Day 37 – Finding God…
I was home on Christmas break from college and my sister Debby was home as well from the University of Kentucky where she went to school. There was something about her that looked different…she was glowing, or at least it looked like that to me.
The break was about over, and it was January 1970, a little over 2 years since that dark night of the soul when I had mono and woke up in the middle of the night and read the record where Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again to see the kingdom of God.
Our parents would usually go upstairs in the early evening to watch TV in bed until they fell asleep. My sister and I, along with our stepbrother and stepsister, who were about the same age as us, would go down in the basement where my parents had a really nice party room with a full bar and fireplace…remember this was the late 60s/early 70s and it was common for adults to have party rooms. However, we didn’t go down there to party but to talk where we had the most privacy.
Debby started to tell us her story. When she first got to UK, she was introduced to a group of people who hung out at the Christ Center, as they called it, close to the campus. Now, let me back up a little to give you some perspective. From 1968 to 1970 was an insane and volatile time. Dr. Martin Luther King was killed is the spring of 1968. Bobby Kennedy was killed in the summer of 1968, and the riots at the Democratic Convention and Viet Nam were blowing up. Riots and protests were everywhere but it was also the beginning of great Spiritual Revivals. The shootings at Kent State, the Asbury, KY Revival and the Jesus People movement all started to happen at that the same time in 1970.
So, here we were in the midst of all the insanity and my sister Debby, who grew up just like me in the Methodist Church not knowing anything, is now telling me of her experiences at the Christ Center. One of the first things she shared was that Christ was coming back to gather people together and take them to heaven.
What!!! Not this again??? I still had no answers from the dark night of the soul about being born again and NOW you tell me Jesus is coming back, and that, believe it or not, was just the beginning. She told us about being prayed for and healed of several things in her life. It was like I was on acid or high from a joint, although I had never done either, that’s what I imagined it would be like…crazy land.
Later that spring, Debby and her friend Beth went up to Asbury, KY not far from the University and witnessed the Asbury Revival of 1970…look it up, it’s the real deal.
The next day or so, I had to go back to ECU, and I still didn’t have answers. I looked around the house and at least found a bible to take back with me because I didn’t have one at school. This is the time that I flew into the Huntington, WV airport that I shared about in the Marshall story. The winds and weather were so bad the flight attendant, we called them stewardesses back then, were freaked out, but I had my head in the bible trying to read something that made sense, so I was not caught up in the drama. We had to wait for a bigger plane to fly in and take us the rest of the way because the weather was so bad, but I wasn’t even paying attention to any of that situation, I had my own crisis to deal with in sorting out all the “God” stuff.
I remember driving back into Greenville at the time, thinking that I was going to have to wait until I saw my sister again to find out any more answers. I went to the dining hall where the football team would eat our meals…we had our own area, I guess they didn’t trust us in the general populous.
I sat at a table with one of the players and I remember that he said he was going into the seminary after college…he later became a lawyer, but I thought maybe he would know something.
I said, “Lawson, you are going into the seminary, right?” and he shook his head. So, I jumped in with both feet… “What do you know about Christ coming back?”
I eagerly awaited his answer. He swallowed his food and said, “Nothing.” What a letdown, so I finished eating and sadly went up to my room.
Now, all of us football players lived on the same floor of one of the dorms and every night, because we didn’t want to do homework and there were not TV’s in the rooms, we would roam from room to room and “shoot-the-shit”, as they say, with each other.
Well, I was in my room and a player one year ahead of me, an offensive lineman of course, because “O” and “D” didn’t usually mix, named Earl Burton came into my room. Earl had never come to my room before, so even though I knew him we weren’t close.
He asked me how my Christmas break was, at first, I was still kind of shut down from talking to Lawson, but then I said, “Earl have you heard of Christ coming back?” And he said “Yes”.
I said, “Sit down, my friend, we’ve got some talking to do.” And for the next three days if I wasn’t in class or we weren’t working out, Earl and I talked and talked and talked. Players would wander into my room while we were talking and listen while I asked questions. Sometimes there would be 10-15 guys in there sitting on desks, beds, dressers or on the floor. Sometimes asking questions, sometimes debating, sometimes just listening. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were on the verge of our own revival, but that’s a story for another time.
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