My childhood was hard (Jean’s was actually harder). I had what doctors called “a heart murmur” and that worried my parents to the point that they didn’t let me play with the other kids in the third grade (I could be with the other kids, of course, but there was no football, baseball, or anything else that would require exertion). Also, I started kindergarten when I was four years old. Thus, I was smaller than most of the kids in my grade, was academically behind, and felt weak and stupid. I was bullied a lot. Thankfully in the fourth grade my parents took me to UCLA Medical Center where the doctor ran some tests on my heart and told my parents to let me play sports with the other kids. But being younger than other kids and having missed a year of any kind of sports left me behind. Then I got a lot of my friends into shoplifting. I loved porn; my clubhouses were full of it (thankfully porn back then was less severe than you would find today in a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition). I was also a disrespectful, lazy student with a GPA under 2.0. In short, by twelve I was a picked on, porn loving, shoplifting punk.
And all of this turned out to be good for me!
It was good because two days before I turned 13, I was at a Billy Graham crusade and Billy’s sermon that day was on heaven and hell. When he finished, I had absolutely no doubt that I was going to hell so I “went forward” and prayed the sinner’s prayer.
In Mark 2:17 Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” By this, Jesus didn’t mean that there were healthy, righteous people that He didn’t come to call. What He meant was that until a person realizes he is a sick sinner, he’s not ready to come to Jesus. I absolutely recognized that I was a sick sinner.
In Matthew 13:44 Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
Jesus was and is to me the treasure in the field. I would be nothing without Him. I would have nothing without Him.
By the summer of my thirteenth year, I read the Bible three hours a day every day. I couldn’t get enough of it. I literally learned to read by reading the Bible. You see, I was nothing and I didn’t have anything but Jesus.
The Lord used all of the hardship that I experienced to help me love Him. Thank You, Jesus!
