As far back as I can remember, I’ve been aware that God exists. Early on, though, He was the far away God who knew everything I was thinking. Therefore, I was careful with my thoughts not to think bad things about others for fear God might punish me. For example, if I thought badly about somebody’s baldness, He would make me go bald.
I was born in the port city of Duluth, Minnesota, right on the western tip of Lake Superior, in 1968. The world was still reeling over Martin Luther King’s assassination not even three weeks prior. Duluth is one of the 100 coldest cities in the world. Minnesota is 50 degrees colder than your refrigerator. I remember serving one day as a school crossing guard with the wind chill at 56 degrees below zero! The wind felt like ice needles through the tiny pores in my jeans. Ice skating and other snow sports (although popular hockey was not one of them) were a natural part of life.
My parents divorced when I was four, so my growing up years were primarily spent with my mother, brother, and sister. My dad had visitation rights for the summer, so my siblings and I spent them in southern California and Indiana. Apart from a couple years in Indiana as a toddler, Duluth was home to me up until 6th grade when my family moved to central Wisconsin so my mom could pursue a career as a teacher in public school. Tilleda, Wisconsin, wasn’t much of a town, basically where two roads came together. Our one-story shoebox of a house was right across the street from the little post office. After my mom’s teaching job didn’t live up to her expectations, we migrated east to Shawano, an actual town with supermarkets. We had “the channel” running past the back yard of our home, where I did some ice fishing in winter and rafting in summer. Then we moved east again, this time to Green Bay for my high school years. I could see Lambeau Field over the trees from my house and I became a Packers fan. I still am to this day and have successfully converted my two teenage sons to Packer fans!
I remember my first time encountering the God’s presence around 2nd or 3rd grade. My best friend, Tom Sweeney, had built a tree fort sequestered in a pocket of woods. One wintry day some older boys were getting close to us but hadn’t seen our fort. Tom came out of the woods and started yelling, “Don’t go in there! There’s wolves in there!” That was an epic fail. Instead of scaring them off, they walzed right in and went to work tearing it down. I got mad at Tom for that and ran off by myself through the woods and into an opening near a iron-girder train bridge, just a stone’s throw from one of the few supermarkets in Duluth at the time. Plodding up the trail underneath the bridge was an elderly woman struggling with a medium-sized bag of groceries. On an impulse I stopped to help. She explained that the strap of her bag had broken. I offered to help her carry it up the hill to the bus stop. Though I don’t remember what she said, she did give me two colorful tracts, one of King David and the other of Jesus. I felt God for the first time. My heart was filled with a joy and peace I’d never tasted before. I’ve often wondered if that was an angel because I’ve been around many thousands of people since then but never experienced such a tangible awareness of God as I did in the presence of that old woman. After she boarded the bus, I went on my way home rejoicing. I never saw her again.
During my middle and high school years, other than occasional Christmas or Easter church attendance, my exposure to Christianity came from literature I got my hands on. As an eighth-grader in Shawano, Wisconsin, a free magazine called The Plain Truth at a local supermarket caught my eye. Not too long before this, I’d gotten intrigued by the prophecies of Nostradamus and started puzzling over them. This magazine just so happened to have an article contrasting the evil origins of Nostradamus’ cryptic oracles with the clarity and purity of Bible prophecy. Nostradamus was out and the Bible in. Later on I learned that The Plain Truth was a published by a cult, but God in His mercy used it to turn me away from a greater darkness by steering me towards the Bible.
After I graduated from Green Bay West High School in 1986, I was attracted to Valparaiso University in northern Indiana that same year for its Christian-based roots (Lutheran) and the cooperative engineering program that interested me.
I became a follower of Jesus as a college engineering intern in northern Virginia in February of 1989. Leading up to this salvation moment, at the beginning of my second semester of my sophomore year (January 1988), I was sitting in one of my engineering classes with rows of long tables. A few rows up from me to my far left sat a blond-haired young man who was a complete stranger to me. Didn’t even know his name. Suddenly this “knowing” came to me that God was going to use him in a significant way in my spiritual journey with Him. How I knew this, I don’t know; I just knew it. The future was as real to me as if it had been printed in yesterday’s newspaper.
So as the semester progressed, I came to know his name, Daren Becker. Since we had identical (or nearly identical schedules), we’d walk together to the same classes, and I got to know him better. That summer I did an internship in southern Indiana doing environmental testing on lithium batteries for the U.S. Navy (boring!). Upon returning to campus in the fall, Daren and I were both living at our frat houses, which were right next to each other. He invited me once to his room in his frat to celebrate his birthday with a beer in October. In the back of my mind, I watched God at work seeing our relationship getting closer and closer. Hope grew. As the fall semester wound down, we both landed cooperative education assignments in Reston, Virginia, at Unisys, a defense company. We planned to drive out together and room together. By this time, I was filled with hope because here was somebody I didn’t know from Adam at the start of the year and now we were going to Virginia together and be roommates!
At this time in my spiritual journey, I felt very distant from God. I had a vivid mental image of myself sitting with my arms cradling my knees on the floor of a four-walled cell. It was empty and dark, but it had a single doorway that was open where all I could see was bright light. I felt trapped in this darkness and was a stranger to that light. I couldn’t figure out how to get where I was to out there in the light. Somehow I knew Daren was a pivotal piece in my puzzle. How I didn’t know. In some ways Daren seemed a fine Christian. I once saw him wearing special robes doing an incense thing in the iconic chapel building, a stained-glass crown jewel of the Valparaiso campus. He wrote me a card once that referenced God.
