| "I came from a church family; I've always gone to church. I was in church every Sunday morning and night and Wednesday night. I went to every service the church had, but that's all it was - church. I heard everything, but didn't take anything in.
It wasn't until one day in 1975 when my wife, Gayle, came home that everything changed. She'd heard Cindy Massengale, Rik Massengale's wife, at a tea some of the Christian wives hosted for the non-Christian wives. A couple of days after she heard Cindy, Gayle accepted Christ. I'd known my wife since she was two years old, and there was nobody I knew who was a better person than she was as far as being religious. So when she told me she'd accepted Christ as her personal Savior because of the sin in her life, I started questioning my position.
The year before, I'd heard Billy Graham speak in Charlotte. He'd said, "If you want to know what your relationship with the Lord should be or how to know if you have a proper relationship with Him, read the book of John and Romans."
Now, a year later, I was in a car wreck in nothern California on Interstate 5. I got caught in a storm and was hit by a truck, so I couldn't play the next week. I ended up in a hotel room in San Diego. There was a little book entitled Love in that hotel room which was The Living Bible New Testament.
That night I remembered what Billy Graham had said a year earlier, to read John and Romans. Verse after verse spoke to me. I found Romans 3:23, which says, "But God showed His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners." And then I found Romans 11:27: "At that time I will take away their sins, just as I promised."
So in that San Diego hotel room, one night in 1975, I asked Jesus Christ to come into my life. As a result of my wife's coming to know Christ a few weeks before in February, I asked Christ to come into my life as well.
Since then it has been good. Of course, the road has been rocky. Well, maybe not rocky - undulating, perhaps. That's true of any Christian walk. It is going to have its ups and downs, its failures and successes.
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