Positioned for Purpose

It was warm sunny day in a small West Texas town. I was four to five years old at the time according to the story my mother shared with my wife Lou Ann shortly after we entered the ministry forty-five years later. I had been to the Methodist church with my maternal grandparents for an Easter Sunday service. I sat between the two of them eating hard candy that my Granddad seemed to have an unending supply of in his pockets. I loved spending time with them and realized later my new life in Christ was birthed through their prayers and love of God. My Granddad was quite a character who loved telling me stories about cowboys and Indians. His passion besides his family was trading horses and cattle; so much of my childhood was spent in livestock auctions. He seemed he always had a horse he wanted try to see if it was really “kid broke “. Often we saddle our horse and go on long rides with storytelling along the way. These stories were so vivid that they became reality in the mind of a young child. Sometimes we were on the trail after some bad guys or riding as fast as we could try to outrun the Apache Indians that were chasing us in order to scalp us. These times with him stirred up the “natural gift “in me to rodeo, trade horses and cattle.
Back to that Spring afternoon a few weeks after Easter. I had a fresh batch of six-week old puppies, so I put them in my American Flyer red wagon and parked it under the elm tree in my backyard. I then perched myself on a wooden box I found in the garage and began to preach with the fervor of a Pentecostal preacher as my mom listened and laughed out of my sight.
I wish I could say that Easter Sunday changed my life so dramatically, that I had gotten saved, went through school and into the ministry, but my life for many years was far from that. My parents gave me everything I desired being an only child. My dad who had a very dysfunctional life growing up, and was unchurched; therefore church became a very foreign thing to me. Our Sunday’s were consumed with hunting, working on projects around the home or playing golf at the country club. My mother on the other hand was raised in a very Godly home, later I found out that she was saved as young child at a Christmas Eve service. I was raised with the notion that some went to church and some didn’t and we were the family that didn’t. I became a very rebellious teenager, getting in trouble constantly in school at home. My weekends were consumed with heavy drinking, that eventually led to my drinking alcohol that I had taken from my father’s liquor cabinet and poured a mason fruit jar, before my first high school class. I graduated by the skin of my teeth, actually I think my principle gave me a diploma just to get rid of me. I went away to college and freedom to live my life outside any parental control. I remember filling out college forms, and when asked what religion I was. The fact was I never thought about being any certain religion, so I checked the only one I had heard of; Christian. My only desire for college was to rodeo and party. If you could have received a grade for those I would have made an A+. The first semester I got kicked out for selling liquor on campus to an underground policeman. I went on to two more colleges and my life seemed to drift further down the tube. I never ever thought about God or whether there was a God or even if He existed. The only mental image I had of Jesus was the baby who had seen in the manger in nativity scenes at Christmas. For some unknown reason I hated church or anyone that went to church, until I had a God encounter in 1972 when my life was so messed up, I felt I had no way out. I was so miserable inwardly that I cried out to God one night, not even knowing if there was a God and asked Him to change my life, because I had failed every time I tried. That night lying on my bed in a ranch house in the bottom of a canyon, God begin to show me how me how rebellious I had been my entire life. I began to cry out asking God to forgive me for all the bad things I had done and for all the people I had hurt. I recall walking out of my house the next morning seeing my friends saddling their horses to help me work cattle that day. I stopped and set down on the fenders of my trailer out of sight from my friends and said “ God I cannot change my life, so our deal is off. “ God had done something supernatural that night, He changed my life and I’ve never been the same since. A Mexican man who worked for me asked after I had been kicked and run over several times by the cattle “ what’s the matter with you, you no gettee mad no more. “ I realized then that I all the hate and rage I had inside me had gone along with the desire to do quit the lifestyle that was destroying my life. I had no knowledge of the Bible or God so I called the only preacher I knew, one that I had ridiculed and cussed on numerous occasions and told him I needed to talk. I knew from the very beginning that God had a call upon my life to preach the gospel, but I wanted to ignore it and finally agreed under my terms which would be lead Bible studies in our home. Finally in 1999 some forty five years after I preached to those puppies, I said “God, I want to fulfill the purpose and destiny that You have for me.” Purpose is defined as the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.