Looking back over my life I realize I grew up with a terrible sense of worthlessness. My life was permeated with fear, anger, and hatred for any kind of authority. During my teen age years I developed the attitude that nobody was going to tell me how to run my life, not my parents, not my teachers, and   especially, not God. I didn’t need Him or anyone else, I had all the answers. As I entered young adulthood I considered myself “my own man,” had the world by the tail, and continued living the facade of not needing anybody. I lived the “tough guy” routine, doing anything to show others how “bad” I was, not realizing I was just a scared little kid that just needed to be loved and accepted.

         God allowed me to live this way until He decided to get my attention in January 1975 when my father died of a massive heart attack. I was almost twenty three at the time. Though we weren’t close at all, when someone in your family dies at the age of forty six it tends to get your attention. Some things were said at his funeral that made me think about the brevity and uncertainty of life and how important it is to know we have a personal relationship with God.

        It wasn’t long after the funeral that I got involved in my self-centered existence again and forgot most of what was said. But God had other plans. I had no plans of going to church or having anything to do with God’s people so He started sending them to me. In the year following my daddy’s death there were five or six different times that someone from the church would drop by to “witness” to me. Some shared God’s Word with compassion, some were like a bull in a china shop (one told me I was a snake in the grass) but they all had the same message, “You’re a sinner in need of a Savior.”

         Then it happened, I met the greatest soul-winner I have ever known (actually I had known him all my life but never in the capacity that God was about to use).

         My younger brother was born in 1954, had a normal childhood, popular in school, and seemed to have everything going for him. Then at age seventeen Doug was stricken with encephalitis. After two brain operations in thirty days and a large part of his right brain removed he was reduced to something like a wild beast. He was left with very limited short term memory and significant paralysis on his left side. We are grateful for all the people that God has brought into his life to help him along the way but in the initial days after bringing him home from the hospital we thank God and a loving mother for helping him progress into the gentle and loving person we know today.

          There is one characteristic about Doug that makes what he did in my life so interesting i.e., most of the time he won’t initiate a conversation with anyone. If you talk to him he will answer but very seldom will he initiate the conversation.

          We were at our aunts’ house in Hickory for a family gathering the Christmas prior to my conversion in February. For some reason I volunteered to take Doug back home. Looking back on that I realize how unusual it was for me to volunteer to do anything for anyone but when God sets His sights on you there is nothing you can do to control the circumstances He engineers.

           We had been riding in silence for about thirty minutes (I was probably listening to the radio, you know, in my own little world) when “out of the blue” thirteen words were uttered that would impact my life for all eternity. Doug said “I cussed mama the other day but I asked Jesus to forgive me”. Thirteen words, then silence.

           In the ensuing days until my conversion a couple of months later there was anything but silence in my heart and mind. At some point during this time I remember thinking “Here I am, acting like I have the world by the tail, have all the answers, but this guy, with part of his brain gone has more sense than I do, i.e. he knows where forgiveness comes from”. I am grateful for all the times people came and shared God’s plan of salvation with me. I don’t remember the details of what they shared but I do remember the thing that stands out in my mind about what they told me was I was a sinner in need of a Savior. The thing that God said so emphatically to me through Doug was “I want to forgive you of all your sins”. This simple thirteen word sermon, delivered in about ten seconds, did more to get my attention than all the other things that were said to me in the months leading up to my life changing encounter with God.