Chapter 5: The Pearl Of Great Price!

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field”

-Matthew 13:44

So, as I was saying everyone referred to my conversion as the biggest night and day change they had ever seen. I didn’t see what the big deal was. I just figured everyone didn’t know the truth and so they hadn’t changed because they didn’t know, so I would tell them. It was that simple. I didn’t know, now I do, so I changed, you can too. I am, of course, an idiot! Most people do know the truth and they refuse to make the change. Why? I’ll never know. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. I wasn’t going to let that stop me. Surely there are those who just need a little inspiring, a little knowledge, a little love, and they will change. And for those I will keep trying. How can you shut up about something so amazing? I couldn’t then and I can’t now. I am so lucky and so blessed, but you can be too. What are you waiting for?

Well, I didn’t shut up. I talked about Jesus to everyone I met. At first I was a little shy, but then I read where Jesus had said “He who denies me before men, him also will I deny before my father in heaven; and he who confesses me before men, him will I confess before my father in heaven.” And I read where Paul said, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel...for it is what saved my soul.” I would rather be a fool in the eyes of men, than a fool in the eyes of God. I didn’t want to be denied by Jesus and I certainly wasn’t ashamed so I didn’t close my mouth to anyone. If the Bible said it, then it was true. If God asked me to do it, then I would. End of discussion. It wasn’t a question. The only question was what exactly does God want ME to do?

As you can imagine my drug friends quickly got tired of me. I thought we were friends, and the drugs were secondary. It turns out our only common interest was the drugs. Once I quit using they didn’t want me around anymore. It was a little hurtful; I’ll have to admit. I was ready to leave anyway. So, in August of 1989 I flew back to live with my family in North Carolina for a while. In the airport in Dallas I saw a guy named James with a guitar. I went up and talked to him. I’ve never really been shy. We ended up talking in the airport and on the plane. We became good friends and still see each other 14 years later. It turns out that he lived a few minutes from where my mother lived. He seemed very interested in what I had to say about God and my experiences.

I spent the next few months detoxing. Man, was that fun! I am being sarcastic. I went cold turkey off of everything. It was hard. I had headaches. I had withdrawals. I had flashbacks and nightmares. Terrible nightmares. I had shakes and every other symptom. I used the time I had to read the whole Bible, Old and New Testaments. My body wanted to get high, but I wouldn’t do it. It was probably easier because I was in a new state and I didn’t have connections.

I know I could have found them if I had wanted to, but instead I used the opportunity to stay away from drugs. I cut all my hair off. It had gotten pretty long again. One of the main reasons I quit getting high, besides the terrible flashbacks, was that I felt very strongly that the rapture would happen any minute. I felt like we were in the end times and it was very, very close. I didn’t want to be high and have to stand before God to give an account of my life and be too high to give a straight answer. Sounds dumb, I know. Either way, it helped me quit.

Do you know the cool thing about doing drugs?

Nothing!

So, whatever my lame reason was to quit. I did. And who do you know who is a better person because they do drugs? Who do you know whose life is improved in the least because of drugs? No one? Exactly! So, I quit. The only way to do it and to do it right is to put it down and never even consider picking it back up again. You walk away and you never look back, never! So, I never did. No matter how bad it hurt or how bad I wanted it, I never did it again. If I can do it, you can too. Any excuse you have to not quit is just that, an excuse to not quit. If you want to, you will. The end. No excuses.

Once I had gotten over the worst of the withdrawals I started realizing that there was a lot more wrong with my life than just drugs. I was a mess. I read in James where it says how can salt water and fresh water come from the same spring? It is impossible! With the same mouth you praise God and you curse men. I realized that I preached all the time, but still had a potty mouth. I didn’t mean to, it was just habit. Well then, it was a habit that I had to break. So I did. I used substitute cuss words instead of real ones and after a while I got used to it. Darn it. I felt the same way about cussing as I did about drugs. You have to put it down and never pick it up again. So, I did. I walked away, forever. No matter what happened I determined within myself to never cuss again, and I haven’t. At the time I am writing this it has been fourteen years with no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, no cussing, and I have only slept with one woman. By the grace of God, not by my own strength.

