Radically Changed by Love

            It was cold on that March night in 1952 when the warmth of God’s love began a process that changed the lives of a countless number of people.

            It began with one young couple in Indiana. He was twenty one years old and she was eighteen. They had been married for a year and she was just six days away from delivering their first child.

            Up to this point, their lives had not been easy ones. Both of them had been born during the great depression and they knew what it was like to have only the basic necessities of life.

She was the baby of her family with eight older siblings. Her home was one in which she was loved, but the family had been destroyed by alcoholism.  The daddy she loved so much left her family when she was fourteen, just when she needed him the most. There was no child support or aid for dependent children then so her single mother worked as a cook at a restaurant to support her children. Three of her older brothers went off to war when she was too young to understand it but old enough to fear it.

He was born into a family of thirteen, eleven boys and two girls.  Seven of his brothers left the farm to go fight in the same war. One never returned home. He is buried somewhere in France.

His too was a home where he was loved; but in a home with thirteen children, the small family farm did not supply much so his dad worked two other jobs.  I’m told if someone was late to dinner, there was nothing left to eat. I’m also told that those eleven boys grew up rough, tough, and as ornery as the dirt they played in. But they also grew up knowing how to work hard. Even though there was no spiritual training their parents taught them right from wrong.

She went to school in the little town where she lived. She thrived there because she was one of those people who in spite of the hard life were bright and full of fun. She left when she was in the eleventh grade to marry him.

His little country school was two miles from his home and of course there are tales of walking through the woods in a foot of snow to get there. If he and his brothers went to school today they would probably be considered the bullies; after all there were eleven of them and they found power in their number

Survival was his ultimate need.  His other needs were not what we would consider normal for young boys. On the days when there was something to eat in the lunchbox he took to school, he would trade it for a chew of tobacco. When he couldn’t trade for it, he fought for it or stole it. It was only one of his addictions. He was told when he was in high school that if he didn’t change his ways he would end up in prison before he was twenty one.

To survive, she needed to know she was worthy of love; her daddy’s departure had left her with feelings that perhaps she wasn’t. When she was sixteen and he was nineteen they met and she found the earthly love she craved as desperately as he craved his tobacco.  

On that cold night in March they both knew it was time for a change in their lives.  One of his older brothers had married a girl who was a Christian, and they had invited the couple to go to a revival with them.

As they drove into the parking lot of the church that evening, there was some fear. Church was as alien to them as daylight is to the darkness of night. But their spiritual need was greater than their fear.

 At the door they had a choice, turn the knob and go in or turn around. They opened the door.

 That night they heard a sermon about the love of God that could break the bonds of sin. All they had to do was recognize they were sinners, believe God had sent His only Son to die for their salvation and ask for forgiveness of those sins. They made their way to an old wooden altar that night and God became the center of their lives.

They left the little country church that night radically changed. As they pulled out of the parking lot in their old truck, he rolled down the window and threw the pack of tobacco into the ditch.  To some, addiction is a disease, to him it was sin because it had controlled him since childhood, and now he wanted God to be in control of his life. God forgave him of that sin and completely took away his desire for it and all the other ones in his life.

She too was changed. She found that the love of God more than made up for the need she had for the love of her missing drunken father.   The cycle of sin for their family stopped that night.

I was born six days later into their Christian home. I wonder sometimes how my life would have been different if my parents had not been radically changed by the love of God on that cold night in March.  I have children and grandchildren, and I wonder what their lives would be like today if the cycle of sin had not been broken in 1952.

Our God took my dad’s life of sin, addiction and possible prison and changed it radically into one of passion for Jesus. He became a and his forty plus years of ministry resulted in countless other lives being brought to Jesus. At eighty, he still gets behind  the pulpit once in awhile to share his love for the One who changed his life.

II Corinthians 5:17 tells us  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” It is true!

            In the world we live in today the word “radical” seems to imply something negative. But my Dad’s life tells me there are other words that describe “radical”. The change that occurred in his life was thorough, far-reaching, drastic, and profound.  They are the words that describe the change that God’s love still produces in hearts and lives today.