My life has been touched with many dramatic events. I was so physically large at birth that I had to be carried on a pillow for some months until it was deemed that I would be strong enough to support my length and weight on my own. Before I was two years of age my father was sent home from work and told not to return until he was cured of tuberculosis. He was sent by his mother to various sanitariums many miles from our home. I saw him for a few days the year before he died. I was six years of age. My mother ultimately remarried, but I never really identified with my stepfather, nor he with me. We did manage well enough. I began to wander, as so many adolescents do, but became a Christian during my final high school year. My mother’s touching story of her own long hiatus of faith in failing to carry through on her youthful commitment to life ministry settled for me that I would be involved in Christian enterprise.
In the course of the years I traveled extensively encountering accidents and threats of danger, as in the plane engine failure flying into Detroit, and an overshoot of a runway in Hawaii. On the highway I saw gruesome accidents, in which men died – one between two trucks in Ohio, another in a flaming wreck in Arizona, and there were others. My children have not forgotten a gruesome accident in Arizona when a driver, likely fallen asleep, speeded into a monster piece of road grading equipment. On another occasion, I turned in a moment, without time to think of what to do to avoid a tractor truck in Wyoming. I have been a passenger when unusual actions on the part of the drivers saved our lives. On one occasion my son apologized as he careened into snow drifts in Nebraska to avoid a driver who did not check the traffic in the lanes. I have had so many eye surgeries that the only surgery left is to remove an eye, if necessary, as was the case with my mother. I have had a number of major surgeries related to three bouts with cancer, melanoma and prostate. I have to adjust my life to Type 2 diabetes. Other references might be made for threatening experiences in my life. I am passed ninety years of age, and heading for a hundred.
On one occasion I stared down and talked down a man who had bought a gun to shoot me in my office. (I later discovered it could not fire a lethal ball. He had mistakenly bought a starter’s pistol.) I worked with people who had on their own taken the lives of their unborn children, and a fellow who threatened suicide unless I could find a way out for him. He later took his life. I was called on several occasions to help suicidal persons who recovered. They were shocked that they were still alive. I saw persons at home and abroad who were in dire straits about this or that issue, mostly related to poverty, broken families, health or plain sin. My experiences seem almost endless to me. Exotic issues have been many, unexplainable – even touching my family members.
With these events I gained a fair portion of mature life (a goal I formed from Scripture); completed a doctoral program (a goal formed because of a desire for effective Christian ministry); had a family that I love and enjoy (partly related to Bible idealism and father lack in my own rearing); gained fulfilling work that included Christian ministries at home and abroad incorporating professorships in higher education, and leadership of a Christian college (formed from a belief from Scripture that God gives work to his children); and, so the story goes. Without Christ, how could I have made it to tell this story? I could not write of it without a sense of compulsion that I should, and that it constitutes a reason for me to enter the tenth decade of my life. It has been family oriented, professionally honorable, and Christ centered. Thanks, God! *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020