At this point, I worked as a part-time delivery driver at a pizza parlor. I hated it. Customers were frequently rude, the hours were slim, and the tips were meager. I needed a change. My bank account demanded full-time work. I applied to a heretofore unknown-to-me nonprofit business called the Weatherford Opportunity Workshop (WOW). It provided job opportunities for people with developmental disabilities. They did contract work for local businesses and the state. They also operated a recycling department, handling plastic, aluminum, and cardboard. I applied for an opening in recycling. I earned an interview with the department supervisor. I can’t say I had an overall positive initial impression of the man. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, but had a well-worn face. He had a scruffy beard and bow legs. He walked with a noticeable stoop and wore overalls. He had an odd sense of humor and wore every emotion on his sleeve. His vigorous Christian faith stood out as his most distinctive feature, which shone through even in our brief interview. He pointedly asked me if I was a Christian. Momentarily taken aback (wasn’t that a forbidden question to ask job candidates?) I stammered, “W-why y-yes, I am”. I hadn’t thought about that question in years. I remembered back to 1988 and my baptism and acceptance into the church. I felt confident in my answer. The supervisor gave me the once-over and quickly moved on to his next line of questioning. In short, I got the job, only to find out later that I had only ranked third on his hierarchy of candidates. He hired me because, unlike the others, I answered the phone when he called. At the time, I didn’t understand the concept of divine providence, but its effects were about to be fully felt.

I quickly learned why my supervisor asked about my spiritual status. He exhibited a rare piety and outspoken Christianity, never leaving me in doubt about his stance on any moral or spiritual issue. I must admit, he fascinated me. I had never met a Christian who unabashedly lived out his faith without compromise, without apology. His name was Earl, and he grew up in Clinton, a town just down the road from Weatherford. He came to faith in Christ later in life, and the change came suddenly and dramatically after a chance encounter with a stranger while he worked at a highway gas stop. The man witnessed Christ to him, left a card, and drove away, never to be heard from again. A powerful conviction of sin and a weeping confession of Jesus as Lord and Savior followed. Earl attempted to contact the mysterious stranger to thank him for his witness, but he never found him, almost as if he had vanished into the wind. His testimony gave me pause. Did God send someone directly to Earl to convert him? Did he entertain an angel unaware? My conception of the Almighty did not fit this scenario. God stood distant, aloof, allowing us to come to him as we pleased. Or not at all. God did not intervene in our lives. I didn’t realize at the time, but my religion could’ve been labeled as a kind of new age Deism. Earl’s testimony did not compute. Ultimately, I categorized his story as hyperbole and moved on. However, I could not ignore the man. He stood as a living example of authentic Christianity.

I don’t mean to write a hagiography here of the man, because I will admit, he did not live blamelessly, but I can say in retrospect, he upheld a high standard of Christian righteousness. He sometimes let his emotions get the better of his judgment and would land in hot water with management. I quietly relished his moral slips because, in my eyes, they knocked him off the saintly pedestal he had placed himself on. I knew many self-professed Christians who didn’t live up to the example of their namesake, but Earl proved himself different than most. When he messed up, he came back in humility without exception. He would apologize for his transgressions and ask for forgiveness. I had never witnessed any person behave this way, especially a man with such strong opinions. Again, this strange, scruffy fellow gave me pause. He forced me to re-evaluate my predispositions about reality, and especially Christianity. Yet, instead of plunging into intense introspection, I reacted defensively. My shoddily constructed worldview began to shake as the sandy foundation shifted under the scrutiny of Christian truths. I responded by leaning hard into my new-age humanism. I sprinkled quotes from various secular and new-age gurus on the corkboard hanging next to my desk. Earl and I shared the same office, and every now and again, he would glance at my quotes and shake his head. He preached the gospel and the goodness of God daily. I never said much in return. I respected his faith. I mean, I had to, right? I identified with Christianity just as authentically as he did. His gospel was my gospel. Yet, I didn’t really believe any of it. I squirmed every time he proclaimed it. So, did that mean I wasn’t really a Christian? I didn’t really believe Christian things, but couldn’t bring myself to drop the label. I think I felt a certain security by keeping the title, a shield to hide behind, avoiding the penetrating gaze of a displeased God. I refused to confront the reality of a feigned faith that once again placed me under the wrath of God. I didn’t like that feeling the first time back in high school when I read that infernal Chick tract. I liked it even less now.

