Lessons From Life

Thank you, Mrs. Royster. I enjoyed that very much. It made me turn to Jeremiah 18. I wanted to double-check. That's a portion where Jeremiah was sent to the potter's house. And God used that as a great illustration to say, I'm God, I can make things over again. So I really, it's one of my favorite stories, and I like to refer to it fairly often. That's one thing I discovered, or I've been thinking, when you're a pastor, your favorite stories end up being ones the congregation hears about, whether they want to or not. But today I'd like to begin by turning to another one of my favorite stories in Genesis 24. And I'll explain in a bit why this, well, how this relates. I try to keep my voice going. I've often thought of this as one of the more romantic and interesting stories, somewhat intriguing. I'll read parts of it and then perhaps skip ahead a little bit. But Genesis 24 begins, beginning in verse 1, Now Abraham was old, well advanced in age, and the eternal had blessed Abraham in all things. So Abraham said to the oldest servant in his house. Earlier in the book we find that was probably the one named Eliezer. So if I refer to Eliezer, that's the oldest servant in his house, who formerly had been Abraham's heir. It was accustomed at that point for the oldest servant. If you didn't have any children, the oldest servant born in your house would be your heir. Now, Eliezer had reason to not be real happy with Isaac then, because he was bumped out of being the heir when Isaac was born. So it shows his loyalty to the family when Abraham gave him this task. Abraham said to the oldest servant in his house, who ruled over all that he had, says, Please put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you square by the eternal, the God of Heaven and the God of Earth, that you will not take a wife from my son from among the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell. But you shall go to my country and to my family to take a wife from my son Isaac.

Now, then there's an exchange. The servant says, Well, what if I go there and this woman's not willing to come back? Should I take Isaac over there? And Abraham says, No, no. God sent me here and told me to stay here, and he's going to give us this land. So whatever you do, don't take Isaac back there. If the woman's not willing to follow you, then you'll be resolved from this vow, but I want you to make this effort. So in verse 9, he says, So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master and swore to him concerning the matter.

Then the servant took ten of his master's camels and departed, for all of his master's goods were in his hand, and he arose and went to Mesopotamia, to the city of Nahor. And there he made his camels to kneel down outside the city by a well of water at evening time, the time when the women go out to draw water. So then the servant has this idea of how God can help him find the right woman.

So he prays, he says, O Lord God of my master Abraham, please give me success this day, and show kindness to my master Abraham. Behold, I'm standing here by the well of water. The daughters of the men are coming out of the city to draw water. Let it be that the young woman to whom I say, please let down your pitcher that I might have a drink. And if she says, drink, and I'll also give your camels a drink, let her be the one you've appointed to your servant Isaac.

And by this I'll know that you've shown kindness to my master. And so it goes. The first woman that comes out will turn out to be Rebecca. And he goes up to her, and she's very beautiful, she's nice, he says, can you give me a drink of water? And she hurries, brings it down, gives him a drink, and says, oh, and here I'll draw water for your camels also.

And this is out of the ordinary. Remember, water is pretty heavy. And drawing enough water for ten camels to have a drink is no small matter. So it says the servant is there kind of marveling. He's keeping quiet and thinking this might be it. And verse 21, the man is wondering at her, remains silent, so as to know whether the eternal had made his journey prosperous or not. So it was when the camels had finished drinking, the man took out a golden nose ring weighing half a shekel and two bracelets for a wrist weighing ten shekels of gold, and he said, whose daughter are you?

Tell me, please, is there room in your father's house for us to lodge? So he has no idea who she is. He said, tell me who your father is. Do you have room? You know, we're basically travelers. We need a place to stay. And so she tells him who she is. I am the daughter of Bethuel, Melchizedon, whom she bought in Nahor.

And she said, we have room for you, and there's straw and feed enough to lodge. Then, here's where I want to pick up in verse 26. The man bowed down his head and worshipped the eternal, and he said, blessed be the Lord God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken his mercy and truth towards my master. As for me, being on the way, meaning on a journey, the eternal led me to the house of my master's brethren.

And there's where I want to focus on and draw a bit of an analogy, because Eliezer traveled great distance. What he did would have been the same as for us to get on a ship and go across all the way around the world for that time. And he meets a stranger, and it turns out she's from the house of his master's brethren. So God led him right to family.

And that's where I want to draw a parallel with my life. My life has been somewhat of an interesting journey, with a lot of twists and turns. But now that I'm standing here before you, I can say that God has led me to the house of my master's brethren. You are the brethren of Jesus Christ, and he's my master. And he's sent me here to have an opportunity to work with you. And obviously, it's humbling, and it's a great blessing for me. And I wanted to start off with that story to say, we're family spiritually in that sense.

And I never knew that I would end up being here, but I think God had that plan. And he's brought me here to be in your house, and you're his brethren. Now, it is common, and it's appropriate for a new pastor to explain himself, tell a little bit about his life, to his new congregation. So that's what I want to do today, and try to include some spiritual lessons along the way.

Now, the first point is the one I just made. God's people are brethren. And we are brethren whether we've ever met each other or not. There's something about God's Spirit, and I guess it's not a mystery. It's because we are begotten by the same Heavenly Father that makes us all family.

And I've found that to be true no matter where I've gone. And I'll give some of the particulars later, but I've had opportunity to stay with church brethren in many places across the United States, and even in other countries. Usually it would be on my way to summer camp or on the way back from summer camp. But it's interesting, no matter where you go, that Spirit is the same. That feeling, that camaraderie, that brotherhood. And, of course, it's God's Spirit that's working in us. It was in July 2nd when Sue and I came here for the first time.

I'll never forget. We walked through the door, and I felt it. It was just like when I'd stayed with brethren in their houses, that love that comes from God's Spirit. So I knew I was among my Master's brethren then. Now, if you'll turn ahead in your Bible, it's just a few pages to chapter 29 in Genesis. There's a very similar story to the one we just read. Now, in this case, it's Abraham's grandson, Jacob. He's not going to send a servant. He would travel himself back to Mesopotamia, once again looking for a wife.

I think I would have gotten married younger if I had just gone to Mesopotamia. That's a whole other story we'll come to a little later. In this case, it's Jacob. He's traveling back, and he will arrive, and he'll meet Rachel, who turns out to be his cousin. I think I might be second cousin, but let's read starting in verse 11. There's the story about how he went there, and he rolled the stone away so they could water the sheep.

He asks Rachel who she is and finds out. Then Jacob kissed Rachel. Now, probably it's a kiss of greeting on the cheek. I don't think he planted one on her, but he made that greeting. He lifted up his voice, and he wept. Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's relative, and that he was Rebekah's son.

So she ran and told her father. So what I'm getting at here, it's common when you meet someone to tell your background where you're from. He said, I'm your father's relative, and he explained I'm Isaac's son, whose Abraham's son is related to your father, and went that way. And I think I've got a similarity here. In addition to being spiritual brethren, which we all are, I'm probably, well, I don't know, closely related, but I share a lot of the heritage with the group of people here.

