A Marriage Rescued & Redeemed

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(00:01) To each of us, according to Mark 5:19, Jesus says to “Go and tell thy friends.” So that’s why we’re here. You’re all friends if you know Jesus Christ and Lord and Savior. We’re brothers and sisters in Christ and we’re friends and we all go to heaven if you know Jesus Christ. But we’re on different journeys but isn’t it beautiful that it ends up in the same spot.

(00:28) So, as we mentioned, going to go back in history to the year 1946, and soldiers were still coming home from World War II, both European and Pacific theaters, and many men had died, and yet many came home. There was a young lady, second lieutenant nurse, working in the Veterans Administration hospital in Neighborville, Ohio.

(00:51) she met one of these young men coming home and uh didn’t know him, but he said, “Um, how about if I take you out on a date? Would that be okay?” And she agreed to do that. And she went and told her mom, she said, “I met this soldier. He wants me to go out on a date and we’re going to a to a veterans dance tonight and and everything’s going to work out right.” Her mother said, her name is Virginia.

(01:11) Her mother said, “Virginia, I don’t think you ought to do that.” But Virginia went anyway. And as she was going to the dance, she was being driven by the soldier in his car. And and he looked like he was being bothered by something. And she said to him a couple, “Is everything okay?” And he says, “No, I’ve just got things on my mind that I just I got to get off my chest.” He says, “Can we pull over and talk a while and maybe I could be okay.

(01:35) We go on to the dance.” And so he did. And and they sat there and they began to talk. and he g began to get a little more aggressive with her and ended up forcing himself upon her. And I’m going to go no further with that, but it it wasn’t good. And so because of that, Virginia ended up with child and she had a major dilemma on her hands.

(01:59) So she lied to her father and said, “Uh, dad, the the Veterans Administration needs some help in Kansas City, Missouri. They’re kind of overloaded. They’ve asked for volunteers to come to Kansas City to help out with the veterans coming home. So, I agreed to do that. So, we’re going to go down there. I’m going down there for six to nine months and work there in the in the VA hospital.

(02:22) And I’ll be back uh after that amount of time. And so, she did. She went to Kansas City with her mother, her best friend. Those are the only two that knew about her situation. She went to the hospital and gave birth. gave birth to a child that when the baby was born, the nurses put a towel over the baby so that she could not visually bond with the baby because she already agreed to give that baby up. And if you can’t, if you haven’t figured it out yet, that was me.

(02:52) 1946, she was with child. 1947, I was born as put into an orphanage. Orphanages in those days were big rooms about half the size of this with cribs in it and metal uh cribs and dozens and dozens of babies crying with nobody to nurture them, cradle them or even nurse them. Occasionally a nurse came by uh which leads to a lot of problems in young children like that.

(03:23) And I was in that nursery for somewhere between six and nine months and a couple came along, William and Josephine Lewis, and they were looking for a son. They found me. They adopted me and took me home. William and Josephine were were good Catholics. My dad was head of the choir and my mom was involved and the ladies worked there and and that’s what I was taken into.

(03:50) They were also very patriotic and patriotism in those days as it is today often times is intertwined with what we would call Christianity and the two are almost inseparable. But dad loved uh the country. He was a military veteran. He’d been on the beach in Normandy uh when uh the American soldiers stormed the beach there against the Germans. He was an auto mechanic then. He was an auto mechanic uh when he got out of the army.

(04:10) He met my mother and got married. He worked on brakes on cars. They’re the things that stop cars and uh they wore out a lot in those days. You could get about 8 or 9,000 miles, 10,000 miles of a set of brakes. And so that’s what he did for a living. And so he was offered um a job.

(04:34) The man that owned the store, the brake shop he worked in said, “Bill,” he says, “I’m going out west to start a shop out there. if you come to work for me out in West, I think I could find a job for you and uh and you do well, maybe even start your own break business after a while. So, my dad said yes.

(04:52) So, he picked up the family, my brother, my adopted brother, and I who I was not related to by blood. My mom, my brother, and I — he took us out to California when I was 8 years old. We went to a suburb called Westchester, not more than 3 to five miles from the beach and little row houses there, you know, plaster and and 2x4s is what they were on a concrete slab, and that’s that’s what we moved into and it was nice.

(05:17) Went to a Catholic school and that was that was the way life began. 8 years old when I get there. And there we were in this residential area and a street between us and across the street were other houses like ours just up and down. But surprisingly, there was this chainlink fence behind the house across the street. Long chainlink fence.

(05:40) And beyond that chainlink fence was the north runway to Los Angeles International Airport. And I could sit on my front porch and I could see those airplanes right over there on the runway threshold running up their engines, white smoke pouring out the back of the engines until those cylinder heads got warmed up and they would get takeoff clearance. They’d pull out of the runway. They’d start down and they go up up into the air out west over the Pacific back east somewhere.

(06:06) And my heart went with every one of them. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, that was amazing. And so I was so interested that I began building these little plastic model airplanes. You know what I’m talking about. Put them together with that glue you’re not supposed to sniff. And we assembled those.

