The Goodness of God!

I love You, Lord

For Your mercy never fails me

All my days, I've been held in Your hands

From the moment that I wake up

Until I lay my head

Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God

All my life You have been faithful

All my life You have been so, so good

With every breath that I am able

Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God

(c. Bethel Music, 2019)

As I sang these words in worship this past Sunday morning, tears rolled down my cheeks to the point that I had to slip out of the sanctuary and go get some tissues! "All my life You have been faithful!" He has, He is, and He will be! Recently, I was asked to write out the story of how became a Chrisitan, and how I became a pastor - a very "Acts 26 witness" thing to do indeed! And as I did that task, what was driven home to me once again was simply the unfailing, magnificent goodness and faithfulness of God! I thought I'd share that testimony with you here and encourage you to reflect on your own story of God's faithfulness in your life too.

I was raised in a Christian, church-going family, the youngest of two sons. In 1968, when I was seven years old, I first understood and responded to the gospel after watching a Billy Graham televised “crusade” with my parents. I knelt beside the couch with them and prayed the “sinners’ prayer” as the evangelist led us.

As I grew, we attended church regularly at one of the only two churches located in the very small, very rural community near our farm where I was raised. Both my parents served as Sunday school teachers and church leaders. During those years I grew in my faith and learned to trust in the truth of God’s Word as I saw it lived out in my parents’ lives and in my church family. Of course, there were also questions and doubts and times of wrestling with God, but I loved my youth. I loved growing up on the farm. I loved the small town and small school where I was raised and was given opportunities to play sports, sing in the choir, play in the band, and participate in theater and musicals. God used it all to teach me about hard work and discipline, and how to both be follower and a leader. My career plan was to stay there and work for and with my father and eventually take over the family farm.

During my senior year, I drifted away from my strict upbringing a bit. I never turned my back on my faith or my family, nor did I ever severely rebel, but there was a lot of “micro-rebellion” going on - seeing what I could get away with - pushing the boundaries. I graduated high school on my eighteenth birthday, in May of 1979, and that summer, two important things happened: I met the girl who would become my wife, and our church got a new preacher who every week passionately shared the gospel in such a way that you either “got right with God” or you quit listening. By the end of that year, I had re-committed my life to Christ and I asked Desiree to marry me. After completing the fall semester at a small state university about 100 miles away and the following spring semester at a local Jr. College, Des and I were married on June 7, 1980.

After a year, we decided we wanted to stretch our wings and get a little farther from home. I almost joined the Air Force, but at the last minute, I didn’t. We moved to a bigger city a couple hours away and I got a job in a machine shop making aircraft fasteners. During that time, we attended a very conservative fundamentalist Bible church and while there, we saw and learned some good things that we embraced, and also, some not-so-good things that we didn’t. We moved back to my home county in the spring of 1982, and I started working as a Deputy Sheriff, a job which I did for the next couple of years until our first son was born. Serving as a law enforcement officer with patrol and jail duties, again proved to be a place where I saw and learned a lot about people and service, both the good and the bad, when you can bend and when you can’t, and the necessity of reliance on others and on God. The Lord is so faithful! Desiree and I both cling to Phil. 1:6 as a foundational verse in our lives: “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it until the Day of Christ Jesus!” He certainly has “made good” on that promise to us, by using all of what we have gone through to teach, train, and prepare us for His purposes.

Our son Patrick was born in August of 1983, the day after my last nightshift as a full-time Deputy, and I went back to farming and ranching with my dad. My uncle, who owned the farm a mile north of my parents’ farm, passed away in December of that year and we had the opportunity to buy his house and farmland. We settled down there in mid-summer of 1984 and our second son, Brett was born Dec. 30, 1985.

