My Testimony on How I Came to Know the Lord

When I was growing up, Church never really meant much to me.  While we lived in Commack, NY, my parents were active in the Lutheran Church, so we went on Sundays.  When we moved to East Setauket, they had stopped attending Church on Sundays, but I had to go.  I never understood that.

Going through Junior High, I had to go to Tuesday night confirmation classes at the Setauket Presbyterian Church.  I despised it with a passion since I never understood what they were teaching anyway.  I stopped attended Church the day I received my confirmation.  Nothing had made sense.  I had to go, my parents didn't, I flunked the final exam big time and still got confirmed anyway.

Somewhere in the beginning of 1981, my first wife Carole, was working at Grumman and was friends with the sister-in-law of the Pastor of Beth Yeshua in Patchogue.  One day, she came home and asked if I wanted to go on a camping trip to Scot Run Campgrounds in Pennslyvania with her friend and people from her Church.  I said 'Only if it isn't one of those retreat things' and she checked and assured me that it wasn't.

Boy was I given a story.  That's exactly what it turned out to be.  We arrived around 8:00 on a Friday night and of course everyone else was there so we had the last campsite, which of course happened to be right in the middle of everyone.

As we were putting up our tent, we found out that Carole's friend Joannie, doesn't like camping, but went to the campground for the Church activities but stayed nearby at her parents house.

Shortly after we finished putting up our tent and getting some things set up, they started their Friday night 'Message'.  Everyone gathered in the center of the campsites, which by the way happened to be our campsite.  People started filtering in, setting up chairs and sitting on our table :-).  If you know me and camping, this was freaking me out and we got off to a really bad start.  I pulled our sandwhichs from the cooler and told Carole lets go.  We ended up eating dinner in the wet grass on the side of a hill :-) ;-)

It was the beginning of a very long weekend and I didn't believe have the stories I was hearing.  I also got tired quickly of being asked 'Do you know where you are going when you die?',  My answer was that I really didn't care because I'd be dead anyway, so I wouldn't care.  Needless to say, I skipped a day session or 2 and was grateful the weekend came to an end.  A comical moment of the whole weekend was that the Pastor had an identical twin and I had seen them together, so while I was thinking I was speaking to one person, I was actually speaking to 2 different people and thought one had short term memory loss!

Shortly after returning from the retreat, I noticed things starting to change.  I started attending Wednesday evening Bible classes at the Church that had the retreat and then their Thursday night discipleship class.  I even found myself going into a Christian bookstore to look for a bible that was easy reading for me.

Finally, I accepted the Lord into my life on September 5th, 1981.  Carole and I were camping at Hidden Acres Family Campground in Preston, Connecticut.  I was just sitting there trying to memorize the memory verse for the next week's discipleship class when it all came together.

I wasn't sure to begin with.  After we came back, I had asked Pastor Richie, 'How do you really know?'  See, all the stories I heard about people accepting Jesus into their life were from people involved in alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc. and when they accepted Jesus, all that was taken away from them and they could actually see it.  I was never involved in that stuff, never gotten into trouble other than normal kid stuff.

I am glad that day happened in 1981 and have been serving Him since.  He really showed me His awesome power in the healing of my daughter, Erika.

Erika was born in June of 1985 and had 2 surgeries on her head in January of 1986 for hydrocephalous.  By the end of January, she was supposed to be handicapped and have another surgery to heal an infection in her head.  Two weeks later, she was discharged from the hospital, WITHOUT the surgery healed.  After several intervention programs, she was completely healed and has been at the top or very close to it in all her classes.

By the way... We found out a few months after she left the hospital that at the time there were only 8-10 pediatric neurosurgeons in the United States and only 1 on the eastern seaboard.  Guess what!  That pediatric neurosurgeon had done the surgery on Erika! 

Last Revised: Sunday, December 04, 2005