In AA and NA and any other group that ends in A they tell you that you are always an addict. For the rest of your life they say you are an addict. Part of me believes that. The fact that I know that I could fall again if I let myself keeps me from falling. I know that I have it in me to do terrible things, so I refuse to do them. I know what the far end of that road looks like and what it leads to. I am not interested in going there again, so I keep myself in check. God will never give you more than you can bear, and when we are tempted there will always be a way of escape. And no temptation has fallen you except that which is common to man. If God says it then it is true. So, I believe. When I am tempted, which is every single day, I look for the way of escape and it is always there. It isn’t easy, but it is there. Every time you say yes it gets easier and easier to say yes. No matter what the situation. And every time you say no it gets easier and easier to say no. So, I started saying no, and now it comes without a second thought. At first it took everything I had, now I laugh if someone offers me drugs. Not only do I laugh, everyone around me laughs.

After I conquered all those things I realized that the music that I listened to wasn’t helping me either. It was a hard decision, but I sorted through my music and destroyed about $5,000 worth of posters, tapes, tapestries, T-shirts, mirrors, autographed items, CD’s, etc. I know you are thinking why didn’t you sell it? You could have made so much money! I know. I thought about that too. I couldn’t pass on the curse that had almost killed me, so I took the loss and destroyed all of it. That was hard to do. I loved that music. I held some stuff back that wasn’t that bad, but after a few weeks I threw that away too.

I loved playing the guitar! Loved it! All I knew how to play was satanic music though, so I tried to make up good music. I couldn’t. I wrestled with this one for a while, but I finally decided to give away my guitars, amps, effects, and everything. I doubted I would ever get to play again, and it broke my heart. I guess I figured that if God wanted me to play the guitar that maybe I could play when I got to heaven or something. The point was that I wasn’t going to have anything stand between God and I, and I wasn’t going to keep something around that was killing me. So, I gave it away. Wow! That hurt! I can’t tell you how bad it hurt.

Then there were the dreams and the flashbacks. I had gotten so used to them that I didn’t really think there was any hope of changing them. I had nightmares EVERY night! I’ll give you just a few examples. One night I woke up in my room alone. Everything was where it should have been. I knew I wasn’t sleeping. I laid there in the still of the night for a moment and then I felt a heavy darkness fill the room. It was all around me and on top of me, but not in me. All of the sudden I couldn’t move or speak! I couldn’t cry out! I was paralyzed. I was terrified...again. It was as if a demon had come back to visit me and to scare me. I could feel it in my face. I could feel it breathing. I knew that if I could just breathe the name of Jesus that he would have to leave because the Bible says that if you resist the devil he must flee. But I couldn’t speak. I laid there frozen in fear struggling to speak for about 10 minutes until I finally squeezed it out: “Jesus please help me.” And then the darkness left in an instant. The room was quiet and peaceful. The name of Jesus is powerful; demons run at the mention of his name. Believe me, I know.

Another time I had a demon chasing me all night long. It was trying to kill me with a huge sword. It always seemed to be just a step behind me, but as hard as I ran I couldn’t gain any ground. He was always right there on me. I paced myself and learned to run with longer paces so that I would still run as fast and as far, but I wouldn’t have to move my legs as much. I ran all night long, and I don’t remember if I ever turned around to face my fear. I may have just kept running. I was exhausted when I woke up, but then again I always was.

I had lots of dreams about going back to hell. They were graphic and disturbing. I finally talked to someone about it and they asked if I had prayed about it yet. I had never even considered praying about it. The thought never even crossed my mind. I figured I was legally insane anyway after all the acid and so I would just have to live with it for the rest of my life. But then he told me about a scripture that said God had given us over to a sound mind. So, I believed and I prayed about it and I never had another nightmare. Praise God, he answers prayers!

