Shocked Into Becoming a Christian

The incident that helped me to embrace Christianity more than anything else was not the night of love and sharing at the Salt Lake City Bible study—important as that was. The clincher came the following night, when we had that harrowing ongoing horror with the cowboys in Wendover, Nevada. Escaping that town unscathed did more to inspire my faith than anything that’s ever happened to me, before or since. It’s because we thought we were dead. We needed a miracle and got one. Though it’s not true the mean cowboy stepped into an animal trap and left to go to the emergency room (I embellished that), everything else was true, including our fear. Coming out of the fellowship mission in SLC may have built up my faith. But it needed a test.  It surely got one the following night. The events of the Bible study were still fresh in mind as we decided to hitch through the night. After the cowboys started tracking us we brought Jesus into the proceedings quite early, like when Otto says, “Jesus God, I’d like to get the heaven out of here.” After we scooted under the wooden trestle to hide, we both prayed as hard as we could “(“I must’ve said that prayer 17 times.”). We prayed to be safe, to stay hidden, and not be injured. And it worked! We came out alive! We both felt sheltered by the blood of Jesus Christ. We gave the Almighty total credit for the deed when it was all over. That’s part of the reason for the extended dialogue on pages 109-110, “giving thanks.”