At about twelve years old I went down in the wonderful name of Jesus Christ for the remission of my sins, but a few years later fell away from the Lord.
By the time I was fifteen, I was quite a mess. I was smoking, drinking, and listening to Led Zeppelin and AC/DC and hanging around with the wrong crowds in high school.
But I began to feel God’s call on my life.
One day, at 15 years old I went outside of our house to smoke a cigarette, I began to think about God and to pray. I crushed the cigarette out, looked up to heaven, and raised my hands to God in submission; immediately I began to feel the Holy Ghost all over me. But because of the way that I was living, I wasn’t expecting this at all, and to be completely honest, it shocked me! It was like I reached out to God, and he reached back down to me, even despite of my condition!
It wasn’t long before God sent a preacher, right to my house. He came to give a Bible study to my sister, but I was all ears. I began to go to church with them, and I also began to repent. I started carrying my Bible to school, and reading all the time. I would come home every day, and pray beside my bed to be filled with the Spirit of God. Well, it wasn’t long, maybe a week or two, that there was an altar call at church, and God filled me with his Spirit and changed my life!
My wife and I have been faithfully serving him now for 32 years, and he’s just as merciful and wonderful to me now, as he was to the little lost boy at 15!
