Looking back over eighty years, I see connections I could not see while living through them. My childhood, failures, work, marriages, and losses once seemed like separate events. Today, I believe God was working with me long before I recognized it.
I Wasn't Looking for What I Found
My understanding of God did not arrive all at once. It came through questions. I began studying things I had previously taken for granted. Why did Christians worship on Sunday? What did the Bible actually say about the Sabbath? Had God changed the day? Where did the traditions I had accepted come from? Those questions led to other questions. And the more I studied, the more I discovered that I could not simply believe something because I had always believed it. I had to know what the Bible actually said.
That became one of the defining pursuits of the rest of my life. I did not want someone merely to tell me what Scripture taught. I wanted to see it. Line upon line. Precept upon precept. Scripture compared with Scripture. That search changed my life. It also cost me something. My changing beliefs became one of the divisions between Tina and me. But once I became convinced that something was true, I could not knowingly turn away from it simply because accepting it made life more difficult.
Truth had begun to matter more than convenience.
Called
Eventually, I came to understand something else. I had thought I was searching for God. Scripture taught me that the story actually begins the other way around. Jesus said:
“No one can come to Me unless the Father, Who sent Me, draws him.”
That changed the way I understood my own story. If that statement is true, then my interest in Scripture was not simply an intellectual curiosity that happened to develop as I grew older. God had begun drawing me. I did not know when it started.
I cannot point to one afternoon and say, “There. That was the moment.”
Perhaps that is because God had been preparing me long before I recognized what He was doing. I only knew that eventually I could no longer leave the questions alone. I needed answers. And when I found an answer in Scripture, I had to decide whether I was willing to live by it.
The Sabbath
The Sabbath became one of those decisions. It was not merely a theological argument over Saturday and Sunday. For me, it became a question of authority. If God had made the seventh day holy, what authority did I have to substitute another day? Once I became convinced of the answer, I began keeping the Sabbath. That decision changed the direction of my spiritual life. It eventually led me toward understanding God's Holy Days and many other things I had never been taught. It also eventually helped lead me to Trish.
And that is one of the places where the different roads in my life begin to come together. The faith that had contributed to division in my second marriage became part of the foundation of my third. Trish and I could walk the same spiritual road. For twenty-two years, we did.
Looking Backward
I am reluctant to say that every event in my life happened because God directly caused it. People make choices. Other people make choices that affect us. We make mistakes. I made plenty. There is a difference between saying that God caused everything and saying that God can work through what happens. That distinction matters to me. I do not believe God made me flunk out of college. I failed. I do not believe my divorces should simply be attributed to God. Human beings made decisions.
But I do believe God can take a life containing failures, wrong turns, disappointments, and losses and still bring that person somewhere he could not see when the journey began. That is what I see when I look backward. At eighty, I can see more of that road than I could as a boy or young man, although I still cannot see all of it. And I have come to believe something that would once have sounded strange to me. I did not find God.
God found me.