prescchurchI started this some months ago and as you can tell from reading, this is not the first time I have re-started this. It is very difficult for me to write about myself and especially of those things that are spiritual in nature. I think I feel somehow that what I write will be made light of. None of us want to leave a heritage of ridicule.

I wish I had kept up my journal over the years. The morning I began to write this some years ago, I started reading parts of the Journal I was keeping at the time our family joined the church. It brought back many fond memories. From time to time I have tried to start a biography to leave for my posterity.

Thinking about some events in my life over the past few days I realized that there are many details that I have completely forgotten. In setting out the following there may be some gaps but the essence I hope will be there so my children and grandchildren will have a better idea and understanding of who I am and why my testimony is so important to me.

Rather than a complete biography this will be more a history of my gaining a testimony and my relationship with the Savior. I cannot remember a time when I did not believe in Heavenly Father. I can remember walking to school in about the fourth grade and talking to Him as though He were walking beside me and knowing that He heard me. I did not realize it at the time, but I had a strong gift of faith. Looking back on this it seems strange, but at the time it didn’t.

To me it was the most natural thing in the world. The reason it does seem strange in a way is that my family was not a church going family. I cannot remember my mother ever having been in a church. My older sister Delores and I attended many different Sunday schools as youngsters but none of them for an extended time. From time to time, depending upon where we lived, we attended Baptist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Nazarene to name only those that I can remember.

My earliest recollection of Sunday school is of one we attended when I was 4 or 5 years old. It was a black evangelical congregation with less than a handful of whites. There was an old gospel song I faintly remember that contained words something to the effect “park your (something and) chewing gum on the door” as you enter the church. And that is what we children did. We took out our gum, stuck it to the door frame and picked it up again on our way out. Not a very sanitary custom, but we didn’t pay as much attention to those things back then.

From the eighth grade through high school I attended primarily the First and United Presbyterian churches. One of my friends, Lynn Shaffer, who was in high school band with me was a Mormon. He invited me to services one Sunday and after the normal church service we went to a Sunday School class where he introduced me. After the instructor welcomed me he immediately called on me to offer and opening prayer. Somehow I got through that but never entered an Latter-day Saint chapel again for almost 30 years.

That was as bad of an experience as I can remember as far as religion is concerned. I was in my teens, didn’t know anyone else there and was very self-conscious as are most teens. But it did not make me think any less of Lynn or his older brother Lyle, who played trumpet in the band. From my association with them in school I knew they were regular people just like the rest of us.

Interestingly, growing up in Klamath Falls, I don’t recall a lot of prejudice against any religion or against any ethnic group. That was to come in later years, but not in the 50′s in Klamath Falls. I don’t know but maybe I just was not attuned to such things.

My early faith and belief in God did not keep me from getting into trouble. Some years, I’m sure, my parents and school officials thought ‘trouble’ was my middle name. In spite of my rebellious nature and trouble with authority, I always held on to my knowledge that there was a God.

(To be continued…)