An Extraordinary Testimony of God’s Mercy

We live in a strange and worrying era, when the value of life is in deep recession.

On the one hand there is the so-called morning-after pill, an insurance against unwanted conception, and – worse – the escalating use of abortion to destroy unwanted, unborn children. On the other hand, at the other extreme we hear of new scientific ‘advances’ in the way eggs can be cultivated outside the womb for women who find difficulty in conception.

Add to this ever-increasing rates of family breakdown, the general acceptance that one’s gender (even that of a child) can be manipulated and re-configured, and the mounting pressure to legalise assisted suicide, and we begin to realise how far our society’s value of life is being eroded.

Sometimes I have wondered how the wastage of life might be made clearer to those blind to what they are doing. Perhaps someone could write a story that imagined the potential of lives lost in the womb, following the imagined life story of those who might have been born, grown up and contributed to our society, but who never made it past the start-line.

Could one illustrate this in a powerful enough way to touch a generation like, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin challenged a whole nation to reconsider slavery and eventually reverse that tide of evil?

I don’t have the skill to write such a book, but recently I discovered something in the testimony of my own life that, at least for me, illustrated these things in a deep way.

A Blessed Childhood

My life has been wonderfully blessed. I grew up in the era immediately following the Second World War, conceived in 1945 and born in 1946. My earliest memories are of the hard winter of 1947, with its deep snow up to my waist, at a time when we had been temporarily housed with other families in a village in South Wales.

My father returned from Belgium in 1946, was demobbed and resumed work as a plumber, enjoying plenty to do in those days of rebuilding a nation and building houses. My mother kept house and was always the anchor of our security as children (my older sister and I).

What followed was a blessed and stable childhood through the 1950s – the era of rationing and austerity but hope, strong families and supportive community, when Sundays were kept special, when there were few phones and few cars. That era lives with me to this day.

A Fruitful Life

I did well at school and was optimistic about my future career. When my father asked me if I would join him in his plumbing business, that he might write SF Denton and Son on the van, I rather bluntly turned him down, having plans to join the RAF.

I did indeed become an RAF pilot, followed by studying for a maths degree at Kings College Cambridge, followed by teaching Maths and Computer Science at Banbury School, and then Educational Research at the University of Oxford where I also picked up my DPhil in the study of the educational of able children. Since the mid-1980s I left all that to go into full-time Christian work, which has, since then, taken me all over the world. It has been a wonderful and fruitful life.

One thing that typified my life from as early as I can recall, was my commitment to serve God, which I brought to prayer every single night in my years of growing up. Much later, I recall a day when the Lord spoke to me on my way back home from a ministry meeting. I was recalling how blessed and encouraged my early life had been, when the question came into my mind: ‘You thought that was your parents encouraging you, didn’t you?’ “Yes,” said I. ‘Well, that was Me’, said God.

It was like a Bar Mitzvah experience at a time when perhaps the Lord wanted me to turn more fully to him as Father and recognise the quiet but significant role he had played in my life all through those blessed years of growing up. Amazing.

Searching for My True Father

Yet the story has become even more amazing recently, ever since a friend put together a genealogical tree for both sides of my family. I was quite pleased to discover a fairly normal set of ancestors from the working class – labourers, agricultural workers, domestic servants and so on – going back through the 19^th Century.

At this time a thought came back to my mind that had, despite having wonderful loving parents, often posed a question during my early years: was my father really my father? It is remarkable what a DNA test can show, so I took up the offer of one towards the end of last year. The results confirmed my hunches and so began an incredible period of investigation to see if I could find my true father.

Amazingly, my DNA results strongly linked me paternally not to the Midlands where my supposed father came from, but to the USA.

Piecing together clues I picked up from other known relatives, I went looking on US genealogy trees for the person most likely to be my real father. I was looking for someone who would have been serving in the US forces, stationed in the UK near where my mother lived in 1945 with my baby sister, at a time when my presumed father was away serving in the RAF.

Surely that should have been like a needle in a haystack to find; but miraculously, with the help of an historical society, I was able to locate a man who ticked all those boxes. More than that – I have obtained a photograph of him and have discovered that he is still alive in the USA – a frail 96-year-old, but alive. I may yet have personal contact with him, though he will probably be quite surprised at my existence!

What Really Happened

The true story is that I descend from a Native American tribe in Mexico (perhaps the Pima tribe). In the days of immigration and of pioneering (including the California Gold Rush no doubt), beginning around 1800, an Italian went to Mexico and married a young Indian squaw (I imagine her living in a tepee) – and so the line from which my true father came was launched.

