My 1 Story involves a family that my wife and I met 1 day in the parking lot of a local McDonalds.
As we pulled in my wife noticed a man under the hood of his van, looking as if he needed help. She said to me, “You should go see if he needs help.” And of course, I sighed and hesitated to get out of our van. Finally as I approached the man I noticed four people inside their van, his wife and three children. I asked him if he needed a jump start. Confused he said, “I don’t know, I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” And one thing I can tell you about myself is, I am not a mechanic, I know very little about motors if anything at all. So I got my cables and said, “Let’s try to jump start it.” No luck. It would start but then die.
Then out of my mouth came,” It must be the alternator.” What!? How did I know that was the problem? I didn’t. Then I knew it must be God, not me, so I just followed God like I knew what I was doing.
By this time my wife had introduced herself and was telling his wife and children about the church we were attending at that time. Then God says, through me, “I have my tools in my van (which was also not normal, these are tools that I never use) let me get them and I will remove the alternator so we can have it checked out.” What!? I remember my wife even looking stunned, asking me as I got my tools, “Do you really know what your doing?” My reply being, “Uhh.., I guess so.”
After about ten to fifteen minutes I had this mans alternator in my hands. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. Then God said through me, again, “Ok, let’s go to the parts store to have it checked.” You can have alternators checked? What!? How did I know this? When we got there I walked in, and with all the confidence God had put in me I said, “I need to have this checked.” The man behind the counter said, “No problem.” Taking it into the back room, he soon returned saying it was dead and needed to be replaced. He offered a new one for $ 140 dollars or a rebuilt one for $90 dollars. My mouth dropped open and about that time, the man I was helping (whose name was Greg) said, “I don’t have that kind of money.” And at the same time I could hear God telling me, “Buy it for him .Buy it for him.” So, out of my mouth came, “That’s o.k. I got it.” What!? I knew then for sure it was, most certainly, without a doubt, God doing this because that was just not like me. I had always been on a tight budget. I would help people from time to time but $90 dollars was part of our rent money. But I was also smart enough to know God must have a bigger plan.
When we got back from the parts store, my wife, his wife and children were all eating ice cream and acting like old friends. I proceeded to act as the mechanic, putting the alternator back on without any knowledge, then we jumped it again and the van cranked right up and stayed running. Praise God!! I knew it had to be God. So we all gathered together to pray and thank God and give him all the praise.
The next week Greg and his whole family came to church and committed their life to Jesus. At that time I thought, ok God, I now see why you used me and gave me this knowledge because you wanted to make this connection to Greg and his family through my wife and I. Wow. God is a good God. It all still amazes me.
End of story, right. Not quite.
Greg and his family kept coming to church off and on until about a year after we met them, Greg became ill due to diabetes complications and quickly passed and went home to be with the Lord. What!? It all happened so fast and then it all became so clear to me that God really is the Alpha and Omega. He already knew what he had planned for Greg before my wife and I ever met him and his family.
I want to thank you Father God for using my wife and I, for giving us the knowledge to help you help Greg. In Jesus name, Amen
We still remain friends with Greg’s wife and kids to this day.
I just want to end this story by saying,” Please never pass up that chance God is placing in front of you. This might be your 1 day to be his mechanic.”

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I stand there like an idiot, hands folded behind my back, feeling completely useless. My brother, a physician, is discussing medical matters with a neurologist, both of them cool and detached. A monitor beeps quietly, almost politely. I catch a few words here and there, all of them ominous, none of them comforting or the least bit encouraging. (Ever notice that in medical parlance you never hear adjectives such as “massive” or “severe” used to describe “recovery” or “improvement”?)

A few visitors wander in from time to time, shaking hands with Roger and me. “Your mother talked about her boys all the time,” they say, or “It’s nice to finally meet Lily’s sons.” Most of them are Chinese, like our mom, and many of them speak with thick accents. A good number of them are from Mom’s church, it seems, and some bring their entire families – five, six people crowd into the room. A few of them hold Mom’s hand and pray aloud in Cantonese. I understand a few words or phrases, wondering if – hoping – that somewhere deep down in her subconscious, Mom is nodding and praying along with them.

