December 1988. My family stood in Heathrow Airport waiting on a plane.
My dad was an Army Ranger, stationed in Germany. We were flying home to see my mom’s people. My brother and I were little. The flight got delayed. Then somebody figured out the service members on board needed a passport. We didn’t have it. My mom had to find someone to help her sort it. We missed the plane. They put us in a hotel.
The plane we were supposed to be on was Pan Am Flight 103.
It blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.
I don’t remember the hotel. I remember the long flight home after. I’ve thought about that delay my whole life. I didn’t know what I’d been spared for. I still don’t, all the way. But I know what I’ve done with it so far. That’s what this is about.
I got saved at twelve.
My mom came home one day and said she felt washed. Something had changed and she couldn’t explain it. I wanted that. I was a kid who lived in his head. I was trying to find out how to be a warlock. A vampire. Anything with power in it. I read Revelation the day before. People cast into hell. I knew that was me. A preacher walked me through it in a back office on a Tuesday night. I went to school and told people. They thought it was weird. I thought I had the Holy Ghost in me now, guiding me. I knew almost nothing. The only Bible I had was a Precious Moments Bible.
Then came the years I don’t tell at parties.
I didn’t fit. I was the kid they made the jester so the class could laugh. I was in special ed for speech and reading and math. I brought a fake bomb to school after I watched Speed. I lit two matches in a paper room and blamed a redheaded kid. A detective sat me down and said, I know it was you. I told my mom and dad. I told him. A lawyer gave me two doors. Juvenile hall, or a place called Charter. I took Charter.
I’ve written about what happened to me in that place. I won’t do it again here.
After that no school would take me. A Catholic one did, in an old Victorian house. St. Joseph’s. The nuns were sweet old ladies. Wednesdays we did the Stations of the Cross. I went because I wanted to.
Then a small Christian school. My dad sat me down in front of the preacher who ran it. He told him everything I’d done. The man looked at my dad and said, That’s the past. It’s all new here.
I never forgot that.
I stood up in a chapel service and said I was called to preach. He said, good, you’re preaching Sunday. I did. I was not ready. I did it anyway.
I made my lifelong friends at the next school. Tim, my best friend, and I went to Fruitland Baptist Bible Institute together. One day Tim handed me a piece of paper with a girl’s name on it. You should call her, he said. She’s a Georgetown girl. (That was the name of the other COOL Christian school we all looked up to) She worked at Hallmark. He’d met her at the Chick-fil-A in the food court.
Her name was Christie. I’ve been married to her twenty-four years.
I dropped out of Bible college to get a job. A man who wants to get married provides. That’s what I was told. Lowe’s. A single-wide trailer. Pancakes and cereal. Work and sleep, work and sleep. Then Olivia was born and we were parents.
We went to Montana to help start a church. We stayed eight years and had three more kids there. Then the work dried up. A railroad job opened in Mandan, North Dakota. I loaded up the Suburban and drove out alone. Christie and the kids came on my birthday. The next day was a blizzard and we got stuck in a hotel.
A church found me there before they arrived. It became our family. That’s the church where I finally started reading the Bible for myself. Not somebody’s notes on it. The Book.
I nearly got my head taken off between two rail cars, so I left the railroad. Electrician. Delivery driver. Security guard. Then a trash man for Waste Management.
One day I was sitting outside the scale house at the landfill, waiting on my turn. I started typing devotionals on my phone to my kids and to Christie. Just for them. A few friends heard about it and asked in. Then I found Substack.
That was almost two years ago.
There are twenty-six thousand of you now.
I know some of your names. I know some of your prayers. A wife in Minnesota asked me to pray for a husband with long Covid. A woman asked me to pray for a godly husband, period. A man wrote that for decades provision was his idol. His wife and children and God got lost in his labor. Somehow they still love him. Somebody read one line about provision becoming an idol and wrote back, uffda, shot to the heart.
Every essay lands free. Every Note lands free. No ads. No sponsor reading a script in the middle of a teaching. No denomination cutting a check. After three days the archive goes to the people who pay. That’s the model. I’m not hiding it.
What holds it up is you. Nobody else.
Paul wrote it plain. “Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things.” Galatians 6:6.
One thing I’m asking.
If this work has held you at some point in the last two years, hold it up once.
Give what you want. Five dollars is the floor. Some of you will give more and I won’t pretend that doesn’t matter.
Every gift gets a gift back. 100 Plain Questions About the Bible, the whole guide. It comes to the email you enter, with a thank-you from me. No second charge. No catch.
If you’ve read me for a year and never paid for a thing, this is the one.
If you can’t give, forward this to somebody circling the Bible. Somebody who doesn’t know where to start. That counts.
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I missed a plane once and didn’t know why.
I’m still finding out.
Adam
