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TESTIMONIES
What has your Lord done for you? What
does the Roundtable mean to you, or what have you learned from the Holy
Spirit through other men? Here's an offer you can't refuse! Write up a
paragraph or two of your own answers to these questions and send it to
roundtableministries@gmail.com
or e-mail or call 360-779-3837 for a short interview!
See below: John Denend, Jim Dempsey,
REVISED: Dave Harris' cousins eating dog food! And yet
another perspective.
I
am a walking miracle who used to think I was the luckiest man in the
world! I will be 58 years old this year and the folks I used to know
never thought I would make it past 25.
I grew up in a religious home but did
not know Jesus. At 17 I wanted to get out from under my strict father’s
thumb and away from people telling me what to do so I joined the Navy.
It made sense at the time.
In the military I discovered
prostitutes, motorcycles, alcohol, and drugs. I also became very
skilled as a Morse code transcriber, technical writer, and reporter with
a top secret security clearance. I was able to party wildly at night and
still function at my job the next day. For years I considered myself
the luckiest man in the world. Following a drug smuggling arrest in
Japan, I lost my top secret security clearance and wound up finishing
concrete in the Seabees. While on leave I was riding my motorcycle and
was rear-ended by a car traveling at one hundred plus miles per hour. I
was found 357 feet from the point of impact by the state patrol and
walked away from the hospital that night with only a headache. The
stories from these years of my life are seemingly endless. Time and
time again my life was spared from certain disaster stemming from my own
indulgences. A dozen car wrecks, several motorcycle wrecks, the drug
smuggling bust in Japan that almost put me in Japanese prison, a drug
bust in the U.S. that did put me in jail, and I still felt like the
luckiest man in the world. I added cocaine to my list of addictions.
The drugs, alcohol, motorcycles, and women gave me happiness for a time.
After years of this lifestyle and time
with a motorcycle gang, I came to Puget Sound as an alcoholic, drug
addicted biker with a bad attitude. Finally, after 18 years of that life
and a second round of in-patient treatment for cocaine and alcohol
addiction I began to wonder if there was a better life to be found. My
brother was involved in a church at that time, regularly attempting to
get me to join him on Sunday mornings all to no avail until a trumpet
player I enjoyed came to town in an evangelist’s band. I was willing to
attend a Christian concert in order to hear the trumpeter. At the
concert I heard that Jesus Christ had paid the price and taken the
penalty for all of the wrong decisions I had made. I had heard all this
before but never really listened and applied it to myself. I wasn’t sure
about all the details of Christianity but I found myself running to the
altar to seek forgiveness. Some guy stepped out into the aisle in front
of me and I never found out whether he intended to go the altar or not,
but that’s where he ended up because I pushed him all the way to the
front since he was in my way.
For the next year I rode the fence and
struggled with wanting to hold onto my life apart from God and wanting
at the same time to follow Him. It was difficult to consider losing all
my “friends” and starting over. I was singing in the choir on Sunday
and injecting cocaine and smoking marijuana during the week.
About this time the Lord brought Becky,
who soon after became my wife, into the picture! Becky committed her
life to Jesus shortly after meeting me. Three months after we were
married, she confronted me about my life and gave me an ultimatum, her
or my addictions. I chose Becky and sought God’s help and hers to leave
the drugs and alcohol behind. I have now been clean and sober for 21
years!
Praise God! Within the first year of
our marriage, I went from bachelor to father to grandfather. Becky’s
daughter had gotten married shortly after us and had her first child.
I now know I was never the “luckiest
man in the world.” God was watching over my life whether I always wanted
him to or not.
2 Corinthians 5:17 – If anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
Psalm 40:1-3 – I waited patiently for
the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the
slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me
a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise
to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.
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COUSINS EATING DOG FOOD?
Hi, I'm Dave Harris,
retired civilian public affairs guy from the Army Corps of Engineers,
click here*, and
from military duty with the Air Force. I've served in California, Japan,
Korea, Denver, Indianapolis, Italy, Germany, Spokane, Seattle and Saudi Arabia.
Everywhere I went I found a group of men from various denominations who
worshiped the same Lord and encouraged me in spite of a number of
troubles along the way. I relate some of of my experiences in a book I
wrote, Treasure Trove in Passing Vessels - Ordinary People Leading
Intriguing Lives -
click here.
REVISED:
When others told of addictions,
abuse and depravity and how Jesus miraculously transformed their lives,
I felt like Christian-Lightweight. I came from a Christian family, and
my testimony was pretty tame by comparison—not worth writing home about
or buying a bus and sharing it on the road—nothing spectacular.
Oh, I suppose if a child of God dug
deep enough into the past, one could dredge up a bank robber, gangster
or certainly a handful of petty thieves.
As it turned out, the seedy side of
life was closer than I thought. And the Lord still uses my 87-year-old
mother to open spiritually blind eyes in the family.
Mom’s sister lost her husband to
cancer, what, 50-plus years ago. Up until then, Mom’s Sis and her
husband, Jack, kept close, making hand-crafted lamps and toys to give to
their nephews and nieces. But after Jack died, Mom lost track of Sis and
her three small children.
Recently, through the wonder of the Internet, Mom first found her
brother, Buster, who knew where Sis was in Florida. Mom visited both and
found Buster warm and talkative, but on a separate visit to Sis, the
atmosphere was strangely cold. Sis never invited Mom into her townhouse
and had them sit outside to talk. Mom left without hearing much about
Sis’s life or her kids.
Since then, two of those kids noticed Mom’s letters with address and
phone number at Sis’s house, and they struck up relationships with Mom,
who would write back and talk at length on the phone.
“I never realized how wicked my
sister was,” she told me after
reading the latest letter from Sis’s eldest daughter. “Sis kept telling
her daughter that it was her fault her dad died. If the other children
misbehaved, the eldest got beaten. She told of other unspeakable abuse
by Sis and those around her. On several occasions, Sis left the three
children alone for three days or more with no food. The eldest was only
8. One day the youngest started eating dog food during one of those
lonely abandonments, and so the other children followed suit. At one
point Sis left the children with friends for two years. Ultimately the
couple adopted one or more of the children and gave them a hint of a
normal life.
Sis even beat her mother bloody. Mom
and Sis's mother, on the other hand, never beat her children; however, she was verbally abusive and
ultimately died an alcoholic. But
shortly after Mom recovered from tuberculosis in her teen years, she
found Christ at the Children’s Gospel Mission in Minneapolis. Her mother
essentially kicked Mom out of the house, saying she was “holier than
thou.”
In God's providential plan, he sent
Dad into Mom’s life in her early twenties. Dad had grown up seeing his
mother and dad on their knees in front of easy chairs in the living room
as they raised their nine children and saw each come to the Lord.
When I learned about the abuse in Mom’s family, tears welled up as I
thought, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
The contrast of the God-bathed life
of Mom and the tortuous lives of her sister and children is staggering.
Now I see, more than ever before,
how God’s powerful hand was on me for generations—how he preserved me
and saved me and gave me a godly family.
As the song says, when Jesus endured agony on the cruel Cross, “I was on
His mind.”
God took hold of my life years ago, but I never this vividly appreciated
the miracle of God in my life.
Until now.
ADDENDUM, 2-6-2006: O, me -
another perspective
*P.S. If you have the time, you can
read two recent articles I submitted to the Corps of Engineers'
Flagship, the employee magazine. They take extra seconds to
download:
Click here (look for page 3)
and
here (page 10)
Reading time with
Granddaughter Austin?!
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