I endured Earl’s daily ramblings for over a year and a half with polite restraint. My humanistic quotes formed a wall of philosophical brick-and-mortar to fend off his theological projectiles. Eventually, my defenses crumbled to dust. I couldn’t refute his arguments for Christianity and against other belief systems. I’m not saying Earl possessed a towering intellect, certainly not. But the simplicity of the Christian message held a beauty and grace I could not deny. I could clearly see God’s favor over his life, and it unsettled me. God frequently answered his prayers in ways I, as a skeptic, found difficult to explain away. For a prime example, one day, he confided in me his need for new insulation in the old house he had bought. He couldn’t afford the cost, so he took his petition to God and asked Him to provide a way to obtain enough insulation to finish his entire house. I reacted with incredulity. I scoffed at the notion that God would somehow drop dozens of packs of insulation straight into his lap. “Good luck with that,” I replied. A couple of weeks later, our trailer for cardboard bales had filled up, and we called the trucking company to swap it out with an empty cargo trailer. Routine stuff. When the truck arrived, it was my responsibility to open the doors and sweep it out. To my surprise, this trailer contained cargo. That had never happened before. I examined the contents and discovered – you guessed it – dozens of packs of insulation. I ran back to the office and informed Earl what I found. He furrowed his brow, picked up the phone, and called the trucking company. Apparently, they had forgotten to clean out the truck in their haste to get it delivered on time. The owner didn’t want to deal with the forgotten cargo and told Earl he could do with it as he pleased. Earl reported this to management and asked if he could keep the insulation for his personal use. They OK’d it, and just like that, prayer fulfilled. He immediately gave the glory to God and did a little dance in his office at His faithfulness. I stood there bewildered, jaw hanging loose. The odds of this being a coincidence were simply too astronomical for me to explain away. I had no argument left. God was real, and for reasons unknown to me, He loved Earl.

Still, I resisted, primarily due to my desperate hope that I possessed a stripped-down, yet entirely credible Christian faith. But every time I looked at Earl, his life and faith, his zeal and boldness, his tenderness and prayerfulness, his humility and humble demeanor, I knew I lacked these virtues within myself. Not out of lack of practice, but because I didn’t possess them at all. The implications of this revelation shook me to my foundations. For a time, I repressed them. I focused on worldly distractions to drown out the nagging voice of conscience. God turned up the volume, amplifying the pressure, but my obstinate will would not yield to the obvious truth: I was not a Christian; I had never been one.- a fact too horrible for my anxious soul to contemplate. My resistance persisted for a short while until one day, as I headed out the door for home, my boss, who threw scripture my direction like a farmer tosses hay to his cows, hit me between the eyes with this text from the sixth chapter of Ephesians:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Of course, I had heard this well-worn passage many times before in my life – more than once from Earl, who, as a Pentecostal, frequently quoted it in relation to the spiritual warfare he engaged with in his daily struggle against Satan’s kingdom. But now I understood the verse as an accusation against my persisting unbelief. God unveiled a spiritual reality I had long scoffed at. He painted a picture in my mind of the certainty of the existence of good and evil – God and Satan. Both realities coexist on the stage of history, and neutrality is an illusion. I had to take up arms either for God, heaven, the holy angels, and all the saints, or I must fall in line with the principalities, powers, and dark rulers in service to the devil. These visions hit me with a clarity I could not deny. I knew which legion I served in. With horror, I realized who I had my sharpened sword pointed against. Indeed, I could no longer deny the obvious: I did not have a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. I had submitted myself to the devil, fought alongside his denizens, and would share their ultimate fate. This scene all took place as I sat in my car, prepared to drive home. I must have been a sight to behold, gripping the steering wheel of my beat-up old Nissan, staring blankly out the windshield for several long minutes.

