I was born in 1932, the youngest of two boys on a diary farm in Watertown, South Dakota. By 1936, the "Grapes of Wrath" drought begun in the U.S. Southwest, and effects of the First Great Depression were starving our cows and destroying our farming. We sold what was left of our cows to prevent their dying from starvation and mud-balls in their stomachs. With the money from sale of the cows, my dad bought a '36 Ford sedan, new, for $800. He and my older brother built us a homemade trailer, we hooked it up to our car, and, one winter day, we drove away and left relatives and all we'd known behind. Someone asked me, 'What's it like to be seventy-nine?' I paused, then said, "I really don't know. I've never been seventy-nine before." It was a simple, honest, child's-heart true answer that came from deep inside me before any sophisticated mind-temptation could start. It came from my repeated discovery that each new present moment we're in, is all the time we ever have-and we've never visited this present moment's temptations/risks/opportunities before. The past is over, and our future will be "live-or-die" formed out of what we've learned and choose to do with ourselves, now And in every present moment, I find I'm always coming into it as a total need-bag, never "owning" or "sourcing" a single thing I need, to live it well. In every present moment's living, I must discover and learn to respect and use resources I totally depend on but didn't originate. From birth, through each of our lifetimes, until we each leave this planet, each of us always remain such amazingly designed "total need-bags, having to discover, learn about, and use correctly, the gifts and resources God provides each of us, to not get killed by temptation's disasters and to live responsibly and blessedly in our "nows." This book is my witness for God, to a lifetime of His faithfully helping me to apply this fact, escape our enemy's hell, and live forever blessed by God on earth and in heaven.
