My Story
By Daniel J. Vert
(April 16, 2002)

Who am I? What right do I have to write sermons and articles that would even pretend to show someone else the way to God? You may be asking me that. I know I ask myself these kinds of questions often. I am no better a person than you are, or anyone else, for that matter. I am not any more religious – in fact I rather dislike religion and super religious people. (But then again, so did Yeshua.) Am I more educated, perhaps? No. I have a high school diploma, and several job related training courses for the fifteen years I spent working in Corrections. I am almost 42 years old and am working on getting a Bachelor of  Practical Ministry degree. I hope I have it by the time I’m 45, but to me it’s really just a simple piece of paper to satisfy demands of other people who need credentials. I have worked with incredibly smart people in my lifetime who had virtually no education at all, my father being one of them. He had a Grade Eight education but he managed a printing department at a large Bible College for close to thirty years. I have also worked with people with Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorates – who couldn’t accomplish the simplest tasks in the real, everyday, down to earth world.  And Yeshua’s disciples were not college grads, but simple fishermen, or hated tax collectors, or political zealots (like the Reform /Canadian Alliance guys!) Am I holier, then, closer to God, with some kind of mystical connection to the Master of the universe? I pray almost every day, and I read my Bible usually every day. It’s a struggle. Some days it’s all I can do to talk to God for five minutes. Some days I even forget to thank him for His provisions to me at meal times. Sometimes I can mess up for a week at a time and not have anything meaningful for a devotional time with God. And the days that I do pray, I ALWAYS have to ask God to forgive me for the sins of the previous day. Sins of lust, of pride, of anger. Sometimes sins of bitterness and unforgiveness. I choose to be holy as God is holy. I ask God daily to forgive me and fill me with His Holy Spirit. I repent of my sins as the Holy Spirit is faithful to convict me of them. But I AM NOT PERFECT!  As God works in my life and daily changes me to become more like His Son, Yeshua, I am holier today then I was a year ago. And by God’s grace, if He doesn’t return by then, I want to be holier a year from today then I am now. But am I qualified through holiness to lead any one else to God? No.

The simple answer is – I was called. Yeah, that’s right – called. By God. Driving my truck down the highway one summer afternoon in 1993 going to work for an evening shift at a maximum security federal penitentiary where I was a Correctional Officer. And a voice said out loud to me, “Dan, I want you to preach.” Now, I worked at a federal maximum security jail where there were more than a few guys incarcerated because they had followed “voices” in their heads telling them to do things. I don’t normally hear voices talking to me when no one else is around. So I shook my head REAL hard and kept driving. And then, there it was again. Audible, out loud, just like someone was sitting in the truck next to me having a conversation. “Dan, I want you to preach.” I pulled a long ways off the highway into the ditch (I didn’t want any one to hit me and I would have to tell Police or ambulance people I was listening to voices that weren’t there!) and started to shake. I said something really smart and sophisticated like “No way, God, you got the wrong guy. I work in a jail and I ran away from You for years and I don’t have a Bible School education and I can’t preach and I used to be a drunk and nobody will ever listen to me and you don’t mean me – PICK SOMEBODY ELSE!” And there it was again, still quiet, calm, gentle, and insistent – “Dan, I want you to preach.” Well, as Hank Hill says on “King of the Hill” on TV, I tell ya what – I just shut up and listened. I had read in the Bible the story about when God had called Samuel to be His prophet, and I figured I’d probably lose if it came down to arguing with God. So I said the first smart thing that day, “O.K. God, I’ll preach for you, but I have no idea how you’re gonna do this. I don’t know how to preach, I don’t have a Bible School education, I’m working in a jail, no one is EVER going to ask me to be a minister of a church with my background and past, so you’re sorta’ going to have to work it all out.” Then I pulled back on the highway and drove to work in jail. Still shaking my head and wondering when someone with a nice white jacket with really long sleeves was going to come knocking on my door. But I’m sort of ahead of myself here already. How did I come to hear God calling me to preach in my truck that summer in 1993?

