My questions about God did not begin in a classroom.
They began with death.
Around 1967, when I was seven years old, two neighborhood friends—local children I had grown up with—drowned.
At seven years old, I did not have the language to explain mortality, but I knew enough to understand that something had happened that I could not make sense of.
Their deaths created questions in me.
What is death?
Where am I going?
Who am I?
What is life?
What happens when life ends?
I had grown up among people who believed in God, and we went to church. So I did what seemed natural to me.
I took those questions to God.
I prayed.
I did not have a theology.
I did not have a system.
I had questions.
And somehow, in asking them, I began to develop a relationship with God.
There became for me a kind of secret place.
A quiet place within myself where I could bring the things I did not understand.
I could sit with God there.
I could ask questions that no one around me seemed able to answer completely.
And although I did not always receive explanations, I received comfort.
That comfort became important to me.
It became the beginning of trust.
By around 1968, I experienced what I can only describe as my first born-again experience.
Something changed in me.
It was not simply that I adopted new religious ideas.
I experienced a radical change in my nature.
My inner life became more serious.
Questions about mortality, God, identity, and existence became personal.
They were no longer abstract questions.
They were questions about me.
Who am I before God?
Why am I here?
What is this life?
What is death?
And if there is a Life beyond this life, how does one become part of it?
During that period, I developed a strong connection to God through reading a New Testament that had been published in 1945.
That book became deeply important to me.
I read it not merely as a religious object, but as something speaking directly into the questions that had already begun to shape my inner life.
Through those words, the person of Christ became increasingly real to me.
The language of faith, Eternal Life, Spirit, truth, death, resurrection, love, and the Kingdom of God began to give form to questions I had carried since childhood.
In many ways, my character and personal identity were formed through that relationship.
The questions did not disappear.
They became part of the relationship.
I learned that questioning God was not the same as turning away from God.
For me, the questions became a way of turning toward Him.
That secret place became a place of inquiry, prayer, comfort, and formation.
It was there that I began to understand faith not simply as something inherited from family or church, but as something that had to become personal.
Something heard.
Something examined.
Something lived.
Looking back, I can see that the deaths of those two children opened a door in my consciousness that never completely closed.
The event introduced me to mortality.
Mortality introduced me to questions.
The questions led me to prayer.
Prayer led me into relationship.
And that relationship began forming the person I would become.
Much of what I write today still comes from the same questions that first appeared in the mind of a seven-year-old child:
What is Reality?
What is Life?
What is Death?
Who am I?
Who is God?
And what, if anything, belongs to Eternity?
Cornerstone 1131 is, in many ways, a continuation of that search.
A Memory of Change
Around 1968, I remember being a little boy playing with toy boats in the bathtub.
My mother would put little toys in the water for me while I bathed. I also spent a great deal of time playing outside, and like most little boys, I would come home with dirt under my fingernails. Sometimes it seemed impossible to get them completely clean.
At the same time, all of these questions about God, life, death, and who I was were already moving through my seven-year-old mind.
I was still a child.
I played.
I got dirty.
I imagined.
But somewhere inside that ordinary childhood, this relationship with God was also developing.
I remember one particular moment while I was in the bath playing with those little boats.
A feeling of joy came over me.
It is difficult to describe because it did not feel like an ordinary moment of happiness.
It felt as though joy had been infused into me.
And in the middle of that experience, I looked down at my hands.
The fingernails that I had always struggled to keep clean appeared to me suddenly pure, clean, and white.
I remember looking at them with amazement.
It was such a small thing, and yet to that little boy it seemed extraordinary.
I had wanted them to be clean.
And in that moment, everything seemed different.
There were several things happening at once—the joy, the sense of purity, the awareness of God, and the feeling that something within me had changed.
That combination made the moment permanent in my memory.
I never forgot it.
I do not remember it simply because of the bathtub, the toy boats, or even my fingernails.
I remember it because I associated that moment with a change in myself.
Looking back, it is one of the earliest experiences I can identify as part of what I later came to understand as being born again.
I was still a child, and I did not have the theological language to explain what was happening.
I only knew that I felt different.
Something had become new.
And from that point forward, the change began to show itself in the way I thought, the way I understood God, and the way I understood myself.
After That
The clearest change was that I no longer felt alone.
And because I no longer felt alone, Fear lost something of its power over me.
I felt Hope inside of me.
Something larger than myself.
I felt comforted.
I felt complete.
I did not have the language then to explain what had happened, but I knew that something in me had changed.
And I began to share it.
I told everybody.
I preached to my family.
I talked to my brothers.
I wanted them to know what I had found.
My youngest brother even picked up the very same Bible I had been reading and tried to find what I had found there.
I do not know whether he experienced it in the same way I did.
But I remember that he looked.
That mattered to me.
From that point forward, this became the path of my life.
The questions remained.
The search remained.
But I no longer experienced the search as though I were alone in it.
I had Hope.
I had comfort.
I had a sense of Presence.
And I carried that with me.
In many ways, I still do.
The child who once asked:
What is death?
Where am I going?
Who am I?
continued to ask those questions.
But now the questions were being asked from inside a relationship.
Not from emptiness.
Not from isolation.
From Hope.
And that has been the direction of my life ever since.