I want to share with you a true story about a three-year-old little boy who lived in a small farming community in Texas. Brownfield, Texas, came by its name honestly. Brown fields are everywhere. If you have never been in a dust storm in Brownfield, you know very little about dust, dirt, and sandstorms. I remember as a child playing outside and the wind was not blowing very hard, but on the horizon we could see a wall of dirt filling the sky. Within twenty minutes, straight-line winds were blowing about fifty miles an hour and everything went black. It was literally dark in the middle of the day. Dust covered everything inside the house. That is why, I am sure, they gave Brownfield, Texas, its name.

In Brownfield a young working-class family was doing their best to live the American dream. Raynell was a young housewife. She married at the very young age of fifteen. She gave birth to Cindy when she was seventeen, had a little boy named Fred when she was nineteen, and welcomed another little boy when she was twenty years old. His name was Rickey. Alfred and Raynell lived about a half block off the main highway that ran through the heart of Brownfield. One day while Alfred was at work and Cindy was at school in the second grade, Fred and Rickey were playing in the front yard with their little black-and-white puppy. Raynell was washing the morning dishes. Little did she and Alfred know that their peaceful lives were about to be shattered.

The boys’ puppy wandered out into the street, and three-year-old Rickey stepped off the curb into the path of an oncoming car. The car literally ran over the toddler. Somehow the child’s body became lodged between the back wheel and the axle and was dragged for almost a block before being dislodged from the automobile. Fred, five years old, witnessed the whole shocking event. He ran into the house crying and screaming, “Bubba got runned over!”

Raynell turned from the kitchen sink to witness the reality of her son’s words. Rickey indeed had been run over! He was rushed to the emergency room in Brownfield, and he was later transferred to the Methodist hospital in Lubbock, Texas. Emergency brain surgery was performed and the prognosis was not good. The brain surgeon came out and told the young parents, “There is a strong possibility that your son will not live through the night, and we want you to be prepared for the worst. If your son lives he will be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and he will be severely mentally retarded. The back of his brain has been destroyed. Bone fragments had to be removed from his brain.” Shock, fear, and helplessness gripped their hearts. Our baby might die, and if he lives he will live a very challenged life.

Raynell had a sister named Wanda Faye. Wanda went to one of “those” churches that really believed in the power of prayer, divine healing, the laying on of hands, anointing with oil, and miracles. When Wanda Faye, who lived in Lubbock at the time, heard the news about her three-year-old nephew, she called on her church to pray. She called her pastor, the Reverend John Kershaw, to come to the hospital to pray for her nephew.

Pastor Kershaw later said about walking into that hospital room, “I felt so helpless as I looked upon the broken body of that baby boy.” Little Rickey was covered^[a] from head to toe with bandages and stitches. His little body had been scraped and bruised from head to foot. There he lay under an oxygen tent, fighting for every breath. Brother Kershaw took out his anointing oil and placed a little on the fingertips of this broken child, and he began to pray the prayer of faith according to James 5:14. He prayed, “In the name of Jesus, heal this child! Give us a miracle! Heal his brain from all injuries, and let him walk again!”

God answers prayer! God honors His Word! God respects our faith! And God touched little Rickey, who lived through the night. Rickey responded to light, he responded to touch, and he began to recover very fast considering the extent of his injuries.

After a speedy recovery, he was released from the hospital. The surgeon told Raynell that he wanted to see Rickey in his office in two weeks to run some tests on his brain activity and make sure there was no swelling in his brain. To the doctor’s surprise, two weeks later Rickey came walking into the doctor’s office holding his mother’s hand. Raynell said, “When we walked into his office the doctor staggered backward, sat on his desk, and began to weep, saying it was a miracle!”

I know this story to be true because I am Rickey. Many decades have passed since then^[b], and yes, I still walk, and no, I am not mentally challenged—maybe just a little crazy. This incident happened in 1962. It was an amazing miracle. God completely restored my sense of balance, healed my brain, and gave me life. However, that is not the greatest miracle that I know. The greatest miracle that I know took place twelve years later.