I was born Charles Edward Bachmeier in Calgary, Alberta, on August 2, 1960. My birth mother, who God has graciously allowed me to finally meet and get to know and love in my late 30’s, was a single mom with four older boys she was trying to hold on to from being taken away by the province. They were in temporary provincial care while Marian, my birth mother, went to nursing school so she could have a means of supporting herself and them after her first marriage to an abusive drunk had ended. Remember, in 1960 this was not a common, accepted thing like it is today. She met and fell in love with another man, my biological father, Edward Charles Ireland, while in nurses training. When she got pregnant with me, Edward was not ready for that responsibility, and left her. She made the wisest decision she could under the circumstances, knowing that she couldn’t support another baby and get the four older boys back, too, and put me up for adoption. I was in a foster home in Calgary until I was nine months old, then placed with my prospective adoptive parents Joe and Florence Vert, in Three Hills, Alberta, where they worked at the Prairie Bible Institute. It was a rough beginning. The day they brought me home from Calgary I cried so hard for so many hours that my mom finally had to just give me to my dad and go for a walk to calm her nerves. Eventually I stopped crying, but that seemed to set the tone for the next seventeen years of my life. I fought my mom and frustrated her greatly all of my growing up years.

I was finally legally adopted in June of 1963, just short of my third birthday, and officially became Daniel Joseph Vert. I grew up there at Prairie Bible Institute. My parents were good, but very strict, conservative, Christians, in a good but very strict, conservative Christian college. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was a well used axiom in our house, and both myself and my adopted sister two years older than me were anything but spoiled in those terms. However, our parents loved us. We had food, clothing, and shelter, and a good education in a private Christian school from kindergarten through High School. As much as at the time I hated growing up there, I can honestly look back and thank God for the Christian teachers and leaders and friends I had there. I accepted Jesus into my heart originally in kindergarten, which at the time my mom taught. It was just the thing that everybody did. I learned about God, and Jesus, at home, at school, and at church. There was never any time I wasn’t being taught about the Bible. We had Bible classes all through school, chapel services every day, and even prayer at the start of every class. I went to Church twice every Sunday, Tuesday night prayer meetings, and Friday night Young People’s meetings. There were spring missions conferences a week long, and fall conferences too, both with three meetings every day. I was a member of Christian Service Brigade, played in a trumpet trio that traveled to other churches doing outreach, and even went street witnessing in Calgary. But as I got older, it all seemed to me to just be a bunch of rules about things that looked like fun, but because you were a “Christian”, you weren’t allowed to do. We weren’t allowed televisions, hair regulations were like the military, girls couldn’t wear pants or make-up, guys couldn’t grow beards or wear jeans to school, and generally I felt like I was growing up in a prison. We even had a loud siren that went off at precisely 7:20 pm every week day which was to notify all students – grade school, high school, and Bible College, that they couldn’t be outside but had to be inside their houses, dormitory rooms, or school library studying. We weren’t allowed to play with playing cards, drink, smoke, dance, listen to any music with drums, and worst of all, no dating of the opposite sex. I basically saw the whole Bible as just the really big rule book that the College condensed their (not much) smaller rule book from. By the time I was in High School I was rebelling. I had lots of detentions and counseling from teachers, but it only made me more rebellious. I hated my parents, especially my mother, who I saw only as strict, controlling jail guards. (Ironic, isn’t it, what I ended up doing as a career for fifteen years!) I came close to getting kicked out of high school at the end of Grade 11, but I had a “religious experience” at the start of Grade 12 and cleaned up my act enough that people believed I was sincere. Secretly, though, I had started to drink quite heavily that summer between Grade 11 and 12, while I was working out in the mountains close to Canmore and Banff. During this period I had also had a couple of episodes of losing my temper so badly I had actually killed a stray cat with my bare hands in a fit of rage, and was secretly very scared that I might actually kill my parents, or at least my mother, in a similar uncontrolled state of anger. I repressed that anger deep inside of me, not wanting anyone else, or even myself, to see what I was capable of.