(06:23) I was in my bedroom. I like being alone a lot. So we began to do that. And then I finally got into uh you control airplanes. Little gas engine airplane on the end of a string and you run it around in a circle around you. And that was exciting. So but not exciting enough. So I got into radio control airplanes. I would sit here in a box and fly it to overhead something like today’s drones and so I was excited about that was something I love flying.

(06:50) At about 17 years old uh I was still la last year in in high school. I worked at a theater. Now theater was something about half this size with a couple hundred people in it and a movie on and and everything’s dark in the room. I was an usher and usher would walk down the aisle with a flashlight on the floor showing people where to sit down because the room was dark.

(07:15) And as I was an usher, I saved my dollars and every two weeks I could afford one flight as a student learning to be a private pilot. Oh, that was exciting. I loved it. Every couple of weeks getting to fly a real airplane, one engine, little airplane, but it was exciting.

(07:35) The owner of the flight school came to me one day and he said, “Vince,” he said, “Um, you’re probably going to solo here pretty soon and, you’re under 18 and you can’t do that without your father’s permission.” I thought, “Oh, well.” So, I needed my father’s permission to do that. So, I he gave me this piece of paper, just one sheet, and he said, “Get your father to sign right here.”

(07:57) So, I sheepishly went home, saw my dad sitting there in his favorite chair with his coffee table there next to him uh watching TV like he was usually doing. And uh I got up all the nerve I could and I put that down next to him on that stand and I said, “Dad, I’ve been taking flying lessons. I didn’t tell you, but I need to sign this piece of paper so I can go solo.”

(08:18) And I waited and he said, “Vince, finally glad to see you’re doing something on your own for once.” And so on with that became a deeper love of flying and more and more I soloed when I was 18. Got my pilot’s license, continued on into into college after graduation. Went into college, met a young lady that I loved. Went through first and second year of college.

(08:43) We fell in love. We said, hey after graduation let’s get married. And we plan to get married a after graduation. But at the same time, I had become an Air Force cadet in college. They’ll pay part of your bill if you’ll grow and agree to go into the Air Force.

(09:01) And I was just hoping for one of those pilot training slots. Now, it cost about a million dollars to train one pilot, one student in the Air Force. That was then, think of what it is now. And it takes about a year, about 12-hour days intense training. And uh got to be an officer. You only get a selected few get these positions and, lo and behold, I got one of those slots to go in Air Force pilot training.

(09:25) The problem was we’d agreed to get married and I was going to go on what’s called Active Duty two weeks after graduation. I was to pack my goods and take off and so we were already wanting to get married. So we decided let’s get married between my junior and senior year, and then we’ll get commissioned go right into the Air Force. Went in the Air Force and began to fly.

(09:49) First missions were in what you would today call spy planes, just droning back and forth in the sky adjacent to Vietnam at the time, and that was good and we had a lot of tours. Military moves around a lot. I’ve been in all 50 states, 23 foreign countries and I spent a year in Thailand. Typical military tour one year without your wife. She’s at home with the children if you have any and her husband’s gone for an entire year.

(10:16) Imagine that ladies. So I spent another year remote tour they call them in the country of Saudi Arabia. Lived in Riyadh in the capital. Uh spent two tours short tours on the island of Guam. Was about 3 months at a time doing that. And it’s I said brutal on a family military.

(10:42) you the movies, the the movie industry and and all the patriots make it look like it’s something really great, but it takes its toll, especially on a marriage. Get a lot of divorces, a lot of adultery, and a lot of men taking their own lives because they just can’t deal with the problems they’ve had in life. And that’s part of being in the military. It’s not all that it appears to be. I came home from uh from the Vietnam War and flying over there.

(11:05) I knew I was going to get a a new assignment. I was going to fly a new airplane because the kind of airplanes I was flying at the time didn’t get used in the United States and the current Air Force. So, I came home. I was wondering what are they going to give me now? Oh, I’d love for one of those big airplanes, you know, something really big or something really fast or something both.

(11:22) And so, um, they said, “Uh, Vince, you’re going to go back to the United States and you’re going to be stationed at Griffith Air Force Base in upstate New York near Syracuse, and you’ve been assigned to fly B-52 bombers.” Oh, really? That’s kind of what I wanted to do. Now, B-52, I know there’s a lot of people in here are clueless of what that is, but I’ll describe it. It’s a big airplane. Really big.

(11:46) Weighs about 488,000 lb. That’s do the math. It’s just shy of half a million pounds. 300,000 lb of that half a million lb is fuel. So basically it’s a flying gas tank. It seems it’s 180 foot wide if you’re to measure from one wing tip to the other wing tip wider than this room 185 ft. By comparison, I want to take you back in history long ago.

(12:15) The years 1903 December 17th is Kittyhawk, North Carolina. Orville and Wilbur Wright who are from Dayton, Ohio, sons of a minister. They went to North Carolina to make the first powered airplane flight in history. They were going to be the first ones to do that. And so they did a Kittyhawk.

