Dan God’s Mirror, Part 1

Years ago, Dan sat in a jail visiting room looking at his mother in disbelief. She’d become a Sabbath-keeper, it seems, and was now urging him to give up pork. She even brought him a pamphlet.

Detained on a marijuana charge, Dan knew how much she loved him and he always listened respectfully when she shared her Christian faith during these visits. But Dan recalls, “I said, ‘Mom, pork is all they serve in here—breakfast, lunch, and dinner! I’ll starve to death.’” Still, she told him that God would protect him and that he needed to trust Him. That day, Dan stopped eating pork. “I was a huge bacon fan, so that wasn’t easy,” he says, laughing.

However, once he was out of jail, many of Dan’s decisions took him in a starkly opposite direction from his mother’s Christian values. For years, he pursued a lifestyle filled with the trappings of the world, including drugs and alcohol.

Then Dan suffered a job accident that resulted in serious injury and pain. When he realized doctors would never be able to fully restore him, he descended into depression. His increased anxiety and daily pain led to even worse substance abuse.

During this dark time, Dan’s brother gave him a book about Christ’s life, and his sister-in-law suggested he might like listening to a speaker named Doug Batchelor. “I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started watching Amazing Facts,” he shares.

Dan went to the Amazing Facts website and began watching “literally hundreds of videos,” he estimates. “Pastor Doug has a way of teaching that really captures your attention, and keeps you listening, and makes you think.”

But a turning point came when Dan watched an Amazing Facts video on the Ten Commandments. In that message, Pastor Doug used a mirror to illustrate how God’s law shows us our sin but that it cannot save us. When the message finished, Dan walked outside. “I started crying,” he says. “I was overwhelmed. I realized that I was living in sin, that nearly everything I’d been doing was sin.”

In that moment, everything around him seemed to disappear. “I was alone and talking to God.” He began to confess all of his sins, asking God to forgive him.

Reflect: Have you ever been so convicted by sin in your life that you actually cried tears of despair? God wants your heart to be broken, so He can make it all new.

Key Bible Texts

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. (Proverbs 28:13 KJV)