My Odyssey

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. And I was I was asked to share my testimony. And I always hesitate on that because I was as weird as a kid. I still am, but I just want to emphasize that the story is of an unusual individual. But that's a good thing, because God has created us individually and uniquely, and He's done that on purpose. And I realize, I've come to learn through the years why He created me as He did. But my story with respect to God began With a question that I contemplated as a child, which was, what do I know for sure is true? That was the issue that I dealt with for, and the story I'm going to compact here, took about a year of contemplation of that issue. What do I know for sure? I spent a lot of time in the woods, born and raised in the woods, and spent a lot of time in my treehouses, so most of this year occurred in periods of time in treehouses. Once in my treehouse, I looked up and watched a squirrel jump from one branch to another, But, you know, it's interesting. I can only see that squirrel with my eyes. I can't see or perceive the squirrel with my shoulders or my knees or anything else. It's just my eyes. I mean, the only reason I know that the squirrel exists is through my eyes. So could it be that the squirrel doesn't actually exist? And it's that my eyes are deceiving me into believing the squirrel existed when it really doesn't exist. And I thought about that and its other applications for a while and then one day in my treehouse looking up, the squirrel was jumping from one branch to another and it made a sound that I could hear and I thought, oh wait a minute, if I can both hear and see the squirrel, That probably means the squirrel exists, because if the squirrel didn't exist and my eyes were deceiving me into thinking the squirrel existed when it didn't, then my ears wouldn't be able to hear it. So the fact that I could both hear and see it would suggest that the squirrel really does exist. Unless... There's something that controls both my eyes and my ears, which is making me believe the squirrel existed when the squirrel really doesn't exist. And I began calling, as I considered this, that thing that was deceiving me, my imp. It's the kind of thing an imp would do, just kind of mean things like that, making me think things existed when they really didn't. So I began contemplating that. What would that mean? One day I was walking with my friend Lance on the path in the woods, and he said, look, a deer! And I looked up and thought, wait a minute. Now if the deer didn't really exist, because my imp had created a deer that really didn't exist and made me believe that it existed, then there's no way Lance would be able to see the deer. So the fact that Lance saw the deer would suggest the deer really did exist. Unless does Lance exist? Because the only reason I know that Lance exists is because I can see him and I can hear him and touch him. And if that thing that's making me believe that the deer existed when it really doesn't is really going to be mean, it might create a Lance that doesn't really exist. to point out a deer that doesn't exist to make me believe the deer existed when it really doesn't. That would be the kind of thing an imp would really do. Okay, so I didn't know for sure if Lance existed or mom and dad existed or the tree house existed or trees or anything else. So what do I know for sure exists? I came to conclude the only thing I really knew for sure was the existence of me and my imp. But what if I don't exist? Because that would be a really impish thing for an imp to do, is to create a me that doesn't really exist, and to keep me from thinking about whether I existed or not, to create things that don't really exist to get me to think about those things, and that would be a really impish thing to do. So maybe I didn't exist. So, then perhaps the only thing I knew for sure was the existence of my imp, unless my imp was created by your imp, and my imp didn't really exist at all, and that would be an even more impish thing for an imp to do, to create an imp that didn't exist, to create a me that didn't exist, to create a deer that didn't exist. Oh, that's very impy, yeah. As I thought about this world and its various constructs, what I would later learn in college was deconstructionist philosophy. I was going through, I had no idea. I was eight years old. Come on! It could be that all these things really exist, or it could be that we're all the way down to the existence of another imp, and that's it. What was in common with all of those things? Figured out all those things are possibilities. If the imp was the only thing that exists, if another imp was all that exists, that was just evil. If I reconstructed things all the way up to assuming that everything really did exist, there was still evil. And everything in between, there was always evil. Evil was the common element running through everything. So I concluded that the only thing I really knew for sure was the existence of evil. And that either I was evil incarnate, as the imp being the only thing, or I didn't exist at all. So, the Wednesday before, the Sunday before Easter, 1969, I was in my treehouse and I decided the best way to respond to this was to commit suicide. because either I was evil incarnate and suicide would destroy evil, which would be good, or I didn't exist at all and suicide wouldn't be doing anything. And so that was my response. I figured that I would come back up into my treehouse one week later on the next Wednesday to figure out the most efficient way to kill myself. In between, I went to Sunday school. Always went to Sunday school with mom and dad. Doesn't really exist. Mom and dad didn't really exist. You just go along for the ride. In Sunday school, the Sunday school teacher got done with the lesson on the third missionary journey of Paul. I have no idea why I remember that. But anyway, he did that and then he asked if there was any of us that wanted to stay afterwards to accept Christ. as our personal Savior. I'd heard this before. It doesn't exist. It doesn't really matter whether I do or don't. Might as well. So I sat down and everyone else dispersed. And the teacher, Sunday