My mom and dad met on the ship that they had taken to migrate to Brazil after WWII.
My mom and her family (her dad did not return from the war) migrated because Germany was devastated through the war and the bomb raids. Food, housing and work were hard to come by.
My dad had to leave his Father Land, Hungry, because he spoke out against communism. If he would not have fled, they would have imprisoned him, if not killed.
My mom and dad got married in Brazil and they lived there for a few years. My older brother and older sister were born there, but my dad sent my mom back to Germany. So I was born in Hamburg-Harburg, Germany in the late Fifties.
My mom had a hard time in Germany all by herself with 3 kids and no financial support. My dad came to Germany after a year or two. But they got divorced soon after and he moved to central Germany.
My mom remarried soon after. My step-dad and she raised us and two more kids they had 5 and ten years after I was born.
We lived our lives and were raised almost completely without religion.
After my tenth grade I absolved an apprenticeship as an electrician for three and a half years and shortly after that joined the German Air Force. First I enlisted for four years. I got some training as an operator on an Air Defense system (HAWK) in Fort Bliss, Texas. I had such a good time here in El Paso, so I signed up for four more years and came over for nine month the following year for training to become a mechanic on the HAWK system.
That’s when I met my wife Carmen. We got married a year later. We lived in Germany until I was done with my eight years service in the German Air Force and then we migrated to El Paso. We bought a piece of land and started saving money to soon build a house.
Life was good, I got a decent job as a computer technician (still there with the same company now 20 years!) and after ten years we finally had our son, and two years after him, our daughter.
Life was good, we had no “real” problems.
But… I avoided all the time to think about the future. And why get gray hair over it if nobody knows it anyhow! I always avoided thinking about old age and death, too! Up to that point in time I never went to a funeral. For me death meant your body decays and that’s the end of “you”. And I was very sure of that! I also did not at all believe in anything supernatural or “spiritual”. I only believed in nature’s law and laws of physics.
I totally believed in evolution and Charles Darwin’s teachings.
I thought that only if you are raised up with religion you can believe those teachings, but that one has to be pretty gullible to really believe in GOD, angels, Satan, and daemons. I thought that the Bible was written down after many centuries of “word of mouth” deliveries and that it might have some good values in it that one could learn from.
So, I had no future to look forward to and also no real passion. I did like my job and loved my family and also liked to practice Martial Arts, but there was nothing “worth writing home about”.
Then my kids went to their first Vacation Bible School (VBS). It was right behind our house and I thought it was great that they had some activities and fun for a few days. Then the following week there was another VBS at the First Baptist Church a few blocks from our house. Our kids had another week of fun and games there and at the end of the VBS they invited everyone to a family fun activity evening.
Meanwhile I was thinking that it would be good for my children to attend church so that they can learn some other good values besides the ones we were teaching them. (Now where would that thought have come from?!)
But I thought that I can’t just drop of my kids for church and not go myself. That would be hypocritical. So we ended up going all together.
I went to the men’s Bible study where they were viewing a video called “Experiencing God” with Henry Blackaby. Everything I heard there touched something deep inside me and it made so much sense. I was eager to come back the next week to get another earful of that great knowledge and wisdom.
So we became members of that church and got involved pretty much right away. We participated in pretty much everything that this church offered. I became a greeter and usher there and my wife also helped where she could. We liked going to church and I do not remember skipping even one Sunday because I was tired or did not feel like going even until today. I just love to fellowship with like-minded people too much.
My wife started listening to our local Christian Radio Station KELP and as I got an earful of those wonderful programs I was looking for a way to listen to it also at work. I did not have a radio or boom-box that I could use but found an old “Walk-Man” (Cassette player with radio) that I connected to my computer at work using the computer speakers. After hearing a few excellent programs I was wondering how I could listen to them again and also share them with others. Since the audio was already going into the computer, I was able to just record it with the existing windows programs.
As I kept listening to KELP (also streaming online www.kelpradio.com) I heard an advertisement about a Creation/evolution seminar coming to town. This made me perk up and think. I loved what I learned from the Bible but in those not even two years I did not learn anything about dinosaurs or the age of the Earth. This one day seminar opened up my mind for how GOD’s word is true beyond reproach and that evolution is just a bad theory based on many, many misconceptions and misinformation. I bought one of the VHS tapes that was sold at that seminar and shared it with anyone who was (halfway) interested.
Then I went to another Creation seminar held by Roger Oakland. He showed the video “A Question of Origins” which is still one of my favorite creation videos today.
This slowly started my desire to share the information/materials I was collecting. The more I found the more interested I got. First I shared with others whenever the subject came up. But after a couple more good magazine articles I also started copying those to share. After a few years (now at Calvary Chapel El Paso) I was allowed to use one corner of a table in the foyer for my materials. After a couple of years of that I managed to get a small table and a bookstand to display about 20 different articles and about 12 different DVDs. It seems like more and more people are getting interested in the whole Creation/evolution debate.
I even got invited to hold a Creation conference at a small church in Juarez, Mexico, in spring 2013 and one in Van Horn in February 2015.
A couple of years ago I was wondering how else I could share the great information I had accumulated and also the great messages from my pastor Charlie Flores, with even more people. I had a FTP site where I had a bunch of messages and materials. It worked but was not very user-friendly. After that device broke and I found a decent offer to host my own website, I decided to go for it and see what might happen. So, here it is. My passion displayed on the big World Wide Web (not pretty but functional).
As of March 2014 I also joined the Jail Ministry in El Paso. I am SOOOOO blessed!