God and Marvin
W “May I Tell You a Story?” BY DICK DUERKSEN
28
May 2022 AdventistWorld.org
hen Marvin drove his giant flatbed truck into town, he was drinking a case of beer every day and nursing a $300 per week cocaine habit. Nothing was going well. The voice in his head was what bothered him the most, a voice that kept telling him that he had to get right with God. “There were so many things going on inside of me,” he says. “I’d been drinking since seventh grade, and now I had dizzy spells and anxiety attacks, and was eating horribly. And a voice kept insisting that I get right with God.” “If it’s so important to me, then why don’t I get it?” Marvin kept asking the voice. *** He was 30 years old when he just couldn’t go any further. He stopped, looked up, and said: “I can’t live my life like this anymore, God. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to do something different in my life. I can’t go on like this.” That day’s mail included an invitation to a Seventh-day Adventist evangelistic series. He read the brochure and thought that maybe God was offering a way out of his mess. A dream woke him up that night. In the dream he was singing “Amazing Grace” with many other people, singing with all his heart. He knew the begin-
ning, but the people were on the second verse and he didn’t know the words! Marvin woke up panicked. “I wanted to sing,” he says. “I so wanted to sing, but I did not know the words!” Marvin went to the Adventist church and sat on the left-hand side, five rows back. The first night the evangelist had everyone sing “Amazing Grace.” Just the first verse. The second night they sang it again. On the third night the evangelist led the group through all four stanzas, with all the words up on the screen. “We were all singing, and on the second verse I was singing as I had wanted to sing in the dream. ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved; how precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!” Marvin sang through all the verses and then sat back in the pew as a small voice spoke into his head. “Keep coming back,” the voice said. “There’s more. Keep coming back.” Marvin didn’t miss any of the meetings, and at the end he was baptized. “I had a new life now, a reason to live better. Different. As though I belonged to God.” *** Marvin knew a lot of things would need to change. He quit drinking and dropped the drugs. He began to read the Image: Dick Duerksen
