The decision was staring me in the face. God was inviting me to surrender to Him. No one told me I had to change and quit smoking, drinking, swearing or anything else. He wanted me to have a relationship with Him and to free me from my selfishness and guilt. He wasn’t put off by my sinfulness, and He wasn’t looking over the banister of heaven with a heavy mallet ready to punish me. He wasn’t requiring the rest of my life to do penance or to remove all the fun out of life. He wanted to give me life!

My friend and other Christians I had met seemed to have joy-filled lives, and it didn’t come from getting drunk and having wild parties. They had their lives together and I didn’t. I began to want what they had. But I needed to surrender to God.

Submitting to Him seemed like a massive leap of faith. I wasn’t sure I had what it took to commit. What would happen if I started but then failed? What would happen if I didn’t measure up? Then again, the possibility of having a real life, not just going through the motions, kept drawing me toward God. I wanted to leave behind the false view of life that I had imbibed from the many movies I watched where music and carefully scripted stories presented an idyllic façade. I wanted what was real, not phony; something I could embrace as true, not trying to live up to others’ expectations or to fit in with the prevailing culture.

I’d be a fool to walk away from God and back to my old slavery, which is what it was. I had little success in bettering my life; I was hollow inside with no other prospects for filling that hollowness. What did I have to lose when I had everything to gain? Yet, to trust in God would mean losing everything I knew. It was an all-or-nothing proposition, surrendering to the God who created me.

I wish I could have recorded my thoughts precisely as they happened, but it became clear that God was not asking me to do something He hadn’t already done. He submitted the life of His Son, Jesus Christ, to win me over and forgive me for being a sinful person. His love began to flow into me. God actually wanted me; He chose me. Would I choose Him back? Would I be willing to leave everything important to me behind? Would I sacrifice my pride, that sense of being the center of my focus in life, and take Him as the center of my life, with Him as the focus?

Yes, yes, yes! I didn’t say a specific prayer or go forward at an evangelistic crusade, and I hadn’t heard of Campus Crusade’s four-spiritual laws or the Roman Road. I surrendered to the love of God, who sent Jesus to die for me. I was, and continue to be, willing to go and do whatever God wanted for me.

The result? God turned on the light. Not just in my mind but in my whole life. I could relate to the Bible story where Jesus healed the blind man. That fellow ran around saying, “I once was blind, but now I see.” That is how I felt. I was convinced that God exists and that He loves me.

So much happened as a result. I drove home that night to my apartment in Buffalo, NY. During those 45 minutes on the road, doubt began to creep in. What did I do? Is it real? God, if you are there, give me a sign. The first of many miracles took place during that drive. It was a foggy evening and along the highway I saw three lights shining out of the ground through the fog, rays of light up as far as the eye could see. Thank you, Lord, for assuring me that it was all real.

That night I broke open every pack of cigarettes in the carton I had bought earlier in the day and smashed every cigarette. The can of pipe tobacco found its way into the garbage, and the beer gained a new home down the kitchen-sink drain. I left three bottles in the refrigerator as a testimony to my freedom. I was free from the control of things that I had proved I couldn’t control. No one said I had to give all that up; I didn’t feel God was demanding that of me. But I was so changed on the inside; I didn’t want to be controlled by that stuff anymore. I later learned that the Bible had a verse that explained what happened: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17). I was a new creature in Christ!

The next day driving back to see my friend, I passed by the very spot where I had seen the three beams of light coming out of the ground. I was not deterred by discovering that the “cause” of the phenomenon was a broken-down billboard with three floodlights shining upward. God used that to speak to me the night before, and I have never doubted my salvation since. Thank you, Lord.