Friends and Family

When I came home from college I shared the good news with my family. At first they did not understand. My parents attended church since childhood. They had me baptized as an infant, confirmed at age thirteen, and we all attended weekly during my growing up years. What did they miss?

I showed them the truth from God’s Word. Soon He saved them too.

Then my sister came home. She was the wayward one, the runaway, a true child of the sixties generation. I shared the gospel with her and God saved her too.

We found a Baptist church nearby and started attending. I earned a Bible degree from Liberty University through their Home Bible Institute. I graduated in 1990 and attended graduation with my fiancée. We came home and married in June. We settled nearby so that all our families were together, no more than about ten miles apart. It was a great thing to have such a godly mutual support system all the time.

As a writer, one of my favorite venues was note-taking in church. I wrote about the sermon. I wrote about the Sunday School lesson. If my mind wandered from them, I wrote what God was speaking to me about. I wrote my own lessons too. I filled dozens of blank books with my notes and muses. Eventually that process slowed down to a trickle. It seemed like the only notes I took were those coming from God. I no longer taught classes. The sermons lost their meat and barely retained their milk. For many years I starved in the church while never losing my hunger for God. So I satisfied it in a different way.

I stopped looking for Him in church and found Him in close fellowship with a few other believers. We started getting radical with the Christian life. We broke a lot of traditional boundaries common to the institutional church. We were closer to God than ever before and close to one another. As we grew, I wrote about our experiences. We relived them as I presented chapter after chapter to my friends. While they didn’t really provide much editorial or critique value, they did continue to grow in their faith as well as a result of remunerating on God’s Word and how He worked in our lives through our shared and unique experiences.

Those writings eventually became the manuscript for Christian Mythology.