I was in junior high when my parents told me it was time to be baptized. We attended the First Christian Church in Princeton, West Virginia, where my father once served in leadership and my mother taught Sunday school. At the time, they were both active in the church. I went through the baptism classes, and when they were complete, we had a special service—not a Sunday morning, as I recall—where each of us publicly confessed Christ and were baptized.
We continued attending church, and I went to Sunday school regularly. But looking back, I realize I was never truly discipled. After being baptized, I read my Bible for a while, and that seemed enough at the time—but eventually, even that faded away.
From that point through high school, I still believed and would occasionally go to church, but I lived far below the standard of what I now understand to be a Christian life. I never denied Christ, but I certainly didn’t live according to His standard. That pattern continued until after I was married to Jon Ellen. After a heated argument, we decided it was time to start going to church again. That was 46 years ago.
When I began to seriously consider Christ and follow Him actively, I wasn’t sure whether I had truly been saved before—probably not. One thing was certain: I wasn’t living according to His standard. That season marked the real beginning of my walk with Christ. I remember having an honest conversation—both with myself and with Him—about what it meant to be a Christian. I decided that if I was going to follow Jesus, I wanted to be the same person everywhere—at church, at work, socially, with friends, and with family. Later, I called that being a “congruent Christian”—someone whose life is consistent no matter the setting. As far as I understood, Jesus was that person. He was the standard, and I determined in my heart to follow Him.
In those early years, I followed Him more out of will than passion—it was “the right thing to do.” I’ve never really liked the phrase “nominal Christian,” because nominal means “in name only,” and I wasn’t “non-Christian.” But the term might still describe how I lived for the next ten years. We were committed to our local church and attended regularly, yet I never truly felt fulfilled—as if I had actually experienced life in Christ. I began to realize that following Him had to be more than simply doing the right thing.
That conviction deepened when my young son was hospitalized, and my wife and I were desperate for him to be well. Through a mutual friend, she contacted a preacher who believed in divine healing. He stopped by the hospital during my watch, and after a prayer like I had never experienced before, my son was healed within 30 minutes. The nurses checked on him every half hour, and in between checks his fever dropped from 104° to normal. He was released the next day. Needless to say, we were overjoyed—but it also set me on a lifelong journey to understand what had happened in that hospital room.
During this time, I was transferred to Winston-Salem to take over sales operations for the company I had sold my business to. It also gave me the opportunity to find a church that could help me understand what I had witnessed. While I was seeking God, the company entered a turbulent season, and I was under intense pressure. Going to church brought relief, but I knew I needed more.
One Sunday night, I attended a special church service where the pastor was teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I had never believed in it before—had even denied its existence and spoken against it—but I was desperate. I told myself that if it was real, and God wanted me to have it, then I needed whatever He could give me to get through what I was facing.
That night, I went forward and received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, with the evidence of speaking in tongues. From that moment, my life was changed. I truly experienced Christ, the fire of God was alive in me, and I have never been the same since. That was 35 years ago.
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