So let me explain a little bit about Sui and I's heritage. And I'll just start by saying, Appalachia is in our blood in more ways than one. My dad was born in Athens County, Ohio. He was born Frank Andrews, which Andrews is, as far as I know, a good Scottish name, or a good Scots-Irish name. Now, I mentioned Frank Andrews. He was a junior. He would be adopted at the age of three and become Frank Dunkel at that time.

But he was born there in Athens County, and both of his adopted parents were from there. My grandfather, by adoption, Chet Dunkel, his family were all coal miners. And his adopted mother, before she became a Dunkel, was Genevieve Humphreys. The Humphreys family were all coal miners. Now, you might wonder, why didn't I come from Athens County, if that's the case? But those of you who are older remember very well that jobs were hard to come by during the Great Depression. And so, you know, Chester Dunkel was one of many who left Appalachia and headed up to the Columbus area looking for work.

He eventually, you know, would take my grandmother and their adopted son there. I love the story about how he ended up finding work, because jobs were scarce up there, too. And it turned out, one day he was near downtown Columbus and going by the Timkins roller-bearing plant, and noticed a fire on one of the roofs of the building.

And he went in and warned him, hey, your building's on fire, and helped him put it out. And they were so grateful to him, warning them and helping them, that they said, we'll give you a job working here. And he worked there for the rest of his career until he retired. So that was a good thing. Now, my grandmother Genevieve would end up being the first one out of all the family who was called into God's church.

I'll talk more about that a little bit later. As I said, my dad grew up there in central Ohio, and sometimes they lived in town. A lot of their life, they lived on the edge of town.

I don't know if any of you know the Columbus area, but sort of in between Gehana and Blacklick in New Albany. He rented a home when he was a young boy from a farmer. And then later in the 70s, they moved back into the house that the farmer had lived in, because he built a new one.

So my grandmother spent, I think, half to three-quarters of her life living on that one street.

My dad grew up, a normal kid, a teenager in central Ohio. He had a job in his early 20s working at Frish's big boy. It is Frish's down here, isn't it? I ate there a lot, and that's where he met a woman named Flora Temple and married her and made her into my mom.

I was wondering how that phrase would go over. I should mention, though, that I wasn't their first child. They had my older sister Tina a couple years before me. Now, I was discussing with Sue this morning. It's interesting. I know more about my father's ancestry or his early life than my mom's, partly because I was around his mother, my grandmother, a lot more.

She was one of eight children, and as far as I know, the temples were in Columbus for at least a couple of generations, perhaps going back a lot further. But my mom never talked a whole lot about her early life. As I said, she was one of eight, and when I was very young, her parents moved to California, so I didn't get an opportunity to know them. What I found interesting, or something I learned interesting that I hadn't known before, is where her grandmother was buried and her grandfather.

Her grandfather was born in 1865 and was named Ulysses Grant Temple. And I thought, so my great-great- two greats? Well, one of my ancestors was named after the general in the year that the Union won the Civil War, so I know which side they were on. So I don't mean that. I know we're near the Ohio River, so if any of you were, your ancestors were supporting the other side, that was long ago.

And I've got to say, I don't know for certain the ancestry of either the Andrews or the temples. I'm fairly certain Scots-Irish is there. I know Dunkle is a Scots-Irish name and a fairly uncommon one. Andrews is, to my knowledge. So I've always been fairly certain of the Scots-Irish and more of the Scottish than anything else because I've discovered I have an inborn proclivity of being, what we'll say, careful with money.

That's, you know, I don't like to let go of it very easily, and Sue can attest to that. So I figured if I don't have any other evidence of being Scottish, I've got that. I also like Highland music. I enjoy bagpipes, although some people hate them. I love a single malt Scotch whisky. It's something I usually only get that during the feast because single malt comes with a good price. And I just love the mountains themselves, and at the time I've been able to visit Scotland, I said, boy, if I'm not from here, I sure ought to be. And the nice thing, of course, when you get in the Appalachians, they look very similar, so I feel much more at home now. Now, I will mention while I'm talking about my family, unfortunately, the 60s and the 70s were a time when U.S. society and culture was changing dramatically. And part of that effect on my family was that divorce was becoming routine and accepted, and I was only three years old when my parents split. I wish I could go back and undo that, but nothing, you know, obviously it was beyond my grasp to change. So I grew up mostly most of my life in a single parent family. My mother had the primary custody of my sister and I. She worked at the Fisher Body Plant in Columbus. So she was a member of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. And I, over the years, said, you know, I have mixed feelings. I don't always agree with everything the unions do or some of their stances, but I did have a pretty good life because of her union membership, very good benefits and pay and all of that. One of the effects of all this, though, and I will mention I wasn't close to my father for a lot of those years growing up, but we have been in touch. And actually, he lives near Columbus, and, you know, I've talked to him fairly often, relatively often, and we're on good terms. I have been convinced that divorce is something that hurts people. You know, I advise against it whenever possible. Obviously, any of you who have been through that, you know, it causes pain on the kids, causes pain on the adults. It's far-reaching, but I can attest that it doesn't have to be fatal to anyone. You can overcome the bad things. And I think my sister and I are remarks of that. And I'm very proud of my sister. She married young the summer after she graduated high school. She married, and her and her husband had troubles along the way, but she said, I don't want to ever get divorced, and they're still together. You know, through the rocky roads here and there, they raised eight beautiful kids. Interesting. All of Connor's cousins, most of them have children older than him already.

Another long story. But, you know, my mother, you know, was, I think, a very good parent. She carried the extra load of not having dad around. She was loving and kind, but she was firm when she needed to be. I've often said, well, one of the things we... Her goal for my sister and I was to make sure we always had everything we needed, and maybe half of the things we wanted that we didn't need. And we probably got by pretty well.

And I can also say, honestly, never got a spanking that I didn't deserve, and I probably didn't get several that I did deserve. Although I tended to get caught a lot when I was a kid. I think that was good for me in the long run. It's good if you don't get away with too much, because you'll learn those lessons. Now, I'm going to explain how we came in contact with God's Church a little bit later, but another thing I do want to say about my mom, because it's important, and it'll come up in sermons at various times. She started attending God's Church when I was about almost 12 years old, not quite, and regularly attended, believed what the Church taught, but she didn't get baptized for years and years. She was one of those people, and they're out there, and you meet them occasionally, who have the idea that I need to overcome my sins before I can be baptized. I've got to overcome, I've got to be a better person, and then I'll get baptized. Because she wasn't overcoming and getting that much better, she put it off and put it off. I personally think that's the reason God allowed her to go through what probably ended up being the toughest trial of her life. She was struck by a terminal disease, and through all of her life, she'd been able to overcome anything she faced, just by gritting her teeth and saying, I'm going to do this. She finally faced something she couldn't overcome on her own. She couldn't, and she learned she had to turn to God and trust Him to do for her what she could not do for herself. To be honest, He didn't heal her of the disease, but He did use that as an opportunity to bring her to full repentance and conversion. She was baptized, actually not just before she died, it was two or three years. It was about six months before I was baptized. I watched what she was going through, and I saw the difference.