I can’t recall how long I meditated on this heavenly illumination before God moved on to the next phase of His redemptive plan for my life. I felt stuck in the mire of conviction, much as I had in high school, but this conviction ran deeper. I didn’t have the stark mortal fear of eternal suffering on my mind. I could clearly hear God’s call to switch allegiances, lay down my arms, and join the army of God, led by King Jesus, and become a member of the Kingdom of Heaven. That path could only be accessed through true repentance and faith. My previous exercise of those virtues failed to produce any real change in my soul, so I simply shoved Ephesians 6:12 and my conviction into a dark corner closet of my conscience and tried to continue enjoying life. But something fundamental had changed within me, leaving me agitated and discontent with the status quo.

In hindsight, I can now clearly see the work of the Holy Spirit preparing me for the salvation to come.

He plucked out the thorns and thistles.

He plowed the soil, removing the rocks and pebbles.

He planted good seed into the soil of my heart.

My high school conversion to Christianity established a root system that delved as deep into the soil of my heart as my thoughts and devotion toward God ran: not an inch deep. After my baptism, I became a full member of Trinity Baptist Church in Weatherford, OK. I decided to attend the Sunday morning service regularly. I came unprepared to grow. I didn’t have a Bible of my own, so I showed up to church equally empty-handed and empty-headed. I had no spiritual inclination, so the pastor’s sermons never resonated with me. I didn’t understand them, nor did I exert effort to learn the language of faith. I grew bored quickly. Church service devolved into back-pew gossip sessions with my friend. We whispered back and forth about our weekend exploits and the girls we wanted to date. I tuned out the preacher, the word of God preached, and any spiritual illumination that came with it. The elation I initially felt at having my sins forgiven and my eternal prison sentence revoked had waned. I forced myself to get up every Sunday morning.

My friend pushed my boundaries further, asking me to attend Sunday school before church. I grumbled at the prospect of tumbling out of bed at an even earlier hour, but I obliged him. This is when I started enjoying church, just not in a pious manner. Our small Sunday school class consisted of me, my buddy, and a female teacher who was probably in her mid-thirties at the time. She took her faith seriously, as well as the teaching material she presented to us every week. The only problem with this scenario is that I did not match her level of sincerity. I cringe now as I recall the memories. I turned the entire class into a vehicle for scalding sarcasm and lame jokes. I made light of the teacher and the material with equal contempt. I exasperated her week after week. She lost patience on more than one occasion. Did I feel guilty? Not an iota. I enjoyed watching her religious facade fade as she struggled to maintain her composure and control of the class. Reflecting back now, I’m almost forced to admit the vitriol I poured out on her came from an unholy source in the deep crevices of my withered soul. I had never in my life treated another human being this poorly. I grew up with an extreme sensitivity to other people’s emotions and navigated the best I could to not offend any soul I encountered. I cannot rationally explain my sudden shift in attitude. Why did I disdain her so? In reality, I had no problem with the teacher, but I proved myself unteachable to God’s holy word. It rained brimstone down on my head every time I heard it. My depraved soul craved the safety and comfort found in the shadows hiding behind empty religious rites. It contorted in torment when the pure word of God was preached. My condemned soul desired the disillusionment of self-deception to the truth; I stood naked in the holy gaze of God. I refused the true remedy of faith in Christ. I wanted no part of Him or His people. I expressed this plainly every Sunday morning for perhaps six months or so. The pleasure I gleaned in seeing my Bible teacher squirm slowly dissipated. I could find no other compelling reason to remain in church. I had my fire insurance card, signed and laminated, resting comfortably in my back pocket. I left the church and never came back. I had a life to live, and I decided not to waste a second more sitting on my butt in an old church pew, listening to words that exposed the darkness in my soul.