(12:37) They had a fabric and wooden airplane, a little engine that drove two propellers and a rail to to launch that thing from it. There they went. Their entire first flight was 120 ft long. Ain’t that amazing? But the B-52 is 185 ft wide. So he could have done the entire first flight to the Wright brothers on the top of the wing of the airplane and had 65 ft for landing roll left over. So you get the idea. It’s a big airplane. Had eight jet engines in pods. Two on the outside.

(13:05) Number one and two, number three and four, number five and six, and number seven and eight. produced a lot of thrust and I said many times that the experience of flying that thing was uh especially during the takeoff getting clearance to take off uh there’s one word and that’s exhilarating.

(13:32) Every time I flew that airplane it was exhilarating or getting to altitude and pulling up underneath and every fueling tanker and getting aviation fuel passed from one airplane to another. That’s uh that’s amazing. It’s indescribable almost. Takes about a 12,000 ft runway, 5,280 foot in a mile. So it’s over two miles long runway. So that’s if when you get taking off.

(13:58) Sometimes if you decide to stop, you got a lot of room left over to stop in because you’re not going to stop that thing on a dime when it’s moving so fast. So I flew those for a while. And after a few years, I got assigned to uh the island of Guam. Then President Nixon had decided to bomb the country of Cambodia because he found North Vietnam, South Vietnam, you had Laos and you had Cambodia, the North Vietnamese bad guys as they were called. Couldn’t get across into South Vietnam because of demilitarized zone.

(14:24) So they went into Laos, came down through Cambodia and in the South Vietnam to attack attack our our allies. And so the president says we need to send the bombers in and bomb Cambodia and eliminate this threat as best as we can. They were coming down the path called the Ho Chi Min Trail and president did not get approval from Congress to do that which got him in a lot of trouble later on.

(14:51) But we were part of that force. Went to the island of Guam, flew off 11-hour missions. Uh just dead heading 5 and 1/2 hours that way. Drop your bombs 5 and 1/2 hours home. We dropped uh 22 750lb bombs. That’s a big bomb. Bombs are still used today. Same one. A 750 lb bomb is has a lot of energy in it when it when it goes off.

(15:18) In fact, that bomb will kill everything within 500 ft diameter. I mean everything. The trees, the grass, the animals, the children, the suckling infants, the mothers, the fathers, the grandpas and the grandmas gone, obliterated out to a,000 ft diameter. Many other things were damaged or destroyed or killed. It was an ugly thing.

(15:51) We’d fly in in three ships cells, the lead aircraft, the number two and the number three aircraft. And we all drop our bombs in certain timing. And there was a kill zone on the ground about a mile wide and about a 2 mi long. And everything in there, nothing lived in that kill zone. And so we pull off the target, drop our bombs, release, turn back towards u Guam where we’re flying. And and and you might hear one of us say to the other one, “Hey Bob, I wonder what they’re serving for dinner in the officers club tonight.

(16:17) ” while those bombs are still on their way to the ground, on the way to obliterate countless people. So, you’re looking at a man that’s killed, I don’t know, one, two, 300 people. Who knows? Only God knows. And that was a part of my past. It was a real part of my past. We were bombing Cambodia. And I want you to remember that country’s name, Cambodia. Interesting place. I was flying a lot, training a lot. Seems the military is always training.

(16:48) Went back to New York, uh, upstate New York and and we were married and and there was a lot of pressure, a lot of time spent at the Flying Squadron, and it’s hard in a marriage. And after 7 years of marriage, my wife, we had two children. My wife said, “Uh, I’m leaving. I just can’t take this anymore.” She actually filed me for divorce. The judge agreed with that.

(17:12) decree and issued the final statement divorced. And that was it. She moved to California, back near her parents where we had met. I stayed in upstate New York flying kind of just get along with life, try to ignore the thoughts in the back of my mind and that was that. And that’s the way we went on. Air Force is always training. They sent me on a training session, two week training down in San Antonio, Texas.

(17:44) You train for two or three weeks. You fly like every third or fourth day at most. I went to San Antonio, Texas for an additional training, three weeks long. This adventure, got the weekend off. Uh, do what you want. So, I had this thought occur to me. I think I’ll buy an airplane ticket on my own and fly to Los Angeles to see my ex-wife.

(18:05) see how the kids are going, you know, just for old time sake. We had a six-year-old and a 2-year-old at the time and I’ll do that and we’ll see how they’re doing. I’ll come back here, go to training and and go back to flying.

(18:21) And so I did a flew out there and Angela, who was the oldest of the two, six years old at the time, she said, “Mommy, will daddy go to church with us because I want the other children in my Sunday School class to see who my daddy is.” Men, if you ever heard anything like that, it’ll get to you. And so I agreed to do that and my wife took them back to the Sunday school and the 2-year-old in the nursery, and they did that during the meeting.