I did have another dream though. I was asleep in my room. Once again, I woke up and everything was where it should have been. I was definitely awake. I laid there in the stillness for a little while. Then the room lit up like the morning sun, even though it was night still. I looked out my window and there was a cloud right in front of my window. Everything else had fallen away except my room and this cloud outside my window. On the cloud stood three men. The one in the middle was brilliant. I couldn’t see his face because it shone like the sun, but I knew it was Jesus. On either side of him there were two black men in robes and I knew they were angels. I thought it was interesting that they were black men. I felt like it was their reward for having to put up with all the racism and hatred and slavery all these years. They looked at me and called me out of my room because it was time to go home. So, I stepped out with them and we rose up to heaven. Of course I woke up before I ever got there, but I will never forget the amazing peace I felt or the incredible joy to finally be going home! I didn’t give a second thought to anything I was leaving behind; it was pale in comparison to what was ahead. I think that is the first good dream I can ever remember. I will never forget it.

So, I had successfully cleaned up my life in a relatively short amount of time. I had taken my own advice. I had taken the plank out of my own eye so I could see clearly the speck in another’s. What a humbling experience. You should try it sometime. It will make you a lot more understanding of other people’s shortcomings. It will give you mercy and compassion and love for others because you know how hard it is to conquer something that has you in a death grip. But it can be done. Hallelujah, it can be done!

I got sick of sitting around doing nothing. I thought the rapture would have happened by now. I still figured it would come any minute. The Amish have a saying “ Live each day as if Jesus died last week, rose yesterday, and is coming back today. But work like he won’t be back for a thousand years.” I wanted to be the guy that when my master came back he found me doing what he had asked, so I tried. I heard Billy Graham say that no man deserves to hear the gospel twice while another man hasn’t heard it at all. That hit home to me. So, I tried to be a missionary.

I tried every place that I could find and always got the same response. “Kid, go back to school and get your diploma first, then go to college, then seminary, then do some kind of specialized training, and then if you still want to go we’ll put you on a waiting list.” There wasn’t time for all that! And why do you want to educate the fire out of me anyway? I have a desire, a need to tell people about Jesus. Send me! I am willing. Send me! Please, someone send me! Finally, someone sent me. One of my mother’s friends from the Bible study that had prayed for me to get saved was a friend with someone at Jesus People, USA in Chicago. He talked to his friend and they said I could come. I saw the ad for it in a magazine. It said, “Can you fit everything you have in one bag? Yes, you can!” It said more than that, but that was part of it.

I gave away everything else I had and I went. First I flew back to Texas to stay with Bill, the friend of my mother’s, for a week. He encouraged me a lot to be a better Christian. It seemed like everyone I met was helping me to be a better Christian. He painted houses for a living. So, for a week or so I did too. I’m sure I was terrible. At the time, I didn’t think so. I learned a lot. One of the first things I learned was that 5 AM really existed. I had heard of 5 AM before and I had seen it from the getting ready for bed side of things, but who wanted to get up that early? The answer. Bill did, and apparently so did I. I had him send all the money I made that week to my mother. I figured she deserved it and I didn’t really want any money.

So, the week ended and I got on the plane to Chicago. Deep down, I really felt like it was a test just to see if I would really go. To see if I really would give everything up and leave everything I knew to follow God. Once he saw that I really would do it I could just go home. I’m an idiot! I got to Jesus People, USA in September or October of 1989. It was cold. The people were really nice. We walked down the streets to the homeless shelter where I would be living. They were lined with homeless people, pathetic, hopeless looking ones. How does this happen? How do you let yourself get this low? (As if that wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black. Look where I had just come from!) I saw more homeless people in any one day in Chicago, than I have in the rest of my life combined. It was staggering. It was total culture shock. I kept thinking if you are going to be homeless and in poverty anyway why not go somewhere warmer? The wind chill got down to eighty degrees below zero. That’s COLD man! Start walking south!!! At least you won’t freeze to death! In case you haven’t figured it out yet I am opinionated and simple-minded.

