Daddy

I told you that Daddy was born to a Mennonite family and community in Fairview Michigan. He was raised in the church and taught many things.

***A Little Info on the Mennonite Church*** I am told that there are 19 branches of the Mennonite church, ranging from the Amish (the people in the horse-n-buggies) to the most liberal branch that doesn't look much different than your average Baptist church. The most of what i can understand about Mennonite beliefs is that they are against worldly things. For instance, Mennonite men do not wear ties (a rule many other men would love to adopt, i think) because ties are too worldly. Some Mennonite women dress very similarly to the United Pentecostal women who we see around here....with long hair and always wearing a dress and so forth. And in conformity with the scriptures that talk about a woman's need to wear a covering on her head, Mennonite women wear a little covering made of netting on top of their buns on their heads.***

Daddy was raised in the Mennonite church, but he didn't have a true relationship with God, and when he got old enough, he got some work traveling with a bunch of people who traveled and followed the wheat harvest and helped the farmers get their crops harvested in a timely manner. At least that's what i understand about it. =)

So in his travels, at some point, (we'll have to get Daddy to tell the story better at some point) he ended up in Chicago. And Chicago was apparently a great place for finding out about all those "worldly" things he wasn't supposed to do in Fairview, and Daddy found them. But also, while he was in Chicago, the Lord began His pursuit of my dad. One night, while he was asleep, Daddy had a dream that so impacted him, he couldn't talk the next morning. When he gained his senses again, he went to talk to a Mennonite pastor in the area. This pastor allowed him to share what he had seen with the church there. And if i remember correctly, the people really responded with repentance and changed lives and so forth. Well, Daddy, in his own words, began to get a big head about the whole thing. And as we all know, pride comes before a fall.

Daddy fell pretty hard. A lot of things happened in his personal life, and he quickly fell away from God. Daddy began to spend his time doing a lot of whiskey drinking, girl chasing, and he spent a lot of his time in "strip joints" and so forth. It's necessary to tell you that because one of these "joints" (as Daddy calls them) is where Jesus came to get his attention. Daddy says that one night when he was sitting and watching the "show," it was like a movie screen dropped down between him and the stage, and he saw again, a similar vision to the dream he had seen earlier. This vision, by the way, is one of Jesus coming back to the earth.