All in all, times were good at Oakwood.  I vividly remember playing a trumpet fanfare in the chilly morning fog at a nearby lake during a particularly moving Easter sunrise service,.  

Jan and I moved in together sometime in the first half of that year.  Her sixteen year old son, Jeremy came to live with us for the summer of 1994.  Fortunately he and I get along very well together and always have.  I was asked to join the finance team at Oakwood and did so…just in time for another big change.

An Information Technology headhunter, someone who is hired to find personnel for companies, called me at work one day, probably in June 1994.  This was normal, occurring several times a week at the hospital where I worked as there were a great many dissatisfied people working there at that time.  The hospital had a reputation as a sweatshop and the reputation was well-deserved in my opinion.  His first question was ‘Would you like to move to Minnesota?’.   I promptly and curtly said ‘NO’.  His next question was “What if I said Mayo Clinic?’.  I said ‘You have my attention.’.   And he did.  I had read “The Doctors Mayo” as a grade school student and in spite of being a college dropout; I take pride in my work and always dreamed of working for a company that strived to be the best.  Mayo is certainly such a company.  It turned out that they were looking for skills that matched mine almost exactly.  They were looking to fill a spot that was two levels below my Lead Analyst Programmer position but the money was slightly better.  I flew to the interview alone, wondering what the future held for me.  The interview went well and I started to worry, because I knew I was going to accept the offer.  Jan and I had only been dating for about eight months.  She is originally from Michigan and was already considered a bit of a black sheep because she didn’t live in her hometown of Traverse City like most of her remaining immediate family did.  Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to happen.  I don’t recall now if my relationship with God was mature enough at that time for me to have prayed about it seriously as I would today.  Still, it is obvious that God was watching over me.  Jan and I decided to visit Rochester together and her son Jeremy came along too.  That visit also went very well.  Rochester is a wonderful town.  Fortunately for me, Jan took the decision out of my hands almost immediately by announcing that she was coming with me.  The lease at the apartment wasn’t up until late summer and Jeremy was obligated to work at one of the Kalamazoo Meijer’s stores for the summer.  He also worked at one of the Meijer’s stores in Traverse City during the rest of the year, so getting on in Kalamazoo for the summer had been relatively easy. 

My start date at Mayo was July 11, 1994.  Jan moved to Rochester in August.  We put most of our stuff in storage and moved into an apartment while we shopped for a house.  We moved into our current home in November of that year.  We started church shopping almost immediately, eventually choosing to settle at one of the United Methodist churches in Rochester, probably sometime in 1995.  Bruce Buller was the pastor there at that time.  Bruce comes from a family of Methodist preachers.  He is a wonderful preacher, full of optimism and energy with a big baritone voice that carries throughout any enclosed space without a microphone.  He has the ability to find God at work in virtually any situation, and uses that ability constantly.  Thanks to observing Bruce for all these years, I have started to recognize God’s works in places that I never would have previously.  I still miss hearing Bruce preach.  He was and is a model for openness and acceptance of all people as children of God, no matter who they are or where they are in life.  We joined the choir there when Jan got comfortable doing so but got involved more slowly than I had at Oakwood. 

The next several years went by, my relationship with Jan continued to be strong and we continued to attend services regularly at that church.  Although it took her a while, Jan was ready for marriage before I was.  I wanted to be sure it was right.  During this time, I started to go to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) with a friend from Mayo, Ron.  There I found another place where I could and easily did get in touch with God.  I don’t think I have missed a year since, having gone between one and three times a year with Ron and/or with people from church groups.  In the BWCAW, I recharge and refresh, getting back in touch with myself and with God while leaving the cares of the world behind.  Over the past few years, the importance of these trips as a means of improving my relationship with God has increased.

1998 was another significant year for Jan and me.  I had finally convinced myself that getting married again was the right thing.  Please don’t misunderstand, I had known since 1994 that Jan was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I was just scared that this marriage would end like all the rest and I would once again be alone and hurting.

We attended counseling sessions with Bruce, where we were open about how and why we were here.  We celebrated our marriage on June 18^th, 1998 in Rochester with friends and family members.  Bruce retired and left that church shortly thereafter.  Jan’s father passed away in November of that year, joining her mother who had passed away a few months before she and I met.  His death led to our most recent change in churches.  After attending church there for several years and singing in the choir for a couple of years, no one from that church even sent a condolence card, in contrast to the folks at her job of two weeks who sent flowers and cards.  We decided that we were looking for a church where we could truly be part of the church  family.  It was time to move on and we did.

Make no mistake, this is a story about God.  It is true, it is real and it happened over the last fifty years or so.  I want to be sure you understand that although this narrative will focus on my life, the intent is to convey God’s power, God’s grace and God’s ability to redeem and utilize even the most broken of human beings.   I believe God wants me to and, indeed, has asked me to, share this story with you.  My relationship with God today is personal, active and life-changing, but it wasn’t always that way. 

Very early in 1983, my life took a drastic turn for the worse.  I was happily married with a reasonably good job, a college dropout who liked to party on the weekends, enjoying life to the fullest extent.  My wife and I had been together almost continuously since 7th grade.  We came from the same small Illinois town, had roller skated, played cards and trumpet together, were rarely apart, seemingly forever.  I had built and planned my life, my dreams and my happiness around my relationship with her.  We had it made.

