Life In Prologue – My Faith Journey

Foreword

This is the story of “the” faith journey. Yes, it is “my” journey but mine is one of many similar journeys that collectively, become mankind’s journey as God weaves together the latticework of His people in preparation for eternal life.

As I write my story, I intend to overlay my “story strip” onto those of the ancient prophets, the apostles, my family, and yours, and all the believers before us, to become a presence in God’s starry constellation. Ours will lay in place awaiting more story strips until the second coming when we shall all come to bloom in his eternal, heavenly garden.

My journey, like yours, has story chapters that include sin and forgiveness, dreams and revelation, trial and triumph, good and bad choices, but a component present in every chapter is faith. Faith is the root of my journey-tree, ultimately leading me to eternal life.

As these rooted rivulets of my journey-tree grow toward everlasting life, I struggle with the concept of eternity. I must admit that I comprehend the concept in one sense only; that my life here is a prologue, just the beginning of what God has in store for me. Nonetheless, my prologue life is a gift for which I am grateful and therefore, feel a responsibility to live well, for Him.

We move into my journey with the need to understand in more detail, just what a faith journey really means. Let’s start there, following my poem on the latticework of our corporate story:

Latticework

Oh, the net of life you weave,
Desperate souls, searching,
For companions of empathy,
To testify with tears of prayer.

You cross our paths of shooting stars,
Each streak designed by thee,
To lead us thru the furnace of life,
Bestowing your grace on shared vignettes.

You stop the rain to show the way,
To a finding ground in your warm sun,
And thread your message of compassion,
In a sewing bee of spinning love. RW

I. What is a “Faith Journey”?

I wish to jump right into my story, engaging you in a dynamic scene. And I will! However, before I do, please allow me one page of patience to ground us in just what a “faith journey” really means.

One might define it as the development of a belief and trust in the Trinity. That’s simple enough but to stop there would be a little like calling the sun a big light bulb, or the ocean a nice place to get a tan. Both those descriptions do the same injustice in defining those two of God’s creative miracles, as does my “faith journey” definition. They are not untrue, just incomplete.

So, let’s take a deeper look at “faith”. Faith, simply expressed, means placing your trust in God and having confidence that he will fulfill his promises. Yet there is still more, right? It includes an acceptance of his assurance that things revealed and those not revealed, but promised in the Word, will come to pass. It is best expressed in Hebrews where it says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”, (Bible, Hebrews 11:1).

To exemplify what it means to live into and accept His assurance, especially of those things not revealed, lets visit a few words from Rosalind Goforth, the missionary partner and wife of John Goforth, two turn of the 20th century missionaries to China. She wrote inspiring words about faith in her personal narrative, “How I Know God Answers Prayer”. In her later years, she reflects on her faith journey with these words, “As the past has been reviewed, and God’s wonderful faithfulness recalled, there has come a great sense of regret that I have not trusted God more, and asked more of him, both for my family and the Chinese”, (Goforth, 129). How wonderful and encouraging because those of us who have read her story know that she was the recipient of many of God’s tangible prayer responses. Yet, she wished she had asked even more of Him! And remember that many of His responses were in the face of practical impossibilities, such as money and new clothes coming out of nowhere, finding safe haven in the face of certain death, and others.

I could argue that faith embraced to this degree, suggests I would have to give up control of my life to God. Yes, that is the critical component of faith. Without giving up control, there is no trust or dependency; there is no confidence that the God who gave up his only son for us, will remain beside us in the present. Active prayer in place of personal action, is a good example of what giving up control can mean. There have been many times in my life when prayer and patience to wait on God would have served me better than trying to fix things myself. Has your journey offered moments better suited to God’s power than your own?

With that deeper understanding of “faith”, let’s add the “journey” part. In its most simplistic terms, the word implies a trip with a beginning, a middle, and an ending destination, i.e., I journeyed from New York to Istanbul. However, if we expand the word to suggest a “passage” from one place to another, it still could mean a geographic trip or, it could mean a process, like that of being saved. I think the best definition for me is to consider it a spiritual walk through my life that includes being saved but continues beyond my baptism into the present. It is a passage that has not yet come to its conclusion.

So, there we have it. This faith journey narrative is about my “ongoing life experience in trusting God in all things, both those he reveals and those he does not. And importantly, learning to rest in the assurance of his truth and love as expressed in the Bible”. You could describe it differently because your faith journey is just that, “your” faith journey. In your journey, there are only four – God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and you. Where our journeys come together is in that we are led by the same God, who has the same destination in mind where he will ultimately weave us together.

