WHEN I was ten years old I got “bit” by the “motorcycle bug.” From that time on, right on through the years of my boyhood and youth, my ambition was fixed and firm. I hoped, studied, labored and dreamed with one ambition: MOTORCYCLE FAME AND GLORY.
As time went on I became a motorcycle racer... Years passed — years of thrills, spills and chills... Then one day things changed.
One Sunday afternoon while out in the country doing a little highway racing I bent a corner too fast and ended up in the ditch with a severely mangled and broken leg and other injuries. I lay on the road for two hours before an ambulance finally arrived.
Then as the ambulance went screaming back to the hospital, we were in a collision with another automobile; and in the second mishap of the day I went through the windshield of the ambulance, broken leg and all. I arrived at the hospital broken, battered and bruised.
I had a long time to lie there and think.
I remember being told once that a fellow should be sure he dies right; because if he dies wrong he can’t come back and die right. But still how carelessly we live, knowing that death is our destiny. He dogs our footsteps, lurks around every shadow. In the past I felt death’s breath many times over my shoulder; but now it seemed death had finally caught up with me and I knew if I died, I would die wrong, without God and without hope.
I had never really sought God for I believed that if I found out what God had to say to me in the Bible I would lose all my pleasures. So whenever I would run into anything “religious,” I would quickly brush such thoughts aside. But no matter how I tried NOT to think of such things, that “still small Voice” came to me again and again — just as it has come to you. Run over your past life and count those times.
I was very much ALONE in that hospital under the dark shadow of death, for I realized that if a person dies without God, he dies “ALONE,” yes, all “ALONE.”
Then as I continued to think about these things, I remembered hearing in the past that old gospel story.... “How that Christ died for our sins.... and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.” And those who received Jesus Christ as Lord would have eternal life.
There on that hospital bed I obeyed the gospel and God saved me... just as He said He would.
I found out that IN CHRIST, instead of the pleasures of sin, I had pleasures forevermore. I found peace... peace with God... peace from a troubled conscience ... peace that passes all understanding... peace the world can never give.
ML-07/15/1973