Childlike Faith - Part One of Two

In July I gave a humor presentation at a talent show, see end of this post for copy of that presentation.

Al Erisman, the retreat speaker, heard my presentation and this week asked me to expand my ten minute presentation to thirty five minutes and speak at a morning breakfast. My talk will be in Seattle at a KIROS event on November 21, 2008.

The title of my talk will be:

Bring Your Child-Like Faith to Work:
Find, Fizzle and Follow.
Planning ahead I decided I needed to put some more childhood stories in my presentation. Here are a few:

While I was growing up my parents started buying Volkswagen buses. We had a 1960 two-tone army green one, a 1966 white over blue and then a 1971 white over red one. The vehicles below are taken from VW websites, not the actual vehicles we had.

The reason I show these pictures is that on each of these rear engined vehicles there is a storage area above the engine and behind the third row of seats. This area we called "the trunk" and my younger sister and I enjoyed riding back there on trips. Actually we enjoyed it unless we were asked or told to ride back there.

These vehicles came in handy for our growing family and we seemed to move a lot. We had moved seven times before I was five, when my parents bought their first house (we moved in Memorial Day weekend 1964).

Shortly after we moved in I was riding in "the trunk" and prayed that we would live in this house forty years. Four years ago my parents had a "homestead" party on Memorial day to Celebrate their forty year anniversary of answered prayer. Today, they are still in that home.

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Back in that day nobody wore seat belts and we were fine to sit in the trunk unprotected. Looking back it was the only prayer closet that if you got in an accident one would become a projectile.

Shorty after that prayer my sister Renee, one year younger, and I were sitting in the trunk discussing life when we discovered that all our older siblings all had younger brothers and sisters, yet we did not. We decided to remedy this and prayed that we would get a younger brother or sister.

My parents were not trying to have children, but my younger brother Irwin was born the following January. When he was born Renee was upset for she told me she had been secretly praying for a sister.

Nine months later my mom was telling the neighbor, Lita Sippy (calling her Mrs. Sippy just didn't sound right) that she was pregnant with another child.

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Lita asked my mom when she had found out and she said "yesterday". Lita then said "that is strange, for your daughter Renee told me three months ago that she was soon going to have a new sister". My younger sister, Ione, was born six months later.

Copied from my July 10, 2008 post titled Tahoe Christian Singles Event

"During the Saturday night talent show I presented the material below:

When I was growing up I was very competitive with my siblings. When I was nine I went to a Bible camp and at an alter call I observed my eight year old sister raising her hand …, so I also raised mine.
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The leader asked the two people who raised their hands to come forward, I felt very uncomfortable as I walked down the aisle. When we got to the front he used us as examples. Looking at my sister he said “some people come to Christ crying” and looking at me, “and some people come to Christ smiling”.
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Three year later at another camp, this time a family camp, at an alter call I was the one crying. My shirt could hardly contain the tears as I moved down the back row, past many other twelve year old boys, and down the long aisle to the front.
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There were approximately a thousand people in the sanctuary as I slowly came forward. When I got to the front a pastor greeted me and asked me to sit with him in the front row and discuss my decision.
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At the exact time I was making the biggest decision of my life, my fourteen year old sister, who was sitting about five rows back, decided to tell me something. She shouted out, loud enough so everyone could hear, “I knew you were faking it”.
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When summer ended I started Junior High School. It was a hard transition for me for I had always been the tallest kid in every one of my elementary school classes. Whenever they took school pictures I was always the token boy in the back row with all the tall girls.
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When I looked around, that first day of seventh grade, I was amazed that somehow I was just an average height kid. This started to bother me enough that I decided that it was something I should bring to the Lord.
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That evening I prayed I would be six feet tall when I woke up in the morning. At the time I had so much faith that God was going to say yes to my prayer request, I slept diagonally on my bed, so that during this miracle I wouldn’t injure myself”.
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Today I am 5' 11" "