I had a lot of pressure as a pastor's kid to perform. They're not allowed to make the same mistakes as everyone else. Not only are people looking at you, but they're judging your father according to what they see in you. After a while, you get tired of carrying that load as a child. By the time it got time for me to leave home, I was pretty much finished with all that. I wasn't good enough and I didn't belong in there. I was ready to go to the world. When I left home, I went to the world at a dead run.
I partied, went to work, and just was living my life as the way I wanted to. I just wanted to be left alone. One day, I was driving my motorcycle with some buddies of mine. All of a sudden, I had oil running everywhere, all up and down my arm, across my legs, and rippling down the tank in the wind. We loaded it up on a trailer and sent it to the shop to have it fixed. I went to pick it up and the mechanic came out. He said, "We got your front end rebuilt." He said, "That wasn't the bad part." He said, "The bad part was the only thing holding the front tire on was the weight of the motorcycle." All I would had to have done was accelerate quickly and the front tire would have came off.
It got my attention. It got me to thinking. You hear a lot of people talking about the relationship that they have with Jesus and all that. I didn't even know what that was supposed to look like. It began to work on my mind. I think God was beginning to speak to me. I believe that you can say I might be a poster child for the Shepherd Lost Sheep story because I wasn't looking for God. I didn't really care, but He cared about me, and HE came and got me.
My name is Larry Murphy and I reclaimed my faith.