I was raised in a loving Christian home. We were always active in our church and to this day, although I live 1000 miles away from that church, I remain in contact with that church, am close to people who still attend that church, and I am on their prayer chain. I have loved God for as long as I can remember. There was never a time that I doubted His existence. There were of course times I felt closer to Him than at other times, but I never doubted His existence. I read the Bible, and had read it from beginning to end several times by the time I’d graduated from college. When I was in high school, our church youth group had a ‘Bible-a-thon’, where we read the Bible out loud continuously for 48 hours to raise money for some of us to go to a Worldwide Christian Youth Conference. (Anyone want to guess how far into the Bible we got reading it out loud for 48 hours?)

I loved the stories in the Bible – David and Goliath, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (my favorite), and many more. But they were just that ~ stories. The Bible, to me, was a bunch of godly stories put together for believers. It was not a cohesive whole. It was 66 books, 66 different books that had little to do with one another except for the fact that they were all about God.

In the spring of 1981, a couple that I knew told me about a seminar they were going to attend about 60 miles away. Their job was to record the seminar and they asked if I’d like to go along. They said the preacher was supposed to be excellent. Since I didn’t have anything planned for that weekend, a friend and I joined this couple and the four of us traveled the 60 miles to attend the seminar. I don’t know what I was expecting, but from the moment the seminar began, I was spellbound. This man, whom I had never heard of, took the Bible from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21 and brought it to life like I had never heard before. For the first time in my life, everything made sense. It was astounding. The teachings were so riveting that the four of us drove home and stayed up half the night listening to the teachings all over again. Then after a few hours sleep, we made the trip back for the second day. Again I was totally spellbound by this minister’s teaching. I remember so vividly during a break, the preacher happened to walk past me and I remember thinking, “Someday I would love to meet that man.” After the second day of teaching, we once again drove home and listened to the second day’s tapes all over again, taking copious notes.

I was not the same person after that. I hadn’t realized how little I knew about the Bible. I had never known how it fit together, the red thread, the prophesies and how they were fulfilled ~ I was just amazed at how little I had known before and how well this teacher had put the Word of God together so even I could understand the greatness of the wonderful Word of God.

I used the notes from that seminar in many Bible studies and fellowships, teaching and sharing what I had learned, and in the process of studying, learning even more. God had used the offhand question of that couple (would you like to go along?) to get me to a seminar that would change the course of my Christian walk. No longer was the Bible just a book with good ‘God’ stories in it. It was THE WORD OF GOD.

It truly is amazing how God works. Sometimes He parts the waters and sometimes he gently prods someone to invite you to a seminar. That seminar changed my life in more ways than one. I finally did get to meet that preacher ~ you know him as B2Y; I know him as my man of God and my husband.

How big is our God!