When I was a little boy, we lived in the town of Bannockburn, Ontario. It is about halfway between Belleville and Bancroft, heading north. Summers were great, but winters were severe.
It is amazing how God touches your life in different ways. He did that in mine until He brought me to the place where I trusted Him as Saviour. The first time God spoke to me was on a winter evening. A group of neighborhood young people were outside sleigh-riding and tobogganing. One of the kids said something that struck terror to my heart. He said, “Well, there won’t be much more snow to shovel because we heard that the world is coming to an end.” I had never heard that before and I spent many sleepless nights thinking about it. The world coming to an end—what does it mean? God spoke to me then; I was just a young boy.
There was a family in the neighborhood by the name of Parks; they lived on a farm at the edge of town. Every Saturday night they had a barn dance. My father used to tell me about it—there was drinking and fights, and it was a horrible place. Their little girl, Levada Parks, was in my class at school. We were maybe seven years old. One day we came in, and the teacher announced that Levada Parks had died very suddenly—seven years old! This brought terror to me. I thought of death as something for older people, so God used that to speak to me a second time.
About the same time as Levada Parks died, some evangelists came to Bannockburn. They set up a tent and they began to preach the gospel. The Parks family went and heard the gospel and they were all gloriously saved. What a price they had to pay! They cleared out all of the junk from that barn; they swept the floor and set up a pulpit where they preached the gospel and souls were saved. This was a clear message to our community of the power of the gospel.
My father worked for a mining company which was operating at a deficit for several years. Finally, they closed down and my father was put out of work. We heard from relatives who lived in the Niagara region that the job situation was a little better in that area, so we moved to Fonthill.
One day my father and I were standing outside and an airplane came flying overhead very low. The pilot began to write a big B and an E and a few more letters in the sky. My father said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said, “I thought he was going to write ‘Be ye also ready.’” My father had a religious background and he knew a lot of things that he never talked about in our home. Be ye also ready. God spoke to me again at that moment.
Time rolled by. Soon it was 1939 and the Second World War broke out. They were years of tremendous change for me. Soon I had my driver’s license. The thing in those days was “big band” music. We spent our time in theaters and dancing to Big Band music in the night clubs. We thought we were really living! Little did we know that we were only a heartbeat away from eternity.
My life was interrupted very suddenly in January of 1947. Late at night my parents received a telephone call from my brother-in-law in Smith Falls. My sister had been admitted into the hospital for an appendectomy and he asked us if we could please come. Mother, Dad and I left about one o’clock in the morning and drove through the night. When we arrived in Smith Falls, we went directly to the hospital, parked the car and walked up to the main entrance. My brother-in-law was standing outside of the hospital. He was leaning against the wall crying. He told us that although the operation was a success, my sister’s kidneys were failing and they could not save her life. We went into her room and stood around her bed. You would never know by looking at her that she had been sick a day in her life. But within a few hours she lapsed into unconsciousness and about an hour later she was gone into eternity. She was just thirty-one years of age. What a crushing blow to my dear mother. Earlier in her life, she had lost a two-year-old daughter. For months after that, every day when I’d come home from work, Mother would be sitting in her chair crying. Her heart was broken. God was speaking to us.
In September 1947, we received word that a relative of ours had died very suddenly in Bancroft. He had been in fellowship at the Gospel Hall for years, but had gotten away from the Lord. His health deteriorated and at the age of forty-two, he was dead. Mother, Dad and I went to that funeral and there we heard Simon Brunson take the service. I never heard any preaching like that in my life! It turned Mother and Dad and me upside down. The ride home was the quietest trip home we ever had—there was hardly a word spoken the entire way.
My father was so troubled after that funeral that he bought a Bible and began to read it. He read it for two years and I could see that his life was changing, but he wasn’t saved.