Now that my belief system had been released from the tethers of church dogma and biblical texts, I could choose from a buffet of more suitable ideologies, then tailor them to my specific tastes. The first doctrine I tossed to the curb was the doctrine of hell. I could never forgive the Bible for clenching up my bowels in mortal fear over the endless terrors of the lake of fire. I performed a lot of hand-wringing over my lost friends who expressed the same strain of apathy I had toward Christianity for years. I knew they were lost and headed for a sulphurous fate. Upon my self-emancipation from the church, I decided hell didn’t really exist; a loving and gracious God would never pronounce such a sentence on His children. Which leads directly into the second church dogma I ditched: only born-again Christians are accounted as God’s children. Rather, He loves us all, and nobody is truly estranged from Him. People might drift away from fellowship, but reconciliation is neither required nor desired by God. We all end up in the same place, though we might take different paths to arrive home.

The nature of God Himself changed as I began to adopt a new age, humanistic view of deity. God is love, but he has no wrath. He is all goodness, and if sin exists, God does not take it all that seriously. Sins are nothing more than mistakes we make in our journey to spiritual enlightenment. I’m not exactly sure what sources I adopted these new-age philosophies from. I did dabble with postmodern spirituality in my younger days. I remember sorting through my mom’s library as a pre-teen and reading through her astrology and new-age books. I vaguely recall she had some Shirley MacLaine books in there, too. I read through some of them with mild interest. I didn’t realize for years just how much those ideas influenced my thinking and worldview. After I repudiated biblical truth, I rested back on these philosophies because they brought me comfort where Christian theology disquieted my spirit. The God of the Bible made me tremble, but the new-age god of my imagination filled me with joy. He approved of all my endeavors and gave me the occasional encouraging pat on the back as I pursued my own lusts. Interestingly, I still embraced the label of Christian, despite my utter rejection of Christian doctrine. I had to hedge my bets, after all. Within a span of six months, I went from condemned sinner to newly minted saint, to caustic critic, then to full-blown ‘Christian’ new-age acolyte. Jesus succinctly explained it like this:

Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away (Mar 4:5-6)… And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful (Mar 4:18–19).

Astute readers will note how I mixed the analogies from the parable. I quoted from the rocky ground portion, then quoted from the choked weeds portion in the explanation. Both rocky ground and choked weed hearers fall into the same category, lost sinners who initially respond positively to the gospel message. Some people may not fit neatly into either category. My roots definitely ran shallow. The soil of my heart contained innumerable stones, devoid of nutrients. However, I did not fall away because of trials or persecutions, though I would certainly have. No, I fell away due to the desires of youth, which I had no intentions of curbing. The God of Scripture forbade my concept of fun at almost every turn. The world, its allure, its philosophies had seduced me. I believe I had a true and powerful conviction of sin at that time in my life; however, I resisted the Holy Spirit’s call and clung to my sinful ways.

I endured for a short season.

But my roots ran shallow.

The weeds choked out the fragile stem with all its delicate leaves.

I withered under the steady gaze of the unrelenting sun.

I bore no fruit.

My primary care physician retired last year, so I visited a new PCP in my community and quickly informed her of our family’s history of heart disease. She suggested I have a calcium scan done. I had never heard of this procedure, but decided it wouldn’t hurt. A calcium scan detects calcium deposits in or around the heart arteries, though it does not necessarily indicate blockages or their severity. The scale runs from 0 to 400, with risk severity divided into 100-point increments. I scored a 656! Off the charts! My brow furrowed with concern. My PCP recommended me to a cardiologist, and we had a consultation. He suggested calcium scores are not necessarily indicative of dangerous blockages. Calcium can build up outside the arteries without obstructing blood flow. He recommended an angiogram procedure whereby they insert a catheter through the vein in my wrist and navigate to my heart. They then inject a dye and, using X-rays, they see how well the blood flows through my major heart arteries. The cardiologist informed me that if blockages are detected, he would insert a stent to open the blood flow to my heart. One or more stents may be necessary. It sounded easy, fairly painless, with the end result being peace of mind about my overall heart health. Without hesitation, I signed on for the procedure. They scheduled it for a Monday morning.