II. The Beginning of My Journey

It is 10:00 a.m. on a lazy Sunday morning in the oil and ranching community of Odessa, Texas, the heart of the Permian Basin oil fields since the late 1940’s. It is 1958 and I am standing in the family pew of St. Luke’s Methodist Church as an eight year old boy. On my left are my mother and brothers, on my right is my larger-than-life father, singing his heart out. I join his baritone voice and some 200 other voices as we sing, “Bringing In the Sheaves”, a popular Protestant gospel song written in 1874.

This poignant moment in time, marks the beginning of my faith journey. How could my eight year old mind and heart recognize this as “the” moment when my journey began? It’s simple really – I did not hear God speaking, I experienced no tongues of fire, and I saw no angel hovering; it was my earthly father’s voice. That singing voice has resonated in my memory for most of seventy years and to this day, will frequently bring a foggy mist to my eyes on the sunniest of days.

Now, who is to say that God wasn’t speaking, or the Holy Spirit or his angels were not present? Perhaps, it was their presence that added a certain gravitas to my wonderful father’s very average baritone. And of course, it took some time and reflection over many years to trace back to this moment as “the” moment.

In addition to the memory of my father’s voice, this was the first time it occurred to me that there was something in the universe that was supernatural, bigger even than my big brothers, my mother’s love, and the things that I could see and touch. Bigger than baseball! Though I had been baptized a few years before, this was the moment that God occurred to me for the first time in a meaningful way.

III. Am I So Different?

I have given some detail of the beginning of my journey as an eight year old in the Protestant congregation of a Methodist church in Odessa, Texas. Does 1958 sound like a long time ago? Do you find it hard to relate your journey to that of a mid-20the century born father, grandfather, and husband of 48 years? Perhaps it would help to tell you that I grew up in a household with a loving mother and father, the youngest of four boys. I played baseball, with my wife’s help put myself through 10 years of college, was a banker for 43 years, and was until recently, a marathon runner. Now, as a retiree living comfortably in central Florida, I am a student again and a nascent poet and essayist. I enjoy volunteer activities that have become central to who I am. I am neither bragging here, nor offering my CV for your enjoyment. Rather, I want to give you some context to my life as a human being.

There are hidden chunks of coal within the valuable metals of gold and silver listed above. There is a story of a broken marriage to my high school sweetheart. There was a child lost in infancy to a fluke infection and the parenting of an adult child who suffers depression. There were whipsaw changes in my professional career, some invited, some invaded. There are the failed efforts to speak a foreign language or break the 4 hour mark in a marathon. And even a successful marriage, as I consider mine to be, has been bumped and bruised in word and action over the years.

I will add that each chunk of coal has a meaningful place in my life, and I would not give any of them away! As Helen Keller once said, “We could never be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.” How true and how prophetic.

Then there are the constant reminders that I am a sinner. No matter how smart I think I am, how well read I become; no matter the many good things I do, I cannot escape the fact that I am a sinner. Does that disappoint me? I suppose to a degree, we all want to be more perfect, don’t we? Or do we? As I read the Word, I have come to realize that we live in a circle of life, to borrow a cliché. It is not a literal, endless circle but a circle in the sense that we are all connected in the cosmos. The connection is our humanity as created by God. That humanity since the garden, was and is incapable of resisting sin. For that reason, God gave his created mankind, a second covenant even stronger than Mosaic law, a covenant bestowed through the death and resurrection of Jesus, followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit to accompany us in this life.

That is a circle of life that I will not take to task and therefore, I have accepted myself as an imperfect being, resting in the forgiveness of Jesus. However, there is more life to live between the eight year old and the final day of resting in that forgiveness.

IV. A Stutter Start and Growing Enlightenment

I left the church in my early teens. Although I always felt that I lived in a Christian home, parents get busy and, teenagers get lazy. It is easy to let Sunday morning church and youth group activities slip by the wayside. Some years went by and I met a friend who was active in an evangelical church in Plano, Texas. She invited me to visit one Sunday morning. I had no clue that the Holy Spirit in me was going to take advantage of this opportunity to remind me who I belonged to.

Mid-way through the service, I found myself kneeling at the altar as part of an altar call. I soon tried to get up, but my body would not. I felt my church companions around me, but I also felt an unfamiliar presence which I later determined was the newly aroused Holy Spirit. Now 23 years old, I had lived a solid 10 years suppressing the Spirit within me. I was unprepared for this moment and uncomfortable in declaring myself so publicly. I felt a little like a circus ringmaster in the spotlight. However, the spotlight glow had a certain pleasantness to it, giving me the feeling that I need not scream and run, though that is exactly what I wanted to do. So, though I struggled, I stayed.