One young man, thirty-something, walks in around 5:30 in the afternoon. He looks tired and a little concerned as he holds Mom’s hand, leans over her and says a prayer. He nods at us and leaves. “I’ll be back later,” he says. Sure enough, two hours or so later, he walks back in, this time with his two little daughters. Each girl has a balloon, and they proceed to talking to Mom in Chinese.

The man chats with us. He came over from Hong Kong only a few years back, before his children were born. I don’t remember where he said he met my mom – my impression was that she just started talking to him one day at a restaurant or someplace like that. Then he says, “My whole family loves Aunt Lily … she introduced us to Jesus.”

Over the next day or two, we find out that Mom has been quite the evangelist there in Los Angeles, meeting random Chinese people – sometimes entire families – and inviting them for a home-cooked meal at her small apartment, followed by an introduction to her Lord. (It helped, of course, that she was fluent in seven Chinese dialects, speaking not only in the different languages, but with the different provincial accents.) According to her pastor, Mom routinely had a dozen or more people she’d only just met crammed into her living room, all eating – take my word for it – some really good food. And afterwards, feeling full and grateful, these same people listened to this new friend (who was, in many cases, their only acquaintance in the States) telling them, in a language they could understand, about man’s problems of sin, separation and death, and God’s answer of love, salvation and eternal life. They listened to her introduce them to Jesus.

And by all accounts, Mom had done this kind of thing for years and years.

A few days later, I came back to Florida. We eventually moved Mom to a care facility in Indiana, where my brother lives. I went to see her a few times when I was up visiting Roger. She looked bad the last couple of times – really bad. I knew it wouldn’t be long before my brother called me, before life went on hold for a time. Mom passed away quietly last May, after three years in a coma from which she never awoke.

But you know what? As sad as I’ve been now and then, thinking about how much I miss both my parents, how much I wish they could watch their grandson grow up … I can’t help thanking God for letting me be in that hospital room in L.A. to hear that one, priceless phrase: “She introduced us to Jesus.” The grandest eulogy, the boldest epitaph would have been cheap drivel by comparison.

“She introduced us to Jesus.”

At her funeral, as I touched her cool hand, I whispered – whimpered – “I love you, Mom.” And right about then, I like to think, Jesus was hugging her and saying, “Well done, Lily. Welcome home. You won’t believe how many friends of yours I’ve gotten to know …”

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My one story took place four years ago, when I first met my wife, Martina. At the time, we were separated by 4000 miles and an ocean and got to know one another by chatting online.

As time moved on, we began to realize that we wanted to try and make a relationship out of our commonalities, despite the distance. We began to talk more and more and realized that we wanted to be together.

Distance aside, there was another stumbling block, though I didn’t know it at the time: I was raised in the Catholic Church and stopped going when my parents stopped going, immediately following their divorce, when I was 9 years old. I began to grow apart from God as my love of science and theory took over. Any hint of faith I had that there was a higher power was being clouded over by my hunger for knowing how and why things work, something which I could not explain nor comprehend when it came to God.

It wasn’t until I met Martina 11 years later that the thought of even considering whether there was a God would cross my mind again. As our relationship deepened, we came to a fork in the road: Martina had been talking to some of her Christian friends about how we were falling for one another, yet was concerned to move forward with a man who didn\’t know Jesus, let alone have him as number one priority in their life. They told her she needed to confront me about it and one night, she did just that. She told me that for the first time, she wasn’t prepared to enter into a relationship without knowing that it was what God had intended for her and that she knew she needed to be with someone who knew God intimately.

It was a very odd thing to experience – I didn’t want to lose this woman that I cared deeply about, but at the same time, I was considering going against what I had been telling myself for the past 11 years.

Well, I made the right choice and discovered a relationship with God. It was like nothing I could have ever imagined and now myself and Martina are happily living together and married, under the authority and guidance of Him, all thanks to that one confrontation.

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