I graduated from Prairie High School in June of 1978, and moved to Banff, Alberta, the very next day to work in one of the many restaurants there. I started drinking very heavily almost as soon as I moved there. I was so unutterably lonely. I hadn’t had many friends in school, partially because I didn’t fit in well –smart enough but not motivated enough to be a brain, not even close to being a jock, and too scared to be openly rebellious and hang out with the true “bad kids”. Nothing changed in Banff. The Christian kids I knew from Prairie who worked in Banff didn’t want to hang out with me, because I drank too much, and I couldn’t seem to fit in with any other crowd. I traveled to St John’s, Newfoundland that summer of 1978 to enter a public speaking contest, for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, against drinking, of all things. I was a total farce. I came back to Banff depressed, and one night decided to kill myself. I couldn’t find any pills to overdose on, and the late night drug store was, strangely enough, closed. So I went to my little staff room up above the restaurant where I worked, and got really, really drunk – even more so than usual. I looked at the fist marks on the wall beside my bed, where I pounded the walls out of loneliness night after night after night. The only thing I could find to do myself in with was a large, glass, 7-Up pop bottle, so I smashed it over my head, I guess hoping that I’d bleed to death. One of the few friends I had at the time was another Prairie kid who worked at that restaurant with me. He heard the bottle shatter and came into my room. He bandaged my head (which must be pretty thick because it wasn’t hardly damaged at all) and then sat by my bed all night to keep me from doing anything else stupid. I lay there in my bed convinced even more that I was the ultimate failure, because I couldn’t even die right. Not once did the thought that God didn’t want me to die, and that He had closed the drug store and that He had even given me a thick skull, ever enter my mind.

I went on with my life in Banff, working in restaurants, for Parks Canada, guiding horseback tours, driving taxi, and drinking ever more heavily. I had small periods of trying to find sanity and soberness, even seeking for God at times, but I never seemed to find what it was that I was looking for. I had various girlfriends that I lived common-law with for varying amounts of time but always I still couldn’t find the love and acceptance I needed so desperately, and these relationships invariably always ended badly. I had a bad car accident when I was 19 and rolled a car, totally destroying it. I and the two girls in the car with me walked away, practically uninjured. I knew this time that this was a miracle of God, but even that wasn’t enough to stop me from drinking, and the short search for God again gradually faded away. I lived for a short time in London, Ontario, because a woman I was living with went back to Ontario for schooling. Again, I almost married her, but broke it off and moved back to Alberta. I even went back to Prairie Bible Institute for a semester of Bible College, but was quickly disillusioned by what I perceived as thorough hypocriticalness in every so-called Christian I knew. I moved back to the mountains and drank even more. I moved to Edmonton, Alberta in the fall of 1981 for work, and met and started dating a Christian girl. She went to a Pentecostal Church, which to me was really wild and strange. I attended, and again briefly searched for what I thought was a meaningful relation with God, even going so far as getting water baptized. I didn’t get baptized in the Spirit though – that was just TOO weird – speaking in tongues was a bit far out in left field for me. As per usual, my relationship with both God and the girlfriend broke off, and back to the mountains to drink I went.

By the time I was 24, I knew I was setting some seriously bad patterns in my life. I was scared of how I was drinking, and had even ended up overnight in the drunk tank in the local RCMP station. I wasn’t charged, and kicked out in the morning. I was doing stupid things like shoplifting from stores, and driving when I knew I was extremely drunk, to the point of not even remembering some mornings how I had gotten home the night before, but looking out the window and seeing my car in the parking lot where I lived. Then one day I went to a big party where people started drinking before lunch time. By about 4:00pm I was already very drunk and got into a fight with some people at the party, so I left. The next memory I have is of waking up the next morning in the RCMP drunk tank soaking wet and very sick. The police said they had picked me up about 1:00am when I passed out into a pile of garbage cans in a back alley. I was wet because they had sprayed me down with the fire hose after I got sick and vomited all over their holding cell. The police officer who released me that morning told me he had been a cop for 20 years, and about 12 years of that in Banff (where drunkenness is a constant problem that the police have to deal with), and that I was the drunkest person he had ever seen that had lived. He couldn’t believe that I had not died from alcohol poisoning. When I put my clothes back on to go home, I found blood on my jacket and $40.00 in my pocket, neither of which I had had when I left the party the afternoon before. All I know to this day is that there is roughly eight hours gone from my memory that I don’t know what happened or where I was. I had passed out drunk many times before, but had always woken up in the same place and remembered what had happened up until I passed out. This was different, and really scared me. I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I went home and cracked a beer to ponder my life.

