A Faith Worth Sharing

A Lifetime of Conversations About Christ

C. John Miller

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780875523910
• eBook ISBN: 9781596387690
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In the final weeks of his life, Miller tells how he learned to share Good News with others—and how you can too. A great inspiration for sharing the faith.

CHAPTER ONE

Sharing a
New Faith

San Francisco, 1948

“I’ll take it.”

The boarding house on Eddy Street was dilapidated on the outside, and worse on the inside. But it offered a job and a place to live, and I needed both while I was at college. So I said to Bill, who owned the place, “I’ll take it.” With those words I accepted the job of breakfast cook for over a dozen single men.

It wasn’t much of a job, and I wasn’t much of a cook.

But Bill promised to train me. Early the next morning, under his watchful eye, I burned toast, overcooked eggs, and charred bacon. After an hour and a half, he limped away, grumbling, leaving the smoky battle station to me. Bill was elderly and shaky in health—watching me torch his kitchen had exhausted him.

From now on it would be up to me to master the art of cooking breakfast for my blue-collar roommates.

After about a week I still burned the toast, but the eggs and bacon were no longer semi-
incinerated. Most of the men had a good sense of humor, and some of them even made helpful suggestions about how to time my preparations. Cooking breakfast may sound simple, but doing it for that many men took coordination. It wasn’t easy to have the eggs, bacon, toast, and pancakes all done at the same time.

Gus, a fellow student at San Francisco State, helped with the preparation of the evening meal for his room and board. On the basis of his experience, he gave me friendly encouragement every morning. At least as much as I could understand. He was Panamanian, and his knowledge of English was still limited.

Here on Eddy Street I had my first experiences with sharing my faith. I had become a Christian only two months before, while working as a flagman and laborer on a highway maintenance crew in southwest Oregon. Before that I had been a college student in San Francisco. But I had dropped out. I had too many questions that college wasn’t answering.

I also think that a difficult childhood had caught up with me. My father had died when I was two years old. My mother remarried and my stepfather made life hard for all of us. I left home at sixteen and went to live with my sister in San Francisco. While working at the Navy Yard, I earned a high school diploma. About that time, we heard that my older brother Leo, who had protected and befriended me after my father died, had been killed in the war.

This news left me confused and searching for answers. I made my way back to my hometown in Oregon, and I got a job working on the highway and spent my spare time reading the Bible. Although I had been an atheist for many years, I couldn’t stop studying the Bible. Eventually God met me while I was wrestling with Ephesians, a small book in the New Testament. Reading it turned my world upside down. I had come to the end of the road, where there is nothing left but God. But he was all I needed.

Now I was different. Rather than being self-centered and self-absorbed, I had a new center—a relationship with my Father in heaven. Now I had a hunger to live for my new Father. I longed to share the joy that had come to me when my life was surrendered to God.

For me to know Christ was to know joy. It seemed to me that people were missing out on the best thing in life—not knowing about the love of God and the splendor of my Savior. I returned to school in San Francisco eager to share this new faith. I wanted to introduce everyone I met to my Father in heaven, knowing that the real changing of the inner life had to be the work of his Spirit. I knew that was the only way a stubborn person like me could come to God.

Now on Eddy Street, I wanted to share my faith with the men I cooked for, but they were not at all religious. At least three were outright atheists. They were not easy to talk with, especially about matters of the heart. But they were the people I saw every day. They couldn’t escape me—I was their cook. And I couldn’t ignore them even though some of them scared me. I had to share with them the gospel that had brought me so much joy.

I tried to be friendly, and then casually mention that I was a Christian. I didn’t want to force my ideas or “religion” on anyone. If someone said, “I don’t want to talk about religion,” I waited until he was ready.

When I was an atheist I had assumed that each person ought to make his or her own destiny because belief in God was pure wish fulfillment. It seemed to me atheism was “the only reasonable conclusion for a modern person based upon the facts of science.” But my views had never been challenged in debate by an intelligent opponent.

As a new Christian and a young college student, I was eager to be that intelligent opponent for others who thought as I’d once thought. I didn’t believe that it was reasonable to go through life without asking about its purpose and without considering whether life is controlled by impersonal fate or divine providence. I was convinced that if I shared the Christian faith in a rational and intelligent way, people would naturally want to know more about Jesus.

My first efforts, though, made me see that communicating the Christian faith is more than a matter of reasoning. Especially with the men at the boarding house, it was going to take more than a logical gospel presentation to bring Christ into their lives. I, the intellectual college student, had to learn to go where people really were. I found this out very quickly.

