Theology Thursday: Mike Humphries' Testimony

I grew up in a very old school Roman Catholic family. Church on Sunday; sit, stand, kneel; confession and confirmation and all the sacraments. I attended a Catholic school from K-8 then a public high school.  

As I grew, I knew something felt off about church and what I was being taught, or more importantly what I wasn't being taught. I started to question things like why do I have to tell the priest my sins? How do they determine what penance makes up for a sin? Lots of questions with very little answers. I gave it "my best" - some weekends even riding my bike to church for early mass after my paper route. However, at about 16 I finally just had enough and stopped going all together.  

At 17 my relationship with my dad had come to what I thought was an impasse. It was the second semester of junior year in high school and I moved out. I moved in with some friends and thought finally I am on my own. Looking back on it I know that my decisions were at best selfish but I feel like God knew this would end up being a part of my life that he would use later.  I met my first wife at 19, we married at 20 and divorced at 22.  My life was just "normal," I thought.  

I moved to Chicago in 1997 and met Jen in 1998. She had no church life either, though her family told people they were Catholic, but that is her story to tell. We married in 2000 and moved to the U.P. of Michigan.

Life continued as "normal". The job I left in Chicago was a great paying job with a great title and I felt pretty good about my chances of landing a job in Michigan, because honestly who wouldn't want to hire me...well I got up to the U.P. and God took that opportunity to humble me. I ended up working at Applebee's as a waiter for a while just trying to make ends meet. I finally got hired on as a computer tech for $10/hour and I was grateful to be back in my field. 

Fast forward a few years and I am working at a small rural telephone company as a network engineer. Things seem to be going pretty well. One day a small craft business calls us and needs us to work on their computers. So I go out to the site and as I am working on the computer workstation, the owner of the company asks me, “If you were to die today, do you know where you would go?” I told her I hoped that I would go to heaven, but I'm not really sure.  

She handed me a tract and told me that if I wanted to know how I could be sure to read this. The paper was cheap and the ink came off on my fingers. The illustrations looked like a 12 year old drew them, but it planted a seed. I never read that tract but to this day I can remember that interaction as if it was yesterday. 

Some more time goes by and, well, let me tell you a little back story. My manager at the telephone company - who was a very open Christian - had shared her faith with me on occasion. Most of the time I would listen, smile, and nod. She also shared with me the story of how her youngest of three daughters had been brutally murdered by a serial killer. She was in a hotel one night when the man broke into her room while she was on the phone with her boyfriend and he murdered her while her boyfriend was still on the phone, helpless to do anything but listen. It was horrific, and something that was, with good reason, difficult for her to talk about.

One day I walked into her office and we began to chat, as we often did and she had the local newspaper on her desk. The front page was a headline that told that the man who murdered her daughter had died while in jail. 

I asked her, "Do you want me to drive?" She replied, "What do you mean?" I told her I would drive down with her and we could dance on his grave. 

What happened next would profoundly impact me to the core. She turned in her chair, looked me straight in the face and said, "Oh, no, I forgave him a long time ago. I only pray that while in jail he found Jesus and that he is in heaven today." 

I thought WHAT? How can that be? Who could ever forgive someone that murdered someone they love, especially a child…moreover, wish that they were in heaven? 

I knew I was not that kind of person. If I were praying, I would have prayed for a special kind of hell for him, certainly not mercy or heaven.

It's now 2004. I was sitting in my living room as Jen was preparing dinner. The day had been fairly uneventful; normal chores around the property. I began to have a little bit of a cough, which I did not think much about at the time. I told Jen I was going to go out to the barn and take care of the horses, thinking the fresh air might help the cough. 

I never made it to the barn; the cough was so bad I hightailed it back to the house. Before you know it I was unable to speak, slumped over the breakfast bar, thinking This is it, this is where I die. Does my Jen know how much I love her? EMTs were able to get me to the hospital and over the course of the next 10 days I found that I had contracted a bacteria in my lungs and was causing hemorrhaging in my lungs. It was terrifying but I made it through.

A few months later, a friend told me about this business he was involved in and that he wanted to come by and tell me all about it. Well, that night I met a man that would eventually be one of my closest friends. Over the next several months Mark and I would talk and he would often invite me to his church. I usually said, "Yeah one of these days, I'll come out," but honestly his church was a 45 minute drive one way, and I just wasn't going to get up that early on the weekend.  

Mark lived northeast of me about 45 minutes. His church was southeast of me about 45 minutes. But if he went the direct route from his house to church it was - you guessed it - about 45 minutes. 

Well, one day Mark invited me to church. I gave him the routine answer, but this time, he said, “I'll tell you what, if I come to pick you up for church, will you go?” I thought Are you kidding me? There is no way he is gonna turn a 45 min trip to church into 1.5 hours, BOTH WAYS. 

So I called his bluff and said, “If you come get me, I'll go.” 

So as you have probably already guessed, the next Sunday my phone rang pretty early in the morning and it was Mark. He told me “I am leaving the house, I'll be there in 45 minutes. Be ready.” So I got up, got dressed, and went to church.

When we arrived that day, I remember just a few details. The church felt different than what I remembered growing up. The pastor was way younger than any priest I had ever seen; he was wearing a suit, not all the garb a priest would wear and the two most important things I remember: he called himself a sinner from the pulpit and he was preaching from revelation. This was two things I never heard growing up. I can’t tell you much more about that day, but I knew it was different.  

So the next week, I didn't make Mark drive all that way again, but I did go and meet up with him.  I continued for several weeks. Jen was not yet attending with me, but every week I knew something was different here; I was being taught directly from the Bible, God's word was being taught, not just read aloud. 

Jen did start coming to church with me after a few months (I'll let her tell her story another time), but I remember that one day I was driving to work, and I just broke down. I knew that I was broken, and nothing I could do was going to fix it. I knew that on my own I could not get to heaven, so I asked God to accept me to take over my life and I surrendered to Him. I remember crying a bit. Then I felt a peace as though God answered my request and said, "about time." LOL!  No, really it was more like, "Yes my son, welcome to my family".  

Over the course of the next 20 years, I have begun to understand how someone can forgive the "unforgivable", why a stranger would go out of their way to ask me about my salvation, and why a friend would drive out of his way so far, for me. I know that I never have, nor will I ever, deserve or earn the gift that God has given me.  

I have not seen my old boss - or the shop owner - in a very very long time, but the impact that all of them made on my life, Jen's life, and the life of my kids is immeasurable.  

The number of times that I have seen God's hand at work, the miracles that I have witnessed, and the love I have felt over the years as a result of the story above can never be overstated. 

These people who led me to Christ were not friends of each other - two of them were acquaintances at best. My friend Mark never met either of them, and my friend that introduced me to Mark never knew any of the others. There is positively no way to explain the events above without God at the center of it all. God's grace and mercy overwhelm me as I write this; to think of a person so undeserving…someone who was so prideful and selfish…the many years of rampant defiance…that God would accept me, that he died for me…sometimes I still have a hard time understanding. 

This side of heaven I am sure I will never fully grasp the true love and grace that He pours out on his children every second of every day.