A short time after that, one of my drinking buddies got into trouble with the law and ended up on probation. I walked into the local probation office and asked if there was some way I could help my buddy out that was on probation, and they signed me up to become a volunteer probation officer. As I started to work with probation clients, I realized that I had to choose which path I was going to take in my life. I didn’t really have much to do with God in this decision, but I decided to quit drinking so that number one – I wasn’t going to end up in jail, and number two – so that I could be a “Good Influence” on the probation clients I was dealing with. I went to AA for a while, and I will tell you it was extremely tough. I was a failure from their standpoint, as I kept drinking occasionally, but I was able to stop the heavy drinking, especially of Scotch whiskey, which was my biggest downfall.

In 1985, my experience as a volunteer probation officer, coupled with experience I had working as a security guard, opened the door for me to start work as a Correctional Officer at the newly built provincial jail in Grande Cache, Alberta. I started this new career scared to death, in a town where I knew no one. I was keeping my drinking more or less under control, going to church every so often, and had another common-law relationship. But I was a long ways away from God, and when this common-law relationship ended, I was fast becoming extremely bitter. I started to hate the job, and the isolated town, and was even starting to doubt that there was a God. If He did in fact exist, He certainly didn’t care about me, nor I about Him. I transferred over to the Federal Correctional system in 1989, and started working at the Edmonton Maximum Security Penitentiary on my 29th birthday. Once again, I found myself in another common-law relationship. Things started out well. I had a good paying job, a house, and she had a good job as a nurse, and we had a lot in common. But all my past failed relationships still hadn’t taught me much, and our relationship started to fail. Then, in 1990, we went to Three Hills to spend Christmas with my parents. My Dad got sick Christmas Day and ended up in the hospital. Four months later, April 12, 1991, he was dead from cancer of the liver. One of the very last things he said to me before he went into a coma, was he asked me if he would see me in heaven, as he knew I was not living my life in any way pleasing to God. I could not even give him an answer. I honestly didn’t know if I believed that there even was a heaven and a God. For his sake, I hoped there was, because I knew that my dad had always believed in and served God, and of all the Christians I knew, he was someone who deserved to go to heaven. But I myself no longer had any faith in God, or was even sure He existed. I was devastated. I realized too late how much I loved my Dad, but had not gone out of my way much to spend time with him since I had left home at 17, other than the semester I lived back with my parents when I went to Bible College. I also felt overpowering guilt because I realized that it was my own selfishness and the fact that I didn’t get along with my Mom that had kept me away.

I struggled with my questions about God, my guilt from my Dad’s death, became depressed, and my common-law relation fell apart in January of 1992. We had a big verbal fight one night, which ended with my girlfriend saying she no longer loved me. I went over to my best friend’s place and proceeded to drink an entire bottle of Scotch whiskey and pass out. Around 4:00am I got up and drove back home, deciding that I loved her too much to lose her and that I wanted to work out all the problems, even if it took counseling. I got home to an empty house. She had called up another friend with a truck and had taken everything of hers, and most of what we had got together, and moved out lock, stock, and barrel. I was devastated and desperate. I played the “Let’s Make A Deal” game with God – “if you bring her back to me I’ll believe in you.” We talked and went for counselling for a couple of months, and things looked really good again for a while. We even talked about getting married. Then one day I introduced her to a military fire fighter I knew through being on the volunteer fire and rescue department in the small town where we lived. The very next day she started dating him. I was completely at the end of myself. I thought I loved her, and that only her love in return was the answer to all my life’s problems and my loneliness. I truly believed that I had nothing left to live for. When I had failed in killing myself when I was 18 in Banff, I had always sworn that I would never ever try that again and fail. Not that I would never try it again – but I would never try it and fail. So this time, I planned everything very carefully. My doctor had already prescribed sleeping pills for me because I was depressed from the break up. I knew what medics and doctors in the hospitals did to overdose patients, so I wasn’t going to go that route. I got just a couple of pills, which I knew from experience would put me soundly to sleep in under an hour. I got a good book to read, and some soothing music on a tape. I was going to sit in my truck in my garage late one night, with the doors tightly shut, start it up, take a couple of sleeping pills, turn on the music in the tape deck, and read my book until I fell asleep. It was painless, no one would know to come and interfere and save me, and it was absolutely fool proof.