Considering the chaos that soon followed, the angiogram passed uneventfully. I don’t really remember anything about it other than the post-op consultation. The cardiologist delivered the bad news in the most cheerful manner possible. He started by telling me they didn’t put any stents in. I cocked my head slightly, knowing intuitively this was not the good news it sounded like on the surface. He then rocked my world with the following numerical horrors: I had a 100% blockage in one artery, 99% in my widowmaker, and a 91% in a third heart artery. He made no bones about the fact that I needed a triple bypass surgery in short order. He made me an appointment with a surgeon at the Heart Hospital for the following day. I must admit I took the news in stride – probably because of the disconnected loopiness effect of the anesthesia. Tuesday, I met with the surgeon. He showed me the X-ray video of the dye injections and how the blood flow stopped dead in their tracks as they travelled through my heart arteries. I looked at the surgeon and earnestly asked, “How am I not dead?” He had me look closer at the video. He pointed out how the blood diverted at the blockage point through a series of small capillaries my body had created in response to the hardened calcium deposits. They gave my heart just enough blood flow to prevent a massive coronary. It surprised me that they didn’t wheel me into a pre-op room and begin preparation for emergency surgery on the spot. They suggested a surgery date a full week out. However, my concerned wife wanted it done ASAP. Fortunately, an opening for Friday morning at 8:00 AM became available.

A week of whirlwind emotions just intensified into a full F5 tornado. From a routine angiogram on Monday to open-heart surgery on Friday. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. The surgeon briefed me on the nature of the procedure, but I paid scant attention to the details, other than my chances of survival and how much pain I would be in afterward. Knowing myself as I do, the more I knew about the procedure, the higher my anxiety would rise, so I made a concerted effort not to Google “triple bypass surgery” in the days beforehand. I didn’t want to hear the gruesome details of the surgery. Knowing that my breastbone would be sawn asunder, my rib cage splayed open, my heart stopped, and my coronary plumbing getting completely rewired constituted more information than I really needed. I also didn’t care to hear personal stories about how the procedure went for other people. I wanted to take everything as it came. I disdained to discourage myself with thoughts of all the things that would come next in the surgery process. This strategy worked wonders. The night before surgery, we stayed at a hotel down the street from the hospital. Pre-op check-in time was 5:00 AM, and I had no interest in getting up in the middle of the night to drive an hour to our destination. I didn’t sleep well, mostly because I lay in a strange bed in an unfamiliar place, without the comforting drone of my bedside fan. Otherwise, my anxiety did not get out-of-hand. I had a calmness, a peace surpassing all understanding I couldn’t explain. I knew what I faced and felt a calmness in my spirit. I kept a couple of Scripture verses rolling around in my head. Primarily Isaiah 26:3-4. I knew God would remain faithful. I kept Him at the center of my thoughts, and He, in turn, granted me a perfect peace. I slept about four hours and awoke feeling surprisingly refreshed.

It’s not really my intention in this article to describe the gory details of the procedure, but to chronicle its effects and how the serious nature of the trauma inflicted upon my body affected my body, mind, and spirit in the following days and weeks. Immediately upon emerging from my anesthesia-induced stupor, I awoke in the ICU surrounded by family. This immediately soothed my anxiety. But it must be said in no uncertain terms that open-heart surgery is a severe body trauma – unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I broke my wrist at 12 years old, trying to complete my first BMX stunt. I had to have surgery to set my bones back into position. Until now, that is the worst trauma I’ve ever experienced. But this rose to an entirely new level. I felt like Humpty Dumpty; shattered beyond all hope of repair. All the king’s doctors and all the king’s nurses couldn’t put me back together again. This kind of surgery is, in fact, a type of death and resurrection. I know that sounds dramatic, but let me explain. The surgery team actually stopped my heart so they could complete the bypass grafts. My circulatory system depended on a machine to sustain me. They put me on a ventilator, so I wasn’t even breathing on my own. Post-surgery, my bowels, after my body sustained such a severe shock, needed to be restarted. Ok, maybe ‘resurrection’ is overkill, but as an IT professional for over twenty years, I’m confident I can safely use the metaphor Total System Reboot. I had to start over. My heart had to start beating again. It had to take over pumping blood throughout my entire body. I had to learn to breathe on my own again (I had some trouble breathing independently briefly after the surgery). Added to that, I had to learn to breathe deeply again with the help of an infernal breathing mechanism. My digestive system had to gear up and start churning again.

