(Taken from my book, “Bright Light,” available for order here.)

My very earliest childhood memories are filled with a sobering reality of God at work, intruding and altering the way I thought and acted. This was simply the way I grew up thinking life was supposed to be.

Like any child, I did things I knew to be wrong. Early on, though, I was set against that behavior and wanted the Lord Jesus to rule my whole life. I was faced with two dilemmas: How could I be sure of life in heaven with the Lord? and How could I stop sinning?

This way of thinking for a youngster seemed very normal to me, given my upbringing. I was immersed in the church and was taught about God in my home by both parents and by all my grandparents.

My two grandfathers, both skilled carpenters, had with their own hands built a church building just around the corner from my childhood home. Organizing their friends and fellow carpenters, and with teams of ladies standing by to feed them, they amazed the community by erecting the entire church structure, foundation to roof, in one day. All that remained was inside work. In this building I heard the Gospel from fiery evangelists who made sure that all of us who listened could not both sleep peacefully and fail to settle accounts with God.

One particular sermon, on the final judgment, is still vivid in my memory. Midway into the message, an electrical thunderstorm arose, and the lights suddenly went out. Taking advantage of the crashing thunder and the flashes of lightening, the evangelist cried out, “There! What if this were the Lord’s appearing? Where would you be?” It seemed to this shaken child that the preacher was pointing directly at me!

I often sat there among the crowds that flocked to the adjacent outdoor tabernacle with its crude benches and sawdust-covered ground leading to the “mourner’s bench” at the front, where I saw many a penitent begin a new life. Though I never found the courage to walk to the bench, I did search for God over and over again, praying down in our garden. Indeed, often while the jarring messages were going forth from the tabernacle platform, I was down in our nearby cornfield listening. There between the rows of ceiling-high field corn, I knelt in repentance and begged God to enter my needy heart.

My inner struggles did not soon end, however. Mom once discovered her younger son sitting up in bed and not sleeping. “What’s wrong, Boy?” she asked in deepest concern. With heavy sobs, it tumbled out, “I’m not a good boy!” But how I longed to be! She immediately summoned Dad, and the two of them knelt beside me, one on either side, and we prayed together that I might be graciously received and forgiven. That scene some eighty years past is still a precious one to me.

And so it was that, early on, I learned the crucial lesson of basing my eternal assurance on what my Lord Jesus Christ did for me in my behalf when he lived here on earth, and not on what he had accomplished in my young life. After years of warring against doubts, I came to rest in John 1:12: “To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” This is what the Lord himself promises, I reasoned, and he is the Judge. I shall forever rest the matter on his word. If necessary, I will recite that verse as my defense in the hour of judgment! A final prayer at my bedside concluded my uncertainty as to personal salvation.

My dad played a key role in helping me find my way spiritually.  He knew how young children thought. Once during our evening Bible time, with my older brother, younger sister, and me circled in front of him, I asked him, “Dad, what’s it like to be a real Christian?” I have never forgotten his classic answer: “Harold, it’s better than eating ice cream!” Bull’s-eye, for sure!

Thus it was, in my earliest memory, that God’s Spirit impressed on me that I was to be his in a singular manner. Each phase of this book seems like a double-edged instrument cutting both ways. Not only was I doing things for God, but he was working in my life significantly. Layer after layer of my apparent strengths were peeled back by Providence.

My first recollection of an attempt to use Scripture in church was when I was eight or nine. The Sunday School superintendent asked a group of adults and youth for a favorite verse. I still remember my selection — Psalm 12:1 — as well as my wonderment at his strange reaction toward my verse. As others shared Psalm 23 and other familiar passages, I contributed, “Help, LORD, for the godly are no more; the faithful have vanished from among men.”

“Well … uh … thanks, Harold. Who else has a verse?”

I wondered then, and still do, why this verse is not a good one for us today. And if we’re concerned about society now, I also see and feel the punch of this little psalm’s final verse: “The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men” (v. 8).

Now, after more than eighty years of experiences with God’s dealing, I am finally realizing something of what God is aiming at through the myriad of powerful spiritual episodes he sent my way. And I am thankful that he began early on.