It's like, okay, baptism means a lot more to me now. I see the difference it makes in your life. It's interesting, I made an appointment with our pastor in Columbus at the time. That was Bob Dick. He was there most of the time. I was a teenager. I remember I made an appointment to go see him, and we chatted for 15 or 20 minutes. Finally, he looked at me and said, what did you want to talk to me about today? I said, well, I think it's time for me to get baptized. He was a little bit surprised. We went on, and he took his time. I'll talk about that more probably over the years, too.

It was about six months before he was willing to put me in the water. He wanted to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons. But it was a very good thing, and my mother and I kept our first Passover together. It was the first one for both of us, and still a very memorable thing for me. She's not with us today, as you probably gathered. She passed away right at the beginning of my second year at Ambassador College.

She'd moved in with my sister and brother-in-law, and they took good care of her. But major influence, and she's one of the reasons I'm very much looking forward to the resurrection. And one of the reasons I've said, I can't afford to go off the track. She's counting on me being there when she comes up out of the grave, so I'd better be there.

And I'll rely on all of you to help me make sure that I'm there, too. Now I've lost track of where I was on here. Ah! Proverbs 31, verse 10. You can jot this down if you want, because it's a short passage. It says, Who can find a virtuous wife? Her worth is far above rubies. And as I said, I want to draw on some lessons from Scriptures there.

But if my early family life is a mixture of some good and some bad, I want to say my current family life is almost entirely good. My wife Sue was born to parents who were already in God's church.

Their names are Henry and Wanda Ward. They've been a deacon and a deaconess. They were ordained in the Cincinnati South congregation long enough ago that I have no idea when it was. But I'm assuming they were probably deacons back when Noah got off the boat or something. They're not really that old, but her family, they're working-class folks. Her dad had various jobs in factories. He retired from Rockwell, I believe it was. Before we married, Sue lived in Florence, Kentucky her entire life. She's Kentuckian, and her ancestry is Scots-Irish with no doubt. Actually, she's got a copy of a journal from, I believe, great-great-grandmother who traveled over from Ireland.

She was living in Ireland. We've got a copy of the journal she kept traveling over. She eventually married. She was living in Chicago and met a Civil War veteran who took her down to Kentucky, and that's where they lived from then on. Both of Sue's parents are from Eastern Kentucky. For those of you in Prestonsburg, they live in Berea now.

Just about a year and a half ago, they sold their home in Florence and moved back to be closer to their family. Sue's four- no, not four brothers, three brothers. She's one of four children. They live near there. So I'm looking forward to them coming up and visiting here and in Prestonsburg. I just wish they were on the map. You know, Prestonsburg is here and Berea is there. It seems like you just go right over and be there in no time.

Those of you down in Prestonsburg are saying, no, it doesn't work that way. You've got to go up and around. If I could get a- I've been thinking about getting in the fleet car program for the church. I said, if they had a fleet helicopter program, that would make things so much easier. Anyways, I've got a note here and you've probably gathered some of this. Sue and I have often been mistaken for being a bit younger than we actually are.

And I've joked that's because we don't have any kids. I've learned having children ages you faster than- But now that we have one, and Connor is about to turn ten months old, and he's a wonderful joy.

That's another quote I'll mention. Psalms 127 verse 3 says that children are a heritage from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is a reward. And that's certainly been the case for us with Connor. He's a blessing and a delight. He's at that age where it can be a little trying at times, but- And one of the things I like to point out, you know, we got married a little older in life, and that's partly because both of us made some decisions. We later said, oh, that wasn't the best decision. There were once or twice I got involved dating a girl that was not in the church. Matter of fact, that's a lot of what led me up to baptism. I started dating a girl when I was 18, finished high school, and I worked with her. And, you know, we got fond of each other. We started talking about getting married, and there was one point where I came back from the feast, and I said, wait a minute. I believe all that stuff. I think this church is really the church, you know, and all this stuff is real. And this girl's not in the church. Do I want to be leaving her behind and going to the feast every year for the rest of my life? I had to say, no, I don't want that. You know, I want to share the most important thing in my life with the most important person in my life. And so I just realized, if God doesn't call her into the church, it's not going to work between us. Now, I asked God to do it, and I asked Him, and asked Him, and a couple of times I got upset that He wouldn't do it for me. And some of you have probably been through that, but, you know, God did answer my prayers, with a resounding no. I think one of the lessons for me that I needed to learn is, you know, the Father decides who to draw to Jesus Christ, just as He said in John 6, 44. No one can come unless the Father draws Him, and the Father decides who that'll be. He doesn't put that in your hands or mine. But, in some ways, it was good for me. About the time that we decided we weren't going to get married or date anymore, is when I decided, you know, I needed to start counseling for baptism. Suddenly, Ambassador College started sounding like a good idea. And I'll come to that a little bit later, actually. I'm getting off track of where I'm going. But the reason I was bringing it up here is, the reason Sue and I got married a little older than typical, I was still in my 30s, but not by a whole lot. And Sue's about five years younger than me. And so, if people mistake us, I love it when people think I'm 28.

And I'll confess this to you all here. Sometimes I wear the whiskers and sometimes not. And in the summer, a lot of times, I'll shave them off. I thought about shaving them off. I said, no, it makes me look a little older, especially since so many of them are turning white. And I don't want them... You know, it's okay if people think I'm 28, but I don't want all the brethren in Portsmouth to think I'm 28, this kid coming in and starting out. So... Now, I'm trying to remember why I was telling you all this, other than to get to know me, but there was a point. Sue and I, after we got married, we were very diligent with birth control, saying we don't want to have kids right away, but then we do want to have kids. And so, after about a year, we started trying and thinking, we're going to have kids, and do we want to have two or three, maybe even four? But time went by, and now... It's easy to think about four kids when you haven't had any, when you have a little one. But we weren't having any. And time went by, and we still weren't having any, and we were pretty sure we were doing everything right. So we visited the doctors, and... This wasn't meant to be all that funny, but... Well, and there's an important lesson about children being a gift. The doctors said, sorry, you're not going to be able to have kids. They said it's not absolutely impossible, but the chances are just very, very small. The chemistry, the hormones, everything's not quite in the right balance, and at your age, it's just almost impossible that it will happen. You know, we didn't entirely give up, but we sort of eventually put it out of our mind and said, well, if that's to be, then we can do other things. We can travel more, we can serve the church more, and set that in our hearts. And so then this big surprise came. And I still wonder. I'm leaning towards the miracle from God. That makes more sense. But it was after the only time I went up to winter camp. I was up there in Wisconsin, and we got pregnant right after I came back. So I don't know if there's something in the water up there. But I do believe it was a miracle. God gave us the blessing of having a child, even though we're a bit older. You know, we've got to age to catch up with some of you. But I can say we're a much more complete family, and I'm much more complete as a person. I can't imagine being able to serve in the ministry in the way that I am now if I hadn't had a child.

