I came to God the long way around, and I came to Him a mess. This is not a sermon. It is just what happened.
My father had been a deacon in the Church of Christ, and when I was a teenager he baptized my sister Candy and me right in the bathroom, with water from the sink. Years later a Congregational pastor baptized me again, in a creek in Smartville, California. It was around that creek that I first heard someone speak in tongues — real Pentecostal worship, though I had no name for it yet. Something in it marked me. I made up my mind to find a church like that in Fairfield, and I was willing to walk into every church in town until I found it.
The only thing I really had against the Pentecostals was my mother’s teasing. She used to speak of “holy rollers” with a laugh, and that was enough to steer me clear of them — so much so that when I began my search I meant to start with the Church of Christ, mostly because the name sounded right to me.
Easter, 1972
It was Easter. I was walking, it was getting late, so I ducked into the nearest denominational church. It wasn’t the one. The next Sunday, on my way again toward the Church of Christ, I saw a building I had passed countless times and never once noticed: Apostolic Faith Tabernacle. The name was almost unpronounceable, but it sounded like a church, so I went in. I knew my search was over the moment I saw an old woman worshiping with her hand raised.
I looked like Charles Manson in those days — beard, long hair, the works. The pastor’s wife quietly came and moved her little boy away from me, and I don’t blame her one bit. But the pastor, Brother Cates, never flinched. He never said one word about my hair or my beard. I was so critical in those days that if he had, I’d have walked out and never come back. I found out later that he was a novice — the church had been forced on him when the pastor before him had a stroke.
The night the voice came out
That Sunday night he preached on repentance. I had never heard it preached before in my life, and I knew it was meant for me. I started to repent — and I never even got past the first thing. A voice came out of me that was not my own, and then I checked out. The next thing I knew, I was coming to in a mess of snot and tears.
Everything that happened in between, they had to tell me afterward: that a devil had manifested in me, and that Brother Cates — humble enough to know it was beyond him — had called in an older, seasoned preacher named Hatcher, from Vacaville, to help. It was only later still that God showed me I had actually been possessed, and that the very same thing had happened to me once before. He was gentle about it. He didn’t show me what I’d been delivered from until I was able to bear it.
“Did you know God has a gift for you?”
When it was over, Brother Cates asked me how I felt. There was a distinct change inside me — real, unmistakable. Then he asked me a question I have never forgotten:
“Did you know God has a gift for you?”
I told him I didn’t know that — “but if God has a gift for me, I want it!”
He asked me if I’d been baptized. I told him about the sink and the creek. He didn’t argue with me. He simply opened the Scriptures, gave me the passages on baptism, and asked whether I had a Bible to look them up for myself and decide whether I had been baptized the way the Scriptures say — in Jesus’ name. Then he invited me back that Wednesday night.
I came back. That Wednesday — the week after Easter, 1972 — I was baptized the third time, in Jesus’ name. The third time was the charm, because it was the first one that matched the Book. Brother Cates told me later it was the very first baptism he ever performed.
A few weeks later
A few weeks after that, I received the Holy Ghost. Brother Wilson was preaching in Stockton that night. A friend from the church had told me it would feel like a lightning bolt striking the top of my head and running clear down to my feet — so when the Spirit came and there was no lightning bolt, I was sure I hadn’t received it. My friend saw it and called out, “Reider just got the Holy Ghost!” I started to cry, because I knew I had not, and I was not going to stand there and pretend I had something I didn’t.
Brother Wilson saw me crying, and he knew they weren’t tears of joy. He asked me what was wrong. I told him, “These people think I got the Holy Ghost, but I didn’t.” He stepped away for a moment, came back, and said:
“I don’t usually do this, but I saw you get the Holy Ghost. Now the devil told you that you didn’t — and the devil’s a liar. You tell him I said so.”
God kept tying the knots
Brother Cates married my wife and me — his first wedding after he was ordained — and our son was born on Cates’ own birthday. And my mother, the one who had once laughed about the holy rollers, received the Holy Ghost herself at eighty-three years old. It is never too late with God.
Ten years later, in 1982, a job and the circumstances of life moved us to the Sacramento area. Brother Wilson’s church in West Sacramento was the second one we tried. I remember sitting in the service and leaning over to ask my wife what she thought of it. She said, “Can’t you feel it!” I honestly couldn’t — my mind was on other things, and I missed the spiritual altogether. Her antenna was always up higher than mine.
I’ll be honest: I came to Wilson’s church afraid. He had risen in leadership and taken over the Harvestime broadcast, and I had watched good men get tainted by leadership before — changed in the way they led once the position was theirs. So I questioned him to his face about the things I had seen creeping in elsewhere. He passed with flying colors. The man I’d first met telling me “the devil’s a liar” was the same man years later, under my own close watch, still staid on Jesus and not on himself.
A better return
Years on, God spoke to my wife about our thirty thousand dollars in retirement savings. He told her to give it to Him, and He would give us a better return. She didn’t want to. At first she ignored it altogether. But God repeated His promise to her. One night, in a giving service for the new church building, I asked her whether God had said anything to her. That’s when she reluctantly admitted, “Yes — God already told me.” And we gave it, as unto God.
That was 2007. We have never been better off in our lives. When the market crashed in 2008, in the middle of so much personal financial turmoil, we never lost our house — and we haven’t gone without since I retired in 2019. We had made a loan to the only Banker who never fails, and He has been paying it back ever since.
What it all comes to
Our life in Christ has not always been easy. Trials come and they go. But God has never once failed to bless us when the need arose. That is the whole of it, from a devil cast out of a long-haired stranger off the street, to a quiet old age with the house still standing and the Spirit still here.
If you are reading this and you don’t know what to make of any of it — that’s all right. I didn’t either. I only knew enough to say what I said to Brother Cates that first night: if God has a gift for me, I want it. That was enough. It turned out the gift was God Himself.
— Reider Waage