school teacher, did a very unusual thing. In fact, I talked to him years later about this. And he insists that he has never done this in his life. So something weird happened that day for both of us. he had his Bible open in front of him and he took his Bible and he pushed it across the table and pushed my Bible out of the way with his Bible then in front of me open to the book of Romans and he recited A verse that was there before me, Romans 3.23, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And then he proceeds very carefully to explain to a nine-year-old kid what that means. For sin you... and I'm thinking, I understand I'm evil incarnate. Then he switches forward to Romans 6.23, and he reads the first part of that verse, says, for the wages of sin is death, and proceeds to explain very carefully to a nine-year-old kid that the appropriate response for my sin is death, and I'm thinking, got that covered, I'm committing suicide. And then he switches back to Romans 5, and he recites Romans 5.8. But God commendeth or showeth his love toward us in that while we're yet sinners, Christ died for us. Now, I am the faintest idea what he proceeded to try to explain to a nine year old kid at that point, because in my brain, something else was happening. An epiphany occurred at that particular moment because I realized, wait a minute. I know more than one thing. Because if evil was all that existed, then evil wouldn't desire its own destruction. And it wouldn't be appropriate to kill evil. And so I realized that I knew at least three things. One, evil existed. Two, evil must be destroyed. I couldn't get that out of my mind. There was that there's something that that had to be true, but that didn't make sense if evil was all that existed. So that implied that there was existence of good. The existence of good would make the destruction of evil a necessity. And so this was an epiphany. I went, I tripled my knowledge in a moment there, going from knowing the existence of evil to the existence of evil, plus the fact that evil should be destroyed and the existence of good. And I looked back down at Romans 5, 8. But God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Whoa, that is what good would do. Good would become evil so that evil could become good. The true destruction of evil. Whoa, that's what Jesus Christ did. The good God took my sin upon himself, became sin for us. that we might become the righteousness of God. And that's when I accepted Jesus Christ. That was awesome. But there's more to the story, because that was the first step for me. I was being introduced to Jesus Christ, but there was something else that turns out to be extremely important in my life, which is coming to realize the importance of His Word. which becomes then the foundation of the remainder of my life. So I have to move forward a few years to my eighth grade year. They explain that where I lived out in the country, we went to a school in Kings, Illinois. You probably never heard of Kings, Illinois, unless you've memorized the towns that have populations less than 200. You would not have known about Kings, Illinois. The school, the grade school in Kings, Illinois, when it was populated, when the buses came in and dropped kids off, it doubled the population of the town. And the school was kindergarten through eighth grade, different rooms for the different, it was a big school, huge school, with one room for each grade. And you started in kindergarten at one end of the hallway, and first grade was across the hall. Then second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, you make your way all the way down the hallway to the eighth grade room at the other end of the school. You know, that was just before the gym. It was amazing. OK, now. And so, you know, when you when you're in a school like that, making your way down the hallway, that always a long hallway. And it's an awesome hallway. And it's also, you realize that when you get into the end of the hallway, the next step is the big city high school. Rochelle, Illinois, with Rochelle Township High School. There's 10,000 people in Rochelle, Illinois. It's a humongous, monstrous city. They've got stoplights there. Awesome! Those things have turned green and red. Wow! I mean, you had to drive a long ways to see a stoplight. And that was scary. That was a big school. It really was. 240 students in that school from the entire region. We drove an hour, we rode an hour in the school bus to that school to get to it. It's 55 miles an hour, that's a long ways. And it was scary, it was like, this is almost becoming a man when you completed this school. Well, the last event, I have no idea why, out in Kings, Illinois, why King's consolidated school district decided that the big event at the end of the eighth grade year to sort of put a stamp and say you are educated, eighth grade wise anyway, was a science fair. Science? Out there? Are you kidding? Even the high school, out of 240 students, two students went to college. This is the country. Well, I guess I'm not technically correct because a number of people went to the local community college to get a degree in agriculture and continual farming. There's no need for that agriculture degree. Aside from that, this is not a place of... no one in my family on either side had been to college, actually, all the way back to the immigrants in the 18th century. It's just unknown. So why a science fair out in the middle of nowhere? I have no idea. But it was the event that we all anticipated being the indication that we're educated. And so when I got into the 8th grade, I was really excited because by then, science had become my life. I loved everything about science. I had 36 hobbies and collections. I collected birds' nests and birds' feathers and birds as a taxidermist. Bark and and leaves and and just about anything you can imagine I was in I was in the treehouse and I was Science was my thing. It's the only thing I could do as diminutive kid I never hit five foot till I was a junior in high school So I was a picked on little guy and and so I couldn't do anything athletic I couldn't even get the basketball up to the hoop let alone you know get it in and and and I could