Now, I've still got a long ways to go to learn, and some of you have raised children or are dealing with grandchildren. And I'll appreciate your help and advice in learning. I know that you've been down that road, and I'm glad to be traveling it, and don't mind getting help when it comes up. So, let's talk a little bit about work and education in our lives. Sue and I mentioned both come from working-class families. So, holding jobs and earning a living has been a very important part of our lives. But so have education. Now, as long as I can remember, the principle that we find in 2 Thessalonians 3, verse 10, has guided me. I'm going to turn there. It's a very simple one. But I'm going to turn there partly because I don't think my parents had ever read this scripture or were aware of it, but they acted as though they had, especially my mom. It says, For even when we were with you, we commanded you this, If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. I told you my mom could be strict in some things. She taught a very strict work discipline. You want to eat? You want the things that you need in life? You need to be willing and able to work. And my sister and I had chores growing up, and I know it was the same in Sue's family. Work was important. But the other thing I learned more from the Church was the value of an education. And of course, you're all aware the economy of the United States was changing dramatically from in the 60s and 70s and into the 80s. You know, my parents, to be honest, both of my parents had a 10th grade education. You know, they dropped out of high school, didn't worry about graduating, and were able to get factory work and make a decent living. That's something that's not so much of an option for people these days. Let's turn to Proverbs 4. Proverbs 4, and we'll begin in verse 7.

Because as a young person in the Church, we turn to Proverbs a lot, and these scriptures are starting having an impact on me. And I hope they will on those of you know, we have several young people in the congregation here. I hope they'll have that kind of impact on you. Solomon wrote this, probably the wisest man ever, aside from Jesus Christ. Because wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom. And all you're getting, get understanding.

So get out there and get that wisdom, get that understanding. That means get an education, learn things. Wisdom, exalt her, and she will promote you. She will bring you honor when you embrace her. She will place on your head an ornament of grace, a crown of glory she will deliver to you. So that's an important thing I realized. If I wanted to be something in life, I had to get some education. I had to pay attention in school. Now, it's funny, when I was young, it wasn't uncommon for me to be called a bookworm by the kids, especially in elementary school.

I just found that I liked reading. And I'm glad my mom did set an example of that. She had a 10th grade education, but she liked to read. Sometimes she'd be sitting in the living room with my sister and I watching television, and she'd have a book open. So I saw that as an example. I would have to admit, though, when I was younger, a lot of the books I was reading were comic books. I branched out on some other ones, too, but I'm still a fan of Spider-Man and Batman and all of those.

So I'm not too ashamed to admit it. It's too late now, anyways. But I've read another book or two, also. Now, I would be... I mentioned my mother was one of eight, so a lot of cousins in my family, and I've dropped out of touch with most of them. But I expected to do manual living. Out of all those cousins, I was only the third that graduated high school. And as far as I know, the first and perhaps only one that ended up going to college. And again, it's not because I was so much better or different, but the church and the emphasis on education made a difference where that went.

But still, back in high school and shortly after, I just expected to do manual labor. And there's certainly no wrong or fault in that. But coming in the... Yeah. I'd be better off if I just skipped the notes and just talked to you. I was going to say, coming of age in the 1970s, I was aware of... Things were a bit different. It made me conservative financially in a way that I might not have been. That's when... Well, if you listen to the news now and they keep saying, this is the worst financial crisis since the late 1970s, early 1980s.

I remember those times very well, and I'm sure a lot of you do, too. I remember the long lines at the gas stations and the rapid inflation and mortgage rates around 17 or 18 percent.

And that's always kept in the back of my mind. It happened before. It could happen again. So my mind was, make some money and make sure you hang on to it. My first job was a paper route that I got at the age of 12. So I always said I was going to be getting journalism from early on. And then at age 16, I did what most industrious teenagers did back in the 70s.

I got a job trying hamburgers. Now, for six months, I worked at Burger King. That wasn't going so well, so I switched over to Wendy's. And was it Mrs. Call, I believe, is a big Wendy's fan? Someone told me that. I'm there with you. I ended up putting in about six years total at Wendy's. And partly I like to work. It's not something I just put up with, but I enjoyed keeping busy and I loved running the grill. I was willing at that time to be a closer.

And a friend of mine helped me get the job in the first place. He said, if you're willing to close, that means you're there until they lock the doors and you do the cleanup afterwards. So lock the doors at 10 o'clock and then you're going to be there usually until midnight. And if you work hard, they want to get you there. I was usually scheduled about 24 hours a week. Whenever someone would call in sick or whatever, make an excuse, they'd have my phone number and call me. Frank, can you come in? Yeah, I want to earn that money, so I'd come in.

I ended up, I think from the time I was about 17 on, I was working more than 40 hours a week and going to school. What's surprising is my grades actually improved when that happened. And I didn't think about it until later. My only explanation is maybe I had to focus. When I had time to study or do homework, I couldn't put it off because I'd be at the restaurant later, so do it right now. One of the things that was interesting also is because I wasn't getting near enough sleep, I often had bloodshot eyes. It wasn't uncommon for me to fall asleep in class.

I still have one memory of being in a history class and taking notes and trying so hard to pay attention. And the notes just sort of went into a scribble off the page.

But as I said, it worked out okay. Well, I didn't say with the bloodshot eyes and falling asleep in class, a lot of my classmates thought I was doing drugs, certainly. But then they found out I was on the honor roll and those two didn't seem to go together. Anyways, I actually contemplated making my career as a fast food manager. I liked the work. It seemed unnatural. But boy, do they work long hours and they don't get a lot of pay.

And as I mentioned, at that time I was going through a change. Now, about six months after high school I said I could do something a little better. So I started taking classes at Franklin University up in Columbus.

And I think they still run commercials. You might see those down here. I went a year and a half and I got my associate degree in business management. So I could take over the restaurant if I needed to. But those other things that happened that I mentioned. The girl I was dating, I realized that that wasn't going to work out, that I was serious about the church. And so I decided to apply for Ambassador College.

And that was a turning point. I said I need to save even more money. I got another job driving a delivery van for a while. And I'm mentioning all these jobs partly to show what's affected me and to show that there's a lot of different, interesting experiences out there. I also worked for most of a year as a meat cutter. There was a restaurant called Fuddruckers. And you've got to be careful when you say that one. They taught me how to get those big hunks of cow and you actually have to butcher it and cut the steaks.

That was the summer that I had no summer because I was in the cold room all day every day. But I was saving money for college and I was able to go. Now, I applied to go to Pasadena and I waited and waited and waited.

And finally I got a letter telling me I got accepted to go to Big Sandy. I was like, okay! They've got a college there, too. What I learned was that both campuses, their admission team, would go over the applications and take their first choices and then they'd have a set of reserve and they'd meet towards the end of summer and sort of trade back and forth and say, we're not sure if we want this, these guys, do you want them? So I was in the second rung.

