I think I will take you right down the front page of my new life with God.... I am not trying to put down everything the church has been trying to do to introduce people to a vital, living relationship with God..... I am saying it needs desperately to change... it has been producing intellectual Christians who get disillusioned, burned out, angry, resentful (you get the picture) and turn their backs on the whole thing because things didn't work out quite the way they were presented.

I was told...... by the man God used to proclaim the reality of a life with God ..... that the reason my life was a mess (business falling apart around me, filed for divorce, 6 kids who didn't know me, alcoholic, obese, huffing puffing chain smoking womanizer - nice resume!) this mess.... the reason I was like that.... was because I was running my own life. What I needed to do was let God run my life.

Now that was certainly true enough. God does have a plan for my life. A wonderful plan...but that plan is not translated as mess will go, success will follow, everything that went wrong will now go right and you will live happily ever after.....and, if it doesn't, then it's because I have screwed up in some way and it's all my fault so shape up there big fella'! And do it quickly. :)

God's enemy was a doctrine..... not a reality. Never ever understood that Satan was trying to kill me and destroy anything I touched.....or that there was anything I could actually do about it.....or should be doing about it. I was clueless from New Jeresey. So was the church.

My business was failing before I met God....I gave my business to God.....now it is supposed to succeed. How come it didn't?

My marriage was a mess. I had left the house months before and started divorce proceedings. It was wrong to get divorced. It was not God's will for me to be divorced..... so I went back to the house and told my wife just exactly that and how we needed to get our act together, I would be moving back in and we would all live happily ever after. She was so thrilled. She said something to the effect of "...over my dead body you will come back in this house" picked up a pot and chased me out of the house.... she then filed for divorce herself.

How come it didn't happen?

And how come it has taken me 40 years to get some kind of relationship with those 6 kids? I was expecting instant everything... like my deliverance from my major addictions.... but bad things were not supposed to happen to me anymore now that I had given my life to God and was letting Him run my life.

The man who led me to the Lord became a missionary aviation pilot and 2 years after that flew into the side of the Ande's mountains taking 5 other missionaries to their death..... I had no place to put that.

Just yesterday, I heard about a 17 year old young man whose life was totally transformed a couple months ago when he met the Lord....who was run over by a truck yesterday...his family is devastated.... simple Christian platitudes won't work here.

We are praying for a little girl who just celebrated her 5th birthday....after almost a year of chemo for 2 different kinds of leukemia they just took her in for a bone marrow transplant in Boston....last chance. Wonderful Christian family, big church, all believing..... hoping.... asking. It brought back all the horrors we walked thru with our own son who got leukemia when he was 15. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

I've told you about some of my successes and failures but mostly it was the frustration of the failures that kept me searching for answers because it wasn't supposed to be this way.

Thousands are turning their back on that understanding of God, still being preached unfortunately, all the rosy promises..... the worst aberration being the prosperity gospel....just turn on your TV (any old Christian programming will do) and discover all the wonderful things that will happen for you by financially supporting that ministry.

The gospel is very, very real and very, very true.... it just is not that baloney.

:)