Tom Saunders - Choices: Decisions That Last a Lifetime

A Spiritual Roller Coaster

This account of my experience with the Lord sets the stage for the conclusions I draw in this book. As I mentioned earlier, my sometimes-tenuous relationship with the Lord started at a young age. My grandfather and my uncle were instrumental in my early spiritual life.

They always encouraged me to attend church with them without forcing the issue. If I wanted to go, I called. If there was a special program they thought Id like, theyd let me know about it and leave the choice to me.

I didnt realize it then, but they were teaching me one of my first lessons about winning others to Christ: plant the seed and let the Lord do the rest. I have seen so many people turned off to Christ by well-meaning, overzealous people trying to stuff their beliefs down anothers throat.

Clubbing people over the head with the Bible or theology is not an effective way of leading others to Christ. Ill address this more in the chapter Be an Example.

I was in and out of the youth group as a teen, and looking back, I know my salvation was always secure because of my sincere faith that Christ died for my sins and that I was in need of His grace and mercy. What was lacking was a relationship with Him. So many Christians miss the greatest part about being a child of God because they are never taught or mentored in developing a relationship with God in Christ.

Theyre lost in a religious shuffle and eventually end up falling away from God because, after the initial joy of accepting Christ as their savior, their life seems to be pretty much the way it was prior to asking Christ into their heart. But just as people arent taught how to lead others to Christ, they also never learn how to grow in Christ and become spiritual mentors. They remain babes in Christ. I will discuss the importance of mentoring believers later.

Another benefit of developing our relationship with Jesus is learning how to nurture our relationships with family and friends. Scripture addresses every aspect of relationship building imaginable including conflict management. How much better would our lives be if we knew more about resolving conflict instead of exacerbating it?

The Bible makes it clear that we cant have a meaningful relationship with the Lord if we cant have meaningful relationships with those we deal with on a daily basis: families, friends, coworkers, congregants, and even strangers.

Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift. (Matt. 5:2324)

Many times we forget that the only time a person may get to see and know Gods love is in how we treat them, stranger or not.

Air force bound

I bounced around in a few jobs after completing high school and joined the United States Air Force eight months after graduation. With no intentions of going to college, it seemed a logical and adventurous choice. At basic training in Texas, one of the favorite social activities was going to Sunday service. It was more than just an opportunity to get away from the rigors of the training. The services were contemporary services, and in 1977, that was something new.

Other than an opportunity to go downtown one time and to tour the base during the last week of training, there wasnt much socializing other than church. Technical training in Denver was quite a different story.

Any restoration of a relationship with God that began to blossom in Texas floundered once I got to Denver. After being told for six weeks when to do everything, including scratch ourselves, we were free to come and go as we pleased after in-processing on the base. We did have a curfew, but that was our only limitation, and the drinking age was nineteena dangerous combination for several young men that felt they were just released from incarceration.

Technical school was an eight-week party complete with drinking, fighting, carousing, discipline issues, and even a few discharges. God was the last thing anyone, including myself, was thinking about.

My on-again, off-again relationship with Jesus continued after my transfer to California to my first permanent duty station. Until my flight to Texas for basic training, I had never been on an airplane and other than a trip to Virginia when I was very young and a few excursions to Ohio, I had never been out of the state of Michigan. Now I was living in California in the 1970s. Trouble wasnt hard to find. It was also my first experience with a church split.

There was a right crowd and a wrong crowd, spiritually speaking, when I arrived at my first squadron. The wrong crowd was pretty easy to find as it usually is in any situation. Keep in mind, Im speaking strictly from a spiritual point of view here. Almost everyone in the squadron from the commander down to the lowest airman, that would be me, was very dedicated to the Air Force and each other and, humanly speaking, was a pretty good group of men and women. But being young and being the seventies, the disco scene called and even a small town in California had several clubs to choose from.

That, combined with the recently ended Vietnam War and the attitude about casual marijuana use, made for lots of trouble if a person wasnt careful. I witnessed several promising young people lose out on a potentially great career because they got caught up in the drug scene. But as most self-serving satisfiers go, the party scene got old, and after seeing what happened to a few people in my squadron, I didnt want to get entangled in something I would regret. Even though I wasnt as close to God as I should have been, He was still convicting me and trying to encourage me to see the light as it were.

Its funny how God puts everything we need right in front of us if we are only willing to search it out. It was no different in this situation. There was a group of devoted Christians in the squadron, and as I felt the Lords urging more and more, I sought them out. They quickly accepted me into their group, and I immediately felt a sense of family that eluded me even before I left home.

During this time, the church we attended went through a split. That sense of family slowly slipped away. I seemed to be in a spiritual abyss for the remaining time I was there, but I believe it was there that I established my spiritual foundation, but it would be several years through much disappointment and heartache before I realized it.

A rude awakening

I was now on my way to Spain! Little did I know what I was getting myself into by volunteering for this assignment. I had no idea if I would be back in the States before the end of my two-year assignment to Spain, so I stopped off at home for a few weeks to spend some time with family and friends before my great adventure. The day after my return, my grandmother suffered a massive stroke. Her body weakened from a years-long battle with diabetes, she succumbed two days later on Mothers Day 1979.

I remember the peace I felt at her funeral knowing that she was a child of God and she was now with the Lord and no longer suffering. Although many would miss her very much, we knew she was much better off now. Three weeks later I landed in Madrid, Spain.

The flight to Spain was grueling to say the least. It started out with two flights and several military taxis before the sixteen-hour ride to Spainyes, sixteen hours not including the time changes. Before we got off the ground, there was concern that because of head winds, passengers, and cargo, they couldnt put enough fuel on the plane to make it to our first refueling stop in the Azores and still get off the ground. I didnt waste any time; I started to pray. We did make it to the Azores and then on to London. We did not deplane at either stop. The aircrew changed in London, and as the new crew boarded the aircraft, they filled the fuselage with spray deodorizer because of the stench from all of us packed into the plane for so long.