The car was well passed the speed limit, as my brother and my mother yelled at me to slow down. But the black depression that had held me prisoner for most of my life, wouldn’t listen. I wanted to die and I didn’t care who I took with me. I was eighteen. At the time, I didn’t know what finally caused me to yield to my family’s cries. Now I know it was the Lord.

I was raised in an atmosphere of domestic violence, and I began to withdraw when I was very young. My father had serious mental problems, and his temper infected the whole family. My mother was a Christian, and she did her best to maintain a home for myself and my two older brothers, but it was within a constant whirlwind of hatred and fighting.

I coped by creating my own little fantasy world, and as I grew older, found relief in art work. I set about to become the world’s greatest artist. As a result an enormous ego took hold of me and joined the variety of moods and depressions that were my constant companions. Thoughts of suicide were frequent and compelling. My moods usually wrapped themselves around me like a grey shroud and my spiritual condition was extremely obvious. I was a lonesome teenage recluse, who spent his high school lunch hours huddled away in the furthest corners of the cafeteria.

Unknown to me at the time, I was being carefully observed by one of the other students. I don’t know how long he had been praying for me before he finally approached and tried to make friends. He talked to me about the Lord and tried to cheer me up. I was struck by his sincerity and his genuine concern. However, I doubt if much sank in until one day he came over and handed me a letter he had written. It was a very compassionate letter expressing his care for me, and outlining my need to receive Christ as my Saviour. “It hurts me to see you so sad and forlorn,” he wrote. “A true happiness awaits you through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” I wanted to believe him.

Several evenings later, I found myself sitting in front of a television set watching a popular evangelist. For the first time, God’s truth began to penetrate my heart. The next day I sought out my friend. “Dan, I want to know Jesus,” I told him. The following Sunday at his church, I went forward and dedicated my life to the Lord. Though my emotional healing was to be gradual, I experienced an immediate sense of security that I had never known before. I was never bothered by those demons of suicide again.

Shortly afterwards, I won a scholarship to study art at the Art Students League in New York City. I wanted to escape the dark atmosphere that still hung like a storm cloud over my family, and I was eager to leave. They didn’t want me to go. But I felt as though I had a mission and nothing could stop me. I knew there was someone I had to find, and I found her in New York.

Trapped in Self-indulgence

I met Deborah (her author name) on my first day at the league, and we shared our classes together. I led her to the Lord, and four months later we were married. She quickly became a source of strength for me in Christ. The Lord gave her patience and a strength of character that enabled her to cope with my moods, which were still following around like an assortment of devoted pets. I was also extremely materialistic, and any money we made was quickly spent on whatever my heart desired.

Two months after our wedding, Deborah’s father died and we moved to Long Island to help her mother run the family business. It was a very difficult time for all of us. Deborah’s mother was opposed to our faith in Christ. In addition, she wasn’t thrilled with her daughter’s choice for a husband. For a while we all had to share the same house, and I consoled myself with spending money. My wife began to share my disease, and her inheritance was spent on cars and houses. We owned our first home at the age of twenty-one.

We continued to run the business for the next nine years. Though we always maintained our faith in Christ and witnessed whenever we could, using our store as a place to distribute free Bible literature, we weren’t growing; we thus remained trapped in a pattern of materialism and self-indulgence. The store itself wasn’t giving us very much fulfillment, and when we finally received a fair offer for the business property we accepted it gladly. We quickly sold what was then our third home, and retreated to a house in the lush, green forests of New England. For the first time we were alone, without the pressures of family or business. And that’s exactly what the Lord wanted.

The Holy Spirit began to fall on us there in our quiet, forest home, blessing us with a fresh, new zeal for God and His word. We spent most of our days reading the scriptures and drawing closer to Christ. I began to paint a portrait of Jesus reflecting His joy, something I never had before. Through the new work He gave me, Jesus began to create His joy in me.

Unequally Yoked

We continued working and growing for the next two years. Then we met another couple, Dave and Penny. They were both new Christians and we began fellowshipping on a regular basis. One evening, Dave asked us if we would be interested in going into business with him. It had always been his dream to have a business of his own. We had been blessed in so many ways, and we wanted to share what we had with him. Without hesitating (or praying), we said yes. We then proceeded to mortgage our home, which we had been fortunate to pay cash for with the money from our busines sale. It wasn’t long before we were wholesaling seafood.

The business took of immediately, and all of us, except for Dave, were grateful that the Lord was blessing our efforts. In the light of his new-found success, Dave quickly forgot about the Lord and began taking all the credit for himself. His old nature returned and he became abusive to his wife and children. The Lord responded and the business went down. The sudden turn for the worse brought Dave to his knees and he repented quickly. The business rallied in response. Then Dave once again turned his back on the Lord, and the business plunged downward. Dave repented. The business was restored.