They didn't want me in California, but they took me in Big Sandy. And that's okay. Like I said, I was the guy with the bloodshot eyes and falling asleep. I can remember on Sabbath sometimes talking to people at church and they'd say, well, Frank, what are you doing? There were some older members, and especially a deacon, who always went out of his way to talk to the kids.

And it's an example that I think I need to, I still tell myself, you should follow that. Be like him. Because he was, hey, how are you doing? And talking to him, what are you doing? You know, you're going back to school, you're going to a job. I said, I'm going to go to Texas this fall to go to college. And I told this to several people and they say, oh, are you going to go to the University of Texas? No, Ambassador College. And they go, really? You? Yeah, they let me in.

Now, I'm so glad I went when I did. This was in 1985 I started, and I think of it as the second golden era at Ambassador College. You know, you know the history of the college going all the way back to the 1950s. And in the 70s, as Mr. Armstrong said, it got a little bit off track. So much so that, you know, Herbert Armstrong closed the college at one point and said, I'm going to start all over and started with a new freshman class.

And so that had recently happened. Big Sandy had only just opened again as a two-year college. So I was accepted. I went down for two years. And the understanding was, if you want to go for two more years, you better toe the line and you're going to have to apply. And half of you are going to get to go for two more years and half of you aren't. And to be honest, I was one of the half that didn't, or wasn't initially. Well, I will mention before I tell you that story, though, that because we didn't know if we'd have a full four years, we crammed as many classes as possible early on.

And Dr. Ward was there at the time. I had a whole schedule of Dr. Ward classes, and they were pretty intense. I had Mr. Antion later for classes, Rod Meredith, Leslie McCullough, several names, you know, that you might have heard, and I was glad to have them as instructors.

I mentioned not getting accepted at first, and so when I was there as a, my first two years, I'd worked for the campus water plant, which I was surprised when I got a, they assigned you a job when you showed up and I said, Water plant?

What do I do? You know, turn on the spigot? It turned out they purified their own water out of Lake Loma, which is a man-made lake for that purpose. They also had their own sewage plant, and the water plant took care of the garbage. So most of my time was spent driving a garbage truck. That seemed fitting for what I'd done so far, and other time was spent in waders in a sewage pond, and very good, humbling experiences that I learned a lot from.

Anyway, and I will mention, you know, so when I didn't get accepted to go on, my boss wanted to hire me full-time to work at the water plant, and I said, That's great! I've got nothing else to do. I hadn't planned a career for afterwards.

And then it was the week before classes were set to start. I got a call from Dr. Ward's office, and the secretary, Frank Dunkel, Dr. Ward wants to talk to you. Now, at the time, I was also working at the shipping and receiving office. I did half a day at each job, and he'd been getting some furniture in, so I assumed this was special instructions for his furniture. So I got a pen and paper out, so I got to make sure I take good care of Dr.

Ward's furniture. And instead, he says, Well, Frank, do you want to go to Pasadena? Well, yeah, I do. I said, Okay, then. And I was a little alarmed. So what do I have to do? He said, Just go!

So, okay! So I hung up the phone. I had to call my boss at the water plant and say, I'm going to Pasadena instead, and loaded up all the stuff I owned, which wasn't a whole lot then. I was able to load it in my old Volkswagen microbus, which was my vehicle at the time. I could probably give a whole sermon on cars I've owned, and that'll be for another time. And a lot of us, we caravanned out to Pasadena and was able to spend another two years there.

And one thing I'll say, Ambassador College and the Church has had a reputation for being a wonderful and a good thing in the Church. Ambassador College has, at times, had a reputation for being a source of trouble, for sending people out that are conceited and full of themselves and self-righteous. And I think the College has earned both of those to the full. It's been a great thing at times, been a bad thing at other times, and different people have gotten different things out of it.

It was one of the best things that could have happened to me. I mean, I grew, I learned things that I couldn't even have imagined possible. And I'm so glad I was able to go for the full four years. And, in fact, because I'd had previous college, I could have graduated after my third year. And I said, why would I want to leave this? I was just having a blast. So, you know, I stuck around for a fourth year, got a second part-time job. Now, I'll mention, Sue was a few years younger than me. She applied to go to Ambassador College and was not accepted. But, as I said, it was a great thing for me. She looked back and said, probably wouldn't have been such a good thing for her because of the age difference. She would have been there when the so-called New Doctrine started coming out. You know, the heresy that came and changed the worldwide Church of God into a different organization. And I knew some of the people that were there then, and it was a difficult time, not the best time to be in Ambassador College. Now, you'll probably hear more from me than you want to about college over the years, although maybe not. I know some ministers I've heard love to tell those stories, and they'll pop up as we need to. I'll mention some of the jobs. I mentioned I worked in the water and sewer plant, which a lot of interesting stories there. At shipping and receiving, I learned how to drive a forklift, and that's one of my favorite things. Also, I got a chance to work with a fellow that would later become one of my best friends. He lives up in Frasiesburg, Ohio, now, and goes to Mansfield. Ted Welch was my boss, and his brother is the pastor. Those of you who were at Camp Pinecrest, remember, his brother Mark runs the ropes course there. I wrote for the campus newspaper part-time, which, interesting, at that time, when I was younger, I thought, boy, I'd love to be a plain truth writer. That's got to be one of the greatest things. I don't want to get up and preach, but writing for the magazine would be terrific. Which, I don't know if I'd shared this. Not long after I was hired by the church, I got a call from Darris McNeely, and he said, oh, Frank, now that you're on the payroll, it's time for you to start writing. And he said, you know, if you've got some education, you know things, get to work. Which, it didn't seem as glamorous as I thought it would be back when I was younger. Anyways, and I worked, the two years I was in Pasadena, I worked for the Watts office. And it shows how dated we are. I mentioned that to somebody not long ago, and they said, what does Watts mean? It's an acronym that stands for Wide Area Telephone Service. Back then, you know, making a long-distance call was still pretty expensive, so the church maintained an 800 line. And I'm sure a lot of you are shaking your head, you remember. Were any of you in-home telephone operators?

Some of you were. I had the opportunity to be one of those people in Pasadena sending you calls at times. And the excitement was really something to be there on a Sunday morning, because what would happen, we knew where the telecast was airing, and what time they would offer the literature. You know, you'd say, you know, 27 minutes after the hour, Mr. Armstrong is going to hold up that magazine and say, and they'll have the number.

And as soon as that would happen, suddenly, ring, ring, the phones would go down the line, one after another. And then it'd come up the next line. And then, you know, sometimes when we had several stations airing, we'd have to start sending calls out to people in their homes who were taking.

And it was so exciting that we were part of the work. You'd pick up the phone and say, the world tomorrow program? Would you like the literature offered today? I've said it so many times, I can still do it. It's bad if you get to practice, because there's more than once when people say, is this a person or a recording? No, I'm a person. I can send you the stuff, and you write down their name and address. But it was, like I said, incredibly exciting to be part of doing the work. It made getting up at three in the morning worth it, because all of us who were floor supervisors, which after I'd been there a little while, they trained me to sit up and take the difficult calls.

