Note: Names in this sharing have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
I grew up practicing martial arts from the age of seven. Because of this I had much exposure to Eastern religions and witnessed many unexplainable acts. By the age of eleven I understood that there was more to life than just the five senses. Later on I began to teach what I had learned and even did some unexplainable acts myself, not really understanding the spiritual truths involved. The study of other religions led me to drugs and experimentation in the spiritual field. I never saw anything work consistently, and I never found the truth I was looking for.
Skip forward about ten years to when I was in my first factory job. I met a man named Jack. He started to tell me about this Christian group he and his wife were a part of and a class they were taking. I liked Jack, and I considered myself pretty experienced with a lot of religions that turned out to be shams, so I decided to help him realize that this was just a scam to get his money. Every day I would talk to him and see if I could figure out the angle they were using to con him.
Also at this point in my life, I thought I finally found the love of my life. Something good was finally happening. But her family didn’t get along with me at all. I was still using drugs from time to time and I had friends that were criminals, so their attitude was not surprising. This was a big problem for my girlfriend, and we eventually broke up. This was a final straw for me. Some of my friends had taken their own lives and this began to be an option I was thinking about. I had been exposed to a lot of teaching on reincarnation in my youth, so I decided to end this life and try again in another.
I had a high performance car that I was building, and I figured I would use it to kill myself. I knew the right spot to do it. It was a railroad track with a steep ramp on both sides. I figured at over 100 miles an hour, it was a sure thing. As I accelerated to the tracks, a car came over the opposite side with their bright lights on. I flashed my lights several times to get them to go to their low beams. Just then a gasket blew on my engine and since there was no hood on the car, it sprayed oil all over the windshield. All I could think of was, “Great, I’ll probably live through this and kill someone else in the process.” So I stopped and limped my broken car home. I went to work the next day really depressed that I couldn’t even kill myself right.
That day I was working in a sheet metal shop. I was grinding some welds on a panel and I was alone. I had stopped working and just stood there considering all the things I had learned and done in my life and how empty it all really was. I had a home, nice things, money, but something was missing. I thought, “There must be a God, because after all, where did everything come from?” I had seen things that could not be explained. All the Eastern religions I had been exposed to had wisdom but no solid answers. So I said to myself, “OK God, if you are real, you know what I am thinking. I want the truth, but there are so many of these Christian religions. They say you have a son, and I guess I can believe that. Just show me the straightest way to the truth.” Then I waited. The lights didn’t flash; there was no shaking of the ground—nothing. So I said, “Ok God, I’ve been looking for ten years; if I have to wait for another ten years, I will.” And I went back to work. About two minutes later, Jack came up to me and out of the blue said, “Hey, want to come to one of our fellowships?” I said, “Sure, what the hell, why not?” I don’t know who was more surprised, me for saying yes, or him getting an answer like that from me, the one who was telling him every day that he was getting conned by these people.
It took two weeks to get me to go. I expected they would look at me and say, “You’re from the pit of hell!” because in my mind I thought it was probably true. The first fellowship I went to, which they called Twig, was in Jack’s apartment. I saw something in that fellowship I had never experienced before, and I knew I would give anything and do anything to get it. A few weeks later, they were talking about a Christian rock festival in Ohio, but no one owned a reliable car to drive there. So I borrowed a van from my mom and loaded up the Twig, and we went. We were camping in the middle of a race track at a fairground!
I went to the first night with a King James Version Bible I had just bought. A man started teaching, and I started getting irritated at not being able to find the scriptures he was talking about. A man near me asked if I knew the books of the Bible, and when I said no, he was kind enough to find them in my Bible and then in his. By the end of the first night, my face was hurting; I had never smiled that much in my life. Later I learned the man teaching was Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille. I didn’t know who he was until I took the Power for Abundant Living class a couple months later. No one had ever taught me God’s Word so clearly and simply that I could understand it and see that it is truth.
I have had the privilege and honor to sit at the feet of many teachers, but none like Dr. Wierwille. God led me to The Way International and answered my prayer beyond anything I could ever dream of. It was, and is, the shortest way to the truth!