In 1942, when America entered the war, a young Italian with Native American roots enlisted and became one of those GIs who came to the UK with bars of chocolate for the children and nylons for the women. Amazingly, it was on the exact day that my deceased mother would have been 100 years old that I discovered this man’s name.

History of the closing days of the war describe the way GIs linked up with local young women. During those uncertain days, my mother formed a temporary relationship and I was the unplanned result. Soon the GIs went home and eventually my (adopted) father came back from Belgium. It was all covered up and we got on with that life that turned out to be blessed.

I think about this, having complete forgiveness for my mother, and being aware that but for the events which took place, neither I, nor my own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, nor the consequences of my life (good or bad), would have happened.

In fact, despite finding him after all these years, I find myself not so much drawn to know my real father as being drawn closer to my heavenly Father.

A Father to the Fatherless

The point of describing all this is that, in raw terms, my origins were from the unwanted of the developing USA, descending from a ‘half-breed’ (as they would be called in the cowboy films), a nobody, then later born in sin, the unplanned and unwanted result of a temporary fling. An accident with a questionable background.

Yet, God did not leave me in my vulnerability. He put his mark on me even as I was a young child. As Psalm 68 says, he is a father to the fatherless and puts the isolated in families.

If I had been conceived today, I would very likely have been eradicated by the morning-after pill or through abortion.

I only boast about this to highlight what God has done with my life, for there has been some fruit, for example in the education of gifted children, the establishing of Bible colleges, participating in the eradication of polio from Morocco, to name a few highlights. For his glory it is important to see the potential in my life that God planned to use, and which he is still bringing to fulfilment.

God Values Life

This is a story with two-fold application. One is to highlight the utter waste of potential in our generation, when life is allocated such little value as to wipe it out before birth. My life is unique and colourful in its origins, but there are many such from our generation. There are many lives from the current generation who never had the chance to find God’s love or to fulfil their potential. They simply weren’t born.

The other is the way Almighty God cares for us when we ask him to help us. In an unseen, sometimes hardly perceptible way, God has been alongside me wonderfully all these years. He will do and is doing the same for others who reach out to him in hope and in growing faith.

God values life so much that he gave his life so that we might live and, as he said, that we might have life in all its fullness. How many of those children destroyed before birth might have grown to have their own testimony, we can only imagine. But here is one who could have been at the bottom of the pile, who might have been lost, but was spared for this life, shared in the work of God, and saved for eternal life.

That is my testimony – still developing and hopefully worth sharing. How about yours? It is the sum of our personal testimonies about what God has made of our lives that could be that ‘book’ I was imagining.

What Happened to America?

Controversy swirls around last week’s tragic shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. As is to be expected, the information being revealed about the shootings is sketchy and often contradictory. Arriving at the truth about these events is usually a tortured process. The final story is seldom what it appears at first to be.

Two things are clear to me, though. The first is that certain factions appear to have been poised and ready to strike a blow at the Second Amendment at the first opportunity. As Rahm Emmanuel said — and Hillary Clinton confirmed — one should never let a good crisis go to waste!

The second is that, contrary to what the four students we are seeing across the mainstream media may think, guns alone are not the problem. It is simplistic to think that and will be disastrous to continue to believe it.

Our problems run much, much deeper than guns. America is in a moral freefall. We are at a cultural crossroads and if we choose the simplistic path, we will be doomed to collapse. Sooner, perhaps, rather than later.

In 1962, there were few laws governing the ownership and use of guns. In 1962, there were no school shootings.

In fact, in the entire 20th century, there were 227 school shootings. In the first 18 years of the 21st century, there have been 207! And that alarming number despite the fact that we have an ever-increasing number of ever-increasingly restrictive gun laws.

Now, I’m no rocket scientist, but it seems to me that if school shootings have gone through the roof AFTER we started tightening our gun laws and even creating “gun-free zones” (schools and entire cities), then there is either no relation between the two or the restrictive laws are contributing to the increase in violence.

Why is it that in the “old days,” young men carried rifles to school in the gun racks of their pickups, and some schools even taught shooting classes and competed against each other in shooting competitions, yet we would go entire years with no school shooting incidents?

Simply because guns don’t cause violence. Humans do. And until we realize that we humans are the culprits, we are going to see more incidents as tragic as Parkland, or more so.