I found out in early January that she was much more interested in ‘my best friend at the time’ than she was in me.  She wanted a divorce.  I was devastated…and divorced by Valentine’s Day.  So I did the only thing that seemed to make sense at the time, I turned to…alcohol. 

Before we go any further into that part of my journey, I feel you should know a little about my background.  I was raised in and around Paw Paw, a small farming community in north central Illinois.  My parents are awesome and have supported me throughout my life in so many ways.  They are also strict teetotalers.  I’ll tell you more about my family at another time.  I was a good student and was also very involved and active in my church.  I have Evangelical United Brethren, United Methodist and Presbyterian church roots.  Singing and playing the trumpet were two of my pleasures and talents.  I didn’t drink, smoke or swear.  I was a “good” kid.  Most of you would have considered me to be a geek and a nerd.  I started working at my great-uncle’s grocery store after graduating from eighth grade and continued to do so for the next 6 years.  I graduated from high school near the top of my class.   I was a member of the National Honor Society and won the band and chorus awards for my school my senior year.  I was on the basketball and baseball teams at different points in high school and was a regular starter at soccer as a senior.  I started Computer Science coursework at Bradley University in the fall of 1977.  I never quite made a successful transition into college life, dropping out after a couple of years.  I was married August 5, 1978.  I was 19 and my life was going just the way I wanted it to.  I left church behind somewhere in this time period as well.  Looking back, I am not sure how or why this happened.  I think the biggest problem was that my plans, at this early age, all focused around my wife and marriage, not on college or a meaningful career or staying in church.  At any rate, I am trying to paint the picture of a normal kid, with a good solid moral and educational background, who had endless possibilities in front of him. 

After my sudden and undesired divorce, I became a drunk, a foul-mouthed, selfish, pessimistic, self-pitying creature, seemingly beyond hope or redemption.  I got drunk most every day, not just a little drunk, but serious, word-slurring, can’t walk straight and at many times, passing out drunk.  Some days, I got drunk twice.  If I couldn’t drink and do a given activity, it was a pretty safe bet that I didn’t do that activity.  My normal habit was to get drunk fast and then keep drinking enough to stay drunk for as long as I could.  I was working at a bank as a computer operator in Peoria, IL when this all started.  I worked three days a week and got paid for 40 hours plus overtime so there was plenty of free time to drink.  I started my workday at 4 PM and continued until the work was done, most days we finished between 1 and 4 AM.  Peoria was a mostly blue collar 3 shift-a-day factory town so the bars closed at 4 AM and could reopen at 6 AM.  You could get a drink at almost any time round the clock…and I did.

I didn’t know it then but the first true miracles in my life were already happening.  I centered my life around alcohol for a long time after that, drinking as if it were the only important thing in the world.  I drove drunk many hundreds of times.  On too many mornings, one of my first actions of the day would be to look out the window and see if the car was outside.  That would tell me if I had driven home or gotten a ride somehow.  Think about that real hard…because on most mornings the car was there.  I was a danger to myself, to those around me, and to the communities I lived in at those times.  Through 11+ years of incredibly stupid and irresponsible actions, I never once got a DUI or was involved in a significant accident when I was drinking.  I never once lost a job or got in trouble at work for my drinking.  That’s an amazing amount of luck, too much, in my opinion.  I now know God was looking out for me all this time, in spite of my complete and total failure to pay any attention to him.  Why or more specifically, why me?  It’s a question that I still ask at times.  I’m not sure why I ask the question, as it’s plain that God has chosen me to do part of his work and who am I to say that God is wrong.

I kept trying to kill the pain with liberal doses of alcohol.  If my ex-wife had walked in during those years, I would have gone back to her in an instant, even if it had occurred during my other two failed marriages during this time period.  Something was missing in my life but I sure hadn’t identified the correct answer yet.  I kept blaming others for my failures and it took years for me to admit my responsibility for what happened to and through me.  I hurt people who didn’t deserve to be hurt and I pray that they have found a way to forgive me.  One thing I know is that God has forgiven me and that I have forgiven myself but I’m jumping way too far ahead of the story.

There’s a lot I don’t remember about those days…and a lot that I do.  Many of the names and faces have slipped away.  At times I would try to stop drinking and straighten my life out but I always slipped back into my old habits.  I could give you chapter and verse on how bad it really was and tell you about some of the specific foolish things I did, but I’m not sure what the point would be.

Sometime in the first half of 1993, my third wife and I were driving back to Kalamazoo, Michigan from visiting her family in Springfield, Illinois.  I had gotten drunk that morning while golfing with my brother-in-law, who had several DUI’s to his name.  During the drive home, she told me she didn’t love me anymore.  The old pain came slamming back, devastating and familiar.  This time, I handled it differently….I didn’t have another drink for at least a couple of years after that day.

Walking through the valley is the part of my story that sets the stage and the background for everything that follows.  All the shame and responsibility of this part of my journey weighs heavy on my shoulders at times but I know that I am forgiven.  I wouldn’t and couldn’t change those times even if I were somehow able to, because there would be no guarantee I would end up where I am today.  I do not believe God predetermined that I was going to go through those terrible times, my choices and decisions led me there.  I do believe that God has every intention of making the best possible use of those experiences.  I believe that the Creator of the Universe wants me to tell others this story.  God wants some to hear so that they can avoid the traps that I fell into and others to others to hear to so they can begin to believe that they can overcome their own seemingingly hopeless situations.
Copyright 2010 John Lage, Jr. All rights reserved