As I continued on my knees praying, the baritone voice of my father came back to me. With his song voice in my ears, the palpable presence of his power and courage reinforcing my decision to expose my renewed commitment to the Lord, I continued to pray. After a few minutes, though there were hands on me, I was able to relax and feel that it was now just me and Jesus. I tuned everyone and everything else out and just listened to him. I don’t remember words spoken. I just remember the welcoming spirit of Jesus coming over me.

I wish I could say that moment stayed with me, and Jesus and I became best buds, constant companions, and that I kept him on speed dial with regular prayer. But that would be a stretch at the least and probably closer to a lie. My newfound spirit at that time was like an old automobile; I started it infrequently, it ran pretty good but would sometimes break down and I never bothered to put enough gas into it to get me where I wanted to go. Nevertheless, I had found the transportation necessary. Now, I needed to learn how to maintain it and nurture it. I needed to add enough fuel to get me where I wanted to go. My faith journey had a ride!

V. A Professional Faith

“God gave us the tool of the Spirit,
To confirm ourselves to Him,
Its use, a freedom of choice,
Too often, our choice is sin.” RW

This is a verse from my poem, “A Part of Me”, that describes where I was on my journey. My faith journey had the Holy Spirit for a ride, but as I moved into my 30’s, once again I chose to set him aside, available but idle. My journey had entered a phase that I refer to as my period of “professional faith”. By professional, I mean that while I attended church and my faith was apparent to everyone, I knew it was superficial, the fulfillment of a duty so to speak. Basically, it was for show. My attitude was, “thanks anyway but I am doing fine and I don’t need the ride”!

By this time, I was already a bank President in Houston, Texas and plenty full of myself. I worked hard in night school to finish one degree and I had my eyes set on another. I was blessed with an obliging wife and two beautiful daughters. I had all the accoutrements of life that my credit could obtain. I was in leadership at my church, I was a lay reader, I pledged annually (a little), and I was on the church’s school board. I thought that I was a big deal and life was about me. I was making my own path. Afterall, I was a busy man, and I felt that I had to be in total control.

I suspect everyone’s journey passes through a similar faith-for-show period. I think back now and realize how vulnerable I was, vulnerable to the temptations of this life, and how oblivious I was to eternal life. I was blinded by the need for worldly success and peer accolades. I was tempted as was Jesus in the desert, but unlike Jesus, I repeatedly made the wrong choices. I had accepted the evil angel’s offer to follow my own path, unconscious to the fact that I had chosen the wrong partner.

In time, my eyes began to open to this wrong choice, and I first attempted to cover it up with my “professional faith”. Who was to know as I continued to shine in man’s eyes? Well, God knew, that’s who. God knew that I had purposely cut off communication with him. I had muzzled the Holy Spirit within me. I did not allow it nourishment from the words of the Bible. I read the Bible, but I never searched its meaning. I prayed but usually it was a request for something. I did not invite his active presence in my life or his voice to speak to me. There was trust . . . in myself. I was rapidly approaching the abyss, but I could not clearly see it.

In addition to the normal work related pressures of deadlines, goals, and politics, I faced trials, difficult trials that rocked me to my foundation. In my selfishness, my marriage suffered. I loved my little girls deeply, but I was not the father I could have been. Although my daughters are now both accomplished adults with families of their own, they too had difficulties that I felt responsible for. There was an unplanned pregnancy and depression. There was an early college failure and failed relationships. In short, I and my family experienced trials that are ever present in a fallen world. I was ill equipped at this time to help myself or them.

Despite this, God took pity by remaining faithful to me and being infinitely patient. He would lead me to be an earnest reader of the Bible, which enlightened me to the uselessness of ignoring him. He had invited me to return to him. His invitation to my ears, is best expressed in my poem, “Lessons” in which He schooled me in preparation for my return to the right path:

Waves and shadows that seem,
To blow hard, disturbing sounds,
As a prisoner on an unknown path,
In my ears a humming surround.

Taunting streams of laughter,
Ten thousand tongues go by,
With shouts from evil warriors,
Blood awash in their eyes.

I was being taught a lesson,
And vision of future cause,
In a medley of changing fortunes,
Through my life I saw in pause.

VI. The Return – Part I

Unless you leave, there can be no return. Haven’t we all played the part of the prodigal at one time or another? It seems to be a rite of passage for many, including myself. Were we not so thick headed! There is little solace in this truism except to say once again that I am a sinner. However, and more importantly, I carried within me the means to return to my faith journey. I had (and have) within me, the wind of God, his unseen power, as do you. We host the mystery and majesty of God inside our physical body. His name is the Holy Spirit. Is that not a sobering thought?