This total system reboot is comprehensive. Not just my body needed a reset, so did my mental faculties. Brain fog is an issue I deal with on occasion, but post-op, I couldn’t think straight enough to form a complete sentence in my head. I had packed up my Kindle to read while passing the long hospital hours, but I could no more read a single page of text than I could climb the walls like Spider-Man. I could not focus on much of anything. I could watch football on the TV, but that’s about all I could focus on. This foggy lack of focus affected my desires. I couldn’t enjoy the things I loved. I couldn’t read a good book. I couldn’t study my Bible or engage with the latest contemporary theological issues. I couldn’t focus enough to play video games for more than 15 minutes. My wife had purchased a new game for me to try out when I got home. I couldn’t get into it. I had trouble learning new controls and mechanics. I leaned on games I knew inside and out and found some pleasure in those. It took a full two weeks to complete the mental focus reboot process. I submit as proof this self-evident fact: four weeks removed from the operating table, I have mustered enough cognitive juju to put together a somewhat coherent article chronicling the entire spectrum of surgery and post-op recovery, so the fog of anesthesia does recede in due time.

Disconcertedly, I discovered my emotional wiring developed a short after surgery. Perhaps this is a feature rather than a bug. My peaks and valleys leveled out for the entirety of my four-day stay at the hospital and for a solid week after I came home. I’m an emotional guy by nature, and losing connection with the feels left me with alien sensations I can only describe as a kind of plunge into oblivion. This fed into the spiritual vacuum I experienced. I should have felt gratitude for coming through the surgery as well as I did. Gratitude is one of the keys to the sanctified life, but after emerging from a life-threatening situation in relatively good condition, I just felt nothing. As a consequence, I felt distant from God. I couldn’t feel His presence. It’s almost as if He hadn’t been allowed inside the hospital walls. This bothered me a great deal. I couldn’t understand it. I felt for a brief moment that I had been abandoned by God at the surgery table. I couldn’t whip up a desire to compose any kind of prayer. As my mind cleared over the next couple of weeks, I came to understand this was just part of the total system reboot. My emotions, my desires, and my spiritual awareness all slowly returned to me. I am grateful for that, and I can actually feel that gratitude, as well as God’s shining countenance upon me. It’s not as if God had actually abandoned me in my critical moment; I just got disconnected from the part of me that feels as well as the part of me that thinks. Whether this is the result of the general anesthesia, the severe body trauma, or some combination of both, I am not certain. I can’t say the cords were cut off completely, only that my capacity to think, desire, and feel became discombobulated. The reboot brought all my systems back online, slowly, over a week and a half. Now, four weeks removed from surgery, I am pretty much back to normal in many ways. I’m still on medical leave from work, but I’m walking, driving, cooking, washing dishes, cleaning the yard, and doing other small tasks. I don’t have much pain. I take a muscle relaxer at night to help me sleep comfortably. My right leg, where they harvested veins for my bypass, is still a little bruised, but the pain is minimal. I can’t complain. My surgery had no complications, and post-surgery recovery has exceeded my expectations. I feel great overall, and the sensations of utter brokenness have faded like a bad dream. I’m still working on stamina. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for a full eight-hour workday five days a week just yet. Or perhaps, I’m just thoroughly enjoying the time off.

