As a thoughtless, willful teenager wanting to escape what I perceived as my father's mental cruelty and my mother's pushing me to accept Jesus, I convinced my father to let me join the navy.
Aboard my first ship, by mere chance, I landed the job as editor of the ship's paper. That job opened the door to my interest in writing. I discovered an aptitude for both art and poetry.
I spent the next seventy years documenting my search for identity and acclaim, as well as meaning for my existence. In doing a daily journal, I began a habit of organizing my thoughts for articles in the ship's paper. That expanded into a daily chronicle of my thoughts and desires, as well as the pain of unrequited love and both success and failure in my pursuit of notoriety.
Finally, at the age of seventy-eight, I found myself at the bottom of a dry well, the result of my own bad decisions. I found myself in jail for the first time in my life. My eldest son came to visit and made me face the reality of my life in crisis and my need to turn my life over to God by accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
Since making that decision, the changes in my life have shown up clearly in my writing. In discussing it with my wife Joyce, I decided to turn the last seventy years of poetry and art into my testimony.
From that point, I have laid out my poetry and art to portray my lifelong search for meaning in my life, which boiled down to the realization that everything I was searching for is found in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus loved us enough to pay the blood price, giving up his life to bring us into a right relationship with our Creator. That choice has changed my life from dark hopelessness into the light and promise of a life turned over to Jesus Christ.