This dormant Spirit was the transportation which awaited within me, anxious to rise once again and lead me back to the right path. I was now in my early 50’s and newly relocated to Frisco, Texas. In recent years, His lessons had made me painfully aware of my ill-advised straying from God’s intended path, living in an unkind world with no cover from my Lord. I was eager to plug into whatever resource the Lord should provide.

I had joined the Anglican faith when I married, and we soon found a church nearby, St. Philips Episcopal Church. God had put us in loving hands. Many of the families were in the same stage of life we were with teenage children, dedicated careers, and marriages well underway, seas of personal debt and the need for safe harbor. We immediately made a connection with the Rector. He was an excellent teacher whose leadership, I was soon to discover, had enriched the men’s Bible study group.

I was still laying low when we first arrived, singed by life’s fires but now fully aware that I needed to find a way to activate my Spirit and heal my wounds. I wanted to focus more on my Lord, my family, and my friends. The Lord had heard me knocking and he answered. I found the “Way”, both literally and spiritually as it unfolded from the pages of the Bible. My journey had brought me to men’s Bible study where I found His word.

I took up the Bible and began to discuss verses with my new friends. He gave me access to his living Spirit through the conversations of a day’s readings. I had found the well spring of water to quench the thirst of the Holy Spirit. The Bible you see is God’s number one way of speaking to us. It is how the Spirit gets the attention of someone otherwise incapable of hearing his voice. I had sidelined him for many years, thinking that I knew better than the indwelling of Jesus himself. My arrogance astounds me now.

In my new friends, I found others with similar spiritual aspirations, which opened the door to multiple mission trips to Peru. As I will detail in the next stage of my return below, the hills outside Lima are home to many poor families, where alcohol abuse of a local brew leads to broken homes with little income and no outside support. Their only refuge was their local Anglican church.

VII. The Return – Part II

If discovering the Bible was God’s way of getting my attention, the gift of my Peru mission trips became the foundation giving me a firm footing for this next phase of my journey. During these missions, I had come to witness firsthand what being poor really meant. At the same time, I had observed the true meaning of spiritual joy in others. I saw with my own eyes in extremely difficult circumstances, what the love of the Lord can do. I also learned the value of spiritual friendship. And for the first time in my life, I experienced the full release of the Holy Spirit as if I wore him on the outside of my body. To give you some insight, let me share some details of one mission trip. Walk with me, will you?

“I found myself in a single file of eight missionaries slogging up a San Andres mountainside toward the Anglican mission church. It was early morning, but the air was already hot. The red dirt trail was narrow and steep, with a crude stair here and there. Otherwise, we stepped over rocks, under broken fences, and through muddy trenches. We were greeted along the way with smiles and stares, all cast in a welcoming spirit. The children giggled and were anxious to touch us, hold our hands, some even blessing us with a hug.

When we reached the church, we found a sanctuary with no roof, situated on a dirt floor of a small area that had been carved out of the mountainside. On one end, was a two room building. The building housed the church’s supplies, some food, a small work area, and a bed where Padre Benjamin Sales Aguirre slept most nights. It is also where we had prayers and Bible study and discussed our work assignments for the day. The church proper would accommodate about 50 people on benches and sundry children on the floor, at any one time. It was packed every Sunday!

As we surveyed the community, we saw mud thatched houses with sheet metal roofs and the occasional village elder’s house made of crude brick. There was very little indoor plumbing, most using a community restroom on the church property. It was poverty that I had only ever seen on television. But here is the anomaly. The people were happy, laughing, and largely unaware of what they did not have. Oh, the beauty of God’s work in those hills was miraculous.

We were welcomed at every turn as we toured the community with Father Benjamin. Though many young men stared at us drunkenly from curbs and gutters, their families invited us into their homes. On Sunday, they came to the little church in the best clothes they had. We read to them, and they read to us. We laughed and played with their children. I found myself living out the bible messages I had read. There were days I thought, ‘this is how the Apostles must have felt’.

Most touching of all was the morning of the final day. As we left the morning service and walked down the mountainside to our waiting van, the congregation followed us with sporadic singing and laughing, some of us holding hands. They lined up and we all hugged one by one as we proceeded toward the van, speaking the broken Spanish we had picked up. We drove away with smiles on our lips and tears in our eyes.”