During my first two weeks in my new home, I mentioned in passing to a burly, bearded man that I was a Christian. He looked at me with contempt and rasped, “I am a member of the Socialist Labor Party, and we are as red as h—l.” He then blasphemed against the Bible and said that he looked forward to the Red Revolution, the hour in history when all Christians would be placed against the wall—and eliminated.

The thought of my death seemed to give him pleasure.

Was he trying to scare the socks off of a twenty-year-old working in the kitchen? If that was what he had in mind, he succeeded. I did not want to give up on anyone. But this man said clearly that he hated me and all that I stood for. Reluctantly I decided that he was not open to the Christian message. I treated him courteously but for the time being didn’t make any effort to tell him about Christ.

Then there was Tony. He was a tall, strong longshoreman. Was he made of the same stuff as this blasphemer? Possibly. While talking to me one day at breakfast, he said that he was an atheist. I just nodded and said that I used to be one, too. Should I try to talk to him about the Lord? He certainly did not look friendly. But after a time I decided that he was not like my red revolutionary. He spoke without bitterness when he said he was an atheist. So I tried to build a friendship with him.

The outward appearances were discouraging. Blond Tony in his black leather jacket looked like a cynical ex-soldier from a Hemingway novel. Occasionally he smiled, but most of the time he said little and ate dinner by himself, about three places away from the other boarders.

One evening, though, after eating, he pushed back his chair, peeled off his jacket, and said to the men sitting in the dining room, “Who’ll arm wrestle me?”

He grinned as a couple of men headed for the door. The silence was deafening. After a few minutes I heard myself saying, “Tony, I’ll wrestle you.”

How in the world did I get myself into this predicament? As I settled into position and bent my arm, I knew my arm looked like a toothpick compared to his. I wondered if he could break or injure it. But I wanted to reach him for Christ, and I knew from my Oregon background that men like Tony respect courage. Maybe arm wrestling would build a bridge into his world that intellectual reasoning couldn’t.

At any rate, in a moment our muscles were straining, our faces reddening. The strength of his arm was immense. What could I do but pray?

To his astonishment (and even more to mine), my arm did not move. He bent all his strength to the work, but my arm stayed where it was. A minute passed. He kept straining while my arm held like a rock.

I had no hope of putting down his arm. All I wanted to do was to keep my arm unmoved by his best effort. And that was exactly what happened. He could not move it!

Was there an angel in the dining room that night? Was Tony just being kind? He did not act like it. I felt him put all his strength into the battle. Maybe my arm had been strengthened by all the shoveling of sand and gravel I had done during my months on the highway crew.

Whatever the cause, my willingness to arm wrestle opened up Tony’s life to me. Within a few days, we had the following conversation:

“Tony, you told me you were an atheist.”

“Yeah, I don’t believe in God. Religion’s not for me.”

“O.K., but let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you ever been really scared?”

“In North Africa I was. We were crossing an open field, nobody around. Then the Stukas came. You know, the bombers that make the screaming noise? I tried to find a hole to hide. No holes, you tried to make one. No time, and the ground like rock. Then there was the howling of the Stukas and bombs hitting all around me. The ground was bouncing. Guys dead. It was h—l!”

For the first time I saw strong emotions in Tony. His cool exterior fell away, and we were there together feeling his fear.

I asked, “What did you do?”

He said, “I did what everybody else did. I prayed.”

We then talked about his instinctive crying out to God in his fear, and he listened to my idea that he’d prayed because deep in his heart he knew that God existed.

In the weeks that followed, Tony and I talked more. From time to time I enlarged on my own testimony and tried to make the point that people are at war with God—which explained his present (and my past) atheism. Tony listened because he liked me, but communicating the gospel has several stages. Tony was at the first stage. He had come to respect a person with faith, and that was a major change for him.

But I needed to go deeper with Tony. Looking back now, I believe I was not courageous enough with him. I should have worked much harder (while praying) to reach his conscience. Tony did not understand himself very well. Like the rest of us, he did not have a clue as to his real problem. He needed to be faced, kindly and tenderly, with his deepest motivat...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Word from the Editors
• 1. Sharing a New Faith
• 2. Faith up Close
• 3. Faith and Two Kinds of Truth
• 4. Sharing My Faith with the “Virtuous”
• 5. Facing the Skeptics
• 6. Faith Looks for Prepared Hearts
• 7. Living Water for the Thirsty
• 8. A Faith for Fathers, Sons, and Orphans
• 9. Faith Learns to Love Strangers
• 10. Epilogue by Rose Marie Miller
• Appendix A
• Appendix B