When last we spoke I’d just won my first battle against an enemy I’d never known was mine. I always thought he was more interested in people who were really evil. I hadn’t considered that it was people who believed in God that were the real reason the devil was kept so busy.
He was so busy trying to screw with them that he didn’t have much time for folks who were already on his side.
Time for me to fess up here. I hadn’t been the best example of a good, upstanding citizen before my experience with believing in God. I’d been pretty rotten to tell the truth and it was really all I knew.
I am to this day an alcoholic though I have not drank any alcohol since 1995. I suppose I should share that with you. It’s easy to judge people by the things they do or have done in the past. It’s much harder to take a moment and try walking in their shoes, examining their lives and maybe seeing that things are different for them.
For me, it was the same. I was raised in a family in which both of my parents drank too much. Mom quit in 1982, but dad drank till his dying day though for a short time in the 90s he quit and was really happy. He was a different man in that short time. So much easier to be around and get along with than when he was drinking, but sadly those days were short lived.
I started drinking in high school and it wasn’t long till I began developing a problem. You see, I didn’t see a problem with it since everyone that was part of my life drank booze and usually drank too much. In fact, I often said in the years which followed that I didn’t really trust people who didn’t drink. It was just strange to me that someone wouldn’t drink alcohol.
That day on the mountain when I believed God started changing things for me. I started seeing that I needed to stop drinking. I needed to start doing right by my family. It was strange, but sometimes when I would start to do something that I shouldn’t I would hear what people call a conscience telling me it was wrong. See, the thing is, I’d never had much of conscience before. Now I had this sort of quiet voice inside that would just let me know I wasn’t doing right. I didn’t even know why it wasn’t right.
I was driving to my brother-in-law’s house to work on my van one day shortly after my “conversion” and decided to get a case of beer because working on cars and drinking beer just go together. As I pulled into the beer joint I felt the strongest urge yet to not do this. I just felt I couldn’t do this anymore. So I said to myself that, “this is the last time. After today I’m gonna stop drinking.”
That drinking binge lasted well into the early morning and resulted in my second DUI. As you probably know, DUIs bring a lot of legal problems and other problems. My life was about to get really hard.
The next day I opened the cooler in my van and there was still cold beer from the night before inside. I pulled it out and walked to my neighbor’s house and asked him to take it which he did. I never drank again after that day.
That summer a church bus had been going through the neighborhood taking children to a little Baptist church in a small town not far away. My oldest daughter had been riding that bus which was great because it gave me some time on Sunday morning to not have to take care of her. That’s how I felt about it. Told you I wasn’t nice. But I did want to fix it.
One Saturday the church people came by and told me that my daughter was going to be doing something on stage with other kids the following Sunday. They invited me to come see and so I said I would. I thought that maybe this would be something that would help me show my wife and kids that I cared about them. There was also some pride involved knowing my little five year old girl was doing something in front of others.
Keep in mind that I hadn’t actually told anyone about my day on the mountain believing in God. Why would I? Who would care and why would it be anyone else’s business? I wasn’t afraid or anything, I just never really thought it important.
I woke up Sunday morning and got around and headed off to church. It was a small church hidden off in a small corner of town, but it was pretty as a picture. I parked the car and walked slowly to the door. I’d never been to church before. I didn’t like church because of people I’d known growing up and because of some scandals that had been on television. I didn’t want anything to do with church, but I wanted to be part of my families life and right then there was a little blonde girl waiting for her daddy to come to church. For probably the first time in her young life…I did not let her down.
But that is another story.
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