A Life in God

"Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."

Rooted in Deuteronomy 6:4-7 · James 1:2-8 · Ephesians 2:8-10 · Ephesians 1:13-14 · 2 Corinthians 1:20-22 · Galatians 3:28 · Romans 11 · John 15:5 · John 14:23 · Acts 1:8-11 · 1 Peter 2:9

A Note Before We Begin

This is not a textbook, and it isn't a sermon. It's a testimony — the story of one ordinary life, held in the hands of God, told alongside the scripture that explains it. It's offered here not so any reader would think highly of the man it happened to, but so that every reader would see clearly what God can do, and is still doing, for anyone who calls on Him. Take God out of these pages, and this is just a story about hospitals and a car wreck. Leave Him in it, exactly where He was, and it becomes a story about a Father who saves, who heals, and who makes His home in the very life of the one He redeems.

Found by God

I grew up going through the motions, but I wasn't a child of God yet — not really, not in the way that changes a person. In the mid-1990s I was at a nondenominational conference, one voice among twenty thousand people in the room, and a man named Bill Britt stood up and asked us to picture eternity. He said: picture a little bird, flying from the far side of every ocean in the world, carrying a single grain of sand, and setting it down on the shore. Now picture that bird doing it again. And again. Until, after who knows how many millions of years, every ocean on earth is empty. He said that when the oceans are finally empty, that's the very beginning of eternity.

That picture wrecked me, in the best way. I needed to know, for certain, where I would spend it. I realized in that moment I wasn't actually a child of God — I still had a real question about eternity, and a life truly changed by Christ doesn't have that question sitting unanswered. Not long after, my friend Scott connected the dots for me plainly. I told him, I believe that. I believe that. I believe that. He asked if I understood what that meant. I said, so then I don't have to do anything else? He said no. I said, so I'm saved. And from that moment I have never once doubted it. I had just never had anyone put it together for me clearly before that day. I found the One I'd been searching for, and it has blessed me every day since.

Verse nine shuts the door on boasting — nobody earns this. Verse ten opens it right back up: once we belong to Christ, He's already prepared good works for us to walk in. Gratitude comes first. The good works are the fruit of it, never the price of it.

Next Chapter: Healed of Crohn's Disease →

Healed of Crohn's Disease

Not long after I was saved, I was already deep into a ten-year fight with Crohn's disease. It took three and a half years just to get a diagnosis, and every one of those days I was in pain. By the time they knew what it was, the disease had done so much damage that what should have been a small laparoscopic surgery turned into something much bigger — opened from my chest down to my groin, my intestines taken completely out of my body, the diseased sections cut away, and everything sewn back together and put back inside me. Doctor Greenstein took five feet of small intestine that first time. Within three months it was back, and for the next three years I was in and out of the hospital every few months for intravenous feeding, skin and bones, fighting a body that had become something to battle instead of something to live inside of.

Doctor Greenstein performed a second surgery — five more feet, ten feet total between the two operations. And it came back again. After that second surgery, after everything medicine could do had already been done twice and the disease returned anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and cried out to the Lord for healing, because the doctors couldn't do it, and I believed He could. I believed it in that moment, and He did.

I could ask God for that healing, and believe He would do it, because my faith wasn't new. It had already been tested and proven true through my salvation a few years earlier. James describes exactly the kind of asking that gets answered:

He doesn't find fault with us for asking — so how could I ever find fault with Him over the circumstance itself? I wasn't tossed back and forth by the wind. I asked, I believed, and He healed me completely. Since that moment, more than thirty years ago now, I have not had one cramp, one pain, anything associated with that disease again in my life. It wasn't gradual. It was instant, and it has held for over three decades.

Next Chapter: Cancer, and the Cross in the Sky →

Cancer, and the Cross in the Sky

Roughly six months before the accident below, I went through a two-month battle with cancer in my mouth, throat, and tongue — believed to have come from a virus. God brought me through that too. Four months later, I was hit head-on by two separate vehicles while driving roughly sixty-five miles an hour — a combined impact of around one hundred thirty miles an hour. My back was broken in four places, my hip had to be reconstructed, and I had bleeding on the brain that put me into a coma for three weeks. I was flown to St. Louis. I came out of it healed — every sense, every faculty restored, against every expectation.

