Following my initial spiritual awakening during deployment, one could say that my road to spiritual growth was paved with good intentions. I started to regularly attend church and Bible study with my wife, but I still had not had an illuminating moment of Christian conversion. I purchased a Bible and a devotional study guide designed to lead me through the entire Bible within a year. Despite carrying both books across the country numerous times, I failed to ever take the time to actually sit down and begin to study.
By October 2002, I was fully entrenched in the day to day toils of being a department head in a fighter squadron. I was responsible for ten aircraft and the leadership of approximately three hundred people. It was a time of great stress and great reward, but I seemed to be unappreciative of the opportunities.
The squadron was on detachment to Fallon, so my workload as the Maintenance Officer was on the rise. Yet again away from home, I was reminded that for the first eighteen months of my young son’s life, I had been separated from him for the combined total of almost a year. For almost ten months I had been battling a foot ailment which, despite the best efforts of the doctors, made it difficult to even wear a boot. I had reached a point where I was feeling stressed, homesick, and melancholy.
On October, 30, 2002, I awoke in my room at the Bachelors Officers Quarters like any other day. Arriving at the squadron to brief the Commanding Officer on the status of the jets, I discovered that my daily flight had been cancelled. Normally, this meant the opportunity to get caught up on paperwork, or maybe head back to the ‘Q’ for a good workout or a little bit of TV.
I’m not sure what it was that finally prodded me to pick up my Bible and study guide. The devotional is set up in a manner that provides a contextual preview, assigns a specific scripture reading, and then has a personal application. The passage in the scripture reading that day would forever change my spiritual life:
Please continue your good work of drawing thousands more to faith in Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior, Fortress, and King.
“The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” (Romans 10:8–11)