(Author’s note: This continues my autobiography of my experience as a Christian and how my time in Vietnam has played an integral part of who I am today. Part 1 of this saga was published on this blog on October 9, 2010, and Part 2 on October 23, 2010.)
So, what does all this have to do with “what Jesus means to me?” In 1969 the Commo Platoon got a new leader by the name of Captain Larry Stallard. CPT Stallard, for some reason or other, decided that he would share with me a little booklet published by the Navigators Christian ministry organization that introduced Bible verse memory to me for the first time. He helped me memorize five short verses that I still remember today. (It’s still available after all these years at Navigators.org.) Well, I DEROSed in June 1970, put Vietnam behind me like a lot of us did, and came back to the “world” and resumed my job at the TV station. In about a year a crisis was beginning to take shape in my life (more about that later), suffice it say that I was in very low spirits that summer of 1971. (I did not know until many years later that I was clinically depressed.) On the front page of our local weekly newspaper I saw an article about a Christian coffeehouse that was opening in August, and, just like had happened in high school when I had first been invited to the high school group at a local Presbyterian church, after about two or three weeks of building up my courage, I went to this place that was in a former Catholic church sanctuary on a Friday night. When I walked in there was some band on the stage and a few people sitting at makeshift tables drinking coffee or pop. A man welcomed me to “Andrew’s Coffee House” and then left me to be alone at the table. I had not prayed much recently (some with Larry in Vietnam and fervently for a Coast Guard friend named Dave Pitkin who I met while on R&R in Hawaii, but not much before), but that night I literally asked God to do “something with my life, anything, but please do something!”
As soon as I opened my eyes, two people, Bob and Nancy Van Der Horn, who had been the advisors to my high school church group six years before came walking in the door to that coffeehouse. I was amazed at the speed with which God had answered my prayer of desperation! (To be continued very soon…)
