the conference had already arrived and were sitting on the stage waiting for things to begin.  No one was at the mike.

At this point in my life, I was fully aware of the reality of God and, as I sat there, was thinking of my parents and, in thinking about them, decided to pray about them.  It was a very short prayer: “God, won’t you save my parents?”  Immediately after I uttered this silent prayer, one of the speakers got up out of his chair, went over to the microphone, and said: “God will save your parents.”  He then returned to his chair and sat down.  I thought to myself: “A coincidence?  Not likely.” and filed it away in the back of my mind.

To complete this story, I am going to jump ahead a little bit and tell how God opened my parent’s eyes to His reality and changed their lives.  It actually happened after Don, his family, and I left Kansas City and traveled on to our final destination, Montevideo, Minnesota.

Montevideo, Minnesota

Not long after we arrived in Montevideo, I received a letter, several pages long, from my Mom.  The letter was not only filled with her description of an extraordinary event but also with several very good pictures that my Mom had taken the time to draw that were associated with the event.  My Mom was a very good artist and enjoyed drawing.  Clearly something significant had occurred for her to prepare such a letter to me.  Truth is, I believe that is the only letter I ever received from either my Mom or Dad.

It happened that my Dad and Mom had gone on a hunting and camping trip in the Everglades with my Dad’s best friend and his wife.  They had been out for several days but had been unsuccessful in getting a deer.  My Dad’s friend had become upset because, in the face of their lack of success, he wanted to go out after dark to poach for a deer.  My Dad’s unwillingness to do so led to words being said and it looked like the friendship would rupture.  Now my Dad was not one to have many friends, especially any that enjoyed hunting and fishing as he did, and the rupture of this friendship would remove something that was very important in his life.

Because of this, my Mom described in her letter to me that she decided to pray about it and ask God for help.  She said: “God, you know my husband does not have many friends and that losing this friendship would be very hard for him.  Won’t you help them get a deer tomorrow and save the friendship for him?”  The next morning’s hunt was fruitless and things were looking bad.  Things had reached the point to where they had packed up the swamp buggy and just left the camp to head home.

As they left the campsite they saw, standing in the middle of the trail, a beautiful buck just standing there looking at them.  Not only did the buck not run away on seeing them but remained while they got down off the buggy to get to their rifles.  After doing so, my Dad told his friend that he should take the shot.  During all this activity, the buck just stood there.  The story, as you probably guessed, is that they got the buck and the friendship was saved.  The real story, however, is that my Mom told my Dad about her prayer later and told him that she believed it had to have been an answer from God.

My Dad, a woodsman himself, told her he had been thinking about it all day and couldn’t believe what had happened.  He said that not only was the buck one of the fattest bucks he had encountered in the glades but that the buck had acted contrary to what every other buck would have done by not running when they stepped down from the swamp buggy and grabbed their rifles.  He said it had been bothering him all day because they had also discovered that the buck had absolutely no ticks or lice on him; something absolutely unusual, something he had never run into before with a deer taken in the Everglades.

This event made a lasting impression on my Dad and mom and changed their perceptions of God’s reality in our world.  God became real to them.  My Mom’s letter to me was an acknowledgement and acceptance of the reality of God in the real world we live in.  As I read this letter from my Mom, I remembered what God said through the man on the stage at the evangelical conference: “God will save your parents”.

Taking the story back to Kansas City, it was at the evangelical conference in Kansas City that Don Paulson decided to accept an offer to pastor a small church in Montevideo, Minnesota.  This would have been late fall of 1968.