When I was four years old our family moved to Amarillo, Texas, and I would discover that God was not finished with me yet. You would have thought that after such a significant miracle my parents would have turned to the Lord, but they did not. My dad turned to the whiskey bottle and to cases of beer. He was an alcoholic for the greater part of my childhood, drinking whiskey right out of the bottle, all day, every day, along with can after can of beer. I can recall several times my family huddled around the kitchen sink watching my father weep and pour a bottle of whiskey down the drain, promising his wife and children that he was going to stop his drinking. But he would just buy another bottle as soon as the liquor store opened the next morning. My father was bound by, possessed by, controlled by alcohol.

Because of my dad’s drinking, my mother was a nervous wreck. She spoke of death often, telling us, “If it were not for you kids I would kill myself!” I remember her at times shaking uncontrollably with a cigarette in her hand. As I look back on my childhood I realize she was a very unhappy, unstable, angry person. There were times that I believe she took her anger out on her children. She yelled a lot, she cursed us often, and when she whipped us, she beat us—not with fist, but with the lashing of a belt, very hard. I will admit at times we needed a good spanking; however, Mom went too far. I remember an incident that happened when I was in the third grade. My brother Fred and I got into a little scuffle, and Mom was going to spank (beat) us. I did not start the fight, Fred did, and I was not going to take a whipping for something I did not instigate, so I ran. Bad mistake! It gave Mother even more reasons to vent her anger on me. When I was dragged into the house she unleashed her fury on me. I was slapped to the ground, and she sat on my chest and commenced to slapping me across the face repeatedly.

Something changed in me after that. I became very angry at my parents. I hated Dad’s drinking, and I hated my mother’s attitude. Thus at a young age I learned to hate and rebel. I was mad at God. I was mad at my parents. I was an angry young man.

Years passed and I was a teenager in junior high school. I fell into what some would call the wrong crowd. At the time they were my best friends. Every one of our parents were drinkers, drug abusers, and pretty much miserable. So we all had a common denominator. We were young, angry, and frustrated.

This was in the early seventies, so we were all still caught up in the hippie movement. We all had long hair, hated authority, and never wanted to go home. So we went to Sam Houston Park and we did as our parents taught us to do. We drank alcohol and cheap wine, some smoked cigarettes, and all smoked pot, except for me. For some reason dope never appealed to me. However, I loved whiskey, cheap wine, and loud heavy-metal music.

I was only thirteen years old when this was taking place in my life. I was heavily drinking and getting involved in things a thirteen-year-old had no business doing. Something is wrong when a thirteen-year-old can get ahold of hard liquor, cheap wine, and pot. We sat in broad daylight in a city park, all drinking, with pot being passed around. The police were driving by constantly and they never slowed down to see what we were up to. Perhaps it was because God was still with me, and He kept me from getting in trouble and going that direction.

By the time I was fourteen I was drinking almost every day. All my friends were getting into deeper narcotics, popping pills, smoking a lot of pot, and huffing acrylics, gasoline, and model airplane glue. I stuck with drinking anything and everything I was given. What is weird about all this is my parents either did not know what I was doing or did not care. I was coming home at one o’clock in the morning, or later. They never said anything about it. I believe they were so miserable with their own lives that they overlooked the lives of my siblings and me.

When I turned fifteen things were about to change for all of us. God works in mysterious ways and uses people and circumstances for His glory and to fulfill His will. My mother had a brother by the name of James Byrd, whom we always called Uncle Bud. Uncle Bud became a Christian and later a preacher. He was an evangelist, and when his travels brought him to Amarillo, my brother and sister and I would go listen to him and our aunt Von sing and preach. I was young then, about seven or eight. I really did not understand much of what he preached, but he was Pentecostal and I enjoyed how excited he got preaching. He would jump on one leg and swing his arms excitedly while emphasizing the point he was making. After church he would always, without fail, take us to get an ice cream cone and a soda pop. I loved my uncle Bud. He had his life together. He was married to the sweetest woman I have ever met. They had two children, Martha and James Jr.