At the moment of the crash, on Route 37 in Southern Illinois, near my own church, a woman came out of her house at the sound of the wreck and looked up. Filling the entire sky above it was a cross, glowing yellow — unmistakably not an aircraft, not a natural formation. She took a photograph and posted about it, describing the glory of God watching over the scene. I didn't learn about that photo for months, until a woman from my own Bible study, who had gone to the accident site to help gather what remained from my truck, came across the post herself. Two witnesses, in two different ways, to the same moment: God, present, visibly, over an accident that by every natural measure should not have been survivable.

I don't tell this story looking for sympathy, or to say God caused any of it. There is no fault in God — none. He is only ever goodness and love. Every hard road I've walked belongs to living in a fallen world, not to anything lacking in Him. That was never His promise to prevent. His promise was to be faithful through it, the same yesterday, today, and forever, even though none of us deserve it.

Every time I came out the other side of one of these, my trust in God grew a little deeper — not because the pain made sense, but because He proved faithful again, right in the middle of it. This life ends. Every one of us has to choose where we'll spend eternity, and God gives every person the freedom to make that choice. Look at the visible circumstances — the hardship, the well-traveled road everyone else takes — and set it beside God's goodness, which is the unseen reality underneath it all, the one you have to believe to find. That's the real testimony behind the cross that filled the sky that day: not that life stayed easy, but that God never once stopped being near, and that the harder, less-traveled road is the one that actually leads to peace.

Next Chapter: The Lehigh Valley Years →

The Lehigh Valley Years

My spiritual maturity was shaped in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, on thirty acres, in a season built around a daily prayer group that met six days a week. Scott, the same friend who'd connected the dots for my salvation, was in the early years of building a men's ministry there, and I got pulled into it — a blessing I still can't fully measure. That work became part of the soil that Promise Keepers later grew out of nationally. Under a humble pastor named Larry, who had memorized scripture for thirty years, I watched real spiritual depth held with real humility. Larry once held his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart and said that gap was the measure of everything he truly knew of the vastness and goodness of God — even after thirty years of seeking Him. That posture became a model for me.

Out of that season came quarterly prayer and praise events — hours spent entirely with God, each one opened with twenty minutes of praise and worship music just to prepare our hearts to receive what was coming, then time in scripture, then praying His own word back to Him. It was Old Testament worship lived out in real time, God's glory filling the room the way it did for Israel. We called on Him, and He came. That whole season carried an active kinship with the Jewish people and with Israel, and we traveled around the Lehigh Valley leading "Becoming One" Bible studies — Jew and Gentile, together, refusing to let anything divide us.

Everyone who was not Jewish was, biblically, a Gentile — it didn't matter whether they came from China, Turkey, Iran, Europe, or Rome. Galatians 3:28 tears that wall down completely, and Romans 11 shows Gentile believers grafted into the same promise that began with Israel, one root, one story, one family. That's the truth we were living out on those thirty acres: no division, one people, all bought by the same God.

None of that fruit was ours to take credit for. It came from staying attached to the vine — the daily prayer, the praise, the scripture, the willingness to keep showing up for six years, six days a week.

Next Chapter: Sealed, and Sent →

Sealed, and Sent

Once someone accepts Christ, confesses Him as Lord, and believes in their heart, He gives the Holy Spirit — Father, Son, and Spirit, living in us. That's not a metaphor. It's the same power spoken of in Jesus's last words before He returned to His throne, when the angels asked the disciples why they stood staring at the sky, telling them He would come back the same way He left.

Layer upon layer, God keeps taking us deeper, so there's no doubt left. Every promise He's ever made finds its yes in Christ — and our part is simply to supply the amen: agreement, trust, and thanksgiving, all at once.

Next Chapter: Why I Tell This Story →

Why I Tell This Story

I don't tell this story so anyone would look twice at me. I tell it because I know what it is to be desperate, on a floor, out of options, and to have God still be enough. If He did that for me — an ordinary man with nothing special to offer Him — He will do it for anyone who calls on Him the same way, with the same honesty, the same empty hands. Heaven touching earth isn't a phrase for me. I've lived it. The kingdom of heaven is here now. God lives in us. He's real. He's the great I AM, and it isn't a doctrine to study from a distance — it's a relationship to be lived, wide awake, every day.

My hope is that other people will come alongside and speak the same truth over their own lives — that our spheres of influence, our communities, our town squares, and yes, our country, would hear it again: God is faithful in every avenue, in every circumstance, not because life stays easy, but because He never once stops being near.

A Closing Word

Lord, thank You for hearing me on my knees when I had nowhere else to turn.

Thank You for the mercy that saved me and the grace that keeps me.

Thank You for making Your home in me, and for a body and a life made new.

Let every word of this testimony point to You, and to You alone.

Amen.