(18:52) And I listened to this message and the minister was was preaching typical 45 minute to an hour message and he preached one of these messages. It’s not unusual for a conservative maybe Baptist church or conservative church of that nature, but it was rock solid salvation message as strong as you could get it.

(19:20) how Christ died on the cross for you paid the price for sin which you could not pay and on and on and on and digging into my heart and I said huh really well the sermon ended and I was there and ex-wife and ought to get the children deacon came up to me after the meeting took me by the hand he said you heard Jesus Christ and the message of salvation preached here.

(19:49) Would you like to pray with me right now to accept Jesus Christ in your life as your Lord and Savior? I said, “Yeah, I guess I would.” It just seemed and here it just seemed to be the thing to do. Nothing other than that just seemed to be the thing to do. So, I did it. I prayed with him and asked Jesus Christ to come into my life and be my Lord. And I did that and I prayed.

(20:14) Nothing big happened, but something happened. I don’t know. My weekend visit was over. It was time to go back to training and on to flying. But before I left there, my ex-wife gave me this little Bible kind you could fit in your back pocket. You know what I mean? New Testament Psalms. She says, “Here, I have a gift for you.” And I said, “Thank you very much.” Threw it in my suitcase, went back to training.

(20:38) Eventually went back up to flying airplanes again. Was in this apartment I was renting. The other guy was downstairs and uh just, you know, by myself up there and I got home, unpacked, saw that Bible and suitcase, tossed it over there in my nightstand and went on about my business, doing what I needed to do.

(20:54) So that night, I went to bed. I saw the little Bible sitting there and I thought, “Huh, what’s this about?” So I opened it up at random. Had no idea what I was looking at or where to go or what to read, but I just opened it up and started reading. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.

(21:09) ” So, I tossed it down there in a nightstand and went about my business, went home again the next day, uh, and tired, sitting on the edge of my bed, pulling my flight boots off, you know, getting ready for bed, and there’s that little Bible again on the nightstand. Couldn’t ignore it. There it was. So, I picked it up again, opened it randomly, randomly.

(21:26) Couldn’t tell you today where it was, but I did that. Hm, that’s interesting. Put it down. And then night after night, day after day, week after week, and month after month, I began to read that Bible, brothers and sisters, and it started making sense. It started getting a hold of me and it started getting into my spirit.

(21:51) I did that. I continue to do that. I learned about prayer. I learned a few other things out of that Bible. One day that I just had this had this feeling, you know, why don’t it was the next year I I had this feeling. Why don’t you call your ex-wife and ask, you know, just ask her maybe she would remarry you? You think? So, I made that call and nervous as can be.

(22:19) And I said, “Do you think perhaps uh we could get remarried?” And uh she said, “Well, you know, I don’t know, she says, “Uh, let me put out a fleece to the Lord and you call me back in 5 days and I’ll give you an answer.” So, she went and and put out a fleece and um I called after 5 days and she said, “God answered my fleece and said to get remarried to you.” And so we did.

(22:49) I hopped on an airplane, flew out to Southern California, went into that same Pentecostal church, walked the aisle with her on my hand, and we got we got remarried to each other. And sitting over here is my wife of 57 years, Charlotte. And she’s and I have been through hell and back. And I’ll tell you, it’s not all good. Then it was bad, but now it’s good. And God can rescue any marriage out of the depths, no matter how deep, if we’ll just listen to his word.

(23:22) Just a little. Just a little. Let him get a foot in the door somewhat. I’d spent two years in uh Air Force cadetses in college. I spent 24 years and three months on active duty flying as a B-52 pilot. 24 years. half of my adult life flying airplanes. I retired from the Air Force after that time. Got into working for what was then called the Department of Defense. Today it’s called the War Department.

(23:51) Does the same thing doing research and development on the B2 stealth bomber and the F-22 stealth fighter, which is kind of the state-of-the-art of what’s going on right now. State of the art of things you can talk about anyway. And so I got involved with that. If you add that up, that’s 40 years.

(24:09) 40 years of military experience. I said if you cut me military will bleed out of me. It’s in me. It’s in my spirit. It’s part of my nature by now. So I was having some interesting reactions. We got into Pentecostal movement. We got into we started charismatic movement got in pistol Pentecostal movement uh conservative Baptist movement. And I thank God for each one of those.

(24:37) There are people in those churches that actually believe in Jesus Christ and are going to heaven just as much as you and I. Had I died when I was in the charismatic movement, I thoroughly believe that I would have gone to heaven or when I was in the Pentecostal or when I was in Baptist. This is not an exclusive arrangement that God has provided in the Anabaptist community.

(24:57) Amen. But each place we went, we heard some good preaching. But we wondered, is anybody here living what’s being preached? And we found, yeah, there were. But there were a lot of them that weren’t. There were women downtown with shorts on, maybe the top button under blouse, sunbutton.

(25:22) Men were wearing whatever they felt like doing uh wearing doing whatever they wanted to do. And it was kind of a shameful thing in the during the week. But there they were on Sunday with their coat and tie looking good and proper. I’m telling you, there’s no such thing in outside the Anabaptist community that as we know it, there’s no such thing as fellowship. You don’t go anybody’s house for supper in the evening or dinner Sunday afternoon.

