The Long Dark Night

Jeremiah 11:10
........They have followed other gods to serve them.......

After we got married, Vicki and I slowly stopped going to church. Quit praying and reading our Bibles. Basically just methodically turned into backsliders of the royal kind. It really wasn't a conscious decision where we looked at each other and said, "Hey...let's leave God!" It happened.

We both were working and going to school. Time was a premium, or at least that was the excuse we used to justify our lapse in good judgement. Sunday was the only day that we truly had off and the thought of going and spending two hours in church was more than we were willing to give up. I guess we figured we could live on the "Church" attendance we had put in over the past years. How wrong we were.

This isn't to say that we didn't make the old college try.
There for a while we joined 4 different churches and each time we walked to the front, we would shake the preacher's hand telling him how we were going to be faithful in our attendance. That lasted about 2 weeks per church. Like I said, we had begun the journey away from God. How ignorant I was.

During this decade, we had two sons born to us. They were the joy of our lives and as I tell most folks, Vicki and I married so young that we not only raised two sons, we raised each other. During this time we moved a lot. Let me put it like this...in the first 11 years of our marriage, we moved 11 times. I had a series of jobs that took us all over North Alabama. But during this period, we kept getting farther and farther away from God and from each other. God was allowing us to live in the freedom we had chosen, and like Adam and Eve, we were making bad choices.  I wasn't the husband and father that my wife and sons needed. I brought great frustration upon our house and if affected my wife tremendously. The only redeeming part of that entire decade was that the hand of God still rested upon our household and he did not let us divorce. We tried, we thought about it, but God used an unusual circumstance to keep it from happening. We simply did not have the money to carry through with it.

It took Vicki's grand father, who God spoke through, to awaken us to the folly of our ways.
One day, as Vicki was visiting her grandparents, her grandfather spoke to her.
"Honey...you and Michael were both raised in church. You have been given the privilege of having the knowledge to choose your own life. Don't deprive your sons of that same privilege. If they are not taken to church then they won't be able to make that choice. It will just happen. Get them in church and let them hear the word of God for themselves so they can make an educated decision on whether or not they want to follow God."
Well, it didn't take a rocket scientist to see that the real crux of the matter was her grandfather's concern for us. He knew that we needed to be back in church. He was right. So Vicki and I, in the middle of all the destruction that 7 years away from God created, made the decision to return to Church.

More later.....

God on you....
mb