The Apostle Paul warned that in the last days, people would be “without self-control, brutal, haters of good….” (2 Timothy 3:3 NASB)

Is that not a perfect description of what we saw last week in Parkland? Or Las Vegas? Or Sutherland Springs? Or San Bernardino? Or Orlando? Or South Carolina? Or Aurora? Or Newtown? Or Columbine? Or… and the list goes on. Unimaginable brutality.

Experts who are much smarter and better informed than I have warned for years that we are raising a generation of “avid videogame players who turned their sick fantasy into our tragic reality.” And, “From a military and law enforcement perspective, violent videogames are ‘murder simulators’ that train kids to kill.” (Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, US Army, Ret.)

Obviously, videogames alone have not bred this climate of violent brutality. Movies, television, the music industry, academia, social media, the breakdown of the family, and more have all contributed to the moral depravity that has engendered such self-centeredness, lack of self-control, and brutality.

But I believe the most critical contributor to this onslaught of violence, brutalness, and terror that now grips our schools and our lives is the fact that America has turned its back on God. When our nation made the decision to begin systematically erasing God and His influence from our national psyche, beginning with our schools, we started down a road that has grown ever darker and more treacherous with each passing day.

It’s like a man who stops eating nutritious foods and taking vitamins, then wonders why he is getting weaker and experiencing greater health problems. What did we think would happen when we decided to cut ourselves off from the very lifestream that has brought America so much blessing, so much abundance, and so much freedom and safety?

In 1962, the US Supreme Court decided that it was no longer constitutionally acceptable to have institutional prayer in our public schools. Of course, that didn’t necessarily stop everyone from praying at school. Ronald Reagan observed at the time that “as long as there are final exams, there will be prayers in school.” But when we proclaimed as a matter of national policy that God and our acknowledgment of Him and His positive influence in our lives was no longer important or acceptable, we did something dangerous. We closed the door to God and opened the door to Satan.

It’s not that America chose Satan over God, we didn’t. But we told God that we didn’t need Him, that we could handle our lives and our futures by ourselves. We didn’t need His influence in our lives, but, most importantly, in the lives of our children. We — through our teachers and professors — were quite capable of raising good kids without Him.

Now, just two generations later, America is on the brink of becoming a third-world nation filled with violence, tribal conflict, poverty, and exploding danger. And I believe it’s largely because we have raised 57 years of children who think God and His principles are not at all important. And why do they think that? Because we taught them exactly that when we kicked God and His influence out of public education — the very place He is most needed!

The prophet Hosea could have easily been describing modern America when he wrote: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind; it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.” (Hosea 8:7 KJV)

We have walked away from God and chosen to trust our own intelligence and abilities. The anemic seed we have sown is now yielding crops we never anticipated or desired: anger, despair, selfishness, hatred, lasciviousness, violence, sheer brutality, and so much more. Doesn’t that sound eerily like the description Paul gave for these times? “…men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God… always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (2 Timothy 3:2-4, 7 NASB)

This week, Michael, my son in the Lord, sent me a photograph of a t-shirt. It was emblazoned with a powerful truth. It read: “Dear God, why do you allow so much violence in our schools? Signed, a concerned student.”

Below that was written the reply: “Dear concerned student, I’m not allowed in schools. Signed, God.”

Folks, I’m not saying that one disastrous Supreme Court decision in 1962 caused all of the mayhem that has followed, but it is indicative of the path America chose. It shows that, as a nation, we determined that God was unimportant to us. And when you walk away from God, you must walk toward something, or someone, else. As Bob Dylan once sang, “You gotta serve somebody….”

Also on this week’s program, I will discuss the recent Department of Justice indictment of several Russian nationals and organizations for alleged interference in the 2016 general elections. I will also give you an update on the crisis Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing in Israel.

Finally, I will share with you my thoughts on God’s “chosen people,” the Jews. Many people don’t realize that God chose the Hebrews for some very specific “missions” in this world. Some they fulfilled brilliantly — and all of us who followed have been blessed immeasurably. In others, they failed miserably — and bore the consequences.

But God’s promise remains true to this day: those who bless them will be blessed and those who curse them will be cursed.

On a personal note, I am, at once, saddened and joyful at the passing of our brother, Billy Graham. I believe he was the greatest influence for the Kingdom of God of our time. Truly, only eternity will reveal the impact he had on our world. His influence will always be felt, but his presence will be missed.

I smile when I read what Billy once said. Echoing D.L Moody, one of his heroes, Billy said, “Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”

What encouragement for those of us who remain here. We, too, will soon change addresses. What a great day that will be.

So long, Billy. See you soon.