(25:45) Doesn’t exist. We went over to the pastor’s house and conservative anabaptist church. We went over there for one meal as his obligatory u dinner with his uh flock and that was it. four years, never got an invitation and never did before that either in the other churches that we were in. All along the way we we left one, we went to another, we went to another and we said there’s got to be something so better than this. So we moved on thinking ah we found it now and ah we found it now and and we found it now certainly we kept

(26:24) moving and moving sometimes spending uh five six seven eight years in the same place thinking boy we we have found what we wanted but God used all these in our in our lives and um but we were still searching and I I could tell you a story about what I call the bread of life. This is truly about the bread of life. My wife had got into bread baking.

(26:51) She got good at it. She began to teach other ladies how to bake bread. You know, I’d take leftovers. I’d take mistakes. I’d take anything. You take a warm slice of bread out of the oven, put a big slab of butter on that, and it’s just like, “Oh, this is good.” I loved it. And her baking just got better and better. She got a reputation.

(27:14) So, she was asked by a bakery, Centerville, outside of Dayton, Centerville, Ohio, and they said, “We we’re baking a lot of baked goods here. We sell some white bread, but we have customers that like some wheat bread, some some whole wheat bread that’s really good and healthy for you, and we’ve heard you bake it.

(27:38) So, could you bake some loaves for us uh every now and then, maybe periodically during the week, and and we’d be able to sell those. we reimburse you to. And so she said yes. So she’s going baking bread for this bakery and once in a while I have to take a trip for the Air Force. Not flying anymore. It’s a business trips visiting some of the big uh aircraft manufacturers, factories and things like that. And I’d go off maybe a trip now and then.

(28:03) And they said to her, “Hey, why don’t you go to church with us?” And she said, “Okay.” The bakery was owned by Kenneth and May Miller and David and Carolyn Miller. They were brothers. And the church they took her to was Old German Baptist Brethren, which is an Anabaptist church. And she went and I’d go on a trip, she’d go to church, and she began liking this. She loved wearing head coverings. She already wore a head covering in the Baptist church. She was told by the pastor’s wife, “Yeah, we used to do that years ago.

(28:36) ” But she loved wearing a head covering and she loved seeing the Anabaptist with their head covering on and she thought it she just loved it. I think she wants to be buried in her cap if possible. But she saw this and she told me she says, “Vince, I found I think we found what we’ve been looking for.” And so I went with her to to a meeting and went to a couple more meetings and I said, “Yes, this is what we’ve been looking for. Finally, something we don’t have to quit looking.

(29:09) I knew in sight that this was it.” But I had a problem. It’s called 40 years of military experience. You know, my experience was you slap me on one cheek, I’ll slap you back twice as hard on the other cheek. you know, kill or be killed. The phrase the phrase still goes around today. World War II.

(29:35) Now, wasn’t that a good war? There’s no such thing as good wars. Real people die. Civilians are killed. Sometimes 3 to one in World War II Eastern Theater, 20 to1 civilians over military were killed. And we could go on and on and on about the damages of war. I had a problem. and Kenneth Miller, the owner of the bakery, was going to meet with me.

(29:59) We were at an annual meeting at Cedarville University, which the German Baptists had rented uh for our annual meeting. And I was I was supposed to meet Kenneth and and Kenneth Miller in the cafeteria. And so Charlotte and I went to the cafeteria, look for Kenneth. Can’t find Kenneth. Where is Kenneth? And brother over here sitting here. His name was Todd Boon.

(30:19) Uh Todd says, “You look like you’re looking for somebody.” Uh, who is it? I said, ‘Well, we’re looking for Kenneth Miller. He’s supposed to talk to us about non-resistance. He says, “Oh, they think Kenneth had a heart attack and and they took him away in an ambulance.” He says, “What what were you supposed to talk to him about?” I said, “Well, I was going to talk to him about non-resistance.

(30:39) ” H So Todd said to me, “Vince, sit down.” And Todd began to walk me through scripture. like I didn’t even know was there. The bedrock of that scripture, Colossians 1:13, for he has translated me out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his dear son, the kingdom of God’s dear son. Translated me out of the kingdom of darkness. There’s two kingdoms.

(31:12) There’s two kingdoms. In fact, when you begin to look at it, it’s all over the New Testament. For the law of the spirit of life has freed me from the law of sin and death. Two kingdoms, two laws. It’s all over the place. Ephesians 6:12, who wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places. The devil is real.

(31:45) That second word is people people get stunned when I say this too abruptly. He wants to kill you. That’s it. He wants to kill you. He wants to take your life. He’s an enemy that earns our respect because he’s a powerful enemy, but we know where the real power is. 2 Corinthians 10:14, for the weapons of our warfare and are carnal, but mighty through the God through the pulling down of strongholds, the enemy strongholds, the enemy fortresses. John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world.

