First Century Christians Did What? (eBook)

Introduction:
My Life and this Book

“Good morning Lord, I love you. Who do you want me to help today?”

I try to say that simple prayer every morning (No, I am not one of these consistent Super Christians). I have been on an excellent adventure for almost fifty years. Like every other human being, I’ve had my ups and downs in life. I’ve learned a couple of simple, basic concepts about what God wants from us. It took me most of my life to understand them. I pray this book will send you in the right direction of enjoying life and God as he intended you, the average person, to live. A lot of heartaches, joys, lessons learned, and successes have produced this book. My one desire is that no matter what your religious background is at the moment, I pray that you will come into a relationship with Jesus Christ. It will make you feel deep down inside; I am what God created me to be. Then, at the end of your life, you can say, like the Apostle Paul, “I have finished my course; I have kept the faith.” This is my story.

In 2001, I was a bus driver for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. One day I was quietly talking to the Lord in my inner soul during a break at work. I was having a mini-crisis in my life, not that I didn’t love my job, because I did, but there was a stirring going on in my soul. I felt I had not achieved or found my life’s purpose. There was more to it, and I knew it. It wasn’t because I wasn’t an active Christian in a local church. I had been everything in a church except a pastor. Yet there still was this thought, Lord; I’m in my forties. Is this all there is? Is there not a challenge out there for me? A restlessness deep in my soul left me unsettled. I felt there was more to the Christian life for me than what I had so far experienced.

My story begins on a small, thirty-acre farm in Wisconsin. My dad was a typewriter repairman, and my mother was a nurse. I was the second of six children, but I was the miracle baby. From my oldest brother to my older sister, I was the only one to survive birth among four pregnancies. I don’t know the details of what happened, but I know I was the one who survived.

Growing up on a farm is a great life with lots of room to roam and have fun as a kid. My life was filled with fun and good times and chores and plenty of work while living out in the countryside. My early memories of growing up on the farm were plenty of fresh food to eat from our garden and the dozens of various kinds of fruit trees, bushes, and vines. We also raised chickens and rabbits and even had a cow at one time. For example, very few people have ever had a chance to get a bucket of apples with their friends, go out into a cornfield, and have an apple fight. Incredibly, late in the year, mushy brown apples lay on the ground. Half-rotted apples were waiting to splattered onto an unsuspecting human being who didn’t see me sneak upon them in the cornfield. Those were my favorite to hit my friends with as they tried running away from me. Smush. It was a great sound as it hit its target on the side of a friend’s head, and there was brown gooey stuff sliding down their faces.

My mom didn’t appreciate the apples on our coats and pants. She gave me a brush as we came in because it was my job to clean up my messes. Neighbor moms called about the messed-up clothes on their kids. Sometimes we weren’t that popular with the other kids’ mothers, but it sure was fun.

However, a kid’s life can drastically change when the reality of life can sink in at any moment in time. A life change happened to me in fifth grade when my mother came home from the doctor and reported a tumor on her nose. I certainly had no idea what that meant, but over the next two-and-a-half years, my mother battled cancer that eventually took her life.

I remember a couple of events from the last summer with Mom. We went camping together up in northern Wisconsin for two weeks in August. Two months after we came home from the camping trip, my mother was gone. Her death coming so quickly after a summer of fun shocked me. Oh, how I wish I could have had those two weeks back so I could enjoy swimming, fishing, camping, and hiking with her all over again. But that was my mom’s way of saying goodbye to the family. My mother took us swimming at one of the lakes so we could play in the sand. She read or sewed while we played during that trip. Later my dad took us fishing, and Mom fried up a meal with fresh-caught fish. They were happy times and beautiful memories. They will always be happy memories for me.

The other great memory was the pain my mother had that last month of her life. I remember her crying and trying to hide it from us as she tried to keep five young ones going in our daily lives. My oldest brother was off to college at the time, so only five of us children were home. My mother tried her best to teach me everything I needed to survive: cooking, ironing, sewing (I even made a shirt), gardening, canning food. She was trying to prepare us for life after she was gone.

But the one thing she taught me that never left me was seeing her faith in God, the Bible, and music. I remember, one morning, coming down from my upstairs bedroom for school. I heard her crying in her bedroom from the pain she was suffering as cancer continued to spread through her head and body. I yelled, “Mom!!!” it tore me up in my soul to hear her cry. She immediately got up, said “Sorry,” and went to the piano. She played her favorite song, which later became one of my favorite songs.

Beautiful Savior

Beautiful Savior, King of creation,

Son of God and Son of Man!

Truly I’d love Thee; truly I’d serve thee,

Light of my soul, my Joy, my Crown

When she finished playing, I could see the pain leave her body as she relaxed, and peace flowed over her. My mom was her usual, smiling self again. She then got us kids ready for school, and off we went. Later in life, I realized that the Holy Spirit gave my mother peace and allowed her to be Mom again, at least for a bit longer. Then the end of September came, and my mother went into the hospital for the last time. A couple of weeks later, she was gone, but I’ve never forgotten the peace and tranquility she had those last few months that she knew were going to be her last.

I was in middle school when my mother died, but life continued to march on. My dad had the job of being a widower and both a mother and father to five children. After middle school, I entered high school. I excelled at sports, especially in football and wrestling, and had many happy high-school memories. But graduation came, and I was off to college to be on my own.

In college, there was a conflict with whom I wanted to be and what I would do with my life. Christianity and the anti-Christianity of a couple of the professors challenged my beliefs. I knew I had to choose between whether the claims of Jesus Christ were valid or not. The one biggie I could never get past, though, was my mother and her faith and my dad and his loyalty to the family. I began to notice a difference between the other students in college who were not Christians and the ones who were believers. I saw how Christians live in real life because they live differently with something inside that drives them to do good. The Christians had that peace my mother had inside of them, too. Finally, halfway through my freshman year, I became a real Christian. I accepted the Lord Jesus as my Savior, a decision I have never regretted throughout my life. Let’s say my life ended up not being ordinary in any way.

After that life-changing decision, it became imperative to transfer to a Christian school. I met my wife there, got married, graduated, and went to Pennsylvania to be a teacher. After one year in Pennsylvania, we moved to Florida. We worked in various start-up churches, taught in Christian schools, had several business adventures, and ended up having seven children. It was not easy to work a job, have a business, balance life and church, and raise four active boys and three young ladies. Somehow, it all worked out despite tons of mistakes and some bad decisions along the way. But I also learned some great spiritual lessons.

The bottom line is, the older I became as a Christian, the simpler I found the Christian life to be. Everything finally came together when I asked this question: Is this all there is? Is there not a challenge out there for me? The Lord answered it, and the most incredible ride of my life began.

Be careful when you say a prayer like, “Is this all there is?”. The Lord answered that prayer in ways we never imagined. My wife and I and our three daughters ended up spending twelve years living in China. We operated an American elementary, middle school, and high school tutoring center for foreigners. They came to work in China, and we gave their children a Western-style education. This book is not about that journey, but I will mention it from time to time.

This book is about how I learned to understand authentic Christianity down to its fundamental foundations; what the early Christians practiced in their daily lives. No matter what Christian group you belong to in this world, you will apply these principles to your daily lives and know the...