9-18-2015

Last time I shared a bit about myself in general.  Even though it isn't two weeks, the Lord impressed upon to go ahead and add this in this week, a bit about the spiritual path on which Father has brought me.  No, it won't be like a Billy Graham, Kenneth Hagin, Benny Hinn or the like, but it is the path I've been on.

I mentioned before that I gave my heart to Jesus during marriage counselling that despite basically having been in the church and hanging on to a thread of what I had been taught, I had never really given my heart to Jesus.  Upon conviction from the Holy Ghost, I prayed the 'sinner's' prayer that day in the pastor's office.  From that day forward I've known that I belonged to God, even though I haven't always lived like I understood that.  The learning process, for me, has been loooooong and arduous.  I've always been a little thick headed.  I've always 'sort of'' read my bible but after that day I found myself wanting to really glean what I could from it.  King James was always hard for me to read/understand, but that was the version I had so I read & read.  At first my reading was haphazzard, a passage here and a passage there, where ever I flipped the bible open, once or twice a week or so,  Whenever the mood struck yet I was still learning - a little at a time.  Later, Father impressed upon me that I needed to take a systematic approach.  I started in the beginning - Genesis and got as far as Abraham (I think) before that started wearing thin.  So I thought Matthew & the gospels.  If memory serves me correct, I did get through Matthew and I figured Mark was shorter so that would be OK but I did not relish looking forward to Luke.  24 Chapters (almost as long as Matthew).  Whoa!  I will tell you it was more than just a couple of years before I finally got out of reading a verse here and a passage there before Father got me into a systematic approach to reading the bible.  I had actually read the bible all the way through from Genesis through Jude (OK almost all the way through) when I just could't get started in Revelation.  The Lord then had me reread the gospels again, then go back to Matthew and go through Jude, again hitting a block at Revelation.  Eventually He took me back to Genesis and back through the whole bible again.  Even though I don't make it a point to read the whole bible through, like once a year or anything, I find my reading is a lot more thorough anymore.  I don't just read to read, I read to understand which means I keep my Strong's Concordance handy as well as other reference books that I have.

My wife and I started off with the Southern Baptist Church in which we were married.  We moved from the general area to a community 15-20 miles away and back into the greater Hyattsville, Md. area.  Actually no place where we lived was far from the Hyattsville area but we still left the Baptist Church because I wanted to attend a church 'close to home'.  But, we never really found one.

In 1978 we moved to Frederick, Md.  In Frederick, Father started taking me in another direction - spiritually.  First we found an Independant Baptist Church (yep, a Jerry Fallwell affiliate, where the pastor was a grad from Liberty Baptist University in Lynchburg, Va.).  It was after moving to Frederick that Father started exposing me to a lot of different things, spiritually.  Things I had heard about and of which I knew absolutely nothing and then showing me not only in Frederick, but on the job at FDA as well.  And that I'll share next time.