A Sheltered Life

I was not on a mission for God, just a broke young Englishman stranded in the American Southwest. I had made it to the New Mexico-Texas border but ended up standing in the blazing sun for hours. Cars sped by, but none stopped. As the hours passed, I was getting more and more tired, so I left the highway and walked to a store. I wearily looked through a telephone directory and called the first church I could find, asking. whoever answered the phone if he could help me find shelter. The man told me I was welcome to sleep on the church floor, but I would have to walk there—a distance of about five miles. Needless to say, walking that far on an unknown Texas highway was more than my body or spirit could endure. I thanked him and dejectedly hung up.
Walking back, I saw a restaurant that was about to close for the night. It didn't matter, because I had no money for food. I saw that behind the restaurant there was a storage shed filled with odds and ends, and I looked for something to sleep on. The only thing that looked suitable was a piece of fiberglass, and that was my bed for the night.
I woke up early the next day and headed down the highway again. Soon, a trucker stopped and gave me a ride to Phoenix. By this time, I was starving. Without me asking, the kind trucker shared his sandwiches with me.
Looking back all these years later, I see the Lord's hand in my life. Back then I was just another homeless person on the road, but today I am founder and CEO of Joy Junction, New Mexico's largest emergency homeless shelter. The transformation came through God's grace in my life.

Growing Up in England
My heart pounded as I lay in bed and listened to the muffled, angry voices coming from the living room. My mother and father were arguing again. About what, I did not know. I just knew they were fighting, something they did almost nightly. I was eleven, and I hated listening to my parents' fights. I knew my mother was unhappy living with my wheelchair-bound father, diagnosed several years earlier with multiple sclerosis. On a number of occasions, she acidly told me that if my dad had not been sick, she would have left him. At other times Mom informed me I should be grateful she stuck around to take care of my older brother and me. Lots of parents would not have done that, she said. My mother only married my father because he told her he would apply for a commissioned officer's position in Britain's Royal Air Force. He failed to do so, and now, because of his disability, there was no chance of that. She felt cheated and angry.
As sharp tones filtered through the muffled voices, I focused on the one bright spot on the horizon: I would be leaving for boarding school in a few weeks. Initially, I looked forward to this as an escape, but later it became my own private hell.
At boarding school in Bournemouth, only about an hour's bus ride from my home on England's south coast, I was the routine victim of schoolboy pranks, such as having my bed short sheeted. Days were filled with dread, as I worried about being laughed at for my stammering when asked to give an impromptu answer. If that wasn't enough, there was also the necessity of faking a sickness to escape the perils of hockey games, rugby football, cricket, or cross-country running—all nightmares for my unathletic body, and so much fun for others to laugh at. I didn't seem to fit in anywhere, so I retreated into a world of books, where no one demanded anything from me. This traumatic time was perhaps the beginning of my shutting down emotionally. The pain of being continually taunted by a multitude of pampered and merciless British kids was too much for me to bear.
Ironically, my escape on many weekends was to go back to the home from which I had tried to escape. Perhaps I concluded that the tension at home was somewhat bearable compared to the abject misery I endured at school.
Admittedly, there were a few fun times at school. One early morning, all the kids in my dorm awoke at about two o'clock, buzzing with excitement. The chapel was on fire. Since a destroyed chapel meant no church services in the morning, and maybe for a long time, the kids were elated. These chapel services were extremely boring for me—just something else in my life to be endured rather than enjoyed. The fire and the circumstances surrounding it were the talk of the campus, and did we love what we found out! The word was that the school chaplain had gone for an evening of entertainment in a nearby town. Returning to school (where he lived) in the early hours of the morning, he found the chapel on fire. This hip spiritual adviser had not gone to town dressed in robe and cassock, however. He dressed in full sixties regalia, including a Beatles-style wig and high-heeled boots. Naturally, we all thought this was hilarious. No one talked about anything else for days.
I scarcely remember anything about most of my classes and my professors. There was one very memorable class I attended, however, even though I hated it. It was math class, and my professor, a born-again Christian, is someone I have never forgotten. The last few math lessons of each semester were different. For a treat at the end of each term, this professor asked if we would like him to read to us. Naturally we agreed, even though his choice of books could have been improved (but then, anything beat math!). His readings of choice were evangelical Christian books, usually dramatic life stories about a hero of the Christian faith who had done exciting things for the Lord. While I did not at that time know the Author of the Good Book, the stories were very gripping and easily held my attention.
I took it on myself to argue with this teacher about whether Christianity was relevant to the culture. I was then a vegetarian, and I had read books showing that Jesus didn't eat meat, either. I used those books as weapons to argue with him, and I twisted Scripture in any way I could to persuade him. Instead of falling for my arguments, this godly man responded that the important thing not what Jesus ate but what he had done for me on the cross. I responded by letting my long-suffering instructor know that Christianity was a crutch for old women and the intellectually feeble. How difficult it must have been for this man to deal with my obstinacy. Still, those powerful, end-of-term stories remained with me, as did my memories of this faithful, patient teacher.
I wanted to study sociology, a subject not offered at my boarding school, so I finished the last couple of years of my education living at home again. I still did not fit in. I attended a different school, with different people, but I encountered the same misery. I was desperately lonely and felt like an outsider again. I threw myself into my studies and soon I adopted all the latest sociological buzzwords and phrases into my vocabulary. One such phrase was Karl Marx's well-known saying, "Religion is the opiate of the people."
I remember scoffing at various religious posters I saw plastered around town. I proudly declared, "I am not a Christian. I am an agnostic. You can't tell if there is a God." My mother was bitterly angry about this, but I reasoned that if the Bible was not true (and I had already made up my mind that it was not), then Christianity is false, since the Bible is its foundation.