I feel compelled to give a shout-out to a special nurse who worked tirelessly to keep me hardy and hale. I am thankful to God, who gave me the most beautiful and virtuous wife a schmuck like me can hope for. She is a nurse by trade and has cared for me for over thirty-five years. She has walked every step with me through this bypass odyssey. She encourages me when I battle anxiety and picks me up when I can’t get out of bed on my own. She gets up every morning to help scrub me down so I don’t get an infection. She’s helped me with my wardrobe and the laundry. She makes sure I take my meds, she cooks, cleans, and runs errands without complaint. She drives me to my appointments and makes sure my favorite snacks are close at hand. She never left my side for my entire hospital stay. My experience would be entirely different if she had not been there to meet my every need. I’m not sure I would have bothered to go under the knife at all without her steadfast encouragement. She has blessed me beyond measure, and I love her with all my heart. Thank you for being the best wife, mother, and partner I could ever ask for.

I’d be remiss not to hand out some well-deserved praise to all my nurses at the Oklahoma Heart Hospital. They were across the board, spectacular. But a special shoutout goes to the ICU nurses for the two nights I spent there. I swear they were angels from heaven sent to minister at my bedside. I don’t have the superlatives to do justice to the comprehensive care I received. I would never wish to go through an experience like triple bypass surgery again, but if I did, I would feel confident in the quality of care I’d receive while there. God has been kind and merciful to an old sinner like me, and I can’t quite grasp His unconditional love for me. To Him be all the praise and glory for the new life that has been granted to me in the new birth, and now, through a successful heart surgery, I’m looking forward to spending many more years with my wife and family. These years are a gift, and I will not take them for granted.

The Kindle version is $.99 and the paperback is $4.95. If you’re interested, check it out HERE

It’s a simple, brief allegory of the Christian life, based on the parable in Matthew 7, demonstrating the contrast between a house built on the rock of Christ and a house built on Satan’s sand. I used a painting made by my now-retired pastor for the cover illustration, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

The book is currently available only on Amazon. The Kindle version sells for $0.99. The paperback version is $4.99.

Click here if you’d like to check it out.

Religion: All persons are inherently religious – even if they do not adhere to any particular religious system or dogma. Everyone has faith convictions. By this I mean every person holds to presuppositions about the world beyond the senses they believe to be true. We could not logically function in society without these assumptions. You may believe a divine creator made all things and all things hold together by His will and purpose. You may think the universe is governed by certain scientific principles that have coalesced over time into the world in which you live. Neither assertion can be proved or disproved with absolute certainty. They are faith convictions. Faith convictions are either theological (divinely transcendent) or Ideological (humanly immanent) in nature.

Worldview: A worldview operates downstream from religion (AKA faith convictions). A worldview is the outworking of your faith convictions. Every day you interpret events, circumstances, and interactions in the visible world of the senses by the light of your faith convictions of the invisible world beyond the senses to understand the reality around you.

Again, all people have a worldview because all people have faith convictions.

Politics: Politics operate downstream from worldview. Political ideology and the governing principles born from it are derived from a worldview believed to be a true interpretation of reality.

In summary, in its purest form, political views are founded on worldview, which is derived from certain faith convictions held to be absolutely true.

Politics are downstream from worldview and worldview is downstream from religion – the fount of all human belief.

The Christian religion gives birth to a Christian worldview that reflects the moral and ethical values of God’s Ten Commandments, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and the apostles’ teaching, for example. The framework of the United States Constitution is the political manifestation (in large part) of a Christian worldview.

Humanism – the idea of a system of morals and ethics not derived from a transcendent source, but from an immanent origin can lead to a Marxist worldview, for instance, where absolute equity is erected as the pinnacle of cultural achievement. The political ramifications of such a worldview lead to socialism or Communism.

Your religion influences your politics via your worldview. If you claim the Christian faith but adhere to a political scheme that is contrary to a Christian ethic, you need to do some serious soul-searching. Your true religion is not Christianity but something else entirely.