(32:21) My kingdom is not of this world.” If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight. You know the conclusion I came to? 40 years I’ve been fighting the wrong war. Risking my life, my family, my blood, my existence on the wrong war. There was a new warfare, a different warfare, but a warfare with a king and a commander of Jesus Christ who loves me and saved me and gave his life for me. A different warfare with different rules and different objectives.

(33:11) During all this time, there’s a parallel event going on, a lot of things going on in our lives. In 2004, uh, let me back up from that a minute. Uh, after Todd had explained uh, the Colossians 113 non-resistance, we became old German Baptist Brother ministers in 2011. And that was just 15 years ago. It’s not that long. And we joined and we loved it. And we love it to this day. People say they’re going somewhere else.

(33:45) I’m leaving here. I’m out of here. You know what I have to say? Where are you going? Where are you going to go to that’s better than this? Well, we’re going to try something else. You know, you find them few years later. They didn’t find something else they were looking for.

(34:02) They found something else they weren’t looking for and it wasn’t good. Don’t think you haven’t got it good. There is nothing better as far as I know and most of you know that too. Some get tired, some get weary, some get to listening to gossip and things like that. I’m telling you, there is nothing better. I’ve been out there. I’ve looked.

(34:22) I’ve I’ve been held that I was Yeah, we I know. But in 2004, Charlotte had been doing search for the National Archives, various places, uh just trying to find my natural mother. And I said, “Okay, you want to do that? That’s fine. Go ahead.” So she did. And in 2004, she says, “Vince, I think I found your natural mother.” Really? Look at this stuff. This has got to be her. It was.

(34:48) So I called her. Dear God, let me at least talk to her. That’s all I want. God, just talk to her. So I can hear the voice of my natural mother. And I did. 2006, two years later, I got to meet her, Virginia, for the first time in my life. All those years, and never having seen me, she’d never seen me and I had never seen her. And God brought it together. God has amazing, what I call them, pivotal points in our life, and this was one of them.

(35:24) She said this, 2006. She says, “We went out to brunch together and she says, “Let me take you home. I want you to meet Edwin.” Well, who’s Edwin? Edwin is my husband. Oh, Edwin’s your husband. Is Edward my father? No. Uh, Edwin doesn’t know about you. You came along before I married Edwin. But she said, “It’s time to meet Edwin.” Edwin.

(35:47) So, we went home, met Edwin, and that was all nice and lovely and cheery and cordial, and they said, “Oh, we’re having a family reunion. Bunch of families will be there. I want you to stick around and join us. That just something inside me said, “Uh-uh, don’t do that.” So, we didn’t. We went home with the three adopted children we had and and we headed for home. And we got home. 3 days later, I got this really, really nasty letter in the mail. It was from Edwin.

(36:13) And Edwin talked about how I’d ruined their lives. Didn’t blame his wife for it. He thought, “I’m at fault. I’m the one that made this whole mess. Why don’t I just keep my mouth shut? And this letter went on and on with with foul language in it. And he said, I haven’t talked to my wife in 3 days, and I don’t know if we’re ever going to talk again because of you. But interestingly, Edwin took a copy.

(36:40) Why did he make a copy of that letter? I have no idea. Well, I know why. He stuck it in his files. I think he lived in a little suburb of Neapville, um, Ohio, and that was, um, where they were living. And, uh, he writes me this letter. Edwin dies, uh, Virginia dies, they’re having a a sale, an estate sale, the house, uh, their children, uh, go through the estate sale, selling everything. They go through the file cabinet. In there, lo and behold, is this letter.

(37:16) That letter has been laying there. He put it in his tax files. Why did he do that? That letter has been there for 10 years untouched. And during this estate sale, their children find this and they say, “Could this be we have a brother that we don’t know about?” So they wrote me a letter and I got a copy of that letter in the mail some days after that and it opens up and it says, “You don’t know who we are, but we know who you are.” I said, ‘Usually junk mail like that, you just toss it overhead. But I kept reading and they said, ‘We were going

(37:49) through our parents’ stuff and we found out that we have a brother and we think that’s you. And they talked and they said, “Yes, it’s me.” And I found out I had two brothers and four sisters that I never knew before in my life. And we did, and we still do get along just fine. There’s no bitterness or anything like that between us. God is good.

(38:16) He continues to be good. We’re still working on some of them to accept Christ, but it may be a long journey. At the same time all this is going on, I heard about a so a program by Christian Aid Ministries um called salt. Uh used to be savings and loan. It’s now savings. They’ve cut the loaning part out of it. So it’s teaching people in third world countries how to save money.

(38:40) We don’t give them any money. We save money. It’s in 23 countries, 100,000 people in it. They had an informational meeting out in western Ohio. And uh some guys I know said, “Hey, Vince, why don’t you come join us out here?” And yeah, this guy sounds interesting. I’ll go out there. The man that was running the thing and a couple other men talked about it all day long. And and so they said, “Meeting’s over. That’s it.

