MY STORY

Part 1: "No Place to Hide"

My parents were married at the Westwood Evangelical Lutheran Church in Elmwood Park, Illinois, where they also baptized me. After one trip to California, my parents eventually moved from Chicago to Southern California. We lived in Arcadia for a summer before moving to West Covina.

By invitation the family attended the Christ Lutheran Church on Citrus Ave. just down the street and across Cortez park. Driving around the park in the family car was easier than walking through wet grass and mud. During the Christmas program at church, my sister Susan and I with other kids each recited our memory verse about the baby Jesus. All the while I could hear a real baby crying in back of the church which was my younger brother Ron. After that embarrassing day my parents never attended church again. Whatever the real reason, my Dad now saw Sunday as a day for relaxing around TV, pro-football and beer. My mom insisted we go at least to Sunday school until she caved in to our nagging and protest years later.

My understanding of God seem more enhanced from Hollywood than from reading the Bible. Movies like Ben Hur, King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, and The Greatest Story Ever Told, were more captivating to me as a kid than reading strange sounding names and places in the Bible. Especially in Sunday school where I tried to sit behind someone where I wouldn't be seen. Yet there was no place to hide, not even from God.

My father was a tool and die draftsman like his father, he also had a private pilot’s license. In high school I did well in drafting and in junior college I majored in commercial aviation. I guess I was somehow seeking my dad's approval, yet I wasn't happy pursuing those vocations. Running out of money and no financial help trying to get a private pilots license, I changed my major to art. I continued to drift aimlessly in this world without purpose.

In 1968 I received my Associate of Arts degree and I also received my draft notice. I would probably have served in Viet Nam if I had not enlisted for three years with the possible option of being sent to Germany trained as a mechanic on Armored Personnel Carriers (APC’s). I now know how to change spark plugs.

Before I was sent overseas for the next 27 months I hitchhiked from Fort Knox, KY to California for Christmas. Some things come quickly when you are least prepared. My last ride wasn't paying attention to traffic that night, and neither of us were wearing seat belts. Avoiding a near collision, our VW Bug swerved and flipped a couple of times down the center of the highway just east of Yuma, Arizona. The glare of headlights and sound of twisting metal seemed like eternity in slow motion. I ended up in the back seat bruised and in shock.

The only words I could remember from a poem I wrote months later concerning the accident was,
“...no thoughts of God came to me.”

Why would I write such a thing? I thought about that phrase often, for I could have died that night, forever separated from God's love. God wanted to draw near and yet I was still pushing away.

Peer pressure, drugs, vain eastern religious mysticism could not bring happiness or meaning during those months in Germany. On New Year’s Eve, while others watched the fireworks from our third story barracks overlooking the town, I lay curled up in my bunk in pain thinking I was going to die from an overdose of LSD. I called upon God, “Oh God, please help me, I don't want to die.” In a way it paralleled my dad's WW II experience confined as a tail-gunner in a B-17 when he was hit with shrapnel. Somehow He survived; somehow I survived; and the day following with our feet firmly on the ground revealed our ingratitude towards a long-suffering God who beheld our waywardness and indifference. How easy to slip back into hiding when we think all is well.

Continued Next Page… "Truth sets you free"

There are five parts to this story:

The Best Good News I've Ever Heard