Dear Tony,

Thank you for your response, and I don't discard your viewpoint. They are valid, but there is more to life than meets the eye...

I don't want you to misunderstand what I have experienced. In the past, that is about 50 years ago, what happened was and has been and still is a continuing experience and is an existential one, manifested in all facets of my life - physical, intellectual, emotional, vocational, social, and metaphysical - what some call spiritual.

I asked God to rescue me from my drug addled calamity. He did. God came into my life, and soon after, Jesus came and found me, and He changed my life completely. That happened when I didn't even have a clue where to begin. He rescued me from the mess I had made of my life. Nothing and no one else. No effort on my part, simply my coming to the foot of the cross; He revived me and gave me a new life, inside and out.

The list of what God has done in my real life, my actual existence, is extensive, but here is a short, condensed list:

*cleansed my insides of all the extra baggage weighing me down

*erased my suicidal depression, born anew with a sense of joy

*opened my understanding of the Bible and in applying it to my life (a rather bumpy road, I have to admit)

*provided a path of rehabilitation, job opportunities, and a career in helping coworkers

*saving me from death in a hospital (when the surgeons were going to "call it," my youth group interceded with God and my parents to encourage the surgeons to go back in and keep trying)

*saving me from death in a sugar cane Camp where a small group of Believers (4 or 5) rescued me from a much larger group (about 50) who wanted to feed me to the fishes

One specific example I will expand on was when I had realized the need to work or not eat, to get out on my own, I was working Temp jobs. But the pay sucked only paying for bus fare and lunches. Riding on the bus day after day on the same route to downtown, always passing the same buildings, God was going to open an employment door. One sunny morning, I noticed the Agway seed Mill which seemed to light up in DayGlo - much brighter than usual - and I heard a still, small voice which said, "Go there and I'll get you a job." I stopped in the next day, was hired, sent for a physical, and I was working Monday morning. It was also providential, because it was a Union job, and when they moved out of town, I went to the Union Hall, and was sent to the larger Company that was across the street from Agway. I worked there for almost 40 years before it moved out of town, too. While there I was elected a Department Steward, then Chief Steward, then Local Union President. I served my coworkers and employers as best I could.

I don't know what else to say that might convince you that God, Jesus, and the Bible are real and can be a reality in your life and give you an interpersonal, interactive relationship with God, Jesus, and the Bible - not to mention welcoming you into fellowship with a whole community of Born Again Believers. They might neither be as strange nor as ordinary as you might think!

Sincerely,

David