Walking with Jesus

I was ten when I first accepted Jesus as Lord. It was early March 1984, about a month after my birthday. Until then I’d been a normal church-attending kid. I went to class, sang songs, and colored or pretended as I sat through the sermon. It seems I always liked church, but when I turned ten I was suddenly struck with the need in my life for a savior and the reality of who Jesus really wanted to be in my own life. We attended Abilene Bible Church at the time. It was still located on Butternut Street and I remember with particular clarity those few intervening Sunday mornings walking past the open stone Bible by the front door. I knew God was asking me to respond, and each time our family entered the church I was struck with uncertainty as I walked by that Bible. Likewise, I was filled with the shame and confussion of my rejection each time I left that building without responding to his call. The matter demanded urgency, but was too important and life-altering to be rushed into wit...

When I lived in Hawaii, my dad would take us to the beach almost every weekend. Sometimes we'd go to the big white beach with the coral reef just under the suface of the water. Sometimes we went to the black beach with its lava-rock sands and dark water. Sometimes we'd go to "the toilet bowl" with its cliffs rising high on 3 sides and it's far out reef breaking the ways into gentle ripples as the slushed in and out of the bowl with the tide. And, occationally we'd go to the military beach. This was where I had one of my first solo adventures as a boy. The camp was a converted bunker beach left over from WWII. There were still cinderblock shelters in from the shore, now hidden by brush, where you could have snipped your enemies as they came up the landing. But, other than these the place was very changed. The beach itself was shallow, sometimes only a few feet from the water to the thick bunches of trees that cling to the rocks where sand turns to grass. They f...