(39:04) ” So good deal. I was there with Todd Boon, the guy that talked about me with non-resistance. Todd was sitting there with me. And this man comes up to me afterwards and he says, “Vince, what country will you be going to?” And I said, “I didn’t say I was going to any country.” “Oh, yeah. We think it would be good if you went to Haiti. That’d be a good first place.

(39:27) ” And it was then that I learned an interesting Anabaptist principle. If you show up to any informational meeting, that makes you an instant volunteer. So go anyway. Right? So we did and we got involved in that and and um I now oversee Nigeria and and possibly soon to be Pakistan. I’ve been overseas to different countries 11 different countries 20 times uh to some of them three four five times and it’s been exhilarating.

(39:58) The highlight of this salt program as I was visiting places like Ghana, Tanzania, Niger, Preston’s here from Niger, Nigeria, which I oversee today in Ukraine and India and Bangladesh and Myanmar. And guess where the last place I went? Cambodia. What a God we serve? Cambodia. And there I went to some of the savings groups about 25 people in each group and I talked to two of the groups there and I said I told them what I’d done. I said a third of them didn’t even know what I was talking about. How I dropped bombs.

(40:38) I said I’ve killed the elders your country elders here. I’ve killed them and I don’t know how many. Would you forgive me? And they said yes we will. The last meeting there was a man there who had his left leg blown off. Really dark-kinned guy. I don’t know how when the last time he bathed was. Had a crutch over here. No left leg, no left arm, and his left eye blown out. He had stepped on a landmine.

(41:07) Explosive landmine left there from the Vietnam War. This was 20 years after the war. He stepped on this landmine. It’s still happening today. There’s still live ammunition out there from 50, 60, 70 years ago. I went up just briefly hugged that man. You know, I just felt I need to do that. And there was something happened then that that said, “You turned the corner. It’s time to go on in a new direction.” So, we did.

(41:37) I’m going to leave you um with this last story if I may in the interest of time. B-52 is a very large aircraft. Has a crew of six. I told you weighs 488,000 pounds. Uh takes a lot of runway to take off. At least five five or six thousand the rest of it for landing roll if you need to stop. And and during that takeoff you get clearance from the control tower. Pull out on the runway and go.

(42:06) And during that takeoff there’s two speeds you got to watch out for. V1 and V2. The airlines call military calls it velocity number one. And velocity number two is called refusal speed. Velocity number one, refusal speed. And that’s the interesting point. It means what it says. That’s the last point in which you have to refuse the takeoff.

(42:25) After that point, you’re going doesn’t make any difference. You try to stop a half a million pound airplane after that speed, you’re not going to make it. You’re going to run off the end of the runway. So, you got to make a decision at that point. Thundering down the runway at that weight.

(42:40) You get to that refusal speed. You got other crew members on board. I was the aircraft commander. I was the one in charge. I was at the controls and I was the decision maker. And it was up to me to say the go no go word. Common. You almost always go. That one word, if you can believe this, is committed. Committed means there’s no going back.

(43:05) There is no that way anymore. It’s that way. You’re going forward. There’s no death if you try to stop. The only way to life is get this thing off the ground in the air. So, we kept going, committed. I no longer said the word committed and the number seven engine fire warning light came on. That’s not good if you haven’t recognized that. So, we were thundering down the runway, number seven engines on fire, and I got to take it in the air.

(43:36) That’s the only thing else. There’s no going back. So, I the crew knew what we were doing. They knew what we had to do. I told the co-pilot, “Gear up,” which he knew reached the handle. Raise it. All the landing gear come up like that. I no sooner said gear up than the number eight engine fire warning light came on.

(43:53) The heat from number seven set off the fire warning detectors of number eight. So, let me describe why this is a problem. You got two engines out here. You got two engines running here, but you got four engines on this side. Two number number one and two and three and four.

(44:09) And you only got five and six on this side. So what you get into a situation where with full power on the aircraft goes into an uncommanded right turn. Well, that’s not good because if it keeps turning, you’re going to roll over and crash.

(44:26) Then what do you do? You pull the power back to reduce the asymmetrical thrust as it’s called and that slows down the roll. But the problem is if you pull the throttles back, then you start going back down. So you have to find this little sweet spot in there where you had just enough power to keep from descending but not quite so much to keep yourself in a right turn. So we did what we did and I’m sorry I’m abusing the time here.

(44:53) We did what we did and we burned off fuel by boring holes in the sky. Like the airlines can dump fuel. Military airplanes for some reason they don’t dump fuel. So we flew around. We got enough altitude. flew back and forth for three or four hours and the u the air traffic control center keeping in touch with us the control tower back at the base Griffith Air Force Base keeps a watch over all this stuff. They know what’s happening and they called the wing commander.

(45:17) Now the wing commander drives a white Air Force blue car with a a blue one and a white top on it with a red light on it. And he’s the commander of the entire military base. Two or three thousand people on it. has a hospital, a commissary, a grammar school, a school bus route. I mean, it’s big. Has a railroad track and a coal plant and all this.