I stayed in a small room with 5 or 8 guys. I, of course, seemed to be the only one who actually believed the line about fitting all your belongings in just one bag. Everyone else had tons of stuff. Oh well. They were all very nice and encouraging. I worked in the kitchen. I cleaned, mopped, washed dishes, cooked, served the homeless people, cleaned the bathrooms, and whatever else needed to be done. It was hard work. I thought it would be a little more glamorous, but it was fulfilling. I was actually doing something constructive with my life and I was helping people. I got put on a roofing crew. I want to interject here and say that roofing is one of the hardest jobs out there. You work hard all day. You sweat, you bleed, and you work some more, then you go home and hurt all night long until you wake up and do it again. I learned a lot though, about roofing and about myself.

I spent all my free time in the shelter with the people. I talked with them and listened to them. It was a rough neighborhood. We heard glass breaking and gunshots all the time. People hardly even reacted. It was sad really. There was this guy in a wheelchair named Bernie. He was in his 50’s. He had been in a war or two. Like everyone else there he was a little crazy. He told me about all the people he had killed in the war… and since the wars. He told me about people he had murdered in the alleys of Chicago. It was disturbing. I don’t know if anyone else listened to him, but I did.

One day he crapped all over himself. He was too embarrassed to tell anyone, but it was obvious. No one wanted to clean him up and he couldn’t do it himself because he was in a wheelchair. I was assigned the task. It wasn’t fun by any stretch, but I tried to make him feel comfortable about the whole thing. There was a lot of gross stuff I had to do there, but I always thought about the fact that whatsoever you do for the least of these, you do unto me. So, I thought I could do this for Jesus after all he has done for me.

After a few months I got pretty sick. My mother came to visit me. We talked for a while and she said I should come home and we could start our own mission somewhere. I agreed. I left about a week later and went back to North Carolina. If we were going to start our own mission we would need some money, so I found a job.

I was a dishwasher and general maintenance man at Applebee’s restaurant. I was making $5 an hour. I worked doubles all the time. I worked as much as possible to save money as quickly as possible. I read up on building a little bit. My mother bought me an acoustic guitar. It was beautiful! I hadn’t played guitar in way too long. I didn’t know any Christian music so I didn’t know what to play. I told God that I would only use my music skills for his glory from that moment on. Amazingly enough I developed quite a talent for song writing. I’m sure I sucked at first. There was something different in me though. I started writing music all the time. I loved it!

I was a machine at work. I worked more hours than anyone up there. I even got some kind of an award for it! Everyone knew if they didn’t want to work that I would pick up their shift for them. I never complained and I never slowed down. I did whatever they asked me to do. They wanted to promote me because I was a good worker, but I told them this was only temporary. I was happy being a dishwasher. I was good at it.

Everyone talked about the fact that I turned down promotions and that I worked like a slave. The Bible said to work as if you are working for the Lord, so I did. There was this one cook who hated me. He used to throw tomatoes at me, and nasty food, and knives. One night he poured bleach all over my feet and made a lot of the skin on my feet peel off. Another night I had opened the store and closed it. It was about two or three in the morning. I had just cleaned the bathrooms again. I was exhausted. I came back into the kitchen and he hosed me down with scalding hot water from head to toe while everyone watched.

Later he asked me “Do you know why I pick on you?” And I said, “Yes, I know.” He said, “It’s because you are a Christian! And I hate that about you. I used to be a Christian too. Then I got a girl pregnant and got into drugs. The same thing will happen to you. You will fall and I want to watch it. But all you ever say when I pick on you is ‘no big deal’. What is the matter with you?” I tried to explain, but he didn’t care.

Not long after that I walked into the kitchen and overheard some people talking badly about me. Then I heard the guy that had picked on me stick up for me. Later, he got me alone and he said, “Do you know why I stood up for you?” And I didn’t, really. He said, “Because you are a Christian. And you live what you believe. That is rare. I won’t let anyone say anything bad about you. You have my respect.” I was shocked. What a compliment! What an honor! By the time I left everyone seemed sad to see me go. They offered me more money, but it was never about the money and they knew that. They laughed a little about how I was going off to the wilderness, into the unknown. I had saved $5,000 in six months working for $5 an hour! I had saved almost everything I made. I had sacrificed and worked hard. I was proud of myself.

