John A. Naphor - God Culture

BOOK ONE

Understanding the Almighty SERIES

John A. Naphor

N EW Y ORK

GOD culture

BOOK ONE of Understanding the Almighty SERIES

2014 John A. Naphor.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other,except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing. Morgan James and The Entrepreneurial Publisher are trademarks of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

The Morgan James Speakers Group can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event visit The Morgan James Speakers Group at www.TheMorganJamesSpeakersGroup.com.

In an effort to support local communities, raise awareness and funds, Morgan James Publishing donates a percentage of all book sales for the life of each book to Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg.

This book is dedicated to Yahweh, my Father in heaven through my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to my wife and my three beautiful children, and to all those who have supported, influenced and prayed for me through the years. Although you are too numerous to name you know who you are.

Introduction

I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I have heard the phrase, God works in mysterious ways, from my friends, family members, business colleagues, and even members of my own church. In fact, I used to feel that way myself. I have noticed that people seem to fall, for the most part, into one of two camps. Folks are either angry at God or, quite simply, they are apathetic toward Him, as if He does not exist at all. It seems that the more modern our society becomes, the less of a role God plays in our culture. God is being replaced with pop.

Throughout the years, there has always been something inside that led me to believe that I did not quite have all the information. I had heard that God was good but I had never experienced this myself. He was never a part of my culture. Was it me or was there something unseen that I just did not have any understanding of? After all, I can remember being a small child and hearing the voice of God speak to me. But where did He go? Was it my imagination? Had He left me? Had He left all of us to fall into the chaos and suffering of such a turbulent world? Something deep inside told me no.

In all of my trials and tribulations I have never been one to play the blame game. Therefore, I never attributed to God all the crazy and messed up incidents I have experienced throughout my life. I knew I was the problem all along and I thank God for that. At the same time, I just could not understand why so many have suffered through so many hardships and why life seemed to be so incredibly unfair if God is truly good and merciful. Sound familiar?

So let me tell you what led me to write this book. I will begin with a brief history of my early life. Like many of you, and I do realize not all of you, I had a great childhood and wonderful parents. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, but at one point I noticed something was not quite right. When I was a young boy, my fifteen-year old cousin died in a car accident. It is my understanding that she was thrown through the back windshield, resulting in the fact that they could not even open the casket at her funeral. I cannot even begin to tell you how devastating this was to my family.

Not long after this incident, my two closest uncles died. The first was hit by the drunken driver of a garbage truck while crossing Route 1 in North Brunswick, New Jersey. He had two small children. I remember my brother and me plotting the murder of the assassin while lying in bed that night. We did not go through with it.

The second, who happened to be my late cousins father, died of a sudden and massive heart attack. He did not have any life insurance and a tremendous financial hardship was beset upon his surviving family. My beloved aunt never recovered and knowingly allowed breast cancer to ravage her until she finally befell the same fate as her long lost loved ones. And God, youre okay with this? was my only thought.

Then there were my own shattered dreams. In the midst of a stellar high school basketball career, of which I sank my entire life into, I slipped on a patch of ice, slamming my shin into the bottom of a car door while having a snowball fight with my friends in a McDonalds parking lot. There were six games left in my senior season. The resulting bone bruise caused me to miss the coveted one thousand career point milestone by a mere twenty-seven points while I was averaging twenty-two per game. Even worse was my teams ousting from the county tournament due to the absence of the teams star player, me.

Just as my injury healed enough to get back on the hardwood, our dreams were dashed in the first round of the state tournament on a half court buzzer beater by a team we had crushed twice in the regular season. Also ousted were my college Division One dreams, as the last game the scouts saw was my six-minute, three-point debacle where I could not run, jump or cut. In fact, I could barely even walk. Athletics are ruthless and there is always someone else ready to fill your spot. Needless to say, my N.B.A. dreams were flushed away along with a lifetime of shoveling off snow-covered courts and playing until the lights went out.

That began my long dark spiral into drugs and alcohol. At the time, I never realized it was merely a mask for the anger and pain I was feeling due to the hopelessness of watching all of my aspirations disappear into blackness and leaving no real hope left of repairing the shattered pieces of my life. So why not just party into oblivion? That is exactly what I did. Just like basketball, I was good at it and dedicated to it.

Now dont get me wrong, these were choices I made and I cannot even stand here today and tell you that I did not enjoy it. I most certainly did. This may sound strange, but in hindsight I would not change a single thing about my past. You will understand why as you read through this book.

The point is, although it started out fun, it was hopeless and empty. For the last three years of my partying career, I wanted to stop but I could not. Not until something changed in my life. Unbeknownst to me at the time I had to leave the party culture behind and embark upon something brand new.