Until I was about thirty I did not believe there was a God. I believed the theory of evolution and thought that believing in God was just a crutch to help people deal with the eventuality that they would die. I was terrified about dieing too, but couldn’t get any peace from their crutch since it was too good to be true. If something seems to be too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

My parents were nominal Christians when I was growing up and I didn’t see any validity to it. After I grew up, they became devout and developed a relationship with the Lord. They prayed that I would someday come to believe. I wanted God to exist very badly, but it just seemed too good to be true.

Occasionally I would flippantly say something like, “God, if you are there, disappear that chair.” The chair did not disappear. That proved to me that He wasn’t there.

Since I am an engineer, I have been trained in the sciences and I knew that supernatural things were impossible, and therefore, I believed that the Bible was fiction. My mother had communicated some details about the Bible as it related to my life and how I wasn’t living according to the Bible.

Something happened in my life that I would never have expected, but the Bible predicted it. I wouldn’t have known if my mother hadn’t mentioned it. I couldn’t help notice that the Bible had exhibited wisdom well beyond my wisdom (I thought at the time that I had some wisdom, but I was mistaken!).

I decided to get serious about finding out if God really existed (beyond the 10 second disappearing chair test). I decided to ask Him many times a day if He was there, and if He was there, would He please show me in some way that I would recognize. (Quite obviously, if He didn’t exist, He wasn’t bound by my request!)

I probably asked Him to show me if He was there 500 times a day for about 18 months. During those 18 months many unusual and extremely statistically unlikely things happened during that time. There are three pivotal things that happened during that time that proved to me that He is real and that He had been very patient with me all these years.

The first of the three stood the hair up on the back of my neck. I was experiencing some tough financial times and only had a motorcycle for about a year and a half. I wore the back tire out and needed to take the motorcycle to the shop to have it replaced. I borrowed a car from my Dad since he had an extra one. It sure was nice to drive with a roof over my head when it rained (summer in Florida!), and shopping was so much easier! I borrowed the car for about a week (wasn’t in any hurry to get that tire replaced, was I?). The third day when I was driving in my neighborhood going home for lunch, I unexpectedly said, “God if you are there, honk twice.” I felt stupid saying such a thing, but within a few seconds, a horn inside the car beeped! In a few seconds when I recovered and recognized that it only went off once, I said, “I said twice!” Then the horn immediately went off twice! The horn had not gone off before that or after that while I had the car for the week. I started to wonder just what horn went off inside the car. It turned out to be a radar detector that I didn’t know about. There were no police in the area, and actually you couldn’t go much above 15 mph because there were 90 degree turns about every three houses. This was the first of three impossible things that happened. Why did I say “God if you are there, honk twice.” right then? Then He tried to get away with a single honk, but I noticed that and He honked twice! He’s got as sense of humor.

The next unlikely event happened very early in the morning. I used to go waterskiing every Saturday morning with my friend Tom. He had the boat and we were both very dedicated and wanted smooth water for skiing. The only way to get smooth water was to get there before anybody else. We were in the ski canal as the sun rose. I had been skiing with Tom for a couple of years. One Saturday as we were approaching the ski canal in the boat in a no-wake zone, something made me asked Tom if he liked to fish. He responded that the only kind of fishing he liked was when the fish jumped in the boat. Being pretty sharp, I figured that fishing wasn’t his favorite activity! About a minute later, we were at the end of the no-wake zone and since his seats weren’t screwed down, he asked if I was holding on so he could speed up to get to our starting beach in the ski canal. I said, “Yes” and he accelerated. Instantly hundreds of fish jumped up in the air and 14 of them jumped in the boat! We had never even seen a fish jump in our ski time before or after this time which was about a minute after he said the only kind of fishing he liked was when the fish jumped in the boat!

The third event was kind of scary. I was baby-sitting my uncle’s house while they were away for the summer. I didn’t mind this because they had a swimming pool and it was a very nice house. One day as I got out of the shower on a Tuesday morning before going to work, when I looked into the mirror over the vanity, I heard inside my head somehow, “SHAVE OFF THE MUSTACHE!” Every time I looked toward the mirror I heard the same thing. I was quite nervous at this point. My response was to say out-loud, “OK, I will shave it off on Friday so I can get it tanned over the week-end and it won’t look so funny when I go to work”. As soon as I said that the voice didn’t come back. This was spooky! I remembered to shave it off and I got it tanned over the week-end. I didn’t tell anybody that I was going to shave it off. When I returned to work on Monday, I went to my girlfriend’s office to say hi and see if she noticed the change. She looked at me like she was looking at a ghost. I quickly mentioned that I had just shaved off the mustache and there is nothing to be upset about. Then she said, “yes, but last week for the first time I wondered what you would look like without the mustache” Suspecting something weird because of the horn honking and the fish jumping, I asked if she remembered which day she wondered about it. She said it was Tuesday. Then I gulped and asked if she remembered what time of day it was. She said it was in the morning before work! She remembered everything about the week before because it was traumatic for some unrelated reason.

I was going to church with my girl-friend as I was searching to discover if there was a God. I was still asking God to show me if He was there many times per day. One Sunday, the Preacher (the late Jamie Buckingham) asked if anybody wanted to accept Jesus today. I thought about it and reviewed the facts: I had been asking God to show me if He was there for about 18 months, and many strange things had happened that had never happened before ( I had never seen strange things like during this 18 months). Three big things had happened: horn honking, fish jumping, and mirror talking inside my head. I finally put it together and realized that I had all the evidence that I needed for total confidence that God really does exist and He has a sense of humor, so I went forward and gave my life to Jesus.

Since then I have been trying to learn more about the Bible and develop my relationship with the Lord. While studying, I discovered that the Bible is the only publication in the history of the world that predicts the future with total accuracy. That is God’s signature. Many “impossible” (for humans) to predict events have come to pass exactly as stated in the Bible hundreds or thousands of years after they were written. There are many predictions yet to be fulfilled.