It's been a while....years actually....and I thought that this might be a good time to post a small biographical sketch....a little more than is in my profile. Lord willing....in six days I will turn seventy-six years old....Lord willing again....for we do not know what a day brings. 
                I was born in Buffalo, New York. My father worked at Westinghouse in Buffalo. He was born in 1921 right smack dab on the land that the Battle of the Monongahela was fought....where George Washington had bullets go through his coat....that in 1755....on what was known for a time as Braddock's Field....in Braddock, Pennsylvania....about eight miles south of Pittsburgh. My father was severely wounded in a kamikaze attack at Guadalcanal....received extensive medical treatment....and met my mother at Braddock Hospital....they moved to Buffalo as Westinghouse opened a new plant. He and my mother separated when I was nine....my mother and I moved back to her home in Pittsburgh. My father died on November 4, 1979....the day that Iranian students took the American embassy in Tehran....and he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
                 It is entirely possible that both of my grandfathers were working at the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920....when KDKA had the first commercial radio broadcast from the top of the building. That broadcast was the election returns of the Warren G. Harding/Calvin Coolidge....James M. Cox/Franklin D. Roosevelt contest.
                 I attended Catholic schools through high school....joined the army....served a year and a half in Vietnam as a morse code intercept analyst....returned home....graduated from Pitt with a major in economics....and met and married my wonderful wife. We have a wonderful son....and a wonderful daughter-in-law....and a wonderful grandson. Isn't life wonderful?
                 I abused alcohol and my own body....and collaterally other people....over a torturous five years. No....life could not be described as wonderful....not because I would roll around as a drunken bum fighting in the street or a bar....and not because I was no help to anyone....but rather because even though I was religious.....attended church and wore medals around the neck....and prayed to Jesus for things I wanted....that kind of thing....I was totally lost....without Jesus Christ....whom I did not know even though I prayed in His name....for to me He was only a token....a sacred name that I would actually nod my head when I uttered it....unless it was in a curse.
                 I had nothing going for me. I deserved to fall off of that water tower while drinking a bottle of vodka....(I didn't fall off)....I climbed down and fell asleep on the ground. (I could give  numerous other examples like that) Time passed....I got out of the army and was married....my wife was patient....I quit alcohol....(only God could cause me to do that)....God gave me a job that I did not deserve....and then that truly wonderful day came when my wife was shopping for curtains....and I was bored....so I walked the shopping center concourse....and because of that boredom....decided to walk into a Christian bookstore. What was this stuff....(fifteen years later we would own and operate a Christian bookstore)....and I walked out with an odd book....written in an outline form....Josh McDowell's....Evidence That Demands A Verdict. (I saw that same book last week....forty-three years later....on the shelf at Barnes & Noble!) Praise God!
                  In that book I learned that there is all kinds of evidence....amazing evidence....for the reliability of the words in those Bibles that just about everyone in America owns but hardly ever reads. There is evidence that Jesus was the expected Messiah. There is archaeological evidence of those towns and battles of the Old Testament....and Noah's Ark....and the Tower of Babel....and the temples on Mt. Zion....and on the fulfilling of hundreds of prophecies....and of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus....and the accuracy of the various manuscripts that have come to be used to compile God's blessed Word to us in this these sixty-six book Bibles!
                  Life was not wonderful yet....for I only knew....and acknowledged....or assented to....the truths in God's Word....but it was the beginning! I became through God's grace....like a child....in that I knew that I had a heavenly Father....and that I had rebelled against Him. I then knew that I wasn't nearly as smart as I thought that I was....in fact I knew that I was ignorant. This was terrible! There was no way out....for I knew who I was....and there was no answer....until there was an answer!
                 Could this be as wonderful as it seemed? Everything that I had done....and everything that I was....could be forgiven? These days were a blur. I was telling everyone that I could about this Savior....Jesus....and not doing a very good job of it....but then I was only a child. So I kept running towards this Light that beckoned me....and I stumbled a fell quite a few times....and had people laugh at me because of it....but I knew that there was no where else to go....for I had seen something of this glory and this majesty. Those same words in the Bible that I had read in religion class in high school....were now leaping off the page....informing me of the greatest story ever told!
                 Forty-three years now? How could He have had such patience....and keep me? How could that glorious gospel....become even more glorious as decades passed? How could the Bible....be like the ever-present fish in those baskets that fed the five-thousand.....and keep on feeding and feeding and feeding me? Doesn't that revelation ever end? How is it possible that even the joy could increase and increase? I'm seventy-five....I can't even remember where I put my keys....but I remember all of His promises....is there no limit to His mercy?
                  So that is me....evidence that God can have mercy on the lowest of the low....and the most unlovable....(I think I used those words in my profile....It's hard not to repeat them over and over and over!) What about you? Maybe you are seventy-five years old? If God calls you this day....I will have absolutely nothing at all on you even after a forty-three year head start....for it doesn't work that way! I didn't choose to have faith....I would never have chosen to have saving faith in the gospel....or in the shed blood on Calvary....or the empty tomb....unless He conquered me....and gave life to my dead heart....that it might beat....for His mercy once extended even on the thief on the cross next to Him....extended to someone as I!