The Path of Purpose Part 1 - Salvation Comes

Okay...
The last time I wrote I alluded to something that I was doing that could easily be 'watermarked' with the word 'Purpose'.
This blog after all is entitled 'A Life of Purpose'.
For me to properly describe what I have been doing I need to give you some background.
The year 2000 was a momentous year in my life. It was in that year that I heard the voice of God. I hear you mock...and mock you may but you are not me and you don't have my ears!
I know what I heard!
You know the most powerful thing we have to share with one another is our own stories. Our own stories tell everything about us because it is in those stories we can unearth our world views, our programming, the things we believe.
Now my birth was uneventful (at least I don't remember much about about it...perhaps it was pretty eventful for my dear old Mum!) but one thing that was eventful was that I was born into a family that attended a church, well you would call it a church, we called it the meeting.
This place was the meeting venue for people who had the desire to share their faith with anybody who came through the door.
I came through the door, not by choice but by virtue of my birth.
Now from my earliest recollection I was told that I needed to believe in Jesus Christ and if I didn't I risked the certain end of the hellfire of separation from God forever. I was very convinced that I didn't want to be separated from God because hell didn't sound very appealing to me.
Look quite frankly I was afraid and when I was about eight years of age I made a decision that I didn't want to risk it and so I chose to believe in Jesus.
Now over the next maybe ten or so years I made that same decision again at least once, and maybe more times. I tell you that to convey the idea that maybe there was something lacking in my decision. Well actually maybe that's not quite correct, maybe there wasn't anything lacking in the decision, the decision was sound, but my execution of the decision or more precisely my understanding of the truth of it seriously lacked.
Now I want to make the point that I was never told that God speaks to us in the 20th century as it was then. You see 'speaking' necessarily suggests relationship and I knew nothing about relationship with God.
I tried hard to live up to the life that the church, sorry meeting, said I should but I failed miserably. I was on a rollercoaster and the ride was very rough.
No relationship, nowhere to go with my real questions, no real connection, struggle, struggle, struggle...this was the truth of my life.
Oh if you had looked at me in the context of my life in the 'meeting' at that time you would have thought, Wow! that guy has got it together even if you thought I was a little wierd.
If you had seen me in the context of my life away from the 'meeting' you would have been confused, especially if you had the capacity to see me in both my 'lives' at the same time.
This conflict of lives was my big problem because deep in my heart I knew that what I was amounted to no more than hypocrisy.
For me this hypocrisy showed itself in me as immense frustration and dissatisfaction, and I had no one with whom to talk about it.
Now what to do? I took the brave man's approach and ran away.
I went overseas and stepped off my life as I knew it and stepped into another.
My life was a sham, I believed (or so I said) in a God with whom I had no relationship and who I thought would certainly not consider me as I had no worthiness before a God who gave me a list of rules that I had no possibility of achieving.
In hindsight I have to tell you that despite all I have just shared I actually stepped on a road that ever so slowly was heading downhill. You see despite my frustrations hidden in all my struggle truth waited to be found.
Now the gap between that and the year 2000 was about fifteen years.
2000. I was married for the second time. I was effectively an alcoholic. I had achieved nothing and I was nothing. I did have two children, one I had inherited and one I had fathered and even my fatherhood was seriously deficient.
One day I had a 'feeling'. My children needed for someone to tell them about Jesus. I wasn't going to tell them because I didn't know who Jesus was so I had to get someone else to do it. A friend gave me the name of the Children's Pastor of a church. I rang him and told him what I wanted to do and he was helpful. He then asked a stupid question, he said "...and will you be going to Church also?" Me? Are you joking? No way on the planet was my blunt reply.
He took that response well and we agreed that I would bring my children to him the following Sunday.
I didn't.
Five weeks later I arrived at the forecourt of the church which met in a school auditorium.
Now if I spoke to you on the phone yesterday, especially if the call was rather 'random', it is very unlikely that I would remember you.
So five weeks after this 'random' phone call I arrived with my children at the church and through the people waiting outside the church came a man striding as if he had a bus to catch.
He walked straight to me, thrust out his hand and said my name.
I was stunned.
Now you may not consider especially dramatic but I was stunned and this is my story.
While we got my two children into their various Kid's Church classes I was travelling in a state of bemused shock.
What to do?
Ummm...I better go in and see what this is all about...something wierd here, how did he remember?
I sat in the back. The pastor preached. No big deal.
Next Sunday found me sitting in the same seat.
I'm sitting there. No one sat anywhere near me but a voice spoke to me.
The voice said this...
"I will restore the years the locusts have eaten."
Now you think about that for a while and I'll get back to you...