Talking About Jesus: Who I Came to Know

I was about seventeen when I went to my friend John's house and sat with him in his bedroom in the basement. I was not looking for religion. I thought religion was for old people. I was a young man trying to find his way, spending a lot of time with friends, smoking, and feeling that there had to be more to life than what I could see around me.

John had a King James Bible. The words Jesus spoke were printed in red. I began reading them, and something happened that I still find hard to put into words. I saw Jesus there. I felt that He was speaking to me, that He knew me. I had spent much of my childhood wanting to be known, especially by a father. My grandparents, Rosie and my grandfather, gave me love and steadiness, and there was real goodness in my family. There was hurt too. My father's absence left questions in me that I carried into that room.

I cannot tell another person exactly what they would have experienced sitting in the same chair. I can only tell what happened to me. I met Jesus in that basement bedroom. What reached me was the feeling that I had been chosen. I had not figured Him out. I barely knew what I was stepping into. But I walked out knowing that I wanted to follow the person I had seen in those red letters.

The next day, Russ, the friend I had spent so much time with, saw me at school and asked, “So are you a Jesus freak now?” I said, “Yeah,” and walked on into school. That was all I knew to say. I had a whole life ahead of me, and much of what I thought I knew would change. That moment with Jesus has stayed with me through it all.

“I have chosen you.”

After that night in John's bedroom, I wanted to learn everything I could about Jesus. I read, asked questions, and found people who were willing to sit together and share what they knew.

Some of the meetings were in homes in Hampton. We sat in a circle, with older people and younger people in the same room. Someone who had lived longer and knew more might share something, but the children could speak too. It felt like family to me. I had grown up hearing that my own family was broken. Those evenings gave me another picture of what being together could feel like.

We sang a lot. I learned “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” in those years, and it has stayed with me since I was seventeen. Jim, an older farmer I came to know, had a genuine fire in him. Later there were groups around Mason City, and I shared and taught at the Good News Center above a disco. “Jesus Is Lord” was written across the front of the stage. Those are the kinds of details I remember because I was alive to all of it.

Some experiences were difficult to explain. I spoke in tongues. I laid hands on people and prayed with them. Once at an altar I felt something permeate my body so strongly that I could not move for a time. I am telling you what I experienced. I don't need someone else to have the same experience to make mine real to me.

There was another side to that fire. I saw many things in black and white. I wanted to do right, and I sometimes acted as though I could earn my way into being loved. I could recognize a living presence in a room and still misunderstand the people sitting beside me. I would need many years to see that.

When Beth and I married and our children came along, I carried a promise inside me: my children would know me. I knew what it felt like to want a father who was there. I wanted to be present for my own children.

I loved walking with them, wrestling on the floor, and finding ways to play. Those memories are real. So are the memories that hurt. I brought anger into our home. I brought selfishness too, even when I was convinced I was trying to provide for everyone. Love and harm can live in the same family history, and I have had to face both in mine.

Beth and I came from different backgrounds and often saw things differently. We disagreed about parenting and about ordinary ways of living together. I was trying to build a business and a family while I was still learning how to be a husband and father. The pressure did not make my mistakes for me. It exposed things in me that I did not yet understand.

I thought being devoted to Jesus ought to make me better at all of this. Sometimes I tried harder and became more frustrated. Sometimes I could see only what I thought another person was doing wrong. Looking back, I wonder how much of my own fear I was seeing in them.

This part of the story is painful because my children lived it too. I can tell you what I intended. I also want to leave room for what they felt. I am still learning to hear those stories without rushing to defend myself.

For a short time I went into a waterbed business with Mark. I had hopes for it. When it failed, I felt the loss of far more than a store. I felt exposed, ashamed, and afraid of what people saw when they looked at me.

I remember the rundown motel room. It was one room, with a shared bathroom, a hotplate, and a television so small it was hardly more than a box with a picture in it. I had fallen a long way from the life I thought I was building. I could sit there and see almost nothing ahead of me. Shame has a way of taking over your whole field of vision.

I have been asked what kept me going. The answer is easy: my children. I felt as though I had failed them. They were still my children, and I had to keep going and take care of them. Some days that meant getting through the next day, then doing it again. I did not have a grand explanation that made the room feel better.

People had their opinions about the business and about me. I carried those voices, but the hardest voice was often my own. At the time, the motel looked like the end of the story. I can look back now and see a father who was ashamed and who stayed because his children needed him. Both the failure and the staying belong to the story.

I don't want to polish that room into an inspiring lesson. I want my children to know why I got up in the morning when I was there.

