I just didn’t fit in college. So, after four years I dropped out to work with the school sculptor on a large commission piece. It was 1969, and I knew I would have to face the draft board sooner or later. The Vietnam War was raging, and I was caught up in controversies over that war. I applied for Conscientious Objector status, and was granted that. I worked two years alternative service at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. “The core of my feeling was that if I did not participate in the war effort, my presence on the side of peace would help tip the scale toward peace. At that time, I didn’t see that war as a fight between good and evil… Now I know the history of the conflict and the plight of Vietnamese refugees fleeing Communism. I understand the evil we were fighting. I’ve also learned that the peace symbol is nothing more than a flag of surrender and an anti-Christian emblem of a broken, inverted cross.”

“The pastor at First Pres would start his sermons with a one-line statement he called a ’hooker’ because it was supposed to hook your attention. One Sunday morning, he got my attention with this, ‘Have you ever been up in the air, looking for a place to land?’ Yes, I had, and it was after dark.”

I had been away from church and the Bible for years but had just lost five fellow hang glider pilots to fatal accidents. I had questions that needed answers and found a church and Bible study that resonated with me. “When I first dug into my Bible, I wondered, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I was chasing after wind, and what did I have to show for it? I found myself one night weeping with regret, doubt, and fear. I was looking through my Bible, looking for some kind of answer, reading at random, asking the Lord if was to live or die. I came across a passage I’d never seen before…”

Around 2001, my wife became desperately ill. “After she had been in the hospital over three weeks, her doctor pulled me aside… and told me she might not make it. I was taken aback… He wanted to call Mayo and see what they said. That was on a Thursday. Mayo said to send [her] up to their Rochester, Minn., clinic on Sunday… Sunday afternoon we rode an ambulance to the airport. They put us on an Air Ambulance, a small, executive-size jet equipped like an ambulance… I later had a doctor tell me there were probably not more than thirty cases of this [her disease] in the medical literature worldwide… That bird flew higher than commercial aircraft. I could look down on regular jets passing underneath us. It was 60 degrees when we left Chattanooga in February and 39 below zero in Rochester. The landscape beneath us went from winter brown to winter white, with the valleys showing up like veins in leaves. It was snowing in Rochester.”

What matters? “It’s the relationships with the people that counts, but most of all it’s the personal relationship with the living Christ that’s important. Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship. The whole Bible is about relationships with people and with God, the Creator of all creators, and the Great Reconciler.”

“I don’t believe there is one political leader, or one political party, that can lead us out of the mess we are in. It will take political leaders and organizations, but more importantly, it will take great numbers of people who can discern truth and communicate it between each other and their representatives. Government is dangerous when driven by deceit and greed. It will take God’s hand at work through the Holy Spirit to move men and women to draw close to Him. Will our prayers ascend to the throne of heaven or get mired in the muck of mammon?”