“Grace, grace, God’s grace…grace that is greater than all our sin!” is part of the refrain from the song, Grace Greater Than Our Sin, by Don Moen. That lyric is a byline for my life. Even when I was still in my sin (Rom. 5:8), He chose me and saved me (Eph. 1:4-5).
I was fearless as a child, so my first brush with death came at around two. I was running like the wind down a steep hill of a cemetery while my parents put flowers on nearby graves. Tripping on the trunk of a small tree, reeling out of control, I landed hard and was later diagnosed with a broken femur. Next around four, I ventured into the river while my dad swam across the river, he looked back to see my long brown hair floating on the top of the water. I climbed on roofs, jumped off high places, and ended up covered head to toe with poison oak after one summer adventure. Those were innocent times.
At eleven my sixteen-year-old brother died in a sudden vehicle accident colliding with a train. The police reported the news to me (I looked much older than my years). His death was followed by my grandmother’s sudden death from cancer and my 46 year old uncle’s sudden death from a heart attack leaving my six cousins all under the age of 18 to figure out life without a provider or protector. I decided at a young age that if I was going to die young, I might as well make the “best” of it while I could. Was it a conscious decision? I do not believe it was, but when added to my fearlessness nature, the combination lit a fire of rebellion that lasted the next thirteen years.
From age 12 to 25, many of my choices were foolish and dangerous. At 17, I came near to death again from Toxic Shock, surviving a 107-degree fever and other awful and painful symptoms. After 30 days of recovery, I got out of my house for the first time, only to be rear-ended by another vehicle, the force so powerful it bent the metal frame of my 1968 Mustang. While my daily life was colorful and full of friends, family, and school activities, my nights and weekends were often filled with edgy, darker activities.
I went to college with the help of my parents and student loans. I continued my sinful decisions and what had now become defiance toward God. I met a young man who knew God, but was not walking with Him. He tried to tell me about God and the devil, but his life was total hypocrisy to me, which was the only loophole I needed to push God even farther away.
Fast forward four years, I was living in another town and working at a small vitamin store, barely getting by. My coworkers were a witch (she said she was a white witch, the “good kind”), a prostitute, and a Christian (although I did not know she was a Christian at the time). The Christian woman was kind and hard working. She had a peace about her that I was attracted to and needed desperately in my life. Finally, amongst the strange environment (we were having break-ins at night), I asked the woman, “Do you go to church or something?” She replied, “Yes, would you like to go with me sometime?” I was in such a hopeless place and knew the only thing I hadn’t tried was God, so why not? Much happened in between, even a miracle that to this day I can’t explain, except that it was God. But after going to church with this woman less than a year, she asked me if I wanted to pray to have Jesus come into my life and by then I knew He really was the only way, the only truth, and the only life (John 14:6).
After years of looking in the rearview mirror, to see if my decisions would either literally or figuratively catch up with me, I felt freedom from my past. God’s grace, His unmerited, undeserved favor had caught up with me instead. I no longer look back, but rather forward to what God has in store for my future as His child, saved only by grace.

I can remember a specific time when God used the daily devotional in “Our Daily Bread” to speak directly to me, giving me direction to get something done. It was a time in my life where I was going through a lot of changes. I was 32, had gone through a divorce about 8 months prior, and my work situation was starting to change. I was moving out from computer programming more into writing, having just finished writing up a manual for a computer project. I was working for a government research site in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Over Christmas, I visited my relatives in Waco, Texas. While there, one of my cousins handed me a college bulletin to Baylor University, which is in Waco, and asked me to send it to my sister because she had been asking for one. Out of curiosity, I opened the bulletin and browsed through the pages looking at the different programs. All of a sudden, my eyes lit upon a degree program called a “Master’s degree in International Journalism.” I reviewed through the requirements for the program, and began to get excited with what I was reading. I love to travel, and one of the requirements was to go on an internship to a foreign country for 6 months. And the idea of writing news stories as a career also excited me. I drove over to Baylor to visit the campus and just walked around, familiarizing myself with it. I would have tried to see a department head about the program, but it was Christmas break and no one was around. While walking around and exploring the campus, I became aware of God’s affirmation on me that this was the right thing to do. Somehow I just knew deep in my spirit that this was a new direction the Lord was leading me toward.
I returned to Idaho all excited about this new direction. However, upon my arrival back home, I was faced with a pile of mail to go through and errands to do that had accumulated while I was away on Christmas break. I temporarily shelved the university idea to tackle my “to do” pile.
Shortly thereafter, one particular morning, God spoke to me rather strongly. Nearly every morning for decades now, I have always started my day with reading the “Our Daily Break” devotional to get in tune with God and to start my day right. That morning, the particular scripture reading was Matthew 21:28-31 about a man who had two sons. I’ll just quote it (Jesus speaking, NASB version):
“But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go work today in the vineyard.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he regretted it and went. The man came to the second and said the same thing; and he answered, ‘I will, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.”
After reading that scripture, I then read what the author of the devotional had to say. He basically said that if God is telling us to do something, we need to act on it promptly and get it done, not say we’re going to do it and then not do it.
It was a mild rebuke to me. I knew that I identified with the second son who said he would go but then did not do it. So I repented, put aside my “to do” list, and started checking into what I needed to do to apply to Baylor University. As it turned out, I needed all that time (starting in January) to get ready for the fall semester of that year. I had a GRE exam to take, lots of paperwork to fill out and send off, transcripts to send, phone calls to the university to make, etc. By listening to the Lord and moving quickly at His direction, I was eagerly ready for college that fall semester, for attending Baylor to get a Master’s degree in International Journalism, a field of study that seemed like a dream come true for me.