I took the money and bought a camper/truck. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I got it for $1,800. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but I bought it so my mother could drive us. Once again I sold or gave away everything I had and stepped out in faith. River and Ann didn’t share my enthusiasm about stepping out in faith. The day we were supposed to move they both ran away. That wasn’t a fun day. The cops got involved. We found them both, put them in the back of the camper and didn’t stop for gas until we got to Tennessee. We drove all the way to Washington State in less than four days. I should say my mom drove the camper and I drove my mom…crazy. I kept her awake and kept telling her we could make it just a little longer. We were all slap happy by the end of the trip.

We looked at a few pieces of property and then found one we bought, on the spot, in Republic. Republic is about 30 miles south of Grand Forks, Canada and 3 hours North of Spokane, WA. We got 20 acres of land for $16,000. It was zero down and zero interest and only $159 a month. It took two days to find the land once we got to Washington. We didn’t have a clue where we would be going. We just went. That was July 1990. I was 17 years old.

I didn’t waste any time. We had needs and limited cash. I bought a shovel and (what I thought was) an axe. I cleared some brush out of the way and dug a pit to have fires in. We cooked over the fire and used it for warmth. There was a park that you could take showers in for less than a dollar, plus we went swimming in the nearby lake to cool off and clean up. We went to the bathroom out in the woods. I put an end to that pretty quick. I dug an outhouse the next day. It took a few days, but I did it. My mom helped with everything. She also kept the peace and kept us fed which wasn’t easy out in the woods. River and Ann refused to help at all. Chris was only 5 years old at the time.

After the outhouse was done I started to dig a well. Fortunately for us there was an aspen grove on the property. Aspen trees have shallow roots so that means there is water close to the surface. I hit water at three feet down! It was hard digging though. Then I went to start cutting down trees to build the log cabin. I had bought an axe because I didn’t want to pay $400 for a chainsaw. I could do it by hand. What is the big deal? So, I picked up my splitting maul (that I thought was an axe) and went to it...for hours...on one freakin’ tree! I was so exhausted by the time that stupid tree fell that I just went and bought a chainsaw. I’m so glad I didn’t know what an axe was at the time. I might have actually tried to cut down all those trees by hand if I thought it was possible.

I knew we had to have a good foundation, but none of the trees looked big enough to use as piers. That night there was a big storm and it blew down the biggest tree on our property, which became our foundation. If there is one thing I have learned in my life it is this: “Where God guides, God provides”. He provided a solid foundation for my life and now for my house. We cut the tree up and rolled the pieces towards our building site. We dug holes for the piers, treated the stumps, and buried them. Then we proceeded to cut down more trees, and cut the limbs off of them, and peel the bark off of them, and cut them to length, and roll them over, and lift them up, and notch them like Lincoln logs with a chainsaw, and spike them in place.

We built the roof. We had 5 windows and a door. We had a wood burning stove for heat and cooking. It was mostly one big room 24 feet by 24 feet with a bathroom and a loft. The bathroom was a bathtub with a drain that went right under the house. We had a pitcher pump on the well and we pumped water into buckets. Then we would pour water into this solar sack, which was a black rubber bag with a nozzle on the bottom of it. If you left it outside in the sun the blackness would soak up the heat from the sun. When it got up to temperature we would take turns in the bath. It was pretty archaic, but it worked. Come to think of it, most of the time we would just boil water, mix it with cold water, and put that in the solar sack. It wasn’t so fun in retrospect. But we did it!

We were the talk of the town. Republic only has about 1,500 people so you get to know everybody pretty quick. Everyone talked about the crazy kid and his mom building that cabin up in the woods out of town. Those people were so nice to us. People would come by everyday and give advice or have something they could do to help. There was a nice couple up the mountain from us. The guy’s name was Jersey. He had been a horse vet for racehorses. He would ride his horse down the mountain everyday and see how we were doing. He was about seventy years old. Then there was a family a few miles away that had a ranch. I would do odd jobs for them to get enough money to keep the house project going. I built a corral for them, repaired their fences, and bucked bails of hay (nothing easy about that!).

