Love and Truth, C.C.

Receiving my first Bible as a going away gift, I boarded the plane and flew to the Philippine Islands. I was nineteen years old with more than two years served in the Navy. I was going to finish my time and return to the land of plenty.

Reading the Bible became my habit. It brought me to tears once while reading one of the accounts of the transfiguration. Something was very attractive. However, there remained a big obstacle in my path. Months had passed, it was now approximately forty days before Easter. My religious training told me I had to give up something that I liked, as a sort of sacrifice, a suffering. Then after forty days I would take it back up. When I was younger, I gave up a particular type of candy. Once I tried to give up meat, but my mother forbade it. I was reading the Bible, being drawn to the person I saw portrayed, but my religion told me that I had to do certain things. I was in a dilemma. I had to give something up. Giving up candy was easy, but I was a man now, and I had to be serious. I knew it was my life of sin that I had to forsake. Yet, that was my best enjoyment. “Okay, I will figure this out. What is the big picture here?” My religion says that if I were lucky enough to die on the day that I “made confession” (telling one's sins to a priest), I would go to heaven. By the next day certain small sins would come in to send me to purgatory (a temporary place of suffering in my understanding, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years). By the third day, exposed by my freshly read Bible, I was an adulterer in my heart. I was going straight to hell for eternity. I had a problem. I did not want to burn for eternity, but I could not keep the law, especially as revealed in Matthew 5. If I “confessed” twice a year, and I was lucky enough to die on that same day, maybe I could go to heaven. That's two chances in 365. If I died the following day, I had two chances of going to purgatory. There remained 361 days to go to hell each year. With the mathematics staring me in the face, I went to town and got drunk. That year, in 1968, I gave up my Catholic faith for Lent.

This was an enormous event in my life. I was now free to live and die. I was going to burn away. I finished my time in the Navy, returned to my home town, worked and went to college. I graduated, could not find a real job, was destitute, I prayed.

It seemed that everything I tried came short, very short, of satisfying my inward being. I always found a “dark side” to the things that once charmed me. They were not true. Whenever I loved someone, I realized I had a motive. That was not love, and for sure no one loved me; my life was in chaos. While reading a book, I found a prayer; I prayed it sincerely. My prayer was to God, the one and true God, if indeed One existed. I doubted. Within a few weeks, a man appeared at my door and asked me, “What do you want?” I told him that I wanted two things only: love and truth. With this I would be satisfied. I challenged him. He said he could deliver, again I strongly doubted. He began to tell me about Jesus of whom I read in the Bible, that I had long ago put away. During the next three weeks we met and he took me to a friend's house where they had weekly Bible studies. Again I was attracted. I found myself believing that one day I would believe and become a Christian. After a Bible study, on the drive home, I reached into the future and seized that believing day and made it “today”. I quietly asked Jesus to be my savior. My first rebuke from my new savior came the following day. I had decided to follow only Jesus and forsake meeting with those who led me to Him. “Remain with these brothers for now”, I could sense the inner voice. I got a new Bible and devoured it, reading everything several times. At one point I was going to five meetings weekly. The organized ones were not nearly as enjoyable as the singing ones and the Friday night fellowship on the book of Revelation. I was like a kid out of school, a felon out of prison, a man saved from hell.

There were some conflicts. One pastor heard that some of us were receiving the teachings of another pastor. I thought that he would rejoice that we were seeking the Lord. No, one pastor is enough. The Christian brother I met at work was not welcome; he was the wrong color. In my heart I was very troubled about these things. I read the Bible, I knew that there were no divisions in the body, that Christ was all and in all (Col. 3:11). I longed for a more enlightened group. With every religious group I found disappointment, they embarrassed me with Christianity. I saw shame. Where was the “love and truth”?

Within two years of first believing in the Lord, I was tired of learning week after week about being saved. Okay, I am born already, what next? My fiancé was sharing the same feelings and frustrations. The grand finale of this experience was the Christian nite club. I cannot dwell here as the shame is too great. We would marry soon, the wedding is planned, but that will be our last meeting in that nondenominational place. We decided to renounce organized Christianity and secretly and privately love the Lord, our Eternal Savior.

A few months before this one of our number, was asked to leave the “church” because he was having fellowship with some in another city. He did leave and moved some five hundred miles away. He wanted to share with us his newly found excitement. Several others would also make the long trip to share with us. This would be the last time we would waste our efforts for “love and truth”. Reluctantly, we went to the last meeting of the weekend. There is no font big enough to express the great light that arose in our hearts. The Christian brothers were from the local church in Dallas and they were reading the ministry of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee and they were full of divine gold. They had jewels in their pockets. The secrets of the ages began to be unveiled. Within a month or so we were married. No, we did not go to Arkansas to be alone on our honeymoon, we went to Dallas. We met a new kind of people. We met with those who loved the Lord above all else. Also, they had a different diet, a different constitution. You have heard it said, “You are what you eat.” They were taking John 6:57 seriously. They were living by eating the living bread and drinking the living water (John 6:35).

We stayed in contact and traveled the distance several times. Have you ever sung for five hundred miles? We did! From Dallas to New Orleans, we sang songs because of the well of water welling up (Isaiah 12:3-4, John 4:14)! Eventually, we moved and joined ourselves to the maturing body of Christ. It is now more than 22 years since that move, the glow in our hearts has not dimmed and the songs on our tongues have not silenced. The scenery in the Bible gets more and more beautiful as we continue to eat and drink. I wish I had the opportunity to tell you of all the conferences we went to, of all the truth we heard pour out of the little humble person of Witness Lee. I enjoy reading his writings and I continue to stretch forward with those who “...pursue toward the goal for the prize to which God in Christ Jesus has called me....”(Philippians 3:14).