I accepted Jesus into my life at age 17. Due to some overwhelming needs in the church, my spiritual training was fragmented, because instead of being in a classroom where I could learn and grow spiritually, I was given a class of two-year-olds to teach. I had ten toddlers and didn’t even know the simplest Bible stories like David and Goliath or Noah and the Ark. I went home from church every Sunday with a splitting headache. That didn’t last long, and it caused me to get out of church.
And although my faith was infantile, it was genuine. During the time I attended church, I had been told the importance of always seeking God’s direction for my life. So three years later, I dealt with a consuming passion to enlist in the United States Air Force. My dad was retired Navy. I wanted to go into the Air Force. And although my parents both gave me their blessings to enlist, I had a balance disorder and couldn’t imagine the military overlooking it to let me in. But I wasn’t going to let it keep me from trying. Yet, as badly as I wanted to go into the Air Force, I knew that it was important to let God guide my life. After all, this was a major decision. So I went to God in prayer. I said to Him, “Lord, I’ll make you a deal. (That was before I learned that you don’t make deals with God.) I want to go into the Air Force, but I don’t think I can pass the physical. So if You want me to go in, You help me pass the physical.” It was that simple, and I believed it.
My recruiter drove me into downtown LA to take the physical. When I finally saw the doctor, he asked me why I’d been hospitalized at age three. I told him that the doctor was trying to find out why I wasn’t walking.
“You can walk now; can’t you?”
“Of course. I walked in here; didn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see you. Walk to the door.”
I thought, You’ve got to be kidding. His office space was tiny and confined, incredibly cluttered. There couldn’t have been more than two feet between me and the doorway, and he was going to be evaluating my “walk.” And if something wasn’t in the way when I stood up, somehow it got there when I took that first step. I tripped and stumbled over everything between my chair and the doorway, including my own feet. I thought, Well, there went my chance to join the Air Force. But the doctor said, “That’s good. I just wanted to see if you could walk.”
You see, if God wants it to happen, He’ll open doors and He’ll make a way. That day, despite a physical handicap I’d had since birth, I enlisted in the United States Air Force.