You know, the people who were calling to say, I'm having a fight with my wife, or there's demons in my house, or things like that. You get to deal with those. But those of us who were floor supervisors, once a month, one Sunday a month, we had to come in at three in the morning, because three in the morning in California, six in the morning on the East Coast, and the telecast was airing then.

So we'd get to go in to do that work. But, as I said, totally worth it. We were helping to preach the Gospel. Only am. I'm going to watch out. I was thinking this could be done early, but it's easy to talk about yourself. Well, I want to mention my first two summers, and I didn't mention this.

As a teenager in the church, I was involved in all the WYU activities, was privileged to get to go to the summer educational program. That was our camp at the time in Minnesota. And I loved that so much that the first two years I was at ambassador, I applied to be on the staff up at SEP.

And I got turned down both times. So, I'm not working out so well. Then, after that, a good friend of mine, a fellow named Mark Johnston, and we were really close friends in college, and have drifted away since then because we believe different things now, but he had spent the summer after our sophomore year working at the camp in Scotland.

And he came back and said, oh, it's so great! We've got to go back there. You've got to come with me. And at the time, I said, I don't want to go there. I want to go to the real camp. Not this weird thing they do in some sheep field, and they set up tents. I want to go to camp in Minnesota. But he kept going on about how good it was. But I did have something else in mind. Now, my mother had always wanted to visit Europe. Among those books she read, and I will admit, she read some romance novels, where a lot of what she read, but a lot of them were set in Europe.

She wanted to see London. She wanted to go to France. And she never got the chance. So when she passed away, she left my sister and I, not a huge amount of money, because she was a factory worker, but some money was in the bank. And I said, I'm going to use that money and go to Europe.

She didn't get to see Europe. I'm going to go and see it for her. So I made a bargain with my friend Mark. I said, if you'll go travel Europe with me, first, I'll then go to the summer camp with you. So we were both compromising. And we did. Now back, I'm not sure if they still have it, that you could get what was called a U-rail pass. You pay one lump sum here in the United States and they give you a ticket that will let you get on any train, going any place, any time in Europe.

And so we did. And we loaded our backpacks. And we went. We flew over and landed in Germany. And we traveled around. And we slept on trains a lot of times. And we ate a lot of bread and cheese, because we couldn't afford anything else.

And we stayed with members in the church. And I was just amazed at what happened. Matter of fact, I'll share this with you. When we first landed, it was, I think, Wednesday. And we said, well, we'd like to stay with brethren on the Sabbath. So we called the minister, who was the regional director in Germany. We got his phone number. And we said, can you put us in contact with some church members that we could stay with on the Sabbath?

And he said, oh, there's a man right there. He'll want you to stay with him. You have to call him immediately. And we're like, but what we wanted to do is, no, call him right now. And he said it was such authority. We said, well, we'd better call. And the fellow said, yes, come to my home right now. And he gave us directions. And we came there. And he put us up for three days. And, you know, including later the Sabbath. But at one point we were going to go over to Salzburg. And he said, oh, you're going to Salzburg. I know some church members there. Let me call them.

And arrange for them to meet us. And we stayed with them. And so it went throughout Europe. And it was, as I said, when Sue and I walked in the door, when you feel that spirit, and you know you're among brethren, it was like that. Everywhere we went, we were among brethren.

And as I said, it was like, the Lord has led me to the house of my master's brethren all over again there. So we had a wonderful time traveling Europe. And then we made our way up to Loch Lomond, Scotland. And if you've heard the song, you know, the Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond, that's where the camp was.

And it was on a sheep field. The church rented this field. And because it wasn't a permanent camp, they would need a small number of people to show up two weeks before camp was scheduled. And so for two weeks, we would pull equipment out of a barn. And we would set up tents and build soccer goals. We'd set up a water tower.

And a lot of us picked up sheep poop. They called it the Pooper Scooper Crew. Because we were going to use that field for camp later, so we had to clean all that up. And you would think it would be horrible, because I've never worked as hard in my life as I did those two weeks. And yet it was the best time of my life. At least in many ways. I'd say being with Sue is the best time of my life.

But working those two weeks, I've often...we like to make the analogy between summer camp and the millennium. And you'll hear me talk about that because of how much I love summer camp. But I tend to think that even the setup for the camp there was perhaps more like the millennium. Because here we were a small number of converted people building this whole new world for a large number of young people who were not yet converted, but who we were going to teach God's way.

So, in my mind, it worked that way. And of course, then, after the two weeks of setup, the kids would come in from Britain, Europe, a few from the United States, and we would have three weeks of summer camp.

And for that first time there, I was a counselor, and I've confessed to the counselors, especially this summer, how bad a job I did. Not real good the first time, but I learned. And then, of course, after the camp, we would have a week of taking down and putting everything away. So, I think before camp, I traveled three and a half weeks. Two weeks of setup, three weeks of camp, one week of take down, and I traveled with one backpack. So, I did a lot of laundry on the way, and in all that time, we paid for a place to sleep three times.

All of us spent either at camp with church brethren or on the trains and three youth hostels. And I'm losing track of the main point I wanted to make here. Something very special happened to me that summer. I fell in love with camp. I mean, I've had crushes on girls at various summer camps lots of times, but I fell in love with the whole summer camp program. And I know there are people in this room that know exactly what I mean.

We didn't call it the zone back then, but we had what we call the zone. That atmosphere of doing things God's way. Everybody in tune with wanting to be like God and teach His way. I knew I wanted to come back. I said, I've got to go back and do this again.

And so I asked the camp director, well, actually, I got the idea from my buddy. He was near the end of camp, and Mr. Succlin was directing the camp then. He said, can I come back next summer?

And so I said, me too! Well, of course you can come back. I should mention they didn't pay us to go there. So it was all volunteers. So they were happy to get ambassador students any time they could if we would get ourselves there. So I've now worked, I think counting this summer, 23 summers consecutively that I've served at summer camp. And I say it a little bit bragging, but also just because I'm so proud and blessed that God has allowed me to do it. It's meant a lot to me, and I've learned and grown and met a lot of wonderful people.

You know, I've been a counselor, and I've taught activities, and I've worked some in administration. And I'm hoping to never miss. Now, Succlin comes with me sometimes. She's had her summer camp experience. But especially this summer with Connor, you can imagine that wasn't real conducive for summer camp. And the summer before was definitely not because, you know, Connor was with us, but inside her. So, although I'm hoping to draft her this next summer, because I've been telling her, if I've got to run the thing, I'm going to need your help more than ever.

So, you know, Succlin loves camp, but she's not a fanatic about it quite the way I am. But going in before we ever met, I always assumed I would meet my wife at summer camp. And I just realized I didn't tell you the story about how we met. We actually didn't meet at camp. We met at a singles activity at the feast, which I've always found ironic. Because I said, you're never going to meet somebody at a singles activity. Not that we locked eyes and said, oh, we're going to get married. But it was the beginning of an opportunity to build a friendship. But anyways, what I was going to say is, I always said, I don't have to marry someone that will always come to camp.

