My Dad’s been gone for 11 years now. It blows my mind that it’s been that long. I was very close to him. I’m glad he’s with the Lord, and I’m glad I still have my Mom. I had a good talk with my Mom this past weekend. I got to asking her questions about her and my Dad that I’d never asked her about. I’d heard things from my Dad, but not her, about how they met and how they became Christians.
My parents turned to Christ after I was born. My Mom had an intellectual faith pretty much her whole life, but actually received Christ as her savior after connecting with a Baptist church shortly after I was born. My Dad was an atheist. He told me that he became a believer by reading the Bible. He was convinced by Jesus. What he didn’t tell me is how that came about.
After my Mom’s faith took hold, apparently my Dad thought it was laughable. He continually mocked Christianity. He thought it was ridiculous. It weighed on my Mom. She spent a lot of time on her knees praying for God to open his eyes. Things came to a head when he made some particularly ridiculing remarks that set her off. She got angry and threw a Bible at him. Then she just left the house to stay at her Mother’s (I presume).
Well… that night my Dad sat down and read… and read… and read. It hit him like the proverbial lightening bolt. The very next day he drove to the church my Mom had been attending to meet with the pastor to make sure he understood the scriptures right. He accepted Christ that day. He walked with him the rest of his life.
My Mom came home the next day, not knowing what had happened. She was shocked to discover he’d turned from full-fledged atheism to a follower of Christ in 24 hours.
So how did it go after that?
Well, God seems to have a thing for pain. My Dad got laid off from his job. He was out of work a long time. They lost their house. At the same time, I was diagnosed with a degenerative bone disease in my legs after waking up one day in pain and unable to walk. I was 3. We ended up moving into a low-income apartment in a high crime area, where we lived for the next five years. But God used this circumstance.
I was little, but I happened to notice a man on TV praying for people and they were being healed. I told my Dad about it. He and my Mom watched. He was coming to Chicago soon. And we went.
Leroy Jenkins was his name. A colorful character if their ever was one. Picture a faith-healing Elvis. He held crusades in large auditoriums where thousands of people would show up. We went to McCormick Place in Chicago to see him. And when he outgrew that venue, we went to see him at the Chicago Amphitheater. We saw hundreds of people healed. Or at least claimed to be. He would openly call for unbelievers in the audience to challenge him. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it anywhere else.
We went to lots of crusades in Chicago, hoping he’d pray for me to be healed. It’s sort of an odd thing. You wonder why you can’t just ask God yourself. You can… but the results he was showing dwarfed ours. Maybe that’s just the way God chooses to use some people. For that matter, maybe it was a show. Except, one day he did pray for me. At a crusade in St. Louis, Missouri in July of 1976. I can’t speak for anyone else, but after he prayed for me, God healed me. It was just before my 8th birthday.
I’ve written about this event on my blog before. It’s altered the course of my life. I don’t know about Leroy Jenkins. He’s done some dishonorable things. I do know he preaches the gospel and God healed me when he prayed for me. That’s the extent of my understanding of the matter.
In the context of my parents’ salvation, however, I think about how it must have been for them. These trials and the things God did created a solid faith in them and in me. Granted, I’ve spent the rest of my life deeply frustrated when God doesn’t intervene, but I can’t deny what happened. And he’s intervened on a number of occasions. It shapes both my struggles with God and the faith I’ve expressed in so many posts here on this blog.
My Dad’s salvation story is the second I’ve heard of an atheist doing a 360 turnaround overnight. The other was a close friend of mine who also came to Christ as an adult. His wife wasn’t a believer. She was away for the weekend and came back to find her husband radically changed. Interesting parallel.
I have never actually seen someone I know turn around overnight. I can only think of one person I knew as an atheist that became a believer after I knew them. I think today atheism is the fastest growing religion. It leaves me pessimistic thinking it’s all over and no one will ever be saved. But that’s not true.
I’m sure glad I had that talk with my Mom. It gave me hope. Hope is precious thing.
January 7th, 2012 at 6:20 am
What an inspiring story!
Yes, God does use flawed people to heal. Gifts of the Holy Spirit are not fruits- they are gifts! So the person with the gift could be all messed up but it could still be a genuine gift.
I was also an atheist before I got saved but it took much longer for me to become convinced.
