Intro to me, sorry this one is long

What have I learned about life? I have learned a lot in this crazy roller-coaster ride. Sometimes things can be very straight forward and at other times it can be a muddled thick hodge podge of beef stew.
I am a Christian; I gave my life to Christ at the age of 17 after never really knowing Him. See, it wasn’t that I couldn’t stand church, I was baptized in a Catholic church and my family attended Episcopalian services at various churches over the years. I served as an altar boy for many years and was active in the various Christmas programs; I even gave a sermon at the age of 11 for a “switch roles Sunday”. Then my family stopped going to church after a scandal involving a beloved minister embezzling funds from our church.
At that time, I was starting my formative teenage years and got away from anything to do with church. We were living outside of Philadelphia at the time and I did not fall in with the good kid crowd. I was living as I wanted, going to school when I felt like it, drinking underage, smoking pot, experimenting with cocaine, sleeping around, spent all of my time hustling in the local pool hall. I became quite the hoodlum. Being the oldest of five kids, this was not a very good example to be setting.
My parents, seeing the path that I was taking, decided to re-investigate the option of getting our family to church again. The strange part about this was that they ended up attending a Mennonite church called Frazer Mennonite Church, about half an hour to forty minutes away from our home. Well, for a rebellious teenager, when given the option of attending a Mennonite church or running with his friends, I wonder which way he would choose. Well, of course I said no, and the week after I said no, and the week after I said no again… this kept up for a while.
Finally, I got tired of being asked and made the deal that if I didn’t like it they would never ask me to go again. Well, deal being made, and the time of departure arriving, I come down the stairs dressed to the hilt in my Philly street-punk best. My intention was to scare the crap out of all the little Mennonite church kids. I am quite sure that my parents were wondering, at the time, about the wisdom of the invitation extended to me.
So there goes the happy family, off on their little forty minute drive to Frazer Mennonite, a sullen Goth black dressed teenager in the back seat, glaring at everyone through the dark glasses he wore, his parents regretting their decision to get this kid to church and the kids in between excited at having their big brother finally going to a church in which they regularly have so much fun. We make the trip and unload from our vehicle, in the walk across the parking lot I noted the number of elderly people entering and realize that this is going to be a short trip.
Once inside the entrance the story changes radically. Inside there are all of these younger families all talking to each other, comparing notes on another week gone by filled with the trials of parenthood. There are children running between everyone’s legs, faces smiling and laughing at being able to play with all of their friends. And here I am, trying my best to be a sore thumb that no one would even want around.
Instead of the opposite way, here are a couple of guys coming my way; they both look around my age… They introduce themselves as Randy and Adam; unknown and unimagined to anyone, the first introduction of the Three Musketeers. Here I was at my scariest and these guys coming up to me, what’s going on here? I needed to find out why they felt compelled to talk to me when it was obvious that I don’t belong. I was of course to find out later that is exactly why I would be approached. Randy and Adam both told me later that they were not quite sure what to think about me, I was quite intimidating to them at the time.
Well, I went into church and sat down with them and listened to the service. It was different then what I had remembered, gone were the stiff and traditional procedures that we had always gone through, they were replaced by a personalized version of a church service. Something where the people sitting in the pews are encouraged to be a part of the service. People were asked to open their Bibles… I was not even used to having a Bible in church (sounds kind of ridiculous to me now), let alone sit there and read along with whoever is up front. There was laughter and spontaneity, something that I didn’t even know was allowed in church. People came up to strangers and tried to make them feel at home.
All of this was new to me… All of my years of going to church and being an altar boy and everything else that I did and there was no comfort along the lines of what I was seeing and feeling here. The service was over and no one was rushing off, everyone was still standing around talking and socializing. I needed to find out more. I continued coming back to the services and talking with Randy and Adam. My manner of dress was toning down quite a bit; I was starting to talk with these guys outside of church, all of these things that did not fit in with the life that I was leading.
The best part of it was I was starting to hear about a new relationship that I could be involved in. A new relationship with God and His Son and the Spirit. See, I was always under the impression that as long as I went to church and was good I was going to end up in Heaven, besides that if I did end up in Hell it was going to be a place where I was hanging around with a bunch of people that I hung out with already. But I learned something new… I learned that Jesus said that there was only one way to get to Heaven, to acknowledge Him as my Lord and Savior. I learned something else as well; Hell was not going to be party town with a bunch of my old buddies. I wanted Heaven! And, at seventeen years old, I asked Him to be the Lord of my life!
It was fantastic; I had a great church to help me with my fellowship and learning, good friends to keep me accountable and more learning. But, the most important thing was that I now had the Lord in my heart. I indeed became a new creation. I became more and more involved with things within the church, places that I could minister through the youth ministry, acting and speaking. My old life was passing away at a lightning pace; I no longer hung around those old temptations, purposely. There was way too much going on for me to waste time in dead-end pursuits.
One thing that Randy had done that he mentioned to me a few times was his involvement in short term missions in YES (Youth Evangelism Service) with the Mennonite Church. It sounded very interesting; I started looking into it and decided that it would be a great opportunity. I ended up entering the program and preparing to go to San Felipe in the Central American country of Belize.
