Written by David Edwards

In a dusty, windblown, tumbleweed-populated out-of-the way place in West Texas, I made a decision that would govern my entire life to follow. I was approaching eight years old in the spring of 1956 ─ spring, when new life emerges everywhere, even in the unforgiving harshness of the desert. The rains had come and the cacti blossomed in resurrected vitality. My sister Vicki was born that year, and this was her first home. This was the right time for my new birth.
In those days the place was known as Terminal and was home to maybe 1,000 residents who lived in old Army barracks built in World War II for bombardier trainees. During the war, the base was designated Midland Army Air Field, and there the training in the ultra-secret Norden Bombsight took place. In 1946 the military ceded the airfield to the city of Midland, which for a few years rented out the extant barracks to civilian families. My family was one of those. We lived across the street from the Tri-County Orphanage, and I recall with delight riding the bus with those children first to Sam Houston Elementary School and then to North Elementary School in Midland. At home we had an old television with poor reception to the two, sometimes three on clear days, area stations, so as often as I could I stole away to the nearby fire station at the landmark red-and-white checkered water tower, where the firemen allowed me to watch their color television, the first I had ever seen. I often crawled through an unlocked window to play in the grain-filled Webb-Davis warehouse down the way.
My upbringing was not a religious one. I recall having attended church only once before that life-transforming night in the spring. It was at the invitation of the large family living across the street from us, who brought me to their Sunday school class. Afterward, I only remembered the teacher writing the word “SIN” in large letters on the blackboard.
Months after that visit I lay on my bed in the dark reciting a poem-prayer that I had recently read somewhere: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Prior to that night I typically would then drift into sleep. But this night would be different, monumentally different.
I began to tremble in a mysterious fear as I finished my prayer. Would I die tonight? Then in the darkness, Someone pulled the reassuring bed covers up over me, and my trembling stopped. The door neither opened nor closed before or after this experience, yet Someone’s presence became wonderfully palpable to me. Intuitively, I softly called into the darkness, “Lord Jesus, forgive my sins.” Even before my cry found completion I had an unmistakable sensation that the Presence which had been only outside me now flowed inside me. I prayed, “Thank you, God.” and went into a serene sleep.
After that night, I could not fully understand, much less explain, that event. But immediately there was an undeniable consequence of my personal cataclysm: my conscience had sprung to life—I no longer had the ability to lie that I formerly had, and as time went on, I could not participate in the destructive deeds of my peers, such as vandalism, theft, and the setting of fires in vacant lots. All such misdeeds would bring a conscience full of condemnation even in the contemplation of them. Intuitively, I fled from all such wrongs, and my fleeing has continued to this day.
Even more meaningfully, I received God Himself as my new life. Through a difficult human experience, including war combat, I have relied on Him and sought His counsel in all things as my real “inside Man.” In my years since Terminal, I have found that He has well-equipped me with the sensitive spiritual capacities of intuition, conscience, and loving divine companionship. From that pivotal night in the spring of 1956, He has not for one moment neglected me or abandoned me. So for me, to live simply means that I keep my spiritual eyes constantly turned and focused on Him within. My oxymoronic beginning in Terminal set a sure course for the rest of my life, for which I am eternally grateful.
DBE