We attended church, went to school, played as children, and worked the land in Eddy County...It was a good beginning...around good people...one for which I am truly thankful...but something was missing.

No Jesus...No peace...Know Jesus...Know peace
Even the best of childhood senarios can be incomplete and lonely. Though surrounded by friends and family, I lived in fear of the future, often agonizing about falling short of some imagined standard that I felt I needed to measure up to. In childish naivity I would offer up a nightly prayer of repentance, hoping that the morning would find me in another world, free from guilt and at long last, 'good'...Little did I realize it,...but God was there smiling at my efforts and patiently laying the groundwork to answer. Many years would pass before I would discover that certain believers had become spiritually burdened for my life and had started to pray. After a few brushes with the truth, my day of reckoning finally arrived...

* * 2 Cor. 5:17
Sunday, Oct.,17, 1971 was the turning point in my life. I remember a short prayer..."God, I am not sure that you even exist, but if you can somehow make yourself real to me, I will follow you!" I was hardly prepared for what was to happen next...
...It was homecoming week-end and the NDSU Bison had been undefeated for ages. Some friends and I had planned to make this a week-end to remember. Friday night, the 15th found me on the party circuit...Saturday morning found me wishing I had stayed home. By evening, my pals were up for another round, but I was now under the power of someone's prayers and things were about to change! Saturday, the 16th was the first night of my life that I can remember not sleeping. I tossed uneasily in bed feeling like the weight of the world was upon me. I had never known conviction like this before, but a few doors down the hallway someone was pleading my case before a Father whose hand had begun to move compassionately in my direction...
...It was a relief to arise Sunday morning from the tangle of covers and sheets I had wrestled with through that unending night. I recall putting on decent looking clothing instead of the grubby status-quo college 'goodwill' duds.
Time just seemed to crawl painfully forward as if in slow-motion, with nothing extreme happenning until about 5:00 that evening. It was then that an ever increasing sense of panic began to take hold. Any attempt to talk myself through rationally was failing bitterly. I could not shake off the dispair of examining myself and my future and knowing that I was not ready for the task, nor was I ready to meet my creator should my days be cut short. Retreating to my dorm room I was becoming desparate, when I uttered the words of that prayer. In answer, there was an immediate flooding of myself and the whole room with the presence of God. It was unmistakably obvious with whom I had come face to face. Overcome with hope and somehow feeling washed, I remember jumping to my feet and rushing to the door as if under orders. It was so strange, I had heard no sound in the nearly deserted hallway, but looking around expectantly, I saw a lone young man to whom, though I knew little about, I called out to realizing that this was my next step. It was he, out of hundreds in that dorm, who had been praying for me. It was he who had been asking God to deal with me, to convict me about my need for Him. Later, he told me that he had asked the Lord not to give me sleep until I had had the chance to accept or reject the eternal invitation.

I accepted...and the rest, as they say, is history or...His-story. Truly it is His story, and it is now my ambition to allow the telling of it through my life by ever increasing surrender to Jesus Christ my Lord.

peterweisenburger@ymail.com

Links to Other Sites
www.osas51@behindthebadge.net