Ok let’s start over and I’ll share some experiences that I have lived and some things that I do know about; choices, “blue haired ladies”, and the faithfulness of God.

I have no memories of my life before I was about two and I been told that some of it was not very good. Some time before I was two my parents split up and I was given to my father. For several months he and his uncle cared for me with help of several teen aged girl “friends”. I was adopted by my dad’s older brother and his wife and things kind of got better. There are lots of details that I’m sure had an effect on how I turned out. The bottom line was that I never felt like I was enough.

When I was sixteen my dad (uncle) died and all of the well wishers told me about this wonderful God who took my dad. It took my nearly thirty years to get over being mad at God about that. Then I learned the difference between receiving and taking.

My experience with the Methodist church was that of being taken to Sunday school occasionally and feeling lost and embarrassed because I didn’t know anything about the Bible, God, or Jesus. As I grew older and got interested in girls I learned that they liked going to church and generally liked guys who went to church. So being the bright guy that I was I started to get involved with Sunday school and youth group. I didn’t much care about God or His son and certainly didn’t think that I was a sinner who needed to be saved. It was purely a social event.

Enter the “blue haired” ladies, I didn’t know anything about them till years latter and they were so important in my life. Eaton, CO was a town of about 1500 people in the late 50’s. Everybody knew everybody and their business. When you are nine years old you are not very aware of all those “old folks” around town or at least I wasn’t. I knew the first names of about three parents of my school mates and along with my mom and dad that was the extent of my knowledge of the people in “my town.” As it turns out a fair number of the “blue haired” ladies knew me and were quite ready to rat me out when I misbehaved (a regular occurrence). I thought that mom really did have eyes in the back of her head as she seemed to know about everything I did.

These women played a very important part in my life even though I knew none of them on any kind of a relationship basis. These “blue haired” ladies literally saved my life. You might ask how that can be. They were women of God valiant prayer warriors to the core and they were praying for me behind my back. Pretty sneaky don’t you think? I believe that they were the proof of God’s word not returning void. These ladies were praying for my salvation and God answered their prayers in spite of my worst efforts. I was in the youth group for all the wrong reasons. And when the opportunity was presented to travel to Salt Lake City for youth convocation my thoughts were centered on getting to know more girls not on meeting Jesus. God had a better plan. I did meet a new girl and that was good. Annie Lewis was a wonderful person and I didn’t treat her very well. God bless her where ever she is. But God’s plan was for me to meet Jesus in a real way and I did.