The decision I eventually made was a great triumph of hope over experience, but impulse more than calculation brought me to it. It seems to me that I might still be carefully weighing my decision, except that I was seized by a sudden spasm of courage, and resolved to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and my God in the midst of it.

I began to feel foolish immediately, then queasy. My mind filled with second thoughts. You are absolutely insane, McReynolds, I reminded myself over and over again. Thus reassured, I asked Pat to baptize me.

Early one misty morning soon after, all of us gathered on a rocky bluff overlooking one of La Jolla's spectacular shorelines. While the others remained watching from above, Pat and I climbed carefully down to the beach. We came to a sheltered area, almost like a cove, but open to the sea so that the waves were rolling in unimpeded. There was a heavy swell that morning. We waded into the surf until the water was well above our waists. It was hard to keep our balance because of the surge of the waves splashing and churning around us. The water was cold and noisy. I was in a mild daze. Attempting to time the event between breakers, Pat turned to me, and with one very interested eye on a gathering wave and the other on me, she put her hands on my shoulders. "Do you accept Jesus as the Lord of your life?" she quickly asked. "Yes, I do!" I shouted even more quickly in the instant before a large wave came crashing down on our heads, sending us both underwater and flailing toward the beach.

I half anticipated a sudden clap of thunder, but there was none, then or after. No bells sounded, no openings in the sky, no angels hovering about. In fact, in the following weeks, nothing much happened at all, except for the supernatural event which was quietly taking place within me.

I had asked the Lord to come into my heart. He had. I asked Him to lead me. He was. I asked Him to take control of my life. He was doing so, insofar as I was capable of permitting it. The Lord Himself actually began to guide me, to bless me and to work profound changes in my heart.

Read with faith, the Bible becomes a new book. Without faith I had viewed the Bible as nice printed words on pages, a mixture of history, poetry and fable, occasionally useful in some marginal aspect of daily living. I regarded it as a classic of roughly equal worth, say, to the works of Shakespeare. Now, however, reading with the mixture of my tiny faith and God's great grace, the Bible became TRUE. It was transformed into a revelation from God to man, an authentic expression of His love and hope for us written down in a book by men inspired to do so by the Holy Spirit.

Although I could seldom accept the Bible's counsel at first, and even less often act on it, I was nevertheless attempting to do so. I believe that it was this desire - the intention of my heart - which the Lord found acceptable, and which caused Him to begin leading me, setting my life in order and to begin revealing Himself to me.