Within the structure of all of these “bullet-point events,” God was at work. I could tell very long harrowing stories of the details surrounding each of them, but time, space and prudence prevents me! During Patrick’s birth, there was a severe complication that endangered Des’ life and future ability to have children, (a pro-lapse of the uterus), but thanks to the Lord and a good doctor, it was resolved quickly. Two years later, when Brett was born, there was an even more extreme emergency (an abruption of the placenta, massive hemorrhage and a 7-week pre-mature birth) that nearly cost both he and his mother their lives. As they were loading Des into the ambulance to transport her from a small country hospital to a larger one, the doctor took me aside and told me that our baby would not survive and that I should prepare myself for that fact. But God is faithful! At the end of this year, (2023) Brett will celebrate his 38th birthday, and he is a happy, healthy husband, father, and Jesus’ follower! You can learn a lot about God and His Word from church, Bible college and seminary training, but these are the moments - the moments when God walks with you alone in the dark valley of the shadow - when you learn who He really is and that you can absolutely trust Him and His Word and that there is no other source.

Soon after Brett was born, we began attending a different church, this one was more contemporary in its style and more charismatic in its theology and we made very good friends there, saw and learned some good things that we embraced … and again, some not-so-good things that we didn’t. But one thing they got right was, they knew the importance of loving and taking care of each other - something we were about to need.

On March 25, 1988, as I drove along a dusty Kansas road, I had an unexpected life-changing experience. I needed some sheet-rock nails for a closet project I was working on, so I took our two young sons and we jumped in the truck for the short four-mile ride into town where we’d planned to stop at the hardware store for some nails and then the filling station for a couple cold drinks. We never made it. A mile and half east of our farm, we ran into some loose sand on the road and were pulled into the ditch where our truck rolled over three times. On the first flip, I went through the driver’s door window and was thrown approximately 65 feet landing in a wheat field. The truck continued slamming over and over, rolling towards the spot where I lay until, just before it rolled over me, it settled and stopped. The boys, who were only 4 and 2 years old at the time, were not buckled into car seats or even wearing seat belts! Yet miraculously, they were uninjured - held fast by an invisible force greater than the centrifugal force that sought to toss them like it had me. God had securely grounded them to the floorboard of the truck as it crashed over and over into and across the ground until the tumbling came to a stop. Somehow, the boys crawled through the only remaining opening of the crushed vehicle, a small outlet where the passenger door window had once been, then began the long walk home, thinking that their daddy was dead. Thankfully, a kind neighbor on his way to check cattle stopped and began to help us. I had crushed the 10th thoracic vertebrae in my back, my ribs on my left side were broken, and I had severe bleeding in my chest. Two hospitals later doctors determined that I had a torn aorta and that I needed immediate emergency surgery. I was placed in an air ambulance and flown 150 miles to a modernly equipped hospital for the operation. But something happened on the way to the hospital. As people were praying, God was listening. When I arrived, the trauma surgeon could not find any problems with my aorta. She drained my chest, sewed me up and 11 days later I walked out of the hospital. I know God is faithful and I know He can be trusted.

It is good for me to tell my stories! And it is good for you to read them too! We are all called to be witnesses of what we have seen of Jesus – to share what we personally have experienced – our salvation stories. When we tell our “Jesus stories,” people are drawn to Him!

During the months-long recovery, I read the Bible from beginning to end for the first time in my life and I did a lot of praying and seeking the Lord about what I really should be doing with my life. He had repeatedly given me and my entire family our lives back. What should we be doing with them? Every Christian has had their life “given- back.” We have been “redeemed” - bought back and brought back and we should all be asking ourselves that question as we offer our selves to God.