The only things left in the world that I still loved were my animals – I had a fat cat named Foster, and two German Shepherd dogs named Rusty and Dreyfuss. I figured I’d put enough food and water down for each of them to keep them alive until someone noticed that I wasn’t at work and showed up to look for me. When they found my body, I was sure someone, maybe even my ex girlfriend, would take care of them. But before I died, I wanted to say goodbye to them, as they were the only things on earth that I loved. I sat down on my bed and picked up my cat, Foster, and cuddled him and petted him. He likes being petted, but even to this day will usually only stay on my lap for a few minutes after I stop petting him. Then he gets up and walks away. I petted him for a few minutes, then stopped, thinking that when he got up and left I would pet the dogs in their kennel, which was outside, in the back yard, on the way to the garage, where I would go and complete my plan to die. As I believed that this would be the last time I saw my animals, I didn’t want to just throw my cat off my chest and go, but I knew he would leave on his own in a couple of minutes, at which time I would carry out my plans. So I waited, propped up on my bed, fully dressed, ready to go, with my cat lying on my chest. I waited, and waited, and waited, until I actually drifted off to sleep with my cat still lying full length on my chest, unmoving. I woke up eight hours later, with sunlight streaming through my window, with my cat STILL lying, in the same position, unmoving, on my chest. I will swear that he has never lain like that on me before that day or since, for any reason. I believe, and I will believe until I stand in heaven before my God and ask Him face to face, that He sent an angel that night who held that cat there and petted him all night long. I no longer had the courage to do in the daylight what I was going to do in the night. I moved my cat off of my chest and knelt down beside my bed. I will never, ever forget the prayer I prayed that day. I said “God, I don’t even know for sure if You exist, but if You do, I need help and I’ve got nowhere else to go.” I used to scoff at people who said what I am going to say next, and tell them they were liars and full of crap. But I swear this happened, because it completely changed my life. I felt that very instant that I prayed, the Spirit of God surrounded me and held me and gave me a peace I had never known in my whole life before. God was suddenly real, not my parents God, not the Bible School’s God, not the rule book’s God, not some preacher’s God, not some abstract theological intellectual idea, but He actually cared about me and my life, and my pain, and my loneliness, and my fears. I will tell you with no shame that I wept for a long time, and then I dug out a Bible from a shelf and started reading. I read all that day until I fell asleep that night, then picked it up the next morning and kept reading. I read the Bible like a man lost in the desert for a week who has just been handed a canteen full of water drinks.

That day was the start of the biggest change in my entire life. I threw out every conceived notion I had ever had about God and started reading the Bible to find out for myself who He is. I learned about His love, His grace, His holiness, His forgiveness and mercy. I learned about His patience, His kindness, His justice and judgments, and His commandments. I found out that I was made in the image of God, and that He has a sense of humor, and that He can get angry, and that He can also be deeply hurt when I turn away from Him. I didn’t become perfect overnight. I’m still not perfect. But I found out that that is all right too, as long as I confess my sin as the Holy Spirit convicts me of it, and I truly repent and seek to know God more and more, and to become more and more like His Son Yeshua Hamashiach. I found out that it is OK to be disappointed with God, as long as I’m honest with Him and don’t become bitter about my disappointments. And I’m finding out that most of the time I’m disappointed with Him He has a much better plan for me, and then my disappointments fade away and turn to amazement and awe as I realize that if I had got what I wanted instead of what God knew I needed, I would have lost out on some truly great things. One of those things concerned the woman who had left me. I thought I could only be happy the rest of my life with her, and I really prayed for her, hoping that she would find God too, and that we could still be married. But it didn’t happen, and I was disappointed. I knew that I had a dismal record for staying celibate, so I prayed and asked God to give me a Christian wife who would love Him as much as I did, and who could also love me with all my screwed up past. In September of 1992 God brought Karen into my life. I had had so many failed relationships in the past I actually told her when we started dating that she would break up with me within a year. She didn’t seem to be breaking up with me, so I made her life as miserable as I could to prove to her that she should. So we broke up for about two weeks, which was just long enough for me to realize how absolutely stupid I was, and how absolutely wonderful she was. So I went crawling humbly back, and wonder of wonders, she still loved me. We were married on June 25, 1994. I know God has a sense of humor, because when I left Prairie Bible College, I vowed I’d never, ever date a Prairie girl. Karen had graduated from Prairie Bible College with a Bachelor of Church Music degree just about four years before we met, and was just finishing off her Bachelor of Music (Honors) in Voice when we met.

