How can I introduce my life without tipping my hand to enough detail that you will not need to the rest of this book? I am thinking this as I write the Introduction: Take Two. I wrote so much, and that which I wrote, I absolutely loved, but it was too much, it tipped my hand, it was a spoiler of the story to come. So I hit the delete key to write a simple message instead.

Within the pages of this book I will tell you my story. It's a story of a latch-key kid born out of time; a boy who lived a latch-key life before that term was coined by social scientists concerned about all these kids coming home from school to an empty house. I am here to say that their fears are justified. Indeed, I agree that idle time is the Devil's plaything, and my life shows how unsupervised children can become rotten to the core. I reject that we are blank slates waiting for moral input. If I was unsure of that as a child, I am convinced of it now, as I look back!

I do not mean to suggest that growing up with supervision will prevent us from being sinners, nor that every unsupervised child will grow up as I did, but rather, I want to show you the impact untempered sin has in a young boy's life. I want to show you that growing up without God leads to a life of sin. I want to show you that sin begets sin. I want you to learn that following God is truly the most important thing you can do!

This is a story of redemption. I was seeped into sin as a teabag forgotten at the bottom of the nearly empty cup. If one were to swig that last bit down it would be a bitter gulp. And that was my life after years of practicing sin. But Jesus Christ found me in those early years of adulthood. He showed me that not even I was beyond His reach of redemption. He called me to cast out the sin so embedded in my soul and preach the God that I spent so much of my life openly rejecting. I want to tell my story about what rooted the sin so deep into my soul, and how God had the power to weed the garden of my heart. This is about our task and responsibility as Christians to pass along the true Gospel.

I am writing this book now because Jesus Christ found me as a young adult scarcely over twenty, but now I am a bit beyond forty. That means as I write this book, I have lived exactly half of my life as a wretched sinner, and the other half as a redeemed saint (and I am not lost on the irony that statistically I could live to be eighty). Such a realization has given me insight into a life with and without God. Such insight is critical to understand who God is, who we are, and what a life following Jesus really means.

I want to show through my testimony not only the saving power of Jesus, but I also want to impress on you the life contrasted between living in the world and living for Christ. I pray that the lessons and testimony in this book will help you to find Jesus Christ, or maybe more accurately, maybe it will help Jesus Christ to find you!