I remember being near 1.5 years old and Mom had this dark patched quilt draped over a clothesline for a play tent. My Father had died when I was 2 weeks old. She came from Alaska to meet the in-laws and stay for the funeral. She would stay with my paternal Grandparents for a year, before moving away from Butler County, to a plot of land, an acre, in rural Hardin County and set a trailer on it next to neighbors who had been close friends of my Father before he came to Alaska.
So I am out in the tent, and I feel the light and a presence in the light near me. I could not even talk yet, and yet I perceived this good spirit to be God.
A month later, my Mother would meet my future step-Father and they would marry, and I had a brother and sister by him, but he was Catholic, not the Protestant my Mother or deceased Father had been, but Mom agreed to attend Church so long as he read his Bible to his children.
At age 9, a priest who wanted my step-Father to divorce my Mother for never joining the Church, not allowing the children to take communion, and is upset she is not having more, wants Dad to divorce her. Mom nearly died with me and my brother, demanded Dad give her my sister, even though he was afraid after nearly seeing her die with my brother, because she inherited a genetic condition that did not allow her to dilate, and so we were all born by C-section. With me it was unknown, but she knew with my Brother, but good o'ld boy Doctors in the South would not listen to her and made her try to give birth to my brother. She lost so much blood, at one point she was outside her body hearing the nurse tell my step-Father, "I can't get a pulse" and she had to have a complete blood transfusion and was white as a ghost in pictures from that time upon returning home.
The Doctors in Burlington, VT were not like the good old boys at Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown and listen to Mom and directed her to stay in bed for the last 3 months before my sister was born where she was safely delivered by a scheduled C-section and not an emergency C-section as with my brother and myself..
Mom couldn't have any more children without endangering her health further and she was 24 when my sister was born, so Dad told the Catholic Priest to go to hell, and my Mother who had been raised Church of God, remembered my Father said he attended the Church of the Nazarene, and we had moved back to Butler County by 1977, just down the road from my Paternal Grandparents.
Dad was 30 and I was 10 when we were both saved in a Revival at the Church, and unlike the Catholic Church that told me if I wanted to talk to God, I had to talk to the Priest so he could talk to God, the Church of the Nazarene told me I could talk directly to God, and so I began to talk to the spirit that had been near me at 1.5, and whose presence was especially strong at Christmas and Easter, and the conversation has never ended.
I knew from that day, a month before Mom met my step-Father who the spirit of God was, before I was even old enough for my parents to sit me down as a toddler to read stories and show pictures from the Children's Bible.
So, even as a child, I was never an atheist, because I knew who God was before my Mother even taught me. So when the Church of the Nazarene told me I could talk to God, I began to talk to the presence of light and spirit that had been there since I was 1.5, and he began to talk back to me. It was never in a voice, but always as telepathy, thoughts I could hear and understand in my head, as when you are thinking, but you are not talking to yourself, because there is an active thought there that is distinctly the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, and the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit began to reveal themselves even more throughout my lifetime, always there, never leaving me alone!
Now at 11 years old about 2 weeks later after my Baptism, I began to be bullied in school. when my parents went to school, 75% of more of homes had two parents in them, when we moved to a poor rural ghetto in 1977 where 90% of the homes were divorced single-mother homes, i was bullied to the point of suicide by age 12 and my parents were in shock not knowing how to help me since they had not experienced this in their youth going to school, where children behaved because a father was in the home to ensure discipline at home and at school. juvenile delinquency rates jumped off the charts by the 70s and 80s and beyond, and once a progressive socialist government did away with paddling in schools, in addition to running fathers out of the home, they replaced the corporal discipline with psychotropic drugs to control the behavior of teen boys for which the side effects or withdrawal symptoms were violent behavior and mass school shooting became a reality with all the mass shooters on psychotropic drugs. the liberal progressive socialists claimed paddling caused the violence, so they replaced it with psychotropic drugs under clinton, and then they brought real violence to the schools. no one in my day ever got a paddling and then went home, grabbed a gun, and came back and shot up the school.
We also had a coal company begin to mine 2 farms around our home strip mining, but using 10X the legal amount of dynamite. One day I heard the siren going off to announce a blast and saw a brown mushroom cloud in the air and dirt & rock the size of laundry baskets fall and bury themselves in our yard missing me and my family.
Then the deceiver came and said, "What if God is just an imaginary friend? Don't listen to him." and so I began to doubt, but that very night demons attacked me in my sleep seeking to choke me.
