In spite of answers to prayer and my grandfather's stories, during my teen years I struggled with whether or not God is real. I also slipped into a state of depression. But change was coming. One day, a man named Brian Ruud spoke at a student assembly in our high school gym. Brian had electric enthusiasm and a blond afro as big as a volleyball. In his testimony, he told how a life of crime and drugs put him in prison. This then led him to a turning point where he surrendered to a higher power.
Finally, he told how the court system released him when fingerprints on a bottle he knew he had handled no longer matched his actual fingerprints. It was the only real evidence the system had against him, so now they released him. Brian concluded that God had miraculously changed his fingerprints!
Ruud's testimony was inspirational and my brother and I told our parents about it. They then took us to see him at First Assembly in Rockford. There we heard his story again, in greater detail, and he openly gave credit to Jesus for saving him.
Not long after, I was leaving our high school when a youth stopped me. He said he was from “The House of Bread,” a coffeehouse at some nearby church. He said to me,
“Jesus Christ changed my life, and he can do the same for you.” He then gave me a copy of “The Cross and the Switchblade,” by David Wilkerson. I read the book straight through, and learned how Wilkerson made a radical decision to leave comfort behind in Pennsylvania, and move to New York to work with street gangs. It was a decision based on only a Life magazine photo and article, and a sense that God was calling him to get involved.
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I was particularly impressed with how Wilkerson made decisions after praying for and receiving guidance from God. He seemed to experience miraculous outcomes from such decisions, and I knew that I desired such a relationship with God, but didn't know how to get it.
Brian Ruud, as he appears on the cover of a book.
These experiences led me to a period in my life where I wrestled with the question of God’s existence. Around this time I read a couple of books. One was by Jeane Dixon, a psychic who predicted President Kennedy’s assassination.
She claimed to be a Christian, but to her Jesus was only a good man with psychic ability. Another book was by Kreskin, a psychic who seemed to demonstrate supernatural abilities on television.
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This caused me to think a lot about the occult realm and ESP. In the end, I reasoned that if anything supernatural was real, then it strongly implied God was real! It only made sense that if one could know anything about the future, read minds, or do anything that defied logic it must be evidence of a powerful intelligence outside our reality. And so it was that I began some rather unusual experiments in an effort to find God. In hindsight, I think this principle was at work: And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13, NKJV) One day when I was in the back seat of our family car as we were returning home from an outing, I prayed and asked God if he could give me a psychic message to prove he was real. Almost immediately, I had the conviction that something was going to go wrong with the car. I spoke up and said, “Something is going to happen to the car!” My mom said, “You’re imagining things!” But less than a block down the road the engine suddenly became very loud and the muffler started dragging on the pavement. We were only three blocks from home and at home my dad was able to reattach the muffler. Still, the experience strengthened my belief that God was real. However, when I reminded my parents that I had foretold something would happen, my mom said I must have heard the car making noises that no one else heard. But I was sure that I had not. I never confessed to my family that I had asked God to speak to me right before it happened.
Proof
For Christmas in my senior year, my parents gave me a copy of the Living New Testament. As I read it, I was drawn to a growing sense that New Testament Christians 29
lived lives rooted in love for God and each other. At the same time, I realized that I was bankrupt in both areas.
Still, I was plagued with doubt. Let’s face it, in our modern culture atheists have made their arguments heard.
But in favor of my hope that God is real were my second grade experiences and my grandfather’s stories. All these things carried weight, but they still did not seem like proof.
As a senior in high school in English Literature class I recall praying silently, “God, I want to believe you are real and that you care about me.”
In those days I loved mathematics, and instead of doing homework spent most of my time working on a variety of mathmatical proofs which never led to success.
There were three that occupied a lot of my time from seventh grade on. They were Wantzel’s Angle Trisection proof, the Four Color Theorem, and Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Thus, at the time it occurred to me that I might also be able to prove the existence of God with randomness and mathematics. So then I became obsessed with running experiments in an effort to prove whether the supernatural realm – and thus God – was real! At first, it was simple tests, asking God for signs and flipping coins. I thought that if God was real, he could speak to me in this way if he chose.
I know that some of you may think I was testing God in a way that he might not approve of, and I apologize and ask your forgiveness in advance, but at the time I simply wanted to know if God was real!
So I began a simple but intriguing test. The immediate goal was to prove there was a supernatural element to reality by creating a situation where God could create an outcome that could be calculated in terms of mathematical odds. I prayed hard because I knew it wouldn’t work if God didn’t cooperate. In the end, it meant using playing cards and I settled on twelve cards. They consisted of face cards except for the Ace of Spades. For the experiment, I could only see the backs of the cards in my 30
hand as I tried to discard all the face cards leaving only the ace. The cards would be shuffled between each attempt. It was a success if only the ace was left.
