My Testimony

My Testimony

During High School, I attended a Mormon Church with my best friend one Sunday a month in order to play on their basketball team during the fall. We played every Saturday during the season and I would attend their teen dances on some Friday and Saturday nights when they had them. I also attended Catholic services in order to appease the parents of the girl that I was dating at the time. I was going through the strokes of attending Churches for the wrong reasons.

Soon after High School I joined the Army. I left the MEPS building in Atlanta, Georgia and headed a few miles down I-20 to Anniston, Alabama were I would do basic training at Fort McClellan.

Basic training was a piece of cake for me and since I was in great shape from being active and playing sports outside all my life. I could already pass the Army's PT test. I was a running, sit-up and push-up machine. I was Army hardcore from the get go. Plus I was in ROTC for 3 years in high school and I had the drill and ceremony down pat.

I went in under weight and that meant I could eat in the hamburger line and enjoy some fried fatty foods, unlike those who came in over weight and they had to eat from the salad line.

The hardest part I must say was the restrictions on candy and sweets. Every Sunday after chapel, they would let us walk up to the PX and Luden cough drops were on top of everyone’s list and provided temporary relieve to everyone's sweet tooth.

If we attended Chapel, we would get a chance to leave the barracks and get out of some extra duty. Anything to get a break from polishing brass, shoes, cleaning and waxing the floors. I again attended Chapel on Sunday's for the wrong reason.

My military experience was overall a good one. It put me in historical places at historical times. This is probably were my interest in History comes from. 

After the military, I moved back to my home town and lived again with my mom for a short while. I lived in a mid-sized town. For a High School kid and for young twenty somethings, the only thing to do for entertainment was to cruise the town's main strip. Listening to the radio, cassette tapes and circling around and around on the 5 mile main thoroughfare for hours on end and occasionally stopping at the closed businesses where everyone would loiter.

One Friday I had been riding the county back roads with a friend on a motorcycle without my helmet. It was a beautiful spring day, not a cloud in the sky. That night when the cruise strip was the busiest, I was going to go back through town one last time before I headed  home to see who was there.

Heading in from the county back into the city limits, I came to the first red light and decided to put my helmet on, just in case law enforcement seen me.  

The next intersection was the beginning of the cruise strip where everyone would do a U-Turn and continue cruising. How would I know this is where God would try to wake me up.

As I approached this intersection, halfway from the red light, I noticed it turned green. I was the only traffic approaching from the previous block. I gave the motorcycle a little more gas and got at a cruising speed of around 45 miles per hour. 

A young kid was approaching my direction and decided to turn to his left, he didn't see me and we met head on in the middle of my lane. I hit him dead center and my motorcycle acted as a catapult and launched me over 5 lanes of traffic onto a side walk in front of a Church. 

I landed on my back and everything happened very quickly. I got up without hesitation and there was a small pick-up truck right beside me with 3 in front and a couple of High School kids in back.. They said, “Get in! Get in! We'll take you to the emergency room!”. I got in all dazed and confused from what just happened. They drove me the 5 or so blocks to the hospital. 

As I was there some people who witnessed the wreck came to see how I was doing and when word got out among the cruise strip, some of my friends and some strangers came to check on me.

The Police showed up to take a police report of the accident. They were amazed that I was uninjured. One brought my helmet in for me to see and the back of it was crushed like an egg shell that had been dropped on a concrete floor.

For the guy who hit me, he didn't fare so well his car looked like he had hit a telephone pole and he had hit his face to the wind shield of his car and required stitches from between his eyes to just below his left cheek. I had won that fight. 

For days that is all people talked about and I really didn't give the Church that I landed in front of a second thought. I knew a few friends from my childhood who attended there, but I thought that Church was for just little rich kids. But the memory of the accident stayed with me until I got married and started having children of my own. 

Within a few months of that accident, I met my wife. We had four children. 

God started talking to me! 

When my youngest daughter was a toddler around the age of three, she would play in her room. She would often run into the living room or the bedroom where my wife or myself would be and be all excited about the “Bird Man”. She would say the “Bird Man! The Bird Man!”, all excited and pointing to her room. We would go and check her room and never saw anything and passed it off as the vivid imagination of a child and really never gave a second thought about it.

Her room she shared with her brother at the time and had a bunk bed, TV, Book shelf and a toy box. One evening while everyone was gathered in the bedroom and sitting on the bottom bunk watching some kids show on TV. My daughter got all excited and started pointing to the top bunk screaming, “The Bird Man! The Bird Man!” No one else seen The Bird Man except for her. But at that moment I thought, “This must be her guardian angel”. How else would a toddler describe an Angel. A man with wings.

My daughter does not remember that time but it's something that I remember like it was yesterday and probably will never forget.

When the time came to put our children in kindergarten, I didn't forget the Church were I had landed and enrolled them there. My wife and I along with our children started to attend services on Sunday's and Wednesday’s. After a short while I accepted The Christ Jesus and was Baptized.

A few weeks after my Baptism, I was getting ready for bed, my wife had already fallen asleep. As I was getting into bed, I had a vision of Christ Jesus. I was fixated on His face and His garment was the most amazing white and through my peripheral vision I saw Angels swirling all around. As I was looking at His face, He placed His right hand out and I put my right hand into His and immediately went back to be fixated on His face. I did not notice any of His wounds.

As I was holding His right hand, He began to speak. But not with His mouth. He told me, “Whatever happens, Everything is going to be alright”. Then as fast as He appeared, He was gone again.

Immediately after it had happened, I tried to wake my wife and tell her my experience and she would not wake, she would grumble and moan as to leave me alone I'm asleep. I tried to put meaning to it. Was it real? What did He mean? Why me? Should I tell someone? Am I crazy? 

After a few weeks I decided to tell someone in my Church. The first person gave me a crazy look. The second was my Pastor's wife and she thought it was amazing. But deep down I thought she thought I was crazy too. So, I went years without telling anyone.

I think of the experience with Christ Jesus every day of my life since then. I've often wondered if it was a trick of the mind. But the experience was all too real.

Before the experience I had trouble understanding the Bible and after my experience, when I read the Bible it seemed to come alive. I went on to teach Childrens Sunday School mostly older elementary kids from the grades 4th -6th. I wanted to teach that age because I wanted to know about the Bible and that was the perfect opportunity to learn and teach from the over flow.

But believe it not, that's not the end of God's hand in my life. When my wife and I lived in Georgia and her family lived in Alabama about 3 hours away. As every year, the week before Christmas, Her family would have their Christmas party.

As they do every year, they would gather all the children and some of the females would read the story about the Birth of Jesus, while the men gather and talked about work, hunting and other things guys talk about. (This particular year I was unable to attend because I worked nights and weekends). 

Soon as the Story of Jesus' Birth had gotten over with, the tornado sirens went off. They gathered everyone into the basement. They did not know that they were in the tornado's path.

I was in Georgia and had no idea what was going on until I got a call from My sister-in-law who said, “Everyone is O'kay!”. I said, “What happened?”. She said, “We were in a tornado!”. She seemed frantic and out of breath.  

As everything became more clearer, the tornado had destroyed the house behind them and momentarily lifted as it past over the house with around thirty to forty members of the family and set down again and destroyed the house across the street. 

It overwhelmed me and I began to cry and gave thanks to God for protecting my family. 

Coincidence? I do not think so.