By this time, my wife and I were experiencing considerable anxiety as we realized the man we had trusted was not what he had professed to be. Too late we learned about the Bible’s warnings about being “surety for a stranger” (Proverbs 11:15).

For the third and final time, Dave refused to acknowledge the Lord as the source of his good fortune, and for the third and final time, the business tumbled into failure. God had said, “Enough.” Sadly, my wife and I faced the possibility that we might lose our home. Reluctantly we put it up for sale, and made the painful decision to return to Kansas where work was more prevalent. We would be able to live in the basement apartment in my mother’s house until we got back on our feet.

We packed our furniture into a rented utility trailer and drove slowly down the long, wooded driveway to the road that would take us to the main highway. We fought the urge to turn and take one final look at our cherished home. We had no way of knowing then that everything was going according to the Lord’s plan. He had trained us in His word there in that beautiful school of solitude. We would not be permitted to continue to live in our old alma mater. It was time to graduate. We were about to inherit a ministry.

The Road to Restoration

We had decided to stop and visit Deborah’s mother before we returned to Kansas. Just before we reached the bridge that would take us from New England to Long Island, we stopped to have dinner at a crowded cafeteria on the turnpike. We were sitting there feeling absolutely miserable, when my wife looked over at me and said dryly, “The Lord just told me that He was doing this to bless us.” We looked at each other realizing it was truly the Lord’s Still Small Voice that she had heard, for being blessed in our present circumstances was the furthest thing from our minds. We began to take comfort in the fact that the Lord was still with us; we didn’t leave Him back there in the New England woods. During the next few years, His presence would become even stronger as He led us in the path that He had chosen for our lives.

True to His word, our first blessing happen to us while we were visiting Deborah’s mother. Out of the blue, she volunteered to finance the printing of the paintings I had done of Jesus. My wife and I were awestruck. This was the woman who used to take the witnessing plaques from the window of our store, saying, “I don’t believe in pushing religion on anyone.” Now she was offering us thousands of dollars to print my painting of Christ!

In Kansas we proceeded to print my art work, a genuine dream come true. We wanted to begin doing art shows as a ministry. We had always enjoyed doing shows in the past with our secular work and we couldn’t think of a better way to witness for Christ than in a crowded shopping mall. We located some promoters and booked our first show in Texas in 1982. The ministry there was very fruitful and we returned to Kansas greatly encouraged. To cut down on expenses, we began to look for a travel trailer.

We then proceeded to fill out applications at several banks, and we were turned down at every one of them. No one wanted to loan any money to a freelance artist who had been in town less than a year. But we kept praying and didn’t give up. Finally, on the way to a credit union, the Lord spoke to my wife once again. “I’m going before you,” He said. We not only were granted the loan for our trailer, but we received an additional amount to purchase a good used truck to pull it! We then decided to leave Kansas and work our way to California where the weather would enable us to work all year round. What we were about to experience was a nine year odyssey of learning and growth. Much like the children in the wilderness we were led day by day, learning to trust, to live on faith. So many times we would begin the day without enough to pay our campground fees the following morning, and always, miraculously, we would have what we needed by evening.

Two times our truck broke down, and on both occasions it was repaired for free by retired auto mechanics who just ‘happened’ to be around when we needed them. God was always there looking out for us, guiding us, and we felt His care through the eyes and hands of so many of His people. Our lives were so different from those comfortable self-indulgent days we had lived so many years before.

The Lord had used the trials and the hard times as tools to help change us into the people He wanted us to be. He had replaced depression with His joy for “In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Perched on the edge of a rocky beach in California, our camper faced the sea. I sat at my easel thinking about all the shows, all the people we had met, and how our lives had changed. I began to draw the cross, with Christ silhouetted against a brilliant sunset. A water bridge, like a crystal shadow reflecting the cross, proceeded out across a deep, black pit in the foreground. Standing on the Spirit water, suspended above the pit, a boy stands clothed in a brilliant white robe. Behind him, lying on the rocks are his old worn and tattered clothes. As the sketch came to life, I realized that the boy in the picture was me. And I knew those worldly clothes were behind me now. I wouldn’t have to wear them anymore. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new,” (II Corinthians 5:17).

J.L. and his wife are currently retired after being on the road for thirty-six years and wearing out five travel trailers. The artist and his wife have been blessed with an apartment (with a bathtub!) and are approaching their fifty-seventh wedding anniversary.
(Holy Ghost written by H. Deborah Shively).

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