I just have to marry someone that will let me go to camp. And Succlin's been very good about that. Now, the story of camp is going to tie back in.

I mentioned I was talking about life or education and jobs I've had. The way it's going to fit in is, of course, I finished Ambassador College, graduated, and realized that I had absolutely no career plans. And once again, I'll say, young people, don't follow my example in that. Because even leading up to graduation, people would say, well, Frank, what are you going to do? Well, I'm going to wear a suit for some company.

Well, if companies aren't looking to hire someone who just has a suit, even though I had two, I would say, well, I'm going to do that. So, you know, I went back to Wendy's and worked as a Wendy's manager and started thinking, I need to find out what I'm going to do. And by the way, a lot of my friends after school had gone to Houston to work, and they said, come on down, Frank, it's great.

We've got jobs and new cars. So I went down to Houston to be a Wendy's manager. So I can sympathize with the Smiths, because I went down there in the summer and know what that weather's like in August. But I spent some time thinking, because I realized by then that being a Wendy's manager might not be my highest potential.

So what do you want to do with your life? In the United States, we're blessed that a lot of us can do something that we like for a living instead of what we have to. Throughout most of human history, if your parents were farmers, you were going to be a farmer. If your dad was a blacksmith, you'd probably be a blacksmith, and most people were poor. We had options. We have options to try to do something we like. And I said, well, Frank, what do you like? There's nothing I like doing more than teaching at summer camp.

The problem is summer camp doesn't last all year, so it's hard to make a living. But I said, I can be a teacher. And I thought about it, and my favorite subject was history. So the decision was made. I'm going to go back to school, and I'm going to become a history teacher. And that's what I did.

Well, Ambassador College wasn't accredited that time. That's hard to say. You know what I meant. It wasn't easy for me to get into just any school, but the University of Texas branch at Tyler was familiar with Ambassador College. So I applied there, got accepted to work on my master's degree. For two years, I lived in a trailer with another student in Big Sandy. And it's funny, because if you've been there, you know there's the campus, a highway 80, and a railroad track.

And there's a little lane with some trailer houses on the other side. So I said, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks. You know, I rode my motorcycle into Tyler just about every day to go to school, pack my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We were doing the poorest student thing. But it was pretty neat. And along the way, I said, well, since I'm learning all this stuff and loving it, instead of preparing to be a high school teacher, I decided I'd be a college professor. So as I was nearing the end, I started applying for different universities to go on for doctoral study.

And I was accepted at Texas A&M University and went down there, spent about six years at Texas A&M, and I really liked the school. I told lots of people, I liked everything about Texas except the climate. Never quite got used to that climate. But I spent that five years.

At first, I worked as a graduate assistant grading exams for other professors. When I finished my comprehensive, then they turned over a class for me to teach my own. And that's when I knew that I'd made the right choice. And I like to tell people this. You know you've made a good career choice when Monday is your favorite day of the week. And it was for me.

Monday morning, I'd wake up and say, I get to go teach class today. I was thrilled that I would get to do that. So, you know, it was a great thing. I taught there as a grad student for one year afterwards, but then of course they want to push you out of the nest and say, go find a regular job. Now, I'd been applying around, but they warned me that there's not a whole lot of jobs for people who studied Western history. They said, if you really want to get a job, study African or Asian history.

I said, I don't want to study African or Asian history. I want to study American history. That's what I'm interested in. I did. I specialized in the revolutionary era. So I can tell you a lot about George Washington and Benedict Arnold and all those guys. But there weren't a lot of schools lining up to hire me. I remember applying for one position and being... I got a letter back saying I wasn't hired, but letting me know they had 300 people apply.

That's 300 people with PhDs. Probably a lot of them better qualified than me. Now, while I was applying for jobs all over the country, I saw a job posting for something called a program officer at the Ohio Humanities Council. I don't know what a program officer is, and I'd never heard of a Humanities Council, but they wanted somebody with my qualifications, and it was in my hometown. So I sent them my resume, did a phone interview, later went in, and next thing I knew, I was a program officer for the Ohio Humanities Council.

I'm speeding up a little bit because I see my life is getting longer than I thought.

So I did work for the Humanities Council in Columbus for about 12 and a half years, and it was a very good job. It turns out every state has Humanities Council affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities. So there in Columbus, my job was to do on a smaller scale what they did from Washington. Largely, I helped organizations apply for funding to put on educational programs. So a lot of my job was to deal with grant programs and give people advice.

Council them on how to plan their activity and on how to write their proposal. So when the church called, I said, well, I've had a lot of experience giving people advice and working with people on the phone and going and meeting people, so the ministry won't be entirely different. I had tons of interesting experiences there, and you'll hear me talk about John Brown and Alexander Hamilton probably later on, more than you want to know, but that's a whole other story.

I do want to say, though, I'm thrilled to be back in the job of teaching. That's what I view my career here is I get to teach the most important subject there is, God's way of life, God's Word. But I'm conscious that education or not, the only way I'm going to have any success is to the degree that I let God do the work through me. He's given me a lot of training and opportunity, but I've got to submit to him doing the work, and that's the only thing that will work.

Now, one more subject I'm going to cover within the next 10 minutes. It used to be common, and I think it still is, when you met someone in the church that you didn't know before, in the old days, the one thing you talked about was, how did you come into the church? Since the 1990s, the secondary thing would be, how did you end up in the United Church of God coming out of worldwide? And so, I'll mention a couple of those things, because you should know those about me. Now, I think I've already told you, the big one, my grandmother was the first one in the church.

She heard the World Tomorrow program in about 1968. She started listening, and I love to tell the story, she said, I knew that was it! He's right! She wrote away for the literature, she started attending church. Now, my sister and I, growing up in a single-parent household, Mom was eager to be rid of us at times. I mean that in a good way, but we spent a lot of weekends visiting my grandmother, so Mom could have a little bit of a break. And when we were there, she started teaching us.

She had us memorize the Ten Commandments when I was 10 years old, and started talking about this Feast of Tabernacles that's so wonderful, and she took us to church services with her. So, my mother was a little surprised after a while when we told her, we want to go to church every Sabbath.

And we actually arranged for a family that lived on our end of town to pick us up. And then we hit her with the big one. We don't want to do that Christmas thing anymore. Now, that might... For those of you that remember Christmas, I say a lot of you grew up in the church, that's no big deal. And I don't want to say it to brag, because I don't think I really understood what I was getting into, but I was willing to trade it off.

And of course, later, the Feast came along and I said, that's way better anyways. It was not long after that that Mom said, I'm going to have to check this out, and she started coming to church with us. And soon the whole family was there. We kept our first Feast of Tabernacles in 1975 at the Ozarks, the Lake of the Ozarks, with that parking lot. I could come up with some good adjectives, but I won't. You all know what that's like. And it turns out, I'm pretty sure Sue was there that same year, and we didn't even meet. I think there were about 5,000 or 8,000 people. Some of you were probably there, too, waiting in line to get out of the parking lot.

