ABOUT

Being Born Again

Here's the way I think it happened.

I remember hearing my older brother commenting about how fundamentalist Christians always seemed to recall the exact day they were saved. He was amused by that. It was not something that Quakers did.

So when I finally came around to accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, I marked the day.

It was November 11, 1972. I knew what God wanted from me. I had been dancing around it for quite some time. I had dropped out of college for a year. I had just quit my first factory job after several months. I was living at home. I was keeping a sporadic journal at the time. Here is my entry from that day.

November 11 armistice.

Try to follow me without all these numbers and names. Last night I did not go to sleep. It was Mimi's room, laying there with my whole magazine life all cut out and pasted in. Couldn't go to sleep and by 6:00 buses were passing. Kept passing and drove me up the wall. So I watched early morning sermons and sesame street and suddenly it was all together.

Today was something I've never experienced before, all rolled up in one great big reassurance, winning card games, friends and maps from McDonald's, birthdays, Ann Arbor Architecture, WVGR newsmen, half eaten candy apples, and the music, lord, it seems to sing from me, it seems to be so much of what we wanted to be, but never were.

Help me, Mr Wizard.

So was I saved that day? I'd like to think so. I can't think of a better day. And I've always regarded it as the beginning. Things did not change dramatically overnight, but something was different. I began to yield to God, and he began to bless me in big ways.

Within eight months, I had the girlfriend I had never had before (she later rejected me, but it was wonderful material for poems). And within a year, I was back at college, involved with a Christian group, learning more about the Bible. And within three years, I had graduated from college and was about to marry a girl I had met in Christian fellowship. After 35 plus years, we're still married. And we still believe in the God of the Bible.

Morning Sermonette — A Poem about the day I was saved.

Enlisting — A Poem about the day I announced I was a Christian.