Appendix
Donald Mitchell’s Testimony
He will lift you up.
Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord,
and He will lift you up.
— James 4:10 (NKJV)
Let me share with you how I became a Christian so you’ll
know where I’m coming from with regard to encouraging you to become a Christian
and to be fruitful in Godly contributions to creating and maintaining a 2,000
percent nation.
I remember my great grandmother
Edith Foster reading the Bible every day, so there has been a long commitment
to the Lord in our family. As a youngster, my mother regularly took me to
Sunday school. It was my least favorite activity; sleeping was much preferred.
I did enjoy listening to sermons, but it was frowned on to take youngsters to
the adult services where the sermons were given.
If I pretended to be asleep, my mom
would sometimes let me stay home on Sundays. I was pretty good at pretending,
and I soon was the biggest backslider in my Sunday school grade. Fortunately,
it was an evangelical church so my classmates were always cooking up schemes to
get me to attend again. Because of my high opinion of myself, I would always
return if invited to play my clarinet for the congregation.
By the time I turned thirteen, I
was pretty full of myself. There wasn’t much room for God in there alongside my
exaggerated opinion of myself. One day at home while my family was away for a
drive, I felt really sick. By the time they returned, I was delirious. Within
an hour I was in the hospital where I would stay for two weeks as I barely
survived a bad case of double pneumonia.
My physician, Dr. Helmsley, was
an observant Christian and worried about my soul because my life was in
jeopardy. He talked to me about our Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit
twice a day when he stopped by to check on me. After I recovered, he took my
mom and me to a tent revival meeting.
Having recovered from the
illness, I soon pushed God out of my life again. During the next year, I was,
instead, very caught up in athletics. When I was in ninth grade, I desperately
wanted to make a contribution to our junior high track team, which had a remote
chance of winning the big meet. Our coach, Mr. Layman, told each of us exactly
what had to be accomplished for the team to win. I was determined to do my
part. I had to come in first!
But that wasn’t likely to happen.
Based on past performances, there were at least two people who could out leap
me in the standing broad jump, my main event. To make such a jump, you stand on
a slightly raised, forward-tilted board and spring outward as far as you can
into a sand-filled pit. After two of the three jumping rounds, I knew it was
hopeless. I was in sixth place and four of the competitors’ jumps were longer
than I had ever gone before. I also didn’t like the board we were using.
Remembering that we should call
on God when we need help, I thought of praying … but what I wanted was so
trivial in God’s terms that I didn’t think it was worthy of prayer. So I
decided to make God an offer instead: “Dear God, help me win this event, and
I’m yours forever.” After all, if He came through, any doubts I had about God
would be dispelled.
I stepped onto the broad-jump
board and felt very calm. I did my routine and took off into the air.
Instantly, I felt light as a feather with a large, gentle hand lifting under
me. I was dropped softly at the end of the pit. I had outleaped everyone and
gone more than six inches past my best jump ever. I couldn’t believe it. Then I
remembered my promise to God, thanked Him, repented my sins, accepted Jesus as
my Lord and Savior, and ran off to tell everyone on the team.
Even more remarkable, I was the
only person on the team who performed up to the plan. Knowing what had to be
done had probably given us performance anxiety, and people underperformed
because they didn’t believe they could do what the team needed. I also suspect
that God wanted to make a point with me that I needed Him.
After a few days, I started to
think that perhaps I’d just developed a new broad-jump technique and God didn’t
have a role at all. God soon dispelled that thought by making sure that my
jumps for the rest of my life were much shorter than I had jumped when He
lifted me up.
Since then, God has been speaking
to me on a regular basis through His Holy Spirit. I’ve learned to pay attention
and to act promptly. When I pursue my own ideas, things don’t go so well. When
I follow His orders, things work out great. That’s my secret to high
performance, and I just wanted to share it with you so you could benefit, too.
He knows the answers, even when you and I don’t … which is most of the time.
As a management consultant, the
Holy Spirit has often filled me with knowledge about what the consequences of
one set of actions would be compared to another for my clients. Naturally, I
always recommended what the Holy Spirit directed me to. Clients often told me
that they were impressed by how certain I was of my conclusions and of how
persuasive I could be in describing the advantages of whatever recommendations
were made. Once again, the explanatory words came from the Holy Spirit, rather
than from me.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t
comfortable in my younger days sharing my faith with clients, and I wrongly
gave many people the impression that I was the author of the solutions rather
than merely the transmitter. I apologize to God and to my clients for missing
many wonderful witnessing opportunities.
I didn’t always listen as well as
I should in making decisions that primarily affected me, but God would always
do something to get my attention. Here’s an example. I made an investment that
I hoped would reduce my taxes in addition to making some money. I didn’t have a
good feeling from the Holy Spirit at the time, and I shouldn’t have invested.
