People might look at us and think having a good family was easy. It hasn't. Having a good family has been an all-out warfare. We have not always won. Many a time, we did not even know we were to fight, or if we did, who or how we were to fight. We are humbled at our failures and take great joy in a God who sent Christ Jesus to die for sinners like us. How patient He is to deal with us.

Perhaps because of our failures, we can share with you how God delivered us. One thing is certain: we are trying to ensure our children start off on the right path. This is not the path that we inherited. If one were to ask us, "What sort of journey led you to the Lord?" Perhaps we can share with you 20 significant, decisive steps we took to get where we are. Remember, in this confession, we are not speaking about our wisdom. Where we have been given insights, it has been through the Lord's grace, His Word, and other brothers and sisters that we have learned from. We dread to think about where we would be without these shapings of our hearts and minds.

Love of God

Paul J. Bucknell

I became a Christian at around thirteen years old. My father was long gone and stopped seeing us when I was around ten. I began to find that the Lord was my Father and spent time talking to Him and reading His Word. I remember backsliding once, but my pursuit of knowing God better has been the backdrop of this spiritual journey that I otherwise would never have made. Through my salvation, God revealed love and forgiveness to my desperate and dry soul. Several changes happened:.

(1) God's Word became a lighthouse of truth that led me out of many confused assumptions.

(2) Great freedom from self-hatred and forgiveness for barrel fulls of sins.

(3) A relationship with God led to relationships with others that I would never have otherwise developed.

(4) God began a sense of purpose and mission in my own life. I set my selfishness aside to serve others in love. He could use me somehow. I wasn't a total reject.

These changes from salvation set the framework where I could begin to repent from my sinful ways and return to the Lord's great ways. They enabled me to never believe that God has rejected me, so that even in my sin and failures, I could always go back to the cross to find forgiveness and the resurrection for strength. I hardly understood all the chains the evil one had already wrapped around me at the time. God dealt with only one or two areas at a time, so I wouldn't be overwhelmed.

Restoration to Parents

Bitterness breeds all sorts of strife and misunderstandings. My parents divorced when I was six and this set a series of family problems that became etched into my soul. I never realized how much hate filled my heart until probably seven years after I became a Christian. God enabled me to care for my parents, but down deep, there were still problems. I think before I married, I had a deep conversation with Linda, my wife-to-be. I remember many tears streaming down my face for the hatred and bitterness toward my parents, especially my Mom. I know she tried hard, but it wasn't the Lord's way.

Unless a child is able to honor their parents, they will despise authority. This relationship greatly affects the degree to which a Christian can grow in their relationship with God. If I despise my parents, then I will despise God's Word. God had always given me enough truth. The problem was that I could not respond to it. The problem is not God's light and truth but my own recalitrant heart.

Freedom to forgive my parents enabled me to love them more and value more the way God would work through them.

The Fight with Temptation

I had a lot of problems with lust. Without God saving me and bringing His Word continually before my eyes and heart, I would have become another statistic. The delivery was not instant. The floodgates of terror opened when I was given a subscription to Playboy in high school. This was given by well–intentioned loved ones, with the hope that I would understand more about manhood. This became a curse to me as I looked forward to these monthly magazines. The struggle was hard, but by God's mercy, I never gave up.

I did not know it at the time, but this struggle was for a one–heart love for God that would revolutionize my love for my future wife. The battle was fierce. Much I have to share is from reflections of my past battles in this area. There seemed to be three key questions that loomed before me:

Was I going to be ruled by my flesh or ruled by what was right?
Was I going to be defiled or obey God?
Was I going to trust God to keep forgiving me for my failures?

By God's grace, I slowly learned how to battle the evil one. This resulted in a very clear one-heart devotion to God. I wanted to serve Him alone. I think through this time the Lord was purging me from the strains of immorality that hung about my family. Although the statistics talk a lot about how the children of divorced parents are very likely to have very unstable marriages, God changed my instability to stability.

Through this time, I learned that His love was constant. No matter how bad I felt about my sin or how much He detested my sin, His love in Christ was constant. There was one there that would never leave or forsake me. I forget how many times I have fallen in the past in fighting sin, but I am sure His love was there each time to pick me up and set my feet forward again.

I was a very unlikely candidate for the mission field because of my background. I agree. However, God worked through this time to give me a purer love for Him and my future wife.

Relationships Restored

I craved relationships. I, however, felt rejected and wanted to feel accepted. I would end up being goofy just to get attention. Or even more, I would act so shy and fearful of being rejected, I would never open up. One can imagine what this would do for a marriage!

Through my quiet times with Him each day, I would learn about His love. I would slowly rebuild my trust in HIm and others. Later I would learn that I could be nice to others without them being nice to me because God's love for me was great enough to satisfy my heart.

Forgiveness for my sins and forgiving others instead of being angry inside enabled me to take some significant steps forward. As God revealed His love for me in Christ, I could open up to others. In particular, regarding marriage, while dating and courting Linda, I would spend time studying God's Word together. We would go on long walks and share with each other. My original shyness would have crippled our marriage, but because of God's companionship, I learned to be a better companion.

Though I could talk superficially with my Mom and to a lesser extent with my Father, I never could get down to deep conversations. Any marriage that is only superficially deep becomes a sore point. Marriage needs to go below the surface to entwine the two into one.

A Christian Marriage

One of the great joys of having Linda as my girlfriend was meeting her family. This was an important contact with a Christian family. Yes, I had wonderful, godly Christian grandparents, but I did not see them often enough to gain a deep enough impact on my life. From them, I did learn that one could have a wonderful marriage. By visiting my wife–to–be's home, I saw that couples could live together without squabbling. A family could go to church. I sensed God's love and genuine acceptance there.

I heard many sermons, of course, by this time. I remember taking one Sunday School class on marriage. I don't remember anything, but I trust special truths were being taught to me. I thought I knew a lot about marriage, but, like most people, I knew very little before marriage. Even worse. What I did know was wrong. You might wonder what I mean by 'what I did know.'

Divorce and remarriage show children what doesn't work in a marriage. They see and hear criticism of one spouse toward another. They don't see and hear the good stuff. We now let our children see us hugging and kissing a bit. We want them to see our affection for each other. (Besides, we like it!)

These kinds of children see the wrong way to work through problems. In most cases, they remember how things were not resolved. There was no real peace afterwards. They only tolerated each other's presence. They would fight, yell, and run off. It is not the way to learn to do things.

Usually, because of these problems and associated poverty, wrong attitudes develop toward different things in life. My father or stepfather never instructed me about the world. I was eager to learn, but no one taught me. I remember having received a most special present one year for Christmas, but because of the snow, I could not take it out. When spring came, the tires were flat. I tried to learn to ride a bike with flat tires. When I learned they should have air in them, I did not know how to do this for a long time and let my bike sit. I just didn't have the courage to ask my father to come around and see how I was doing.

Just being around a peaceful home like my wife's meant a lot. There was peace. There was a home.

More Truth

During college, I did a special private study on the Song of Solomon that wonderfully changed my life. I had many life problems due to the wrong perspectives I held. Many of them were born into dysfunctional families. Like most families, the moral failures as well as the more victories are passed on. I did not even recognize how these problems troubled me. From this Song of Songs, the Lord restructured how I thought about life, sex, and many other things. It has become a treasure box to me. Now I have been happily married for more than forty years with eight children and nine grandchildren! Praise God