I need to start from the beginning so that you can know where I started from to see how far God has brought me. When I was maybe 5 years old my parents my sister and I started going to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. My dad’s friends that he grew up with went there and I believe they talked him into going. I hated it, I was miserable! At one point I got baptized there, I didn’t know what I was doing, other kids were doing it, so I joined in. When I was 15, I asked my dad if I could go to a Baptist Church with my best friend, dad said “as long as you live in my house you’ll go where we go!” That didn’t help my hatred with that church at all! At 16 I started running around with the “Wrong crowd”, I started drinking beer, smoking marijuana and sampling other drugs, I’m not sure if I hated God or just didn’t like him but I blamed him for any bad thing that happened in my life, but of course all of the good things were my doing (so I thought)! 

  One day at the age of 17 I stopped by a local fireworks stand, I met a pretty blond girl and we started talking, then I asked her out. She was a Christian I wasn’t, she and her family went to the Church of Christ. It wasn’t much better than the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Lds in my opinion. But I was with my girlfriend so I could handle it for a few hours a week.

  At the age of 18 we got married, we moved into what was called a cabin, it was a small 1 bedroom apartment at Mallard Bay on Fort Gibson Lake. I immediately quit going with her to church, I hated it anyway. She would sit and read her bible which was okay at first but as time went on I felt that she was paying more attention to reading her bible and going to church than to me so I began hiding her bible. I had quit smoking pot and drinking because she didn’t like me doing that, after a short while I started smoking a pipe, it was okay, but it wasn’t marijuana, so I began putting marijuana in the pipe. She didn’t know the difference other than what she called an awful smell. Later we moved into a FHA home in Wagoner. It was much bigger than the cabin! I was working at a factory in Wagoner that made electric motors and she worked with her mom at her mom’s restaurant. In our off time I would sit around and listen to hard rock music on the radio. Periodically a good friend of mine (Mike) and his wife (Debra) would come over, Mike and Debra were Christians, and they went to a charismatic church. They loved their church and would talk about it often. They would come visit and immediately Mike would walk over and change my radio station to a christian station, it would upset me but I wouldn’t say anything because he was a good friend. But as soon as they left I would change it back. When they would talk about their church (Hillcrest Christian Fellowship in Muskogee) it would sound much more interesting than any church that I had ever been to, and they would invite us. Finally I decided to go with them, I don’t know if I really wanted to visit there or just wanted to shut him up (as if he would quit asking!) But we went one Sunday morning. It was nothing like any church that I had ever been to! People looked happy! They were smiling, raising their hands, praising God, and looking up as if they were singing directly to God! I had never experienced anything like it in my life. For the first time I saw people happy to be in church and in love with their God. I went back the next week! At the end of the service their pastor asked if anyone wanted to receive Jesus into their heart as their Lord and Savior, and I raised my hand. He walked us through a prayer and my life was changed. People think I’m crazy when I tell them this but when I walked out of the Church that morning the air smelled different, everything seemed more vivid. My life was changed in an instant! After that I never went partying with my friends anymore. I needed time away from them so I wouldn’t get caught up in how I lived before! I had a radical transformation! I don’t know anyone else that had quite that experience but I know it was real and it changed my life forever. I went from hating church to loving it, from pretty much hating God to loving him and being so thankful for what he did for me, from hiding my wife’s bible to us sharing scriptures together! We started going to church together at Hillcrest but after a while because it was so different than the church my wife attended for all her life, it didn’t seem right to her so she started going back to her old church and I still went to Hillcrest, I just couldn’t handle going from what I thought was amazing services to boring services again. I believe that was the beginning of our problems. We had a son (David) and we would take turns taking him to church with us. Even though we had a different perspective on church we definitely wanted our David to know that church was important to us and we wanted him to learn and grow with us. Unfortunately our different views on religion and other issues continued to drag us apart. When David was around 12, me and my wife separated and later divorced. I started dating a woman that I worked with and soon after we moved in together. David would split his time between me and his mom. We moved to Broken Arrow and started attending a Nazarene church there. The pastor of the Nazarene church married us. We moved to Pryor Creek to be closer to work and started going to a Pentecostal Church of God where some of our friends went.