(45:41) He was responsible for the whole thing, plus all the B-52 bombers, all the KC135 tankers and all the nuclear weapons that were stored underground on the other side of the runway. People knew where he was and who he was when he came by. and his white top as we called it. And they called him in the middle of the night because this was an all night flight of all things, already tired. And they said, “We got an airborne emergency.

(46:03) Two engines, two outboard engines out on one side. We thought you need to know.” And they said, “Okay, who we got flying the thing?” And they said, “Well, it’s Vince Lewis, and uh this is only his second flight as a brand new aircraft commander.” So he says, “I’ll be right there.

(46:21) ” So he puts on his flight suit, gets in his car, goes down to the command post, and sits there. And so he’s there waiting, watching what’s going on. So we get down to the weight that we’re supposed to allowed to land at, and we come around uh from maybe 10 mile out approach and you get to the glide slope, as it’s called. You’re on instruments, whether it’s clear or not, you’re on instruments, and you get to the glide slope, which is going to lead you down to the runway.

(46:43) And you got an instrument called an attitude indicator and a horizontal situation indicator. And it’s got two little bars on it. One bar goes up and down to tell you when you’re on the glide path and one bar goes left and right. The idea is to keep them centered. Left and right means you’re going too far right, too far left.

(47:03) And so the idea is to keep them take them right down to the beginning of the runway where these big runway 25 numbers were on. We were on runway 25 and uh take it down there. They also had a guy on a radar underground, a radar controller, and he would back you up by saying, “Buff 24, you’re on glide path on glide slope. Buff 24, you’re going slightly left of glide path.

(47:27) Buff 24 on glide path on glide slope. Buff 24 slightly below glide path.” I never varied an inch. He never made a single call other than on glide path on glide slope. And so there we are coming down, coming down again. Another time there’s no return because now you say, “Oh, you’re lightweight. No problem.” Well, you do have a problem. It’s the same problem all over again, only worse.

(47:55) You got all this power one side. You’re a lightweight aircraft. You got less power on this side. And you’re going down. You not only have to stop the descent, you have to get to level, and you have to get to back up to where you’re climbing. So now you got to demand a a dynamic thrust requirement. And so it’s it’s a difficult situation.

(48:15) And the four crew members upstairs, they got ejection seats. They’re fired on rockets. The rocket opens the parachute. The ejection seat comes down. Hopefully lift through that. But the two guys downstairs, their ejection seats go downward. And so you have a moral obligation to get that airplane down and to get them past that no ejection point. So you have a lot writing on this lives of of all the crew, the airplane and things like that.

(48:42) So we’re coming coming in for landing and and I can see those big runway numbers and the runway strobe lights going and the red lights at the beginning of the runway and it’s like uh oh this is this is a great site. Nothing like that. And so we came in over the numbers. We touched down. You hear the familiar chirp chirp of the tires as they touch the ground. 300 PSI tires, massive tires. They just go chirp chirp.

(49:10) And uh lower the nose. The co-pilot at my instruction. You say shoot. And he pulls a lever, pops a 28 foot parachute drag shoot back to help slow the airplane down. You got the flaps down. You put the spoilers up. You get on the brakes and you try to slow this thing down and finally you get it slowed down.

(49:29) You dump the drag shoot and get it slowed down. You got to get off the runway. There’s fire trucks and police cars everywhere. It looks like a Christmas tree. And so we pull off the runway and chop the engines. The fire trucks are making there to make sure there’s no other fire. And there standing out in front of the airplane is the wing commander, Bob Duffer. I’ll never forget Bob. Bob was like an old cowboy, you know.

(49:54) He even talked like a cowboy and and but he was a big man. He had respect just looking at him. And so I saw him out there and co-pilot says, “Hey, there’s the wing commander. You better go greet him.” So I got downstairs out on the ladder down on the ground, walked smartly over to the wing commander towards him, put my flight cap on, popped a good salute, waiting for him to return the salute, and he stuck out one of these big hands. And he says, he says, “Well done, partner. Well done.

(50:23) Just the way I would have done it. Wow. Isn’t that what I want to hear from my commander, King Jesus, when I go to heaven and he says, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Well done. Enter into the kingdom.” Why? Why would he do that to us? because we were committed to him over to get past this problem with God’s help and I’m not going back.

(50:57) I’m not going to be that way with my wife and children anymore. I’m not going to have this habit or that habit. I’m done with it. There’s no going back. So, we’re not. There’s an urgency to this all. Romans 13:12, the night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Philippians 1:21.

(51:20) For me to live and to is Christ and to die is gain. Daily choices sometimes they’re very difficult. Sometimes they’re at a great cost. But there’s tremendous joy that awaits us at the end of those decisions when you’re committed to Christ and his ways. Committed to Christ and his ways. Philippians 3:14, a familiar verse. I press towards the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

(51:59) I trust too that you could be committed. There’s no going back, folks. There is no going back. Thank you. God bless you.