A Secret World of Fear
When I met him I was eighteen years old sitting with my mother in a television studio watching her favorite Christian program being broadcast live. I had just graduated from high school and was not sure what direction my life was going to take. I was raised Lutheran and went to Lutheran schools. For nine years I not only attended church and Sunday school, but I was required to take religion classes at school and attend chapel weekly. By the tenth grade, however, not long after my first communion, my mother gave up making me go to church. During my senior year, though, I was invited to a different kind of church. Their passionate worship and preaching moved me to tears. I would later learn that their teachings were false, but their enthusiasm for the Bible got me going to church and reading the Bible of my own free will for the first time in my life. Weeks later, hand pressed against the hand of an evangelist on the TV screen, my mother prayed her own way into this new kind of