I grew up in the Bronx, a section of New York City just north of Manhattan. My parents, brother, sister, and I lived in a six-story apartment building. My dad was a decorated New York City Police Department (NYPD) detective and avid outdoorsman who drank too much, and my mom was a stay-at-home mother who tried to set a moral compass for the family. My siblings and I attended Our Lady of Refuge (OLR) Grammar School, and we went to Mass at OLR Church every Sunday. When my mom tucked me in as a young child, I would recite three prayers: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.
Despite my mother’s efforts, I was easily led astray by others and by my own impulses. In high school, my friends and I drank in the park before going to the Friday night dances the Catholic schools hosted. My behavior was shameful at these dances and at other drinking parties. A few times, I took various drugs that were offered to me, and occasionally I did such reckless things that the police responded. But each time, I managed to get away before they arrived. I felt guilty about my actions and confessed some of what I did to the priests, but I was unable to overcome my own behavior. On Sundays, my buddies and I met at church, but we sat in the balcony and passed around the comics during Mass. I was a lost sheep without a shepherd, and I had no inner strength to stop doing things I knew were wrong.
All this began to change on January 28, 1971, one month before my 17th birthday. That evening, I went to visit my dad, who was dying in the hospital. Formerly quite a strong man, his health had declined for years due to heavy drinking. Now only 57, his body was too weak to fight off a pneumonia virus. Dad lay shaking uncontrollably in the hospital bed as I entered the room. Mom was holding his trembling hand. A priest came in to administer the Last Rites, and I watched as Dad turned toward him with all his might, knowing this meant the end was imminent. Looking back now, I sincerely hope that my dad’s strained gesture toward the priest indicated repentance and true faith in Christ.
My father died that night, and I cried for about a year. I never knew real grief before, and Dad’s passing began a sincere search in my heart to know God. I stopped sitting in the balcony at church and sat downstairs, where I could see the priest better. I thought that somewhere amid all the ritual of the Mass, there must be something that could make God knowable and real in my life. Between the ages of 17 and 19, I continued going to Mass, but each week I went home disappointed. My search for God was not answered in my religion, and my behavior was not improving.
One evening, around my 20th birthday, I took my dog for a walk, and an old Jewish man stopped me on the street. Abraham Segal had recently moved into my apartment building. This Russian-American Jew had become a believer in Christ years earlier and now spent all his time sharing his faith with people he met on the street. He carried a large Bible stuffed with tracts, and he wore a button that said, “One way, His way.”
Abe approached me and said, “Do you know there is something different between you and that dog?” My wiseguy reply was, “Yes, he has four legs and I have two.” Abe continued undeterred, “When that dog dies, that’s the end of him, but when you die, that’s not the end of you.” He added, “God wants you to know Him in a personal way, like your own father.” He said, “I went to the rabbi, and you went to the priest. What did they give us? Religion.” Abe continued, “God doesn’t want to give you religion; He wants to give you His Son.” He then instructed me, “Begin to read the New Testament; it has the answers to the riddle of life.” Although I had attended eight years of Catholic grade school, four years of Catholic high school, and was finishing my second year at a Catholic college, I had never opened a Bible. My family never even had one in our home.
Abe gave me a small paperback New Testament, and I began to read it constantly. As I read, I was stopped short by John 14:6, where Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” At first, I thought that was a shockingly narrow statement! How can there be only one way to God? But my Catholic upbringing had predisposed me to take Jesus’ words seriously, even though I had never read them for myself. And since I had been seeking to know the way to God and to know the truth, and since I felt an emptiness in my life, I thought deeply about that verse. I also considered a verse that followed: “…he that hath seen me hath seen the Father…” (John 14:9). So I began to understand that the reason Jesus is the only way to the Father is because only He was sinless and, in fact, God in the flesh. Therefore, only Jesus could offer Himself as a sinless substitute for my sinful life, and He did that by His death on the cross.
As I considered these things, Abe invited me to visit a Christian coffeehouse called “The Lost Coin,” a name taken from Jesus’ parable in Luke 15. The Lost Coin was in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. When I arrived one evening, I was invited to sit at a table, and a middle-aged lady spoke to me about the love of Christ. As she spoke, I pictured Jesus as a loving shepherd and myself as a lost sheep, and I wanted Him to carry me home. A group of younger Christians also sat with me and gave testimonies about what the Lord had done in their lives. Hearing their life-changing stories and seeing how very real God was to these people, I finally said, “I want what you’ve got!” One of them replied heartily, “You can have it,” and encouraged me to pray to receive Christ right then. I prayed in my own words, and I believe that night was the beginning of my new life.
Abe followed up my decision to receive Christ by bringing me to a week-long Bible conference at Word of Life Inn in upstate New York. Over the next year, I kept reading, and I began to pray about everything in my life. Sometimes my knees became sore from kneeling next to my bed so long. Some changes happened immediately. I had been smoking a little, but stopped without even thinking about it. Before long, I lost my desire to drink and stopped going to bars and dances. As I moved away from some relationships, I began to pray that God would give me fellowship with other young believers. Ephesians 3:20 says God, “is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” and soon I saw Him answer my prayer for fellowship beyond my expectation.
As senior year of college approached, I prayed about my class schedule and specifically asked the Lord to direct my choice of courses and give me someone with whom to have fellowship on my Catholic campus. When I sat in my first class of the semester, there was an empty seat next to me, and in came a pretty, bright, and exuberant coed named Marita, who sat beside me. Like me, Marita had a strong Catholic upbringing. But one Sunday, several months before we met, she heard the Scriptures read at Mass and became very interested. So she went home, dusted off her family Bible, and started reading on her own. Eventually, she came to 1 Corinthians 6:20, where she read, “you were bought at a price” and she fell under conviction and yielded her life to the Lord.
Never having met another person interested in the Bible, Marita was very excited to find me reading the Bible in our college library one day. And now, in answer to my prayer for fellowship, the Lord had placed her in four of my five classes. We quickly became best friends, read together, prayed together, witnessed to classmates together, and took long walks together. Within six months, I proposed, and much to my delight, she said “yes.”
Marita and I were married soon after graduation and settled in Yonkers, NY, but we did not have a steady church to attend. We began a Bible study in our home, using a Campus Crusade for Christ curriculum. Friends came for the study and a meal, and we sometimes also had the Lord’s Supper. We no longer believed in transubstantiation, and we had never attended a communion service at a non-Catholic church, but it seemed to us that a group of Christians coming together should also take the bread and the cup, so we added that to our gathering. After some months, our group completed the Bible course we had been studying, and friends invited us to visit Bethany Chapel, also in Yonkers. At Bethany, we found many mature and caring saints, and we happily began to participate in all the activities of the assembly.
In the years that followed, we witnessed many remarkable answers to prayer, and 1 Peter 5:7 became a favorite verse: “Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” I also had the opportunity to attend Emmaus Bible School and work at Pacific Garden Mission, both in Chicago, Illinois. I served in short-term missions as well as Sunday School and eldership at Bethany Chapel. God has blessed us with three children, each of whom trusts the Lord as Savior, and we have seen others come to Christ and go on well. All of this has been by the mercy and grace of our Lord. There were pains and losses along the way as well, but we can truly say, as did the prophet Samuel, “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam. 7:12). And we trust Him for all that is to come!