We arrived in Virginia in January, 1989. First time ever on the East Coast. Ed Chiado was the amiable owner of the brick townhome we roomed with in the two upstairs bedrooms. Ed worked at Unisys and welcomed us in with enjoyable conversations (usually around a Pittsburgh sports team or his girlfriend, Kelley) and crab feasts on his patio. Daren and I checked out a nearby Lutheran church one Sunday, but nobody acknowledged us, so we didn’t go back. I had purposed to check out all the local churches in the yellow pages, but I had at the top of the list to see what Assemblies of God was about. A couple months prior I’d ventured out to a Christian concert not far from Valparaiso. Carmen, the singer, polled the audience where they went to church. When he mentioned “Assemblies of God,” there was a rousing cheer more so than the others. I’d like to see what they’re like, I thought to myself.
I found a church in Sterling listed in the yellow pages under Assemblies of God and slipped into a Sunday evening service. Much was new to me. Dimmed lights. People praying out loud in what seemed a sad murmuring. There were worship songs with words on an overhead projector. I don’t remember much about the pastor’s sermon, but I did get a big aha moment. He was talking about being in the world but not of the world from John’s Gospel. It suddenly dawned on me that the reason I felt trapped in that one-room cell in the dark that I’d been envisioning was because I was choosing to be of the world. I was there by my own choices. That got the wheels turning in my mind that week.
After coming home from work, I’d hole up in my room, unfurnished except for a comfy futon bed on the carpet. I read the Bible and asked God a lot of questions. About the middle of the week, I heard Jesus speak softly in my heart. It was no audible voice like a face-to-face conversation. But they were clear, perceivable words that I understood. “Ken, you’ve been seeking Me all these years. Are you going to accept Me or reject Me?” And that was it.
Boom! That hit me like a ton of bricks. I had never seriously considered accepting Jesus Christ in a personal way. I thought it was going to the right church or knowing the right things about the Bible. This was a serious challenge. At that time, I got another vivid mental image in my mind. I was walking on this narrow path, more like a bridge over a vast dark nothingness (or outer space). I stopped at a wooden door blocking the way. I couldn’t see anything beyond it. I could either open the door and go through to Jesus, or I could turn around and go back the way I came. I felt frozen with indecision.
A regular runner (but by no means an athlete) since high school, I caught a nice jog along the W&OD (Washington & Old Dominion) trail, a former railway converted to a concrete bike path. As I passed by those tall, steel-gray girdered electrical towers, I thought to myself, to accept Jesus would be as impossible as me trying to high jump over them. I had my first real girlfriend whom I’d met at my fraternity house weeks before leaving for Virginia. I felt I loved her and toyed with thoughts of marrying her. But I knew she was no Christian. There were other matters, but that weighed most heavily on my mind.
Then came Saturday, the momentous day: February 11, 1989. Daren and I went to a Christian concert, a former Petra singer, held at a brick, steepled church up in Maryland. Another co-op student at Unisys went along with us, a nice, soft spoken guy named Mike Malinchock. After the concert, Daren dropped Mike off at his house. Riding shotgun I opened up my heart about the events leading up to these new challenges about Jesus. We drove around a long time. Daren sat behind the wheel, stone faced. He said nothing the whole time. I secretly hoped he would join me in this momentous decision. Finally, I said, “I don’t know if I’ll last a week, but I’m going to go ahead and do it.” And right there is where I believe that Christ came into my life! I didn’t feel any fireworks or jugs of honey dumped into my soul, but I knew in the days following that things were different. And what God had planted in my heart a year before, that knowing that this blond-haired young man would be a key for my knowing Him was fulfilled. Praise the Lord for His faithfulness!
So I’ve lasted, by God’s amazing grace, more than a week. I have had a passion for over 30 years as a Jesus-follower to seek out God’s heart in the Bible. I’ve listened to thousands of sermons, read hundreds of Christian books, studied the biblical texts in the original Greek and Hebrew, biblical commentaries, you name it. I’ve been down many theological rat holes and dead ends in pursuing to know the Lord. The Lord mercifully rescued me from extreme legalism. The Lord has been my help in increasing degrees, interjecting insight at strategic times in my life.
One watershed moment came in December 2005. A like-hearted brother in Christ named Scott Shelton and I got together a few late Friday nights just to seek the Lord. We were just hungry for God and for a move of God in our church. I brought my 12-string guitar to his home to sing, praise, pray and examine God’s Word together. We experienced a beautiful, sweet presence of the Lord together. Though our time together in this way was short-lived, the Lord powerfully answered the cry of my heart the following month.
Being an avid audio sermon listener via the Internet (and still am), I happened upon a sermon from Daniel called “Two Kingdoms and a Miracle” by Ed Miller, founder of Bible Study Ministries, then based in Rhode Island. The clarion vision of Jesus Christ riveted me; I’d never seen Him in there like that before. From then on I was hooked, gobbling up message after message through most of the books of the Bible over the next several years. The Lord screwed my head on straight, centering my walk in the person and work of Jesus Christ. I came to a settled persuasion that Jesus Christ truly is the focal point of all of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible literally became a brand new book!
Through Ed’s consistent repetition of God’s indispensable principle for Bible study–absolute total reliance on the Holy Spirit–by personal application my eyes were opened wider and wider in amazement at the preeminent place the Lord Jesus has in a unique way in every single book of the Bible. My life has been transformed and will never be the same. May the Lord unveil His glory from the Scriptures to you as you desire to know Him more.
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
Psalm 27:4 ESV
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple.
Glory Unveiled: Discovering Jesus 