Look in the right place

I have been told by someone who knows that the 3 basic ingredients of a good story are:
Desire, Struggle, Realization.

Hmmm As I have been writing my book I have been trying to use these ingredients to shape it. I think I know how they relate to my personal story. I started my life with what I believe to be an “innate” desire to find happiness and peace, and as a small child I wanted to do the right thing and be a good person. Personally I think God lays that on all of our hearts while we are still being formed in the womb.

Starting at a very early age I embarked on a trip that involved tremendous struggle filled with serious wrong turns and outright mistakes. I tried to achieve my desire every way that my flesh led me. I tried everything I could think of in trying to find it.

I tried the mind expanding drugs of the 60’s like LSD, mescaline, STP and psilocybin, I tried cocaine and Quaaludes, I tried sticking a needle into my arm and injecting meth and heroin into it. I did not find it in drugs.

I tried alcohol beginning with beer and wine and advancing to hard liquor. I went to bars, and parties, and sat at home and could drink all night long. I did not find it in alcohol.

I tried the free love of the 60’s generation. I did not find it in sex.

I tried building businesses and achieving the pinnacles of success in my chosen fields. I did not find it in achieving success.

I tried money and buying all that it can buy including material things of every color, dimension, size, and shape and traveling the world in style and comfort. I did not find it in money or material things, or in traveling the world in style and comfort.

I have been chasing my desire now for over six decades and have struggled mightily. I have finally reached my realization. Like the song says, “I was looking for love in all the wrong places”. I found that apart from God it can never be achieved.

I could have saved myself an enormous amount of time and agony had I just opened my Bible to Ecclesiastes and read about Solomon and had faith in his words. He was the richest and wisest man the world will ever know and he has chronicled his memoirs for us in that book. He had thousands of wives and concubines, he drank the finest wines, he amassed wealth as no one before him or after him. He had enormous public works projects of a magnitude that is simply amazing, (the remains of which still stand today. I saw them when I visited Israel last year). People came from all over the world, far and wide just to listen to his astonishing profound God-given wisdom.

We can go to him and seek his wisdom even today in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and other writings in the Bible

In the end his realization was the same as mine. Even though several thousand years have passed, nothing has changed really. God is the same today, as tomorrow, as ten thousand years from now. He will never change; our fleshly nature will never change apart from Him changing us. We cannot find love, peace, happiness, and success apart from Him. My realization is the same as King Solomon’s and has been penned far better by him under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit than I could ever write, and I have recorded it for you below. I only add that my desire was fulfilled when I found Jesus Christ. There is no sense in struggling like I did and looking in all the wrong places. He is standing right beside you as you read this, gently waiting for you to invite Him into your heart and life. When you do, your whole world will change for the better. Won’t you just say yes?


Eccl. 12:13
Let us hear the conclusion of the
Whole matter:

Fear God and keep His
commandments.
For this is man’s all.
For God will bring every work
into judgment.
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.