People would bring us food all the time. The building inspector became a great friend of ours. He was very helpful and kind. In the middle of the whole thing we had to keep dealing with problems like bears and coyotes… and being ignorant. We also had to deal with River and Ann. Ann ran away several times and kept getting in trouble. Somehow Child Protective Services got involved. River moved back to North Carolina to join a band. He dropped out of school and got a job. He was 14 years old when he left home. He did successfully complete the eighth grade before dropping out of school forever. We got smartified and got our edumacation we just never gadiated that’s all.

River ended up as a manager at a steak house within no time. He had the keys and the codes to the store. I guess they didn’t know he couldn’t even legally work yet. He rode a skateboard to work. It took three hours one way to get to work. His roommate and band mate charged him gas money to give him a ride to work. So, a lot of the time River would sleep in fields or Laundromats or Denny’s restaurants so that he wouldn’t have to do another skateboard marathon for six hours round trip. If anyone sacrificed them self for music, it is River. He has applied himself more than anyone I have ever met.

So, we finished the log cabin in seven weeks and moved into it in September. It was already getting cold. This guy named Don owned a backhoe service. He came and dug the well out to a respectable depth and filled it with a culvert and gravel and a lid. He also graded our road, which was at least a mile. I had told him that we were poor. When the time came to pay him he wouldn’t let me give him more than $500 for all that work. He is one of the many people in my life that didn’t claim to be a Christian, but what he did was very Christ-like even if he didn’t want anyone to know. To everyone in Republic who helped us, which was almost everyone, thank you.

We needed money so I started doing odd jobs all the time. I did anything I was asked to do. I chopped down trees, split firewood, built anything and everything, picked apples (hard work!), and did a lot of construction. I got a job with one of the contractors in town and got to help build a chiropractic clinic and a bank. It was cool. I learned a lot.

The cabin was freezing! A family invited us to stay at their house for a while. There was some great reason at the time. Whatever it was, their house was warm. We had been going to the Catholic Church in town and met them there. I actually ended up helping build an addition to the church fellowship hall at that church.

Jamie, the oldest son of the family we were staying with, invited me to the Church of the Nazarene. I liked it a lot! Everyone was nice and the preaching was right on with the Bible. That was the first church I was ever a member of. I got really involved. I helped out wherever I could. I kept doing construction through the winter. I learned a lot about building. Building is very interesting. There are a lot of lessons in life if you pay attention. In fact if you pay attention, there are lessons all around us. All you have to do is look.

One of the cool things about God is that he speaks to each of us in our own language. Not just English or Spanish or French, but individually. There are things that would take lots of time to explain to a stranger that I already know because of my life experience. Instead of picking some obscure thing that I don’t understand God looks at something I am familiar with and says, “See it’s like this. Do you get it?” He does the same thing to you. Are you listening?

Over the winter I started wondering where the mission part of our journey had disappeared to. It was nice to have work and have a place to stay, but I wanted to do something more with my life. It wasn’t like I was doing nothing; I just wanted to do more. I struggled with what I should do. My mom is always wise. I am always spontaneous and rash. Sometimes she sees clearly when I don’t. I was talking to her one night and trying to figure out what I could do with my life. She said I should go finish school and try to be a pastor. She said “The only time you are truly happy is when you are sharing the gospel with someone, John. Go and do that.”

I had already dropped out, two years before. I was so far behind that I could never catch up, or so I thought. There is something empowering about having someone you know believe in you. She told me that I was smart and I could do anything I set my mind to. She said she believed in me. So, I went and took my GED. I aced it. It was easy. I made up for two and half years of high school in a few hours. The next challenge was how to get into a college and then how to pay for it! You can’t study to be a pastor at a state school, so you have to go to a private school. Northwest Nazarene College is the one everyone said I should go to. It was $10,000 a year!

There was a lady at the church named Phyllis Mason. Phyllis truly is a woman of God. She is a single mom with two teenagers my age. She worked at the community college for $8 an hour. She helped everyone she knew. It was unbelievable that one woman could have such an impact on a community. Even though she didn’t have much, she never complained about it. She helped out at the church all the time. She played piano several times a week for services. She let the youth groups and Sunday school classes meet in her house. She shared everything she had... without reservation. The way she figured God gave her everything she had, and he gave it to her to share not to be hoarded.

