"And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death." Revelation 12:11
I was born in Santa Monica, California on July 29th, 1956. My sister, Sandra (two years younger), and I lived with our mother until approximately 1959. My dad and mom divorced when I was about 2 or 3 years old. At some point around 1960 my sister and I spent about a year or so living in foster homes until my dad won custody of us. I'm not real clear about all the details concerning these events because I was pretty young at the time. I also have some sketchy recollections of having spent some time with my grandparents during these years. My grandparents were very important to my sister and me as we were growing up.
My dad won custody of us just before Christmas in 1961 (at least I think that's when it was). One of the first memories I have after coming to live with my dad was our first Christmas. I don't even know if I knew there was a Christmas before that. Anyway, when I got up that Christmas morning and walked into the living room, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven! The whole place was filled with toys! I was almost afraid to touch them, because I knew they couldn't be mine. But sure enough, a number of them were. The rest were my sister's.
My new stepmom's name was Mary Ann. It didn't take me long to realize how much I loved her. She was everything a person could want in a Mom. In fact, I started calling her Mom almost right away. You wouldn't have known she was a stepmother, the way she treated us. She punished us when we needed it, but I always knew how much she loved us. The next two and a half years were, no doubt, the happiest years of my childhood, notwithstanding her two other children, Tom & Jerry, who were my teenage stepbrother and stepsister respectively. Now they fit the stereotype when it comes to step siblings. That means they were mean! But not always. So I suppose, in a way, they were no different than are regular older brothers and sisters.
Now this next event is probably one of the most profoundly pivotal points in all my childhood. One day in early 1964, on a Friday afternoon, after we got out of school, we (my sister and I) went to visit my grandparents for the weekend. This was not unusual, because we loved visiting our grandparents and we did that quite often on weekends. We would come back on Sunday afternoon so we could get a good night's sleep at home before we went back to school the next Monday morning. We were always sort of reluctant to go back home, but at the same time we were anxious to tell Mom and Dad what a wonderful time we'd had. But, when we got home that particular Sunday afternoon, as we excitedly piled out of the old 1941 DeSoto, we were in for a staggering shock.
When we walked in our house, we noticed the place was almost empty! A lot of the furniture was gone. Almost all the pictures on the walls were gone. Tommy and Jerry's rooms were both empty. And Mom wasn't anywhere to be found! I didn't know what to think. When I finally asked my dad what had happened, he just said she had left and she wasn't going to come back. He might as well have torn my heart out and fed it to the dog that very moment, because it would have been a whole lot less painful. My sister and I cried ourselves to sleep that night, and I don't know to this day if I've ever completely gotten over it. I mean, I've forgiven her, but the pain is still palpable.
Well, the rest of my childhood and adolescence went about as you'd expect. My grandmother took care of us for a while (between stepmothers). My Aunt Marge (who was my dad's brother's widow) became our stepmother for a while, but it didn't last long, and she wasn't a very good mother (having never been one before). Then my dad married my present stepmother who was also new at the mothering business. We got along fine until she had two children of her own, and then we (my sister and I) felt like spare parts that weren't really needed or wanted.
I suppose in order to get attention I started behaving badly about the time I turned 13. I was eventually arrested for burglary and spent a couple of days in Juvenile Hall. Fortunately, that embarrassed me sufficiently that I managed to stay out of trouble from then on. If they only knew how much I had "gotten away" with, they would have locked me up and thrown away the key!
I think one of the things that helped keep me out of trouble when I was a teenager was a place called the Braille Institute in Anaheim, California. Because I'm legally blind, I qualified for their services. They always had fun activities planned for the weekends during the school year, and a summer program that kept me busy almost every day but Sunday. They had summer camps, sports car rallies, backpacking and river rafting trips, and all sorts of games and arts and crafts during the week. To me, it was more like home than home was.
My sister wasn't as fortunate as me in that sense. She got heavily involved in drugs and the counter-culture of the early seventies until she became a "Jesus person" at about the age of 15. Although I didn't appreciate it at the time, that was the first time I had ever seen, first hand, someone's life dramatically change for the better because of an experience they'd had with Jesus. A few years earlier, about the time I did my stint in Juvenile Hall, in fact it might have been the Sunday before that, I answered an alter call, and "gave my heart to Jesus" at the Bethel Baptist Church in, I think it might have been, Garden Grove, California. But I didn't really understand what I was doing, so the experience didn't last very long. But here my sister was, a radically changed person, all because of Jesus. That did make an impression on me.
