This is a personal story of a journey from cynical realism to a born-again Christian faith.

It started with the loss of my goal of becoming a Christian minister thanks to a dispiriting Bible course taught by a professor who then committed suicide - my first year in college. But my world nonetheless quickly expanded well beyond my bruised Middle America through years of work and doctoral studies in Washington DC and through extensive travel, study, and work abroad.

And I was able to fine-tune a quite tough understanding of man's political and social dynamics, serving as an international studies professor and as an international political risk consultant to various American corporations.

But that well-constructed world would ultimately disintegrate, thanks to forces well beyond my control, when the American economy crashed at the end of the 1970s. This left me exhausted and angry at the world.

And then Christ showed up in the strangest of places and by the oddest of people. In them I saw Jesus, a true Savior that I wanted dearly to be part of my own life. And thus I found myself heading down a very new path led by God himself, to want to work among society's rejects. But I also had to learn to wait for God to open life's doors, something I, as traditionally a high achiever, found very difficult. But a few hard knocks here and there (some of them from rather legalistic "Christians" I was called to pastor) brought me to a wonderful relationship with God and the surrounding world.

Thus I finally was able to put the professional world in its secondary place, and take up my primary duties as a husband and father, and finally as a teacher of life's hard realities, but also life's awesome blessings in Jesus Christ, to a rising generation set before me in a Christian classroom. And I have every reason to believe that these members of this rising generation will be able to take up their responsibilities very wisely. Praise be to God!