Well, when the crisis of the 1990s came, I was at Texas A&M University. We were assigned to the Wake Oak, Texas congregation. My experience was different than a lot of people's, because I had one of the pastors that didn't believe the so-called New Doctrines. He thought that we had it right already, so he wasn't teaching them. Mostly I learned what was going on, because I had a classmate who was from Big Sandy, and her parents had some inside information they were sending down to us. You might remember, email was sort of this new thing back then.

We were able to get information so much faster than the people in Pasadena wanted us to have it. So we were trying to organize and let people know the truth about what was going on. And the challenges to the truth inspired me. That's when I started writing in a way I never had before. I wrote several essays proving doctrines of the Church.

Now, I knew they probably weren't very readable or wouldn't go out very much, and they weren't. I showed them to some people. I remember handing them to Dr. Ward, and he opened his briefcase. He said, I'll put them right in there. I'm not sure if he ever even looked at them. But they helped me to clarify my thoughts. I was proving to myself what I believed. From the Bible, not from anything else. Because I had ministers that I had trusted before telling me, oh, we were wrong. That doesn't count. So I want to find out from this book what's true. Those essays helped me out quite a bit in doing that.

I was guided by my favorite scripture. I adopted it as my favorite scripture years and years ago. So I'll share it with you now. It's Acts 5.29. It simply says, we ought to obey God rather than men. There are a lot of other wonderful scriptures that I'm fond of. But this one comes back to me, because when it comes down to crunch time, we ought to obey God rather than men.

And I hope if I ever get up here and say something that runs counter to what's in the Bible, you'll remember that, too. Mr. Armstrong used to say, don't believe me, believe the Bible. Blow the dust off the Bible and prove it to yourselves. So certainly I hope that the same will apply to you. Now, our pastor attended the Indianapolis conference in 1995 that formed the United Church of God. And he came back to Waco and said, I think this is right.

I'm joining. And any of you that want to be in, come with me. As far as I'm concerned, this is now a congregation of the United Church of God. And two-thirds of us stayed together and were there. Now, the interesting thing that comes out for me is all of this. I knew where I was. I believed the truth. I hadn't been all that involved in the congregation before. Students sometimes show up in congregations, and they're treated as visitors. We had at least in Columbus fairly often, because people would come up there to go to OSU.

You'd see them at services, but they're busy doing the school thing, and you know they're going to be gone soon. So I wasn't given many assignments to help out. But one thing interesting happened. When the one-third that did leave the Waco congregation left, they took all the song-leaders. So Mr. Gulley is looking around saying, anybody here know how to lead songs? Well, I went to Ambassador College. So I became the song-leader for the next year and a half. And, you know, giving sermonettes and eventually longer messages on a regular basis. So that was where suddenly I was introduced to the speaking schedule. Now, while I mentioned serving at camp, of course I couldn't go to Scotland anymore after that.

So I became a regular at Camp Heritage, and I've served at several of the other United Camps. I was able to go, you know, when I moved to Columbus to take the job at the Humanities Council. I was thrilled to be able to serve, you know, continue serving there and given more and more opportunities. I'll never forget, it was a few years ago Mr. Stiver invited Sue and I to come over for dinner.

And, you know, we chatted and all that. And eventually I said, well, something I want to talk to you. And I don't remember exactly how he let in, but he said, we want to make you a deacon. And I said, well, do I have a choice? And he said, no. But he said, there's something else I want to talk to you about that you do have a choice. You know, and he asked, well, how would you feel about being made an elder and serving in the full-time ministry?

And that did take some thought. And at the time I said, you know, I've been given a lot by the church. You know, if God wants me to serve in that way, I want to give as much back as possible. Now, I wasn't ordained an elder right away. It would be a while later, but I guess they kept that in the back of their mind.

So I was given that opportunity and then here I am. I'd say, concerning the crisis that we've been going through the last few years in the United Church of God, rather than saying a lot of words, I would just say, I'm here. And that probably tells you most of what you would need to know. But it is worth saying, you know, I honestly believe that probably a large majority of those who have left and wanted to go to another church, I think are sincere. I think they've been told lies and believed them.

But I don't think there's maliciousness in the vast majority of those people. And I take very seriously what Mr. Luecker told all of us when he said, they're our brethren. We should pray for them. We should love them. I don't want there to be a spirit of animosity. I don't like what some of what's been done. But as I said, I think the vast majority of people who have left have done so because they thought it was right.

And I think eventually God will bring us all together. And I'm fortunate, of course, very few have left from here. And the last thing I want to do is be any cause of anyone else deciding to leave. So if I do say something offensive or hurtful, please come and talk to me. And I'm not too big to apologize because I'm certainly not too big to make mistakes.

I've done that too many times. I do support the government of the United Church of God. You know, it's not a perfect system. Matter of fact, it was purposely made slow and cumbersome to prevent what happened in the worldwide church of God happening again. And I do have a note. Yes, that was me that wrote that letter that circulated around to the pastors. That might have been the first time a lot of you saw my name. And I was very surprised at how far and how fast that traveled. And to be honest, I wrote it sort of in the mode that I did those essays back in the 90s, to clarify my own thoughts and to sort of put it in order, my thinking.

And I showed it to Sue and to her parents, and they said, Do you think I should share this with anybody? And they said, Yeah, you should. That could help some people. So it ended up on the Internet. And I'm pleased if it did help some people. If it helped any of you, I'm very thankful, because it was just a way of trying to put things in order and think about things. I am honored and humbled to be your pastor here.

And as I said, I know it's not because I'm something special, but because God can work through me. There are a couple of scriptures I want to read in closing. If you'll turn to 2 Corinthians 1, and we'll read verse 24.

And the Apostle Paul, after writing a rather corrective letter to the Corinthians the first time, he writes one where he's a little more mellow in appreciating their change. And he says something very significant. He says, Not that we have dominion over your faith, but our fellow workers for your joy. For by your faith you stand. And that's something important for me to remember. I don't have any dominion over your faith or your belief. I'm a fellow worker with you to help you draw closer to God and live His way. And we can help each other that way. Portsmouth, Ohio, and Prestonsburg, Kentucky are two of the most stable, happy congregations in the country. And I certainly want to keep it that way as much as possible. So I'm very appreciative for what you have to offer, and I'm so thankful that I can be here. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from you, and hopefully helping you to learn as well. Let's turn to Romans, also chapter 1. Just back towards the front a little bit.

Romans chapter 1, we'll read verses 11 and 12. The Apostle Paul was writing to a congregation where he had not been, but he was planning to see them.

He said, And he corrected himself. He said, I want to give you something to help you, but that is that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith, both of you and me. And that's an attitude I want to take here. I want to give you spiritual gifts as God has given me, but this is something we're doing together. That we can be encouraged by each other's mutual faith, that God will lift us all up. And we're all brethren. We're all in this together, and we want to stick together. And I said at the start, God has brought me to the house of my master's brethren. I'm very thrilled that I can do that, and I'm looking forward to all the time we can spend here together over the years, and hopefully in God's kingdom.