One thing I find iconic is the line about waiting for the Lord’s timing. Didn’t He say something about a day being like a 1000 years?

I have removed some items out of identity theft concerns, but the rest is mostly verbatim from my 1981 bivocational  resume.

For you trivia buffs out there, the church I was a youth director at is the church that was mentioned in the movie “Norma Rae.” I was there during the time the movie was filmed (although the set used by the movie did not look like the real church at all).

Personal Testimony and Call to the Ministry:

     I was born on [date removed] in [place removed], but was raised in the San Jose, California area. I grew up thinking I was a Christian because I went to Sunday School (unvoluntarily) until about the second grade. However, I did not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. God, as far as I was concerned, was dead.

     Yet my early church training had some effect on my youth. I learned to abhor violence in all forms and never learned how to fight. This was fine when I lived in a nice neighborhood, but not when we moved to a rough one. My high school years were spent separated from others in fear of getting beat up, and I ended up very lonely. I spent most of my time studying.

     When I entered California Polytechnic in 1973 I decided to change but I didn’t know how. I soon became attracted to a woman in my Freshman Composition class. I thought a good “opening line” was to offer to look for errors in her term paper and have her correct mine. Her paper was on “How to Have a Personal Relationship with the Living God.” I didn’t understand what those two foreign phrases “personal relationships” and “living God” meant, but I did start thinking about Christianity. I picked up a free Gideon’s Bible and started reading it. Soon I found myself taking with God (and to my surprise, Him talking back!), and on January 19, 1974 (at 1:30pm) I invited Jesus Christ into my heart to be my Lord and Savior. I had found that “personal relationship with the Living God” which we all desperately need.

     At first my Christian growth was slow, but to learn more about God (and for obviously other reasons) I spent the summer of 1976 at Campus Crusade’s Institute of Biblical Studies in Hilo, Hawaii. In Hawaii I developed the desire and then conviction that the Lord wanted me to go into full-time Christian service. This calling first came on the evening of July 4, 1976 while at a service led by Dallas Theological Seminary professor Howard Hendricks.

     In my Senior year I felt God calling me to seminary, but I refused thinking it was just my pride, so I made plans to enter the Air Force to be a self-supporting missionary in some foreign country upon my graduation. I was not accepted due to defense cutbacks and I graduated from college without a job. I became a volunteer high school worker at Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California.

     In October, after finding a job as a computer analyst, I felt a strong calling from God to go east toward Connecticut. On faith, I left California in November. While driving across the country I again felt a call to go to seminary. I visited Dallas Seminary but God said to go on, so I did.

     On December 24, 1977, after passing through Wake Forest, North Carolina, my car was hit broadside totaling my car and giving me three broken ribs. While stuck in nearby Raleigh I began to feel God wanted me to stay there. During this time I went to a church that contained no one my age. A deacon suggested I try Forest Hills Baptist Church – the first Baptist church I had ever been in. I read of copy of the Baptist Faith and Message and found it agreed with my own theology more than the church I had been a member of. So I became a Southern Baptist. Two months later God directed me to go to Southeastern Seminary and this time I listened, entering in June, 1978. In July I got my first church job as a summer youth director for two months in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

     The next year the Lord confirmed my earlier plans on becoming a missionary, but it was to be on His timing and not mine. To learn more about the Southern Baptist missions programs I spent the summer of 1979 church planting in Oregon. I didn’t see a church started, but I did see a love grow between me and Teresa Sue Bayes, a Southern Seminary student who was with the New Work program in another part of greater Portland. We became engaged at the end of the summer and were married on December 21, 1979 in her home town of Louisville, Kentucky where we now live.

     We finished our seminary education in August, 1980 and have been waiting since that time for the Lord to lead us where he wants us. We humbly ask you to pray for us in this matter.