run about halfway across the room and and That was it, so I was useless with athletics, so everything to define a boy, I didn't qualify for. The only thing I could do was science. I could do that, and so I was very excited about the science fair. So at the beginning of my eighth grade year, I started working on my project. Well, I was trying to think, what could I do my project on? Because I'd like to incorporate as many of my hobbies as possible and that sort of thing. I lighted upon the idea of doing a project on evolution. Because evolution could incorporate the evolution of everything from the stars to humans, I could put just about every hobby I had into it. I could put my fossils into it, I could put my stargazing, my telescope into it, my microscope into it, and everything. And so that's what I did. We designed a step a stair-step thing, where the run on each of the steps is proportional to the length of the geologic period, and that's when I memorized the geologic column, the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, Carina, all that, and the appropriate length of time, and what evolved during that time, and what the earth looked like, and all of that sort of thing, and poured everything I had into this project. Years later, I would meet one of my fellow Eighth graders at the time, obviously older at this point. In fact, at the meeting she introduced me to her eighth grade daughter. And she said to her daughter, she said, now this is the guy I was telling you about. Oh dear. This is the guy you remember I was telling you about at the science fair. He had half of the room and everyone else had the other half. I know she's exaggerating completely on this issue, but nonetheless, I worked the whole year on this puppy, and it came all the way to the day of the science fair, and eighth graders didn't have class that day. The whole day was to be devoted to finishing up the project for that evening presentation. And there I sat with about half the class beginning their project at that point, but I was done. And I sat there with, oh, I forgot to tell you about Carl. My good friend Carl. Carl chose for his science fair project to do something, and I know no one ever tries to do this. He thought he would create a volcano. And about three weeks before the event, he had a dry run. Well, that's not a good description of it. He tried it out. And three days later, when we'd replaced the desk, and we had replaced the ceiling tiles, and we'd repainted the room and all of that sort of thing. Poor Carl. Carl was sitting in his desk. He was actually shorter than I was, a little guy, and really, really nice kid. And he's sitting there in his desk, and the teacher comes up to him, up to his desk, the opposite side of his desk, looking down at Carl, comes right up to him and Carl, and she says, you will not do a volcano for your science fair project. Okay. And so poor Carl didn't have a project and it's only three weeks before the event. So Carl actually joined me and finished up. And that's part of why I was finished by the time the day came. But we we sat there at the beginning of that day, having a whole day ahead of us with nothing to do. And in the midst of that flurry of activity, I said to Carl, you know, I got a problem. He says, well, what's that? I can't reconcile what we did on this project with the Bible. He says, well, what do you mean? So I picked up a Bible and I turned it to Genesis chapter one and I just read out loud. We were there and while everyone else was doing their thing and I read through the chapter and I said, I just can't. I mean, the time, this is six days, and that's billions of years, and the order here, this has the earth coming before the sun, and this has the two of the same age, this has the stars coming after the earth, and this has the stars coming before the earth, This has the sea creatures coming after the plants, but in here we have the sea creatures before the plants. And I mean, just there's all sorts of ways in which it doesn't fit. And Carl says, oh, I see what you mean. And at that point, I had an epiphany. And it was one of those things where you go, oh, this is a good idea. I wouldn't come up with this idea before. We probably publish this or something. I said to Carl, Carl, what if, what if the days in Genesis 1 are actually millions or billions of years long? Don't tell anybody I got that idea. And this is really cool. This is probably publishable. No one's ever had this idea before. And so he said, ooh, that works. And well, you know, it sort of took care of about 95% of the conflict I saw, but not all of it. There was still that order problem. There's still an order that didn't fit, but it got most of the way there. in a principle that I've learned in science. It gets 95% of the way there. Hey, who cares about the other 5%, right? And so early on, I didn't realize I already had that scientific reasoning. But hey, I said, OK, this is close enough, sort of, kind of. But you have to realize I'm an obsessive compulsive, so there's a little bit of a problem here. So I put that conflict into a door. into a room, into a closet in my brain and close the door and put a lock on it and a second lock and a third lock and a fourth lock and I'm not going to let it bother me, right? Yeah, it's not going to bother me at all. And I made it for about two years into my sophomore year of high school and I couldn't take it anymore. I got to deal with that door. I've got to get in there. I was in high school and I snuck out of high school one day. Don't tell anyone. I snuck out of high school one day and went down and bought a Bible and snuck back into high school. Now, it wasn't that living up north that buying a Bible is that scary. No, it's what I was going to do with the Bible that scared the bejeebers out of me. And so I took that Bible, hid it, and all the way home, And at night, that night, I got into my sleeping bag. I'd learned some time before that if I put my sleeping bag on top of my bed and slept in it, I didn't have to make my bed. So I slipped into my sleeping bag with my Bible and with a flashlight and a pair of scissors. And now the question before me was, if evolution is true, what would I have