I was hired to manage a furniture store because I had experience in business software and management. I was grateful for the work. After that came a job at a television station, and later I was able to buy a house on contract. These steps mattered, but none of them changed my life all at once.

I kept raising my children. I played with them and tried to be there. I worked, made decisions, got things wrong, and tried again. Even when I could provide more than I had been able to in the motel, I could not simply provide my way out of what had happened in our family.

I had gone into fatherhood wanting my children to know me. As they grew, I had to face a harder question: had I learned to know them as they were? Each child had a life and a way of seeing our family that I could not write for them. I wanted to leave them strength and independence. I also wanted closeness. I have sometimes struggled with the distance between those hopes and the relationships we actually have.

There were years when I could tell myself a story about recovering from failure because I was working again. There were also quieter truths I was not ready to see. Children had kept me alive in spirit through the hardest days. Now I had to keep learning how to love them as people, not merely as the reason I survived.

I am still a father. That means the story can still grow, even where I wish I could go back and do part of it differently.

For many years after those fiery beginnings, I did not feel Jesus the way I had when I was young. I kept living, working, raising children, and carrying questions. There were times I felt cut off from Him, and I did not always want to admit how angry or disappointed I was.

I had learned to study Scripture closely. I knew verses and could argue over words. Then I encountered sincere people who read the same passages and understood them differently. That shook me. It also kept me asking questions. I began to notice the distance between knowing a great deal about Jesus and receiving the love I had spent so long talking about.

In my fifties, after what felt like nearly twenty years without that earlier sense of His presence, I felt Him near me again. This time the experience seemed to come from inside. I don't have to settle every question about that moment to tell you that it was real to me. It opened something I had held closed for a long time.

Becoming a grandfather also changed what I could see. Loving my grandchildren made me think again about the Father and about the fear I had carried. The picture of an angry God had shaped more of my life than I wanted to admit. As I looked at those children, I found myself asking what love would mean if I truly believed I was loved too.

That question did not resolve my whole life at once. It stays with me. “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” is a song I learned as a teenager, and I still return to it. I am learning to look at Him and to let myself be seen.

Years ago, when I was studying the Bible so intensely, I spent time looking at the way Jesus spoke about seeing. He could take the person everyone had already labeled and make people look again. I began to wonder how much of my own life was shaped by the way I looked at people, at God, and at myself.

My views have changed through every decade of my life. At one time I saw things in sharp lines. I thought I understood what a good person should do and what a bad person was. Life with people I loved made those lines harder to draw. My own failures made me slower to hand out answers.

I have watched someone make a real, visible change and still carry an old picture of herself inside. That stayed with me because I have done it too. A person can move into a different life while still seeing the face they used to see in the mirror. Changing circumstances and changing perspective do not always happen together.

Everyone is a world unto themselves. Each of us is living a story with memories, fears, and hopes another person cannot fully see. I make connections that sometimes seem obvious to me and invisible to somebody else. That gives me a reason to ask questions, to share what I have noticed, and to listen when someone sees what I missed.

I have heard religious and political voices tell people exactly what they must think. I have used that kind of certainty myself. I no longer want to write that way. I can tell you what happened to me, what I came to see, and why it matters to me. You can take your own time with it. I know in part, and I am still changing.

If something I write makes you stop and look again, that is enough. It might even make me look again too.

I have so much I want to leave my children and grandchildren. I want them to understand their father and grandfather more fully. I want to tell what I have experienced with Jesus, the mistakes I made, the questions I still carry, and the things I have come to see. I hope others may find something useful in it too.

This past year I have begun to believe that the purpose I feel in this work may line up with God's purpose in me. That is how I understand my own life; I am not trying to name anyone else's purpose. My work with words, with people, and with the tools available to me now has opened a way to share more of what I have carried for decades.

My recent health troubles made me feel that time was closing in. I could feel myself thinking, I have to get all of this out before I am gone. The thought of dying before I finished weighed on me. There is still a great deal I want to say, and I still want to be here to say it.

Then my perspective began to change. I found myself saying, “Okay, Lord, it's on You. If this is Your purpose in me, help me do today's part and see it through as You will.” I can stay here and keep writing, or I can come to be with Him. I find myself more at peace either way. I remember Paul speaking about wanting to be with Christ while also seeing the good he could still do for the people with him. His words have stayed with me.

The peace does not take away my love for my children or my desire to finish. It lets me sit down and write the next piece without the fear that I have to force the whole book out of myself today.

These are the opening chapters. I am still here, still learning, and there is more of the story to tell.