The change in my life has been nothing short of incredible. One of the biggest gifts God gave me right away to prove His presence in me was tears. Working in corrections for as long as I had had made me very bitter and hard. One Correctional Officer in Grande Cache before I left there told me I was the hardest, coldest human being he had ever met in his life. I literally had no sympathy for any one or any thing. If an inmate came to me and said he had just found out his mother had died, I would laugh in his face. I never cried a tear for anything, hardly even at my father’s funeral. But after God started changing me from the inside out, He gave me compassion for people that I had never had before. I’m not ashamed to say that I do literally weep for people who are hurting, and when I pray and even sing worship songs to God in church, tears often come when I think about what God has done for me, how He sent His only Son Yeshua to die in my place.

Since that day in 1993 when God spoke to me and told me He wanted me to preach, He has led me on some strange paths to accomplish His purposes. I had a federal government job, with a secure job future, pension, benefits, and good pay. I could not see how I was to get out of that to preach. I started to pray that God would take me out of the jail so I could follow His call to preach. Then, on September 27, 1997, while I was doing a search of the unit I was working on, I slashed my middle finger on my right hand very badly on a razor blade the inmates had hidden on a door handle. It severed the nerve and artery in the finger, and just missed the joint. Because in jail it is a given that at least two thirds of the inmates are infected with one or more variants of hepatitis, and HIV is rampant, I also had to be tested for all of these diseases as the blade could have been contaminated. The inmates had even broken a small fish tank thermometer in the room that they had booby-trapped, so I was even tested for mercury poisoning. Mentally the injury was far worse than physically. I had to be concerned about my wife possibly contracting hepatitis or AIDS if I had it, so even our intimacy in our marriage suffered. I became very bitter, and after I went back to work I no longer had the patience and ability to shrug off inmate verbal venting. Just over a year back on the job, I looked in the mirror one day and did not like what I saw. I didn’t want to be a bitter, angry, resentful man for the rest of my life, working in an environment where I would never again be fully secure or feel completely safe. Karen and I prayed very hard, and God seemed to set an opportunity for me to start up my own business with two skid steer loaders (bobcats) and a tandem gravel truck doing snow removal in winter and landscaping in summer. I took a leave of absence from corrections in January, 1999.

Green Pig Enterprises started out well, with several big snowfalls to do snow removal. I got a huge contract in the spring to haul dirt with the gravel truck, and all looked good. Then it started to rain. Six weeks later, when the rain stopped, I had lost the big contract, and had no work. I had one employee who was supposed to run one bobcat for me, and had been in the business himself. Both of us calling every construction and landscaping company in the phone book could only find enough work to almost make the payments on the gravel truck, but not even enough for that. I had to lay him off so he could make some kind of living selling used cars, and I kept driving the gravel truck and watching my dream of owning my own company go down the toilet. By late fall, when no snow had fallen by the end of November to even give any hope of surviving through snow removal, I had no choice but to claim personal bankruptcy. Karen and I had started the company as a partnership, so both our names were on everything, including the bankruptcy. We lost all of the equipment, Karen’s car, our credit rating, and my pride. I couldn’t understand it at all. I knew we had prayed and I truly believed that God had led us into this business. Over and over I asked Him why He had let us fail. Then one day as I was reading the Bible and praying, which I had lots of time to do as I wasn’t working, I realized that I was back to a place where I was spending many hours a day with God, which I hadn’t been able to do for a long time. I suddenly saw that I was learning more about Him than I ever had before. I also realized that my marriage to Karen was even stronger in its bond because of going through the hardships together. We still had our house, one vehicle, and Karen still had her job. God was totally taking care of us. The mortgage payments were always there – sometimes a bit late, but the bank still let us keep the house. Food was always still on the table, even though some months it was from donations from our church or our cell group “family”. We even started to have enough money, despite the fact we were in bankruptcy, to tithe regularly. The disappointment I was feeling with God started to melt away as I started to understand the lessons He was teaching me that I would not, or even could not, learn any other way. I learned the value of things is NOTHING! What is important is following and knowing God, and having a strong love and relationship with Him, and also with your spouse. Things are just that – things. Houses, cars, TV’s, computers, equipment, big bank accounts, personal stuff, even excessive clothing and household items are just STUFF. You can’t take them with you when you die. They won’t help you get to heaven. God isn’t impressed with stuff. Yes, when we obey, love and follow God, sometimes He sees fit to bless us with material blessings. But if they become our sole and soul desire, they are wrong. One of the strangest “things” God helped me to loosen my grip on was my fairly nice gun collection. I was one of the top marksmen at the jail, and used to shoot handguns competitively. I did not want to sell my gun collection because I knew that with the present gun laws in Canada I would never again be able to own some of the same guns I now owned. I fought God’s Spirit for months telling me to sell the gun collection. Finally one day, I woke up one morning and asked God to give me the strength to get rid of them all, as they were just “things”. I loaded them all into my truck and hauled them all over to the Jail’s gun club president and told him to sell them all for me. I drove home, and realized I didn’t even miss the guns, and felt freer than I had for months. But these lessons came from going through a bankruptcy, which I at first thought was a great tragedy, until God showed me how great of a blessing it was.