January 7th, 2012 at 12:04 pm
Thank you. “Fruits vs. Gifts” – I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s a good point.
I’d like to hear how you became a Christian.
January 15th, 2012 at 7:39 am
Thanks. I was taught the difference between fruits and gifts a long time ago — it’s not an original idea with me.
As to how I became a Christian: my dad is an atheist, but he’s a “live and let live” atheist — he figures that if other people want to believe in gods, that was their business. But he did like to point out the silliness of religion to me as I grew up.
So no surprise that, by secondary school, I was also an atheist. But I wasn’t a “live and let live” atheist like him. I figured, if there were no gods, nobody should believe in them.
However, I was also very introverted and had a low self-image. I was one of the nerds and was bullied by the jocks. In fact, the year before I got saved, the bullies had pushed me to breaking point and, because the teachers ignored my complaints about the bullying, I tried to take things into my own hands and took a kitchen knife to school and tried to kill the leading jock!
The teachers stopped me as I was chasing him with the knife, but they never took any disciplinary action against me — perhaps they were ashamed of their own inaction with my numerious bullying reports.
Anyway, that stopped the bullying, but it didn’t stop the hatred I felt, nor my ostracization from school society.
Then the next year, I heard some singing in one of the classrooms during recess time. Curious, I stuck my head into the room to look, and it turned out to be a bunch of students called “the Christian Union”. They invited me in, and I told them that I wasn’t a Christian, but they said to come in anyway, and I was too shy to refuse.
So after a while, I got to know them, and after I got over my shyness with them, we got into big arguments over what I preceived was the stupidity of belief in God. Eventually, they answered my intellectual objections, but I wasn’t yet willing to give up my pride and receive Christ, so I stopped going to see them.
One day, I received a chain letter stuck into my book bag. It was the standard stuff, claiming to have been written by some priest somewhere and promising great things if you make many copies and pass it on, and terrible things if you don’t, along with the requisite testimonials about what happened to people who did or didn’t. (People who believe in them somehow never ask themselves, how did those testimonials get into the letter? The letter had to have been passed on BEFORE they happened, after all!
Anyway, as a good atheist, I didn’t make copies to pass on. I just left the original in someone else’s bag or something, if I remember right.
Anyway, I started feeling paranoid after that, and I went to speak to the student leader of the Christian Union and he told me that these things were not of Christ even though it claimed to have been written by a priest and that if I were in Christ, He is greater than any demons etc.
Since they had earlier already answered my intellectual objections to the faith, and I was only resisting because of pride, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s quite funny in hindsight how God used a tool of the devil to bring me to Christ!
At first, my parents thought it was just a fad, for me to have gone from being a flaming atheist to a committed believer in what apparently to them was a short span of time (since they didn’t know about my earlier discussions with the Christian Union.) Then they decided that it wasn’t a bad thing, “those Christians will keep him out of trouble.”
I was really blessed that my parents didn’t oppose my faith, because I’ve heard horror stories from other people from my cultural background whose parents gave them so much grief and opposition. My Sunday school teacher even was kicked out of her house by her father, until the pastor as one proper Chinese gentleman to another went to her father and showed him that one could be a Christian and not abandon one’s Chinese culture.
But my parents even dropped me off at church when it was convenient!
Anyway, this reply has gotten too long already so I’m going to stop here. It’s been over 30 years and I’m still with Jesus!
January 15th, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Wow, what an unusual path to faith. Thank you for sharing your story with me. It sounds like a really difficult adolescence. Kids are cruel. It’s not hard to understand why a person being bullied would feel helpless and react so strongly. I’m glad you found God’s love through it. Like scripture says, he uses the things that are not to shame the things that are.
It’s odd how your brand of atheism came with some superstitious fears. I guess you felt the struggle within, recognizing something is there, but not realizing who he is.
After 30 years, I guess it took. (-: No turning back once you are in Christ, just the wild ride of faith, with ups and downs and twists and turns that come with moving against the stream. Thank God for the grace that stands us up.
January 15th, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Yeah, I can totally understand those school shooting kids… I’m glad I live in a country with strong gun control laws that meant that I had no access to guns like that at my vulnerable time. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
January 15th, 2012 at 7:45 pm
P.S. The superstitious fears were not from atheism but rather from general culture. I live in a culture with a lot of belief in witchcraft, charms, hexing, etc.