As in previous dealings with the Lord and His with me, no one shared the perils of the victorious life, which are equally as devastating as the joys are edifying.  I wanted to remain totally open to the Spirit's working in my life, but I was unaware that I was equally open to satanic attack or demonic harassment.  Within a week my mind was flooded with impure thoughts; it was almost two years later that I was to discover Satan's part in this and be freed from it.

I read voraciously in the Word and in books on spiritual freedom.  As I did so, I knew that I couldn't live in the aura of one experience so I endeavored to understand my position in Christ.  I read between 50 and 100 books that first year and began to put into focus my eighteen years of Christian experience and service prior to understanding the operation of the cross in my life.  My life has not been unproductive since I had been involved in soul winning, Bible studies, etc.  However, I found that I had been working out my problems on other people.  I had known all along that I still had my problems but was powerless to do anything about them.

I still had no inkling as to God's way or what He was bringing to pass.  It gradually began to dawn on me that others who suffered from so-called ‘mental illness’ were no different from what I had been except in degree.  As I contemplated sharing the growth truths, it seemed logical that the best way would be in counseling.  I had had considerable experience in soul winning and one to one relationships, so in the summer of 1967, I enrolled in the evening school at the University of Colorado in a beginning counseling course.  My wife was open to my going to California that fall to take some intensive counseling training.  While there, I heard of a pastor whom I knew that I must see immediately.  While resting that evening prior to going to see him, the numerals 50:14 came into my mind.  I was half asleep and dismissed it.  During the mid-week Bible study I looked through my Bible and found Psalm 50:14:

Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High

and verse 15 adds:

And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.

That night as I shared with the pastor, I was freed from demonic obsession in my thought life.  A short time later while still in California, I was reading Isaiah 58 when the Holy Spirit drew my attention to verses 10 and 11:

And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day; and the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.

No passage with which I am familiar could have been a more appropriate call to the ministry, which I now knew to be an indisputable fact.

A month or so later, back in Denver, my sleep was interrupted by satanic emissaries. Upon resisting in that area and having my sleep restored, I was praying by a chair one night and a vase came off a bookcase and fell near me.  If this had happened a few months previously, I would have fled out the front door and left my wife and children to fend for themselves.  Next came a satanic oppression, which was worse than any depression I had ever known.  I was unable to resist Satan so I requested prayer from others and the oppression lifted one night as I was reading Psalm 37.  I discovered the ‘wicked’ referred to in the psalm was Satan who had been spreading himself like a green bay tree.

The next day God gave me my first poem, God's Processing Tunnel.  By June, 1968, I had completed all of my basic counseling courses and the company needed a volunteer counselor in a program to train hardcore unemployed persons – a government program. This counseling was the basis for my master's thesis.

In January, 1969, my attention was called to Deuteronomy 8:2:

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or not.

Later in the year, this number forty was to have great significance in God's leading regarding my employment.

Grace Fellowship International was incorporated May 29, 1969 with the express purpose of establishing a Christian counseling ministry. Mr. John A. Stevens, author of Suicide:  An Illicit Lover, and Dr. Raymond B. Buker and myself constituted the original board of directors of the non-profit corporation, which was granted exempt status by Internal Revenue Service.

The Master of Personnel Service degree was awarded me by the University of Colorado in December 1969, and God made it clear to me, as will be later described in Chapter 8, that I was to leave the company in January, 1970, to begin the ministry.

Though there were no subsidizing individuals or groups, God supplied all needs as he had promised to do. Just before I left the company He had given me a promise in Exodus 23:25:

And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee.

After more than six years of counseling I have yet to miss a counseling appointment or to reschedule one because of sickness.

From the uncertainties of the beginning until the present, my wife has stood by my side helping with secretarial work, bookkeeping and telephone counseling with contrary health conditions most of the time.  The beginnings of a world-wide ministry are well in view and it is all to the glory of Him who can make something out of nothing.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

At this juncture I had three teenagers who had each been affected to one degree or another by my neurotic behavior in the family, and I suffered much guilt as I expected their lives to be ruined by their emotional and spiritual deprivation. Since this had all been a necessary part of my ‘boot camp’, God gave me a promise about my children on March 24, 1968:

O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold … all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children (Isaiah 54:11a, 13).

To jump ahead to the present, Sue and I have been married 62 years; and we have 5 grandchildren and  9 great-grandchildren.