For many days I was addicted to this game. When my Navy ROTC class took a flight to the Naval base in Pensacola, Florida, I recall spending the entire time on the plane recording results of these tests in a notebook.
The results were disappointing. On rare occasions I would “win” two or three times in a row. That seemed encouraging. By the time our trip was over I had documented more than a thousand hands, but when I averaged the results the average was distressingly close to random chance.
But then one evening I had success by managing to draw the ace last six times in a row. Excited, I called my sister Karen into the room and told her what I had done. She didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, so I dared her to do the same. Almost immediately she beat me by doing it seven times in a row! I believed this to be the proof I was looking for. To draw it six times in a row, followed by seven times seemed impossible. Still, I noticed skepticism taking root in my mind. So even though all the cards seemed identical, I couldn’t rule out the idea that we were subconsciously seeing slight differences in the backs of the cards.
So from that moment on I changed the method. No longer did I fan the cards out, but started splitting the cards into two stacks. With each guess, I would then discard one stack and split the remaining stack, until only one card remained. If that card was the ace, it was a win. In this way, only the backs of two cards were ever visible at any time. I felt this further reduced the chance of subconsciously knowing where the ace was. Still, my goal was the same, to wind up with the ace as the last card.
The next day in the band class at school I told a friend about the amazing results I had seen. It was then that Dan M., a trombone player in our band, said he wanted to try. He had been holding his trombone and laid it down. I said, 31
“Sure!” and proceeded to shuffle. Then I repeatedly split the cards and told Dan to discard a stack until only one card was left. It was the ace! And then he succeeded again and again.
By the time he finally failed he had won eight times in a row without fail!
Dan didn’t seem to think it was all that amazing. So I told Dan that the odds were better than 400 million to one against. And then I got even more precise Since I was into math I had already calculated the odds. I remembered my sister’s odds, so I multiplied those odds in my head and mistakenly told Dan the odds were about 424 million to one. But after borrowing a calculator it turned out the exact odds were very close to 430 million to one!
So let me explain. The chance of winning once is one in 12. To do it twice you multiply 12 times 12 to get odds of 144 to one. Six times in a row had odds of one in 12 to the 6th power, or about one in 3 million! When Karen did it seven times in a row, the odds were 1 in 35 million! So now, the calculator showed the odds were exactly 1 in 429,981,696 to one, or very close to 430 million to one!
But even more amazing, the odds of having three successes in two days with few failures in between – well, I’m not that good at math! Still, if I could have calculated the answer I am sure it would have had so many digits that anyone would have to agree that something supernatural was at work. To me at the time, this meant God was real. Yet still, in spite of believing this was overwhelming evidence, I did not fully surrender to God.
Turning point
Not long after, an emotional crisis came. In Physics class I refused to let anyone help me thread tape through an expensive video recorder. The fragile wire pickups spun around behind a narrow slit. When I let the tape slip through that slit, it wrapped the wire pickups around the spindle.
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Now the expensive video recorder needed to be replaced.
This caused both teachers and peers to ostracize me. A night or two later, in the quiet of my room, I prayed a prayer that went a lot like this:
“Jesus, I'm in a mess and I’m not even sure you're real. I guess I never decided to follow you – at least not like the New Testament Christians. I suppose if you're not real, I have nothing to lose. So here’s the deal. If you can figure out how to show me what you want me to do, I'll do it, no matter what."
Suddenly, something changed. I am not sure what, but the fog of depression instantly lifted and I felt an amazing sense of being loved. Then I drifted off to sleep.
The next morning I woke up feeling great. This was incredibly unusual, and I tried to figure out why. I recall thinking, "It's not my birthday, and it's not Christmas!" It was only then that I remembered my prayer from the night before.
At this point, I began to read the New Testament in earnest. Now it took on a whole new dimension. Instead of just seeing it as ancient history it was as though God was speaking to me personally, challenging my lack of faith and love. I was actually loving no one while Jesus was commanding me to love everyone, even my enemies, with no exceptions. It had an effect. After about two days my sister asked why I was not fighting with her anymore. When I told her about my experience she said, “Well whatever happened to you, I like it!”
Not long after, Mr. Luhman, our band instructor, entered the hospital for tests. Someone in the band announced that after school there would be a prayer session in the band room to pray for him. I made it a point to attend, but was met with resistance. A fellow student said, “I didn’t think you were a Christian!” But immediately, a girl came to my defense saying, “I think he is! I’ve noticed a change in 33
him!” And with that we entered into a time of prayer, and not long after Mr. Luhman returned to his regular class schedule.
The end result of surrendering to Jesus was that I now had a sense of freshness in my life. Before this, I had spent months striving on my own to break free from depression and find purpose. All my best efforts had backfired, while simply surrendering to God did not. •
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