to cut out of the Bible? And I, being both a literalist and an obsessive-compulsive, I figured I had to actually do that. So I decided I'd read the Bible, and then I came to a verse that didn't work if evolution was true. I'd cut the verse out. Now, I know you're ahead of me on this. I understand. If I cut the verse out of one side of the page, it's going to cut the verse out on the other side of the page. I looked, I did, I looked for a Bible that had writing on only one side of the page. This would be better. I mean, this would be a great idea, don't you think? I think it would be great to have a Bible like that, because you could make notes on the one side of the page, and this would be great. Anyway, I couldn't find that. I could only find a Bible with writing on both sides, so thinking about this, I decided what I'd do is I'd read both sides of the page, and I would cut out every other verse. Is that okay? Does that work? It kind of gives the same... On the average, I'm going to be about right. Now, there's another thing I did which is important here. I did not cut the Bible from the outside. I didn't cut from the edge of the page in. I stabbed the verse in the middle and I cut out just the words and left that little bit of white that's found around the verse and around the edge of the page. Now that's important for what's about to happen because it's going to hold the Bible together better and it's going to bias my results in one particular direction. So that's cheating, I know. But anyway, that's what I did. I then started reading and I started cutting. And I, I'm an obsessive compulsive, I kept going. And in this process took me a year, more than a year. Little by little getting all the way through the Bible. It was very obvious where this was going long before I got to the end, but I had a problem. This issue of if evolution is true, if it turns out that I have to reject the Bible, that didn't seem quite right. But if I accepted the Bible and rejected evolution, science was everything of my life. It's the only thing I could do. It's the only thing I found of value. It's the only thing I really enjoyed greatly. And I didn't know, and from what I could see from the books I'd read, was evolution was, if science is true, evolution is true, you can't take the two apart. So it's either science, everything I loved, or the Bible. And I didn't want to make that decision. I didn't want to make a decision to choose one or the other. So I delayed this entire choice until I got to the end or when the day finally came that I got to a revelation. Chapter 22, verse 19. Just about there, just two verses away from the end. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city and. Oh, dear. Got to take that one out. I'm telling you, my hand shook. as I stabbed that puppy and cut that puppy very carefully out. So at that point, I didn't have any choice. I've got to make a decision. I can't delay this decision any longer. I had my holy Bible sitting in front of me. And I carefully tore the cover off of the Bible so that all that remained were the pages that contained the verses that were left in the Bible. And and then as it's sitting there on the on the on the bed, I tried to kind of grab the Bible, kind of pinch it and see if I could lift it up. Was there enough left to the Bible to hold itself together? Now, I'd already biased it. towards holding itself together, because I'd left all those little white spaces that aren't really verses in there, that's going to hold it together better. And I did that because I wanted it to hold together. But no matter how much I tried, and no matter how many times and places I tried to pinch it, there wasn't enough left of the Bible. The decision It's either evolution or the Bible. It's either science, everything I love. Or the Bible. In that moment. I remembered my Sunday school teacher pushing his Bible in front of me. I came to know Jesus Christ that day. He saved my spiritual life and he saved my life because I never went back up into that treehouse to commit suicide. And since that day, enough years had elapsed that he had come. I'd come to know him. He was my friend. He was my companion. I couldn't reject him. And so I couldn't reject his word. that I had come to know him through. So that day. I accepted his word. And rejected evolution. And science. And I cried for three days. And then. On Friday of that week. Our youth group piled into a bus. And we took off for a youth retreat. We didn't. Youth advance. We don't retreat. We advance. So we got on to got into the bus to go to an advance and we drove to normal Illinois. Not much that's normal about that city of normal. But anyway, we drove to normal Illinois to a gymnasium parking lot, got out, went into the gymnasium, sat down. Now, clearly this had been planned for some time. It was I was completely oblivious to this at the time that I was completing my cutting of the Bible. But we got into the seats and a person got up at the podium in the middle of the gymnasium floor and said, hi, my name is whatever. I am a Christian. I am a creationist. I am a scientist. And I don't believe evolution is true. What? Wait a minute. What did he say? You mean you can reject evolution and still be a scientist? Whoa, there's an epiphany. And I don't remember much of what he said or anything else. I went down to the book table at the break and I got as many books as I could and started, and that began a, I realized that that, well years later I would recognize that as what happened to Abraham when Abraham was about to kill his son Isaac. He was about to bring that knife down to kill his son. And he was stopped. And God says to him, now I know that you love me more than your son. I realize at that moment God had said, I realize you love me more than science. So I'm going to give it back to you. An awesome God. Who did that? An awesome God. But that's the point at which I accepted the truth, the veracity of His Word. So, I went from coming to know Jesus Christ as an individual to becoming committed to His Word as the foundation for the remainder of my life. And I love His Word. I've come to love His Word. As much as I love he who authored that word. And so that's my story.