When you want to look or find truth as badly as you want to breathe air and you honestly come to God, no reservation, and you say, "Lord, show me your truth", God is diligent and will always answer that prayer. And I see that as long as you're seeking after that truth, God will bring situations into your life. He will bring people into your life, obstacles that will get you to pause and say there is more than me and this situation, and there's more than this situation, there's a solution to this problem.
In New York City, I was a musical director of a Latin orchestra comprised of about 15 musicians of which I was one of them along with my twin brother. Unfortunately, in the business of music, you see a lot of the drinking, the debauchery that comes along with not being in the right state of mind in a nightclub, and reflecting on that, whether or not that was something I wanted to show my child, he was one at the time, he couldn't ever see me play because there's no way they would let a child, of course, into any of those places.
From that perspective and the perspective of wanting to be safer for my family, we decided to move to Florida. After a year, a friend of the group called me up and he invited me over to a church that he had located here in Florida. I went to visit with him, and the draw there was that the pastor was looking for musicians to participate in his worship team. By participating in music at this particular church, the pastors there would give me more of an influence as far as being able to teach others music as well as giving me responsibility for their Sunday Bible classes. Doing the classes really got me to look at certain things within the Scriptures, and it created more questions than it had answers for me.
I didn't really disregard what I was reading, but I kind of put it on the back burner because I couldn't reconcile it until a certain situation arose where I had to witness to a friend to a mine. In the course of us talking, he began asking me questions that were the questions I had put on the back burner and I really didn't have answers for. The biggest one for me and really stuck in my brain the most was what happens when you die. I wanted to delve deeper into what I was learning, it had to be in there. I just didn't know where to find it and that was the problem that I was facing.
One day I was at work and I came across a station, and the title was Amazing Facts. Doug Batchelor was the host, and the very first caller that calls into the show is asking Doug Batchelor what happens when you die? To say the least, I was excited. I stopped what I was doing at my desk and I grabbed a pen and paper and I knew, because of the format he explained, that he was going to give Bible verses.
Before he gave the Bible verses, he started to explain his answer and everything he was saying just made sense. It was as if you had a half completed puzzle and what he was saying filled in the spaces that were missing, so I was hooked. I was listening to Doug Batchelor every day, I mean maybe two, three times a day and throughout the course of his radio show, he would explain about his website. That got me going to his website looking at his Bible study material and using that to help me learn more about what I was interested in. It went from one thing to 12 things to 24 things, and it just kept growing, I couldn't get enough of it.
There was another gentleman from my band, and we found out he had a terminally ill disease such as cancer, and he had the same question and I did; what happens when you die? I explained what happens from Scripture. He went from being nervous about what was going to happen to having peace. At that point, I could hear the change in his voice in the way he approached things; he was no longer depressed. For me, I like to believe that he had a sense of hope that he was going to be where he had read in the Bible as far as it relates to heaven and to support it with Scripture and all the things that I've learned from Doug Batchelor's classes and seminars.
Looking back and kind of reflecting on this journey God has put me on from where I was to where I am now, I can definitely see how He's used providence to influence the steps. Of course, it was me making the choice because He never takes that away from us, but He's influenced these steps to where I'd ask specific questions in prayer throughout my lifetime and God was answering each and every one of those but He had to wait till I was ready to receive the answer. I believe that had He showed me this before, I wouldn't have accepted it, I was just too involved with the things I was doing at the time. Definitely I see God's hand in everything that I've done, at every point that I've reached up to now.