I had ended my 25-year rut muting the Spirit and spent the next 10 years at St. Philips advancing my walk in faith. There were wins and losses, good stretches, and those when I felt alone. And of course, the stronger my commitment to Jesus, the more resistance I experienced from evil forces. For the sake of brevity, I will not dwell on these darker chapters except to say that evil does not want any of us to be happy in the Lord. For that reason, we need to stay equipped, stay in the word and listen to His voice for direction.

VIII. Where Am I Now?

After moving to central Florida in 2018, we found our new Anglican church in Fruitland Park, Florida. By 2021, we had a new priest who is humble, transparent to a fault, and full of the Spirit. We were together often in Adult Ed. classes, and we instantly had a good relationship. I think he saw an opportunity to help me grow my faith and perhaps even, to fill a need of his own. So, one day out of the blue, he asked me if I wanted to give a sermon. Caught completely off guard, I told him I would pray about it. God encouraged me to accept this invitation and I felt his assurance that he would lead me through the process, so I accepted the offer.

When it came time to give my first sermon, I was prepared but a bit nervous. I had prayed to God to help me breathe evenly, to give me a confident voice and stand tall in the pulpit. My sermon was titled, “Consequences” with a focus on the consequences of our choices. I asked God to limit my words to those he wanted to be heard and to speak to those who were awaiting his message. That has essentially become my go-to, pre-sermon prayer.

I also continue to facilitate Adult Education classes which I have now done for three years. Facilitating Sunday school is a joyful exercise as I follow along the leader’s guide, anchored in a 10-15 minute DVD by professionals, like Max Lucado, Adam Hamilton, Amy J. Levine, and others.

Still another activity that I have felt called to do is to volunteer in the Emergency Room at the University of Florida Health-The Villages Hospital where I try to do God’s work and assist people in Jesus’s name. I love the work, the dedicated nurses, the caring doctors and all the patients. Most days are fulfilling and as I leave, taking off my mask for a deep breath of fresh air, I say to God, “I hope I did the work you had for me and made you proud today. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you.”

So, how do these church and volunteer activities fit into my faith journey? My immediate answer is to say that they feed my Spirit and bring me closer to God. The preparation for the sermons and adult Sunday school requires me to read and research, mostly the Bible but other sources as well. The ER work makes me feel that I am “healing the sick” as Jesus did. So, I am continually learning more about God’s message both for myself and for those who he wants to contact through me.

These activities have also positioned me to share my faith more publicly. For most of my life, I have considered my faith personal, no one else’s business, not the Priest and not my church family. Then, in recent years I came to realize that approach is cowardly and half-baked. It expresses a lack of trust in the Lord, and as I explained earlier, trust is a necessary part of a faith journey. Lacking trust is like a handshake instead of a hug, a smile instead of a laugh; it is being present instead of being a participant. If you or I were to build a pyramid of our Christian faith, would not our church community be a pillar supporting that pyramid? My acceptance of this truth has led to my preaching and teaching, both central to the continuance of my faith journey.

I will conclude my narrative by offering you some thoughts on why my faith journey matters. It matters to me because I experience a growth in my faith. It also empowers me to deal more effectively with my struggles in this life. More importantly, it matters to others because we each see that we have partners in this walk. In that partnership, we learn that even though we are individuals, we are not alone. And it matters to God because He loves each of us and one day wants to welcome us home.

Let me add a statement of certainty that Liberty University is a planned way station on my journey. A happenstance by me perhaps, but I trust that God purposely placed Liberty on my path. The exercise of documenting my faith journey is evidence of that. It feels as though Liberty is the cauldron, my faith history provides the ingredients, and my evolving trust in Jesus will be the resulting meal from my time in this place.

Does the Lord have more in store for me? I hope so. Will I continue to hear my earthly father’s baritone voice of encouragement? I am certain I will. Do I understand my responsibility to nurture and continue to grow my faith? Yes, I think I do. The challenge is to stay focused on the eternal prize, but that is another story and different essay. But I can tell you that my faith has taken on a permanence in my life, as expressed in my poem, Naked Death:

To pay a passage into his presence,
My currency is thankful prayer,
To pass beyond my sinful self,
Beyond the devil’s lair.

To need more than his promise,
My shameful weakness to bear,
But I’ve learned wisdom is insufficient,
Nor wealth will get me there.

So, strip away my comforts,
No longer will I give them chase,
Make me naked, broken, and dull,
Just leave me with my faith. (RW)

Works Citied:

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Copyright 2001, by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Goforth, Rosalind, “How I Know God Answer Prayers”, Copyright 1921, Harper Brothers Publishers, New York City and London.