Even more lessons have been taught to me by God in the last two years. I tried to go back to work at the jail, but ended up getting sick and ending up in a hospital with chest pain. My doctor told me I should reconsider ever working there again. I held on to the security of the government job until February of 2001, when I realized that I was only hanging onto the job in case God ever screwed up and stopped supplying my needs. I asked His forgiveness for my lack of faith and went into the jail and completely resigned. I tried to find work at other jobs, driving gravel truck and then fuel truck for other companies, even though I felt God telling me to stay at home and study and pray and get to know Him better. After both jobs totally fell through, I began to understand that I needed to listen to God and follow what He was telling me to do. Not working as a man in today’s society is hard to do. People look down on you, and judge you. Even Church friends don’t understand and tell you it is your duty to support your wife. But as both Karen and I have followed God’s leading, He has blessed us. Karen’s job has not only fully supported us for the last two years, but God has dramatically increased her pay to almost what I used to earn at the jail to provide us with some material things which we thought we would never have again. As we are faithful to tithe and give back to God what He has generously given to us, He keeps blessing us in return. At the same time, I have been able to read and study and pray in a way I would never be able to do if I were still working. God even blessed that study – when I applied to take my Bachelor of Practical Ministry degree, the Institute I applied at gave me 166 credits out of 210 credits needed for the degree, leaving me only 44 credits to have to take to receive my degree. These are God things that have only come to us as we follow and obey His calling and will.

As I look back over this amazing story, there is much that I have not written that I could have. There has been miracle after miracle in our lives over the last ten years. That I came back to God is the biggest miracle. That He saved my life that night using a big old fat cat is a miracle. That He gave me a loving, wonderful Christian wife is a miracle. That I wasn’t more severely injured and didn’t get hepatitis or HIV from that razor blade is a miracle. That we didn’t lose our house or anything but the equipment and one car in a bankruptcy is a miracle. That God called me, a rebellious one-time drunk, to preach, is a miracle. That we have started up a ministry organization called Vertical Ministries is a miracle. That Vertical Ministries has a web site that reaches people with a message of God’s love is a miracle. And there are many, many more miracles that I could tell about. Miracle stories about God’s promise to provide us with a bus for our ministry travels. Miracles of leading us into ministry opportunities in an inner city Street Church and the many chances we’ve had to tell people there about God’s love. Miracles of God calling me to a ministry of blowing a shofar for Him, and then Him providing me with my own shofar. Miracle after miracle after miracle.

This story is not yet complete. I believe God has called me to preach and be in ministry full time with Karen in a ministry of music full time along side of me. We believe that God is going to provide a full size highway coach converted into a motor home for us to live and travel in for this full time ministry. We know that God is going to keep doing miracles and providing miraculously for us. God’s word says that He uses the weak to confound the strong, and the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. I fit both of those categories really well, and I know and believe with all of my heart that it is ONLY God that could have done all of these things in my life so far. So, that is why I can write these articles and sermons. I am nothing special at all. God in me, and I in Him, through the power of the Holy Spirit filling me, can do ALL things.