Anyway, I left home right after I graduated from high school and moved to Albany, California where I attended a school called the Orientation Center for the Blind. I had heard some interesting stories from friends of mine who had attended that school, so it seemed like it might be a good stepping stone, at least to get away from home, and then on to college. I knew my stepmother was getting anxious for me to start my own life and get out of hers. I was only too willing to oblige.
The purpose of OCB (Orientation Center for the Blind) was to teach us blind people how to function as independently as possible as blind people in a "sighted" world. They did a pretty good job of that, but some of us younger folks got an extra-curricular education there that we, no doubt, would have been better off without. The dorm was, for all intents and purposes, co-ed, so a lot of us lost our virtue there, and I was no exception.
After OCB, I started my college education at the College of Alameda in (of course) Alameda, California. After the first quarter, though, I decided I couldn't hack it, because I was "in love" with a girl I had met at OCB and I didn't have a clue where college was going to lead me career-wise and I didn't want to wait long enough to find out. I wanted to have a date certain to know when I could start making a living so that, in my mind, I could qualify to ask my girlfriend's parents if I could have her hand in marriage. I knew they wouldn't agree unless I could support her, and I didn't relish the thought of marrying her without her parents' consent.
After some investigation, I found out about a program where I could learn to be a psychiatric technician in one year. I would learn to work with the developmentally disabled and/or with the mentally ill, probably in a state hospital setting. The pay was reasonably good, so I decided to do it. But, before I even started that program, my girlfriend broke up with me. It seems she was still in love with the boy she was going with before we met, and I was too intense for her. Of course, that tore me to pieces, but the dye was already cast, and a year later I became a psychiatric technician.
The first ward I worked on, at Napa State Hospital, was a children's unit. I worked with mentally disturbed children, not much younger than myself. They were, in fact, all teenagers, but psychologically they had never matured past childhood. One of my co-workers was a man named George. He was in the class ahead of me, and he was really good with the patients. It was obvious that he really cared for them, and they readily returned his affection. I wanted to be just like him. I never quite managed to accomplish that, but nonetheless he taught me a lot about how to relate to "problem" children in a positive way. He only worked there for about six months before he got tired of the system and went back to work with his father in carpentry.
Many times when I would have a three day weekend (which was every fifth and sixth week), I would go spend it with him and his family. He had a very interesting household. They ran it kind of like a commune. It was a big house, and lots of people lived there besides his family. The door was always open. You never had to knock. There was always somebody visiting, and you were welcome to stay there as long as you wanted as long as you didn't mind sleeping on the floor or on the couch. I felt very much like a part of the family.
One thing that struck me as kind of strange about this family was that they were Christians. But they were not like any other Christians I'd ever met. Another funny thing about them was that they went to church on Saturday instead of Sunday.
At the time, George was very much into bicycling, as was I, though for me it wasn't so much for fun as it was a necessity, since I can't see well enough to drive (technically I can with the right low vision aids, but I wouldn't recommend that anyone else be on the road if I did!). Anyway, George agreed to build me a bicycle using a really nice Italian frame and some name brand gear that he had at his house. It seemed like it took forever, but really it was only a couple of months before he delivered it to me at work.
My next weekend off I determined I was going to ride to his house (instead of taking the bus). Jerry (George's wife) gave me detailed instructions on how to get there, but I took a wrong turn at a certain juncture and rode several miles out of my way, up hill! When I turned around to get back on course, I got going too fast and ended up locking my brakes, flying over my handle bar and busting my head open in the gravel on the side of the road. Someone in a station wagon had mercy on me and took me to a hospital in Napa where unfortunately I had no insurance. About an hour later, I arrived by ambulance at another hospital in Vallejo where I did have insurance. Twenty-seven stitches and a day later, Jerry came and picked me up and took me to their house to recover.
At some point during my stay there, Jerry and I started talking about something not entirely unrelated to the gospel: what to look for in a good marriage partner. As we talked, I kept asking questions, but before we were done, she had told me the whole story of creation, the fall of Lucifer, the fall of man, why Jesus had to die, and the rest of the plan of redemption. I had never heard it all put together like that before. Finally I asked her what I had to do to be saved. She asked me if I believed that Jesus is who He says He is and that he died for my sins. I said "of course." Then she said, "You're a Christian." Now I don't know if those were the exact words we said, but it was something very similar to that. That happened about a week or two after Elvis died in August of 1977.
Since that time, I've learned a lot more about what the gospel means, in terms of how to co-operate with Jesus, and forgiving others, and the importance of overcoming sin, but I believe from that day in August, 1977, my name has been written in the Lamb's book of life. Praise His Holy name.