If anyone needed a ride she would give it. If someone were hungry she would feed them. Anyone who needed a place to stay could stay at her place. She visited people in prison all the time. She stretched herself beyond her comfort zone all the time. She said, “God gives blessings to those that God can give blessings through.” If you needed an ear to hear your problems she was there for you. She could quote the Bible all day long, and she actually applied it to her life. Lots of people can quote the Bible, but not many actually apply it to their life. She lived a holy life. Nobody could say anything bad about her. And she is the ONLY person I believe when she says, “I will pray for you.” The woman is a prayer warrior. I am not. I am a terrible pray-er. Phyllis on the other hand still tells me that she prays for me every day, and like I said, I actually believe her.

Anyway, she worked at the college and she helped me get my college application together for NNC. For whatever reason (probably $) they accepted me to the college. So, now I had to save a lot of money in a short amount of time.

I got a job at the gold mine as a geologist’s assistant. I made $6.50 an hour. It was a cool job. I got an apartment in town with Jamie and ate nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for months so I could save money. Phyllis would invite me over for Sunday lunch. She acted like it was no big deal to give me food, but it was the only real nutrition I got. I was so thankful. I always made sure to wash the dishes and help clean up afterwards. After a while I moved out and needed a place to stay for a month. Phyllis insisted that I stay with her in the extra bedroom until I got another place. There was always somebody staying at her house. She wouldn’t let me pay her any rent either.

I learned so much at the gold mine. I didn’t work in the mine itself. I worked in exploration. It was our job to find the gold that they would one day dig up. It is a tedious process. We had to survey this entire mountain and put stakes in every 100 feet in a giant grid. We had to label everything and keep track of it and make charts and topographical maps. Then we had to take soil samples at every stake. We had to dig into old dirt and take out a small sack of it from every stake and label those as well. Then they would send the soil samples off to the assayer who would tell us what elements were in each sample.

Then we had to drill hundreds of feet into the earth with core drills and take core samples. We had holes everywhere at every possible angle. They had all the holes mapped out as well. Then we had to split the core samples in half by hand. One half would go to the assayer and the other half would go to the geologists who would then determine where the gold might be. We kept all the core samples in archives, which were huge. The cost was monumental!

One day all the geologists got very excited because they had found “visible gold” in one of the core samples. They showed us. We were retarded and pointed and said we saw it. They laughed and said, “No, that’s pyrite, you know fool’s gold” The real gold is right here. They got out a needle and a magnifying glass and pointed at this microscopic dull flake. I said “that’s it!” and then I learned a valuable lesson, one that has stuck with me through the years.

“The days of getting gold nuggets off the ground or in a stream are long gone. A gold mine takes a lot of work to set up, as you can tell. Once we find where the gold might be we have to blast the rock out and go miles below the surface of the earth. Then we bring the blasted rock to the surface and pulverize it. The good stuff we put in huge vats and extracted all the metals. We skim all the metals off and put those in another vat where we refine it again and again and again until we are left with pure gold. In a good gold mine we only get a tenth of an ounce of gold out of every ton of rock! With three shifts working around the clock we only get two 80-pound gold bricks a week if we are doing well. It cost $80 million just to set up the gold mine we were working on.”

It hardly seemed worth it to me. It seemed so hopeless. All that work and all that money for a tenth of an ounce of gold! Later I did the math. It is about $2 million a week. All of the sudden it made sense to me. And then I saw it. We are like that! God says we are like gold refined in the fire seven times. It takes great expense and work just to map out where the gold might be in us. Then we have to be tested just to see if there is a sample of what God is looking for, if there is even hope for us.

Then we have to dig deep within us, far below the surface, miles below the surface. Farther than any man would ever want to go. Then we have to be blasted out of our comfort zone. And then we have to be pulverized. We have to be broken down to nothing so that the treasure can be found. Then we have to be tried by fire, which for us the fire is usually unpleasant circumstances.