The whole program would take nine months. The first part was spending three months in a training center in Baltimore, Maryland. Here we received daily teaching in different aspects of the Christian life and evangelism. We also worshipped together regularly and had scheduled quiet and study times. Along with that, if we were going somewhere that spoke a foreign language we received beginning training in that language.
After our time there, we went to Guatemala for additional language training for a month and a half. We were finally ready then to go on to our assignments and our team left for Belize. Over the four months that we spent there we carried out visitations of members of the community, construction of various buildings in San Felipe and preaching and leading worship for the church that we were working with. When this time was over, we then went back to Baltimore for two weeks of debriefing and orientation.
During my time away, my parents had actually moved the family to a farm in upstate Pennsylvania. It was a situation where my Dad was milking cows for a man and living in a house on the property. When I got there I found that it was actually quite a bad situation. The man they were milking for was not a pleasant person, to say the least. My family was basically in a situation of plunging into a deep depression because of the circumstance and after coming back from my mountaintop experience I was plunging even harder then they were in this harsh reality.
Looking back on this now, well, you know what they say about 20/20 vision. I can see that perhaps my parents were not looking for what was God’s plan for their lives but more of a situation that gave them what they wanted, well, more like what my Dad wanted.
On my part, I believe that I had been riding on a mountaintop since my coming to Christ in the first place. I went through intense feelings and confidence after being saved and then straight into missions work. I wonder if I was really seeking after God and His purpose for my life as well. Not that I am saying that my time in missions work was wrong but maybe my intent was not aligned with God’s desire for me. I also think that I was possibly at a place where I had inflated my own ‘knowledge’ of where I stood in my Christian walk. Whatever the reason, I definitely bottomed out.
It was at that time that I also received an invitation to go back to missions, this time leading a team. I saw that as a way to escape the situation I was in and jumped at it. I can tell now exactly where I was at by my response to the invitation. I was asked to pray over the offer and get back to them but instead of going to God with this position, I called them back a day later and agreed to go. Oh, the mistakes that I have made when dwelling on my own leading and strength.
At this time there was an added complication to my situation that I treated in a definite misguided way. Women. This is probably another indicator of my lack of readiness. I met a young lady named Cheryl in my first missions trip. We became good friends and whether there was any chance or not I found myself becoming infatuated with the daydreams of us being together. She also ended up being asked to be a team leader the following year and she ended up working at a summer camp in my area which gave us the chance to socialize over the summer and into the fall of our new missions’ training.
Add more drama to the situation… Before going away on my first missions trip, I was involved with a Christian theatre group. Within that group there was a young lady named Johanna. She was a couple of years younger then I was at the time. She and I started to see each other a bit, socially at first and then more romantically. Again this was a situation where my response was not helping the situation, I’m sure it actually led her on quite a bit and for that I wish I could apologize to her.
But here I was juggling the relationships with two women, agreeing to go into a teaching and encouraging position without guidance from the one Source that I should have been looking at first and generally making a buffoon of myself.
During the training period in Baltimore I was able to immerse myself in the fellowship, worship and teaching that was going on but once out on my own, once again in Belize, I became Jonah, cowering and running from God, trying to decide best what was the good plan for my life. With these actions, I ruined a possible rewarding and growth experience for five other people, possibly alienating them from all of the richness that God has in store for them, I can only hope and pray that God was able to bring all of them past me.
Added to those frustrations were the long talk with Cheryl in which she informed me that though she wished she did, she was not able to reciprocate my feelings, and letters from Johanna letting me know all of the ways that I was breaking her heart. All of this devastation because I was walking in my own strength. On top of that, because of my wrong direction, I was concentrated on assigning blame for all that was wrong on God and not me, so this worked to build up bitterness in my soul that was eating away at me.
Once I got back from this trip, I was plunged back into my family’s condition and this increased my issues by again putting me into a downward spiral. To run this time I ended up going into the Army and again demonstrating my ability to run away from the reality in a situation. I ended up at Fort Campbell in Kentucky after my basic training was over. While I was there I ended up falling into the routine of everyone else that I socialized with in my company. I was running around chasing the wild nights of a single serviceman, every once in a while I would get a little twinge to remind me of the life that I was once a part of but I managed to drown that out in the midst of the loud music and alcohol.
While running around I happened to meet another young lady named Heather. We ended up seeing each other on a regular basis and finally moving in together. In the midst of this whole scene, she became pregnant and while I was out on a maneuver she had an abortion. I didn’t know exactly how to feel about it at the time because I had always been under the impression that though I disagreed with abortion, I was quite enlightened in allowing the woman to make the final decision because it as it is her body. After being on the inside of this situation I can tell you honestly that this is the last thing that you ever want to do. I was given no choice in the situation but afterwards I felt as if a part of me was killed. I can still hear the voice of regret in my sleep to this day. Besides the grief that is going on, there are many other issues that you never think of as side effects of this murder. I think that after this incident I was not able to really be close with my then girlfriend.