My tax return was audited by the
Internal Revenue Service concerning that investment. It turned out I was in the
wrong for the deductions I had taken. Anticipating a big tax bill plus penalties
and interest, you can imagine my astonished surprise when the revised tax
return showed me owing no additional money to the government even though I had
lost on the audit issues. I knew that result was a gift from God, and I was
overwhelmed by His wisdom and power in protecting me. Praise God for His mercy!
I rededicated my life to Jesus in
1995, and I have enjoyed great peace since then. I have also done a lot better
in being obedient to the Holy Spirit and to what the Bible tells us to do in
all aspects of my life. Many blessings have been mine since then.
Having been told by God to start
the 400 Year Project (demonstrating how everyone in the world could make
improvements twenty times faster and more effectively than normal with no
additional resources) in 1995, I continued to receive His instructions. In
2005, for example, God told me to start explaining to people how to live their
lives by gaining more joy from what they already have.
In the summer of 2006, I began to
see how the 400 Year Project could be brought to a successful conclusion (as I
reported in Adventures of an Optimist,
Mitchell and Company Press, 2007). Realizing that perhaps I had devoted too
much of my attention to this one challenge, I began to seek ways to rebalance
my life. One of those rebalancing methods was to spend more time communing with
God through prayer, Scriptural studies, attending church services and Bible
classes, and listening more to the still, small voice within.
For several years I had been
enjoying the devotionals sent to me daily over the Internet by evangelist Bill
Keller. One of those devotionals speared me like an arrow that summer. The
evangelist reminded his readers that our responsibility as believers is to
share our faith with others through our example and sharing the Gospel message
from the Bible. Not feeling well equipped to do more than try to be a good
example, I began to pray about what else I should be doing.
The next day, my answer came: I
was to launch a global contest to locate the most effective ways that souls
were being saved and be sure that information was shared widely. This sharing
would be a blessing for those who wished to fulfill the Great Commission to
spread the Good News of Jesus as commanded in Matthew 28:18-20 (NKJV):
And Jesus came and spoke to them,
saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go
therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all
things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
The contest winners were Jubilee Worship
Center in Hobart,
Indiana, and Step by Step Ministries in
Porter, Indiana.
You can read their stories and learn amazingly effective ways to help lost
people choose to accept Salvation in Witnessing
Made Easy: Yes, You Can Make a Difference (Jubilee Worship Center Step by
Step Press, 2010) by Bishop Dale P. Combs, Lisa Combs, Jim Barbarossa, Carla
Barbarossa, and me. Six of the many other worthy ideas and practices from the
contest for leading more unsaved people to learn about and to draw closer to
Him are described in a second book, Ways
You Can Witness: How the Lost Are Found (Salvation Press, 2010) by Cherie
Hill, Roger de Brabant, Drew Dickens, Gael Torcise, Wendy Lobos, Herpha Jane
Obod, Gisele Umugiraneza, and me.
Let me tell you another
interesting thing about my life with Jesus. When my daughter was about a year
old, I suffered what resembled a stroke that caused me to start to become
paralyzed. As I could feel my face’s muscles freezing, I immediately prayed to
Jesus to stop the paralysis and He did. I was left with a lot of pain and
numbness on the left side of my body and was very weak for over a year.
Part of that pain continued for
the next twenty-two years until, on November 8, 2009, I asked two of my pastors
during a communion service to pray in the name of Jesus that the remaining pain
be removed. During the prayer, the pain started leaving immediately and was
totally gone within a half hour. As I felt the pain leaving me, traveling inch
by inch down my body, I was overcome with gratitude and fell on my knees in
thanks.
That wasn’t the only time He
healed me. Encouraged by that miraculous experience, I came forward again on
December 19, 2010, during a communion service to request prayer for relief from
the pain in my wrists that was making it difficult for me to write books to
serve Him and to do my other work. Knowing that my mother had been plagued with
arthritis, I assumed it was a similar onset for me. My pastors were all
occupied with prayers for other members of the congregation. This time an elder
of the church and his wife anointed me with oil and prayed for me. Almost
immediately, my whole body shook violently in a way that I couldn’t stop.
Gradually, the shaking stopped after about half an hour, and my wrist pain was
totally gone. It has not returned. I was even more overwhelmed that He healed
me again. Can anyone appreciate all the goodness that God has in store for us?
Glory be to God! Praise Him
always! His miracles, grace, and mercy never end. I am so happy and honored to
be His servant and witness to you!
Copyright © 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012
by Donald W. Mitchell.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or
transmitted in
any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or
other
electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written
permission of the
publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical reviews
and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Scripture quotations marked (NKJV)
are taken from the New King James Version.
Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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