Uncle Bud was the real deal. He was not just a Christian by title, but he was a Christian by his actions. He loved everybody and always had a smile on his face. He was only a young thirty-three years old when he was diagnosed with cancer. He was dying a slow, miserable death. We have all witnessed what chemotherapy and radiation treatments can do to a person trying to overcome cancer. Uncle Bud was no exception. I wept openly when I visited him in the veterans’ hospital. He had been a large man, and now he had lost a tremendous amount of weight, his hair and teeth had fallen out, and at thirty-three he looked old. I was devastated.

Toward the end of his battle with cancer my mother had gone to visit him in the hospital in Temple, Texas. One evening he called her over to his bedside, and as always he had a smile on his face. He took his big sister by the hand and told her how much he loved her and the rest of his family. They wept together for a few moments. Then he said to my mom, “Skeeter.” Skeeter was the nickname given to my mother as a child because as a little girl she was no bigger than a “skeeter.” Holding my mother’s hand, he looked her in the eyes and said, “Skeeter, Jesus loves you and Alfred. Y’all do not have to live the way y’all do. God can change your life. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, and He will forgive you of those sins right now.” My mother knelt down beside my uncle’s hospital bed and repented of her sins. She was soon thereafter baptized in the precious name of Jesus Christ.

Mom came home a different person. She was determined to live for God. She went to the First United Pentecostal Church in Amarillo, where she received the Holy Ghost. When she received the Holy Ghost, Mom changed drastically. She was radically saved. She came home glowing; she was smiling the biggest smile I had ever seen on her face. She was singing all the time, she was hugging us, and all she wanted to talk about was Jesus and church.

Raynell, the new convert, was determined to get her family in church and filled with the Holy Ghost. She was on my brother and me relentlessly about coming to church. I mean, it was a continual, everyday mission for her. She knew she had salvation, and she wanted her family saved. After about three weeks of her relentless pleadings, one Sunday afternoon I said, “Fred, we might as well go to church, because Mom is not going to quit asking, and maybe if we go we can get her off our backs for a while.” My brother agreed to go with me to church.

Keep in mind that we hardly ever, almost never, went to church. I could probably count on one hand how many times I had gone to church as a teenager. Church was for the weak, the wimps, and the elderly who knew they were about to die, and as a last-minute gesture to get on God’s good side they went to church. I did not know one Scripture. I did not even know John 3:16. I did not know Genesis from Revelation. I was totally ignorant concerning church. However, I did know that God thought enough of me that He healed me as a child. That is all I knew about church.

As most Americans do, we had a Bible in our home, and we, like most Americans, hardly ever picked it up. We were Christians, after all! At least we were Christians by religious title, without knowing anything about what it actually meant to be born again of the water and the Spirit. I remember picking up the Bible and trying to read it, and nothing made any sense. It was a book with a lot of words, and I had no idea how to read it. So I would thumb through it, put it down, and go on about my business.

Fred and I went to church on October 6, 1974. I will never forget walking into that church. These people were absolutely the most excited people I had ever seen in my life. The most radical sports fan could not hold a candle to these people. The few times I had gone to church before, it was boring and mundane. Keep in mind, at that time I was a young hippie. Hard rock music and alcohol was all I lived for. So when I walked into this church that was loud and had drums, guitars, bass guitar, organ, piano, saxophone, and about five tambourines, I was just a little taken aback. These people were freaking me out, and Alice Cooper didn’t even freak me out. These people were clapping, raising their hands, and worshipping God with a great amount of enthusiasm. I was a nervous wreck. My brother and I sat toward the back. Mom marched right up to the front like she had been going there for years. I remember watching my newborn-in-Christ mother get involved in the service, and she was really having a great time. Honestly, I was a little embarrassed for the way she was acting. You weren’t supposed to actually have “fun” at church. I thought you was supposed to sit there and endure to the last amen.

After about an hour of exuberant singing, and after the choir sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and these people reacted like they anticipated being swooped up at any moment, Pastor Elms got up to preach. I had never really sat through an evangelistic sermon. This man was on a mission! He looked out in the congregation and saw two young men who needed God. One was a short-haired, Merle Haggard–listening type of guy, and the other was me, a greasy- and long-haired, unkempt fifteen-year-old kid who hated just about everyone and everything. I remember slumping down in the pew and putting on my hardest face, staring at this man who seemed to be preaching right at me. I will never forget that message as long as I live. Pastor Elms preached about “Voices from Eternity!” It was a hellfire and brimstone message. As he preached I began to squirm. For some reason during the course of the sermon I reached up and grabbed the back of the pew in front of me. The pastor’s eyes were boring holes right through my heart. He looked at me as he took the microphone, lowered it over the platform, and asked the question, “Can you hear your voice screaming out in hell? For all of eternity you will cry out from a devil’s hell! Can you hear your voice in hell?”