For some reason, even after all of this, we still ended up getting married. Why? I will never know, that was one of the most wrong decisions I have ever made in my life. We were married for four years, during that time we had a little boy, named Liam Christian that is now living with Muscular Dystrophy as well as no father. When I got out of the Army there was a brief time of being reconnected to the church but there were so many problems that we continued to drift apart and ended in divorce.
During that time of being reconnected, I even served as a youth pastor in a United Methodist Church, but, because of financial reasons we had to leave the area and that position, which broke my heart and ended up taking me deeper into broken-heartedness and away from the Christian walk that I knew as being the place that I needed to be.
I ended up falling into another single situation, this time in the casinos in Mississippi, near Memphis. This time, in addition to my other worldly pursuits I could add gambling. And of course, having the run of eleven different casinos, I made quite a fool of myself. I ended up running home to Pennsylvania, by this time my parents had gotten a divorce after twenty-two years of marriage and I spent my time living between both of their homes as well as hearing their ranting about each other.
Then I got a job waiting tables and bartending. This was such a great step up for my spiritual well being, the carousing started again, the drinking, all of the old weaknesses, as well as the various debts being accumulated between my divorce and other bills I was working up.
While bartending I ended up making friends with a guy named Seamus, and starting to hang around with his family, I ended up with a job at a lumber and building materials buying group, in the marketing department. It was here that I met someone named Margaret. Margaret and I ended up talking to each other on the phone for hours every night and then visiting every weekend until finally I moved to Connecticut so we could be together.
See her family owns a solid business in Ridgefield, Connecticut. They are a member of the buying group that I was employed by at the time. We ended up living together for quite some time and then finally getting married. Of course all of this is going on while I am ‘backslidden’.
Because of our differing backgrounds, outlooks and situations, the marriage quickly made it on to the rocks. To the point where I was told, before she left for a business trip for a weekend, that I had better think on our situation for a long time and decide if I wanted to stay when she came back on Sunday.
I thought hard. I thought back over the times in my life when I was down and when I was up. I realized that, aside from my own issues and attitudes, the only times that I was happy in my life were when I was following Jesus. I suddenly saw all the little nudges that he had been giving me to bring my life back into focus. All the times that though I turned my back on Him, He never left me.
I realized that I knew what I had to do to capture any hope of making my life and marriage worth living and fighting for. I could do nothing good aside from the leading of God. I then rededicated my life to acknowledging what Jesus did on the Cross for me. God loved each of us so much that He sent Jesus to die in my place. I had hope again, hope for my life as well as having hope for my marriage. That hope took quite a shot that Sunday when my wife came home.
As soon as she walked in the door she wanted to know what I had decided. I sat her down and told her about my thoughts and the conclusion that I had come to. Her first question…
“Does this mean that you are going to grow a long beard, wear sandals and a robe?”
Oh, how my hope started to tumble. And then, this time, it caught itself and started to climb again. I talked to her about exactly what I believed in being a Christian and she made claims that none of that was necessary and that as long as my religion did not interfere with her life she was fine with it.
Well, this started another journey in my growth. I studied on my own and prayed on my own. It came to the suggestion of us starting to go to church, I was told that I could look around, decide on one and then we would go to that one. After looking in my town and finding nothing that taught sound biblical teaching, I searched in the next town over. I found something great there and when I went back and started talking about this church I was told that she had enough of my looking around. Her family had supported one church in our town forever and her parents were still members there, although they had not stepped inside the church in twenty-five years. So ended my search for a church for us. I applied myself to studying on my own and kept praying for change.
Well things have gone on at this pace for a while. My wife would throw out biting comments every once in a while attacking my faith and I would try my best to respond in a Christian way. Of course part of the difficulty lies in my inability to be perfect, I would try to be a perfect Christian and of course I would fail. I know now, better then any time before that I am able to surmount these mishaps and continue to grow without tumbling down but when I am under the magnifying glass, every one of my mistakes is brought to the light and thrown in my face and she is not willing to hear my sorrow for my mistakes. I broke down to the point of asking God just to send other people into her life to be able to tell her about His kingdom because she wasn’t willing to hear anything from me.
We were proceeding along this line until Extreme Home Makeover came to Connecticut. My wife ended up getting involved in the project and started telling me about these Christians that she met and how their actions were affecting her. Finally, as I am driving home from work she calls me to tell me that she wants to go to church, after almost running my car into a ditch next to the highway. I hear the story of how this came about. She then tells me the name of the church and that it is in Fairfield, Connecticut. I am of course overjoyed to hear all of this and am looking forward to attending this church. Now I have all kind of people praying for her and she is getting so much closer. God’s timing is not ours. His is perfect, ours is not.
I can apply those words to my own life as well as my wife’s. All of this time that I have been wandering in and out of the desert; He has been there whether I realized it or ignored it. Now, finally, I can see clearer then ever before, God does have so much in store for me, all I have to do is ask and He will be a shield and my strength. I don’t know why this is only so clear now and not before. Maybe, I never really accepted Him before? I don’t know the answer, and you know what? It’s not important; He is working in me now. That is the part that is important.
And my hope and prayer is that He is working in each of you that read this as well. Let me know and I will answer comments as I can.
In Christ,Sean