A year later, a missionary came to our church and invited men to come with him to Hong Kong and go on a bible-smuggling trip he was planning on making into communist China a few months later. After prayer and discussion, we decided I should go. At that time, late fall of 1988, it seemed relatively safe. Hong Kong was still a British protectorate and they assured us that if we were caught, we would simply be deported, not imprisoned. The local believers would not be so well-treated though if they were caught, so that’s why they were asking Americans and other westerners to do it. When I arrived in Hong Kong, I met believers there from New Zealand and Australia and the Philippines, they all believed God and trusted God… they prayed like it... and they lived like it! Our team made four trips successfully across the border during that week and carried as many bibles as we could and on the final trip into China, we actually got to meet with some of the underground church there. I was highly impacted by this trip. God was speaking to me there and began working on my heart about leaving the farm and going into the ministry, although I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. The week after we got home, the riots in Tiananmen Square broke out culminating with the massacre on June 4, 1989. Consequently, China became a huge topic of conversation here at home. I was given several opportunities to speak to various churches and Christian groups about my trip to the Far East, including a class of ministry students at Barclay Bible College taught by a former pastor of ours, the same one who steered me back onto the "straight and narrow" during my 18th summer. He also encouraged me to think about the ministry.

Not long after the China trip, the church we were attending went through a split and we spent a season at a Baptist church before coming full circle back to the church where I grew up and where we both were saved and married. I was still farming and ranching and sometimes working part-time as a Deputy. I had met a fellow about my age with a young family who was a ministry student at the Bible college who worked at a gas station where I would often buy fuel, get tires fixed or just stop in for a cold Dr. Pepper, and we would talk about the Bible or what he was learning. One day he said to me, “You talk like a preacher! Have you ever thought about going into the ministry?” I said I had, then he asked me a tougher question that I couldn’t answer yes to, “Have you ever prayed about it?”

That night, I told Des that I wanted us to start praying about it. For several weeks we prayed about it, but I couldn’t see any way that it could work. We owed a lot of money to the bank on the house, land, equipment, etc. I had a wife and two kids to support. I only had one full year of college under my belt, and that was now ten years past. I told God if He would show me how I could possibly work it all out, I’d say, ’yes’ to Him. But God said, “You say, ‘yes’, and I’ll show how I will work it out!” After several more weeks of wrestling, I finally went to town and met with the admissions director just to see what it would take to finish a Bible degree. He gave me the figures and there was no way I could make it work. I drove home and got out of the truck. Des was in the garden picking tomatoes. As I walked over towards her, another truck pulled in our driveway and parked behind mine. An old-order Mennonite couple that we had never seen before got out of the truck and introduced themselves. He told me something that I had no idea about- that he had just bought the land on the east side of my farm and the land on the west side, and he wondered, if just possibly, our farm might be for sale. Turns out, it was, and in that stunning, miraculous moment, God funded our lives and my schooling for the next two years. I graduated with a dual-major bachelor’s degree in biblical theology and pastoral ministry in 1993 and left there with no school debt or debt of any kind. Did I say, God is faithful?

Since then, we’ve raised our boys and now we are grandparents. We’ve helped to take care of our elderly parents and we’ve buried all but one of them. For the past 30 years we’ve worked together as I served as pastor at two different churches. I could tell you tons of stories from those years too - more than any of us has time for - lots and lots of good, some bad, some ugly, some devastatingly hard. It is sitting beside a deathbed, singing and reading scripture, it is standing in a graveyard crying with the mother of a baby who was stillborn, or the parents of a teenager tragically taken in a car wreck or a soldier killed in Iraq, it is pointing to Jesus and trying to make some Romans 8:28 sense out of a senseless murder or sharing the life-story of a senior-saint who lived faithfully and telling those they left behind why we can say with confidence that they are in heaven. It is weddings and funerals and praying with anxious hearts at the hospital. It is laughing and singing and worshipping and preaching. It is doing life together on the best days and the worst with only one secure underpinning... but that One is enough.

I learned some good things in school, but what I need to know about God and His Word, I learned well before I went back to college. It is a truth that we will only fully realize when we see Him, but until then, it's something that He just keeps on teaching all of us day after day after day: He is good, He is faithful and He can be trusted!

"All my life You have been faithful

All my life You have been so, so good

With every breath that I am able

Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God"