Part I - The Search

The Turning Point

Shortly after a business failure in Edmonton, when I was a grown man with a wife and family, I moved back to Winnipeg with my family and it was there that some of the old questions began to surface again. But they came at me, surprisingly, through my love for my two daughters. “What could I possibly give them that would be lasting?” I mused. “Something that could not be changed by the whims of a society that seems increasingly preoccupied with sex and violence, something that is good?” That was the question that came at me. I guess I wanted to leave a legacy. I wanted them to have something, something that I could pass on to them, something that perhaps would guide their lives and that they would find worthy of passing on to their children. The only thing that I could think of was the Ten Commandments that I had learned in Sunday School. They seemed to fit the requirement. They were eternal in nature, and they were good. So what did I do with that epiphany? I parked it, that’s what I did, but God was moving me to look at other things as well.

I found myself re-exploring the whole subject of origins. A man at work used some words with me one day that I had never heard before. The words were “creation science.” He lent me a book on the subject and for the first time in my life I realized there were Ph.D.’s out there who had scientific evidence which supported the creation view. My eyes must have almost bulged out of my head as I explored these new concepts. I had never heard anything like it before. That was a turning point for me.

I don’t know why I had such a hatred for hypocrisy, but I did, so I made a vow. I felt that in order to be truly honest with myself that I should spend at least the same amount of time studying creation science as I did studying evolution. I wanted to have an open mind. I did not want anyone to be able to criticize me for looking at only one perspective, as I would have criticized another for doing the same. So my vow went something like this: “I will study creation science at least as much as evolution and whatever I find to be true after an honest and thorough investigation, I will live by that.” So my exploration began.

A friend at work introduced me to a bookstore in the city where I could buy more material on the creation science topic. Another friend of mine had given me a book called the “Late Great Planet Earth,” by Hal Lindsey. It had challenged me so much so that when I walked into the recommended bookstore one day and noticed all the Hal Lindsey books on sale, I bought a number of them. That is how I started studying Biblical prophecy.

Prophecy - fulfilled prophecy - certainly got my attention. I thought it was amazing that men had spoken about what was going to happen centuries after their time and then the events took place in exactly the same manner spoken of by the prophets, proven by ancient history and archeology. In one book I learned about all of the prophecies concerning Jesus of Nazareth and how they all came true. In one book I learned about the actual mathematical probability that Jesus was most definitely who He said He was.

All of the things I was learning about creation science and the probabilities about Jesus all seemed to be pointing in the same direction. Finally, after about a six month period, I realized that I had more information on which to make a decision about all of this than I would ever need. I remembered the vow that I had made about “living by whatever I became convinced was true.” I had far more information than I needed to convince me creation and the Bible were true, and yet I was not acting on that knowledge. Even if did act on it, I couldn’t come to grips with what would that mean to me personally.

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