When the demons attacked, I knew God was real But the troubles in my life seemed unending between the bullying in school, and sexuality active women in 7th grade conducting polls on who was still a virgin, and then telling erotic tales of their sex with 8th graders, high schoolers, and men as old as 21 while the teacher left the class unattended for 45 minutes each day so she could go gossip and smoke with the cafeteria ladies. One woman, a year later at age 13 dropped out of 8th grade in our rural Elementary School grades 1 - 8, and married the 21 year old man who made her pregnant.
Meanwhile, I was scared to death to one day come home from school to find my parents killed or my siblings too if they were home by the illegal blasting.
The the town millionaire who owned the mining companies has his brothers on the board of the bank foreclose on our home despite my parents never missing a mortgage payment.
So I hated God and blamed God for all my troubles and was so mean I could curse the wallpaper off the wall and when I began to fight back, more bullies joined in, instead of fighting them one at a time, I had to fight 4 to 6, and I can't watch MMA to this day, causes too much stress, PTSD, except in MMA you can tap out, but bullies don't let you, so I had to hurt them bad and I never lost a fight.
In the middle of all this God sends a Christian girlfriend into my life and then at 15, I am in a car wreck and I realize my heart is so FAR from God that if I died I would go to hell, and I am having visions of demons trying to carry me to a black door and I saw it again 12 years later, but on TV on Kevin Sorboes Hercules, and in the story it was the door to Hades. I've seen things on TV and horror genre that I had only seen in visions. When attacked I could cry out for Jesus and the Holy Spirit would rescue me in my prodigal state, but then I would be mad a God again.
Two weeks after the car wreck, I hit an altar at a youth revival at a Church, and once I gave myself back fully to Jesus, my life has had peace despite the troubles in this world. So I'm not following a religion made by men, but a relationship with Jesus Christ and 40 years later come February 2023, when I turn 55 and made that decision at the youth revival, I have no regrets.
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Addendum to BLOG in further response to a debate on Facebook in the group "Christians versus Atheists Debate Group:
Wolfgang Niesielski: In the story I cited I tell of seeing the black door the demons were trying to drag me to, which was the door to hell.
Before my Father died, my Mother told him after his testimony of his love for God, that she hated God, because god had done nothing for her, being an Aluttiq orphan at age 6 being placed in a Children's Home by her alcoholic Father after the children reported him to police for beating their Native Alaskan Mother. As soon as he was out of jail, he had the children placed in an orphanage. Then when she was 14, her alcoholic Father returned with a new alcoholic step-Mother claiming to be the Savior of the children, come to take them home. All he really wanted to do was use his teenage sons on his fishing boat, where he worked them, but did not pay them, and what money he earned, he and their new step-Mother went out drinking and partying while the house literally had no food for the 9 children, 6 of them belonging to the alcoholic Father.
At age 16, he took Mom to a babysitting job, but here were no children. When Mom ran away from the man who tried to rape her, she returned home, and was told by her Father they couldn't afford to feed people off the street.
So Mom stayed in Churches and worked odd jobs. She met a young man of 23 when she was 17 from the Army, and by age 18 & 24 they were married.
My Father kept telling my mother of the premonitions of his death and where he wanted to be buried back in KY, but he thought he would die in Vietnam.
So Mom has her own premonition before he dies, and sees herself in outer darkness, but sees a door of light, the door into heaven, she cannot enter, but my Father is in there surrounded by people who love him.
Two weeks after I am born, my Father is killed by a drunk driver the same day his orders come in the mail for him to leave for Vietnam.
Mom is invited by the Chaplin who married them a year earlier to a memorial service for his company before the body leaves Alaska a the Army Chapel.
He reads and preaches from this scripture:
'I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.'
1 Corinthians 15:50-58
https://my.bible.com/bible/111/1CO.15.50-58
Mom, having seen herself in the darkness, and not able to enter the door of life, is saved at the memorial service for my Father and then accompanies the body to KY, where she will meet her in-laws for the first time, and a year later, she marries a young man returned from Vietnam who was shot 3 times.
There is definitely more to their story, the comments do not have time for, and perhaps a 2nd blog to cover.
But we all have two choices, the door to Hell or the door to Heaven. If you have not prayed to Jesus and repented of sin (life without talking or acknowledging your Creator and Savior), then you will enter the black door, not the door of light!