He had an uncle who was a missionary in Egypt, and when he was home on furlough he went to a little building in Collingwood called a Gospel Hall. My father got so desperate to find the truth, that he said one day, “I’m going to look for a place that looks like the Gospel Hall in Collingwood.” So he left our town on foot and walked down the road, checking all of the church buildings and the times of their meetings. After a walk of more than five miles, he finally found the unadorned building of the Queenston Street Gospel Hall in St. Catharines. The sign gave the next gathering time of the Christians: “Prayer meeting Tuesday night.” So my father came back the next Tuesday. After the meeting, Mr. Bill Robertson and Mr. Fred Campion took my father aside and said, “Are you a Christian from out of town?”
He replied, “No, I’m not a Christian at all, but I’m not leaving this place tonight until I am a Christian.” My father was desperate. They read. They prayed. But my father couldn’t see it. Mr. Robertson told us my father said, “Don’t tell me that fifty years of sin can be wiped away just like that.” He couldn’t see the simplicity of it. He came home and told Mother and I that he wanted to get saved. This was quite a shock to us.
The following week he went back and he heard John Pirrie preaching. He realized for the first time that his sins had been paid for at the cross. That night he trusted Christ as his personal Saviour. Some time later, coming home in the car, my mother just rested in John 3:16 as she realized that she was the “whosoever” mentioned in that verse. She also was wonderfully saved.
The year 1951 arrived and Aubrey Dellandrea of North Bay, ON, was getting ready to have gospel meetings at the Pelham Road Gospel Hall, also in St. Catharines. Mother and Dad were saved now, and one night when I was working they took my wife Audrey out; that night she trusted Christ as her Saviour. So now it was my turn.
When I first went to hear Mr. Dellandrea speak, he spoke on the judgment of God. He took his arm and ran it across the whole audience and said, “Young man, remember this: if you go to hell, you go alone.”
After the meeting, I asked to speak with the preacher. He read one verse to me: “Christ died for the ungodly.” “Is that you?” he asked. That’s pretty hard to face. I had been going to church and Sunday school. I didn’t think I was that bad. He pointed a finger right at me.
I thought for a few seconds, then said, “Yes, it is. I am ungodly.” So there I was: faced with the greatest decision of my life—a lost, guilty sinner, on the road to hell. I knew the world had nothing to offer. I had tried all of that and it just leaves you cold. I remember going to a New Year’s party one year at the General Brock Hotel in the city of Niagara Falls, and back in the 1940’s if you had a ticket for the Brock Hotel, you were really high up on the ladder! We bought corsages for our girl friends and danced to the Big Band until one or two in the morning. When I went home, I remember thinking, “There has to be something better than this!”
So there I stood before Aubrey on the broad way to hell. But I learned that night that there is one good thing about the broad road to hell: it’s broad enough to turn around! And I did. I turned around to Christ that night and trusted Him as my Saviour. I learned that when Christ was on that cross, God took all of my sins and laid them upon Christ, and He went down into death for me and put away my sin forever. Never again will I be called to give an account for my sin! Christ has paid it all.
When you’re first saved, it’s nice to have someone come alongside and give a little help. That’s when brother Boyd Nicholson came into my life. Boyd was a tremendous help to me. We used to go away together on a weekend when he had to speak, and he would try to get me up on the platform for a couple of minutes. I was terror-stricken but he kept after me. We went preaching in the open-air, passing out tracts, and visiting the sick. He told me about some of his experiences in the war and that helped me a lot. He told me that one of the hardest things he ever had to do was when he came into the barracks at night with all those rough guys around, and he had to take a stand for God. He said, “I had to get down on my knees beside my bunk. I couldn’t even pray, but I had to get down and acknowledge God.” He told me about his many experiences when he felt the hand of the Lord on his life, keeping him safe.
I thank God for brother Boyd and his influence in my life. I want to finish with a verse of a poem that he wrote:
Can it be true that a soul still in time
Would turn down God’s offer of mercy sublime,
And trample rough-shod o’er the dear Saviour’s blood,
And risk an eternity shut out from God?