This has to happen again and again and again until we are left with only pure gold. Without all that we are only a pile of rocks. He only puts the good stuff in the fire to be purified though. The trash rock is just discarded immediately. No real trial, it just sits there. I looked back and realized that that is what God has been doing with me! All my trials and temptations, all the trials by fire are only purifying me. So break me God, test me, try me until I am what you want me to be. I am yours! I will come out of this whole thing shining, watch and see!

All that work and expense and time and hassle is worth it in the end. For one day the trials that were so hard for me when I was going through them will be jewels in my crown. The real challenge then is to know that while we are actually going through the trial. In retrospect, we can always see how even the bad things in life had a purpose. How they worked out for good in the long run. So if we know that, then we can apply it while we are going through the hard times. We can hold our head up high and say this is all for a good reason and I won’t complain. It is hard at first, but very effective if you can do it.
One of Phyllis’ favorite scriptures is Romans 8:28 which says, “For we know that ALL things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” That’s right. All things. Even the bad ones are there for your good! What a blessing!

After a few months the work ran out for me at the gold mine. We had found the gold. They ended up starting a new gold mine there. To my knowledge they are still digging on it to this day. But my job was done there. Republic had two gold mines and a sawmill. I like variety so I applied to the sawmill. I got the job. That place was huge!

I remember the first day on the job. I had to be there ridiculously early, like 4 or 5 in the morning. I was wearing all this gear that was awkward for me. I had a hard hat, chaps, steel-toed boots with heels, gloves, long sleeve shirt and pants, and earplugs. I had to park about a quarter of a mile from where I actually had to work. So, I parked and then I walked and walked and walked in this silly looking outfit. I walked past huge, loud machinery that I didn’t understand past rough looking, hard-working, jaded people. I realized how small I was. The whole thing intimidated me. Inside I wanted to go back home and just not try, but I walked on. I found my way and I started working. It was amazing to me that someone had invented all this machinery.

I started on the green chain. Basically, I sorted all the extra boards straight out of the sawmill that the automatic sorter didn’t get to. There were 30 bins to sort into and a huge set of chains pulled the lumber across all the bins. I would walk up and down a catwalk and sort the boards as they got to the right bin. The lumber was still “green” because it hadn’t been kiln-dried yet. So, it was called the “green chain”. The sawmill was very interesting to me. When I wasn’t doing my job I would go to different stations and see how their equipment worked. I wanted to learn all about this stuff. It was so cool.

The whole thing was so huge and complicated and yet when you looked closely at any one part it was really very simple. That is the way it is with anything though. Complicated things are just a bunch of simple things put together. You just have to look long enough to understand the pattern and get the big picture. There were laser guided saws and computerized sorting machines. There were conveyer belts and chains and vibrating bins. There were debarking machines and chippers. The whole thing had an organized chaos to it. I ate it up!

After a few days I wasn’t intimidated any more. I was a part of it. I think it was a big step for me in my confidence. You see a man has to feel like he is a man. He has to have some sense of victory. He has to measure up. If he doesn’t then he is just a coward until he does measure up. Most men never really get the opportunity to do anything truly challenging and so they never feel whole inside. They spend the rest of their lives trying to measure up, but always feeling like if anyone saw the real them that they wouldn’t measure up at all. So they hide. They put other people down to try to make themselves feel better. I am lucky. I have been challenged in life time and time again. I have been broken and rebuilt more times than I can count. I am lucky.

Anyway, I made $7 an hour at the sawmill. I worked there for a few months and saved some more money for college. I learned a lot and gained some self-respect, which I needed. I finally felt like I had something to offer the world besides just labor and food service. In the fall of 1991 I packed what little I had for belongings and went to college in Nampa, Idaho at Northwest Nazarene College. Three of us from the church carpooled in Mike’s car down to college. I felt so inferior it was unbelievable. I hadn’t been in school for three years and I was a dropout. Mike was going to take Calculus and Chemistry and Physics and a bunch of other smart classes. He was going to be on the basketball team and do lots of extra-curricular activities. I was going to TRY to pass. I wanted to be a pastor so I could preach the gospel to people who needed it. I was going to work hard so that I could hopefully make enough money to cover my second and third terms. I just hoped I could keep up and maybe even possibly pass.

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