All of a sudden I stood up, and my hands shot up in the air! I put them down to my side, but it was like two angels, one on each side, said, “Oh no you don’t,” and put my hands back in the air. All this time I was heading toward the altar. When I got close enough, I literally threw myself onto the altar, pleading for God to have mercy on me and to not let me go to hell!

I did not know how to recite a prayer or quote a Scripture; all I had to go on was my physical miracle as a child, Uncle Bud’s testimony, and my mother’s conversion. I did not know how to repent. I had never heard the words repent or repentance. I do recall these enthusiastic Christians got excited when I went to the altar. They swarmed around me like bees on honey, praying with me and for me. I remember Pastor Elms laying his hands on my head and praying more fervently for me than he had preached. Then something supernatural happened. Something miraculous happened. God filled me with the Holy Ghost! I began speaking in a language I did not know, and joy flooded my soul. I felt a world of iniquity lift off my shoulders. I was free. The love of God saturated me. This was real. This was powerful. This was amazing. No wonder these people were happy in church. After a while I stood up and looked across the sanctuary, and there stood my brother at the altar, hands raised in worship. I walked over to him, fell in his arms, and hugged my big brother tight, and God filled my brother with the Holy Ghost.

Some churches believe in shouting, and some do not. This one did, and so my mother, who had just witnessed her sons being filled with the power of God, was beside herself, along with about seventy-five other Holy Ghost–filled saints. Wow, what a time we had that night.

After things calmed down a bit, one of the young men asked me if I had ever been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. I said no. He asked, “Would you like to be baptized?” I was ready to do anything and everything that God wanted me to do. So after Steve Beattie gave me a quick Bible study on baptism, I was baptized in the precious name of Jesus Christ for the remission of my sins. I came up out of that ice-cold water on fire for God. I was without a doubt born again of the water and of the Spirit. Everything in my life changed. Everything!

This is my story, and the greatest miracle I know is not part of my brain was destroyed when I was run over by a car, and God healed me. The greatest miracle is not that I can walk. The greatest miracle I know is that I am born again of the water and the Spirit. I am a child of God; old things passed away, all things became new. I was made a new creature in Christ Jesus. I now love everybody; I am not mad at anybody.

One night after we had been going to church for about four years, my stubborn, alcoholic father walked into the church on a Wednesday night. The service was almost over, and some of us were standing around the altar praying, and in walked my father. Still wearing his work clothes, he marched straight to the altar, not pausing to acknowledge anyone, fell on his knees, threw his hands up, and surrendered his heart to God. God instantly delivered my father from the awful vice of alcoholism. That very night my dad went to the car and threw out every bottle of whiskey that he had, weeping for joy as he did. My dad was set free.

I am so very thankful to write this testimony about the saving power of Jesus Christ! The Alfred and Raynell Musick family were all born again in the 70’s.  At the time of this writing we are all still in love with Jesus Christ. I am the pastor of a wonderful apostolic church in Memphis, Texas. My sister, Cindy, is a faithful member of a church in Breckenridge, Texas. Fred attends a wonderful church in Longview, Texas. My mother attends the church that I pastor, sits on the second pew from the front, and still has the same zeal she had in 1974.

Dad passed away in 1995. The last time I saw him on this earth he was lying on a hospital bed in my daughter’s bedroom, being cared for by hospice. Cancer had taken its toll, and Dad was slipping away. I was getting ready to go to work and looked in on him. My mother was on one side of his bed, and Aunt Wanda Faye was on the other side. My father had his hands in the air, holding onto the sleeves of their blouses, and they were praying. I chose not to interrupt them. That day Dad passed away. The last words I heard him say on this earth were, “Jesus, I love you!” That is the greatest miracle I know.

Next Chapter: Ocean of Tears