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When something you love is gone! God's word or man's tradition! Preparing to live in the desert! Use the links above for convenience........
I was born in the summer of 1954 in Knoxville Tennessee. At that time I
was just another child born in a time when life was hard for all…. but,
“getting better”. I am the eldest child of a family of eight. During
my childhood years my mother birthed a total of six children. She had four
boys and twin girls. People would see our family as a poor non deserving
family in a bad part of town.
The
first home that I ever realized was when I was 5 & 6 years old, prior
to that time we lived in a housing project for the working poor and the
most significant life changing experience that I can remember was getting
hit by a car. I ran out into the street from between two other
vehicles. I was unconscious at the time but woke up in the hospital.
Evidently I was just dazed and the doctors released me to my parents. God
had spared my life at age 5.
During
my life at our new home, a real honest to goodness home with a cherry tree
in the fenced in back yard and a puppy to play with me we had a bad
electrical storm, at least that is what my day called it, I called it bad
wind a lot of rain with thunder and lightning. This storm was a turning
point for me at the young age of six. I was outside playing when this
storm all of a sudden came up and before I could get in the house the
thunder rolled and it sounded to me like “
Terry, serve me, I need you”….. I thought, how did the
storm know who I was. Anyway that impression has always been with me, not
because I now know that it was God calling me but because God marked me to
remember that day
My
uncle, Wally use to put his fingers in a fan while the blades were moving
to impress us kids, well It did impress me, that is to try and do the same
thing. At that time I didn’t know that you could only do that trick if
you knew which side of the fan to put your fingers. Well, the next day
after the storm I was outside the house and seen the window fan and I
thought to put my fingers in the fan to stop the blades, like my uncle.
Well, you may have guessed what happen but I now have two marks, one on
each finger, my index finger and the finger next to it. These marks are
always visible to me and I often remember,
“Terry, serve me, I need you”. You to may have similar
things that has happened to you. I can’t believe that I am the only
person that has had an experience like that one, when I was only six years
old.
I
remember during our stay in that house, that everyone in my family was
sick with the worst case of the flu than anyone had every seen, except for
me. I was taking care of everyone else when I was only six years old. My
youngest brother was born on Halloween night while we were still living at
that house. Soon we had to move. Years later I found out that we could no
longer afford to live there so we moved into my grandmothers house. She let
us live there rent free, well Dad was suppose to pay $25.00 per month but
he couldn’t afford that. We moved there when I was seven years old. Lots
of things happened there at that house, and I could go on and on about
those things but the most important things I learned when I was 9 years
old.
My
mother gave birth to twin girls and she taught me how to do, “taking
care of children things”, I am sure most of you reading this know what
that means. 6 months later my mother had to go to work to help make money
for the family, so at the old age of 9 years old I was left to take care
of my three brothers, my two baby sisters, the house cleaning, the clothes
washing using a ringer type washer and the cooking. You never know what
you can do until you have to do it or else. I mean when your family is
counting on you to be all grown up. What an experience. God was teaching
me things that I would need later in life. This went on during the summer
months until school started.
Years
later when I was going to high school I could remember my cousin dying of
a hemorrhage within the brain. She was only 21 years old, the favorite
niece of my dad. I remember thinking, "where
did she go when she died". We all had a hard time, you know, with that death thing.
Then my mind went back to my aunt Lily dying of a heart attack and how
everyone was sad but of good spirits. The difference was that she was a
Christian and the people that was at her wake were Christian people. This
comparison of what death was to people had an impact on my life about what
happened after death. Weeks later I caught the school bus and on the way
to school my thoughts begin to ramble and as I looked at my two scared
fingers, the thought filled my mind, “ Terry,
serve me, I need you” so that day I said in my mind, “Yes
God, I will serve you”. Through the years many things happened and I
forgot about my promise to God, but God didn't!
Our family was Baptist by association but apostate by profession. We only went to church on Christmas, Easter and vacation Bible school, except for the two weeks in the summer that we stayed with our grandmother. Not much of a Christian life although I was always wanting to do good things for people. I just didn’t know why I wanted to do good things I just did. After my
aunt Lily died the years took its toll on my uncle Frank and I had to go live
with him and take care of him somewhat. I was 11 years old when I started
taking care of Uncle Frank…. Some of my best memories was given to me
when he started telling about his life…… that’s when I found out
that old people have a lot of wisdom and I gleaned as much of it as
possible.
My
stay at Uncle Frank’s house started when I got home from school and
ended when I went home to go to school. I remember one morning going home,
walking through the 8 inches of fresh snow the 6 blocks that I had to walk
home, I met a woman in the dark. She wore dark clothing and was carrying a
staff in her hand. We met nose to nose and I was too scared to say anything
but she said God is in control of your life. We passed and then I turned
around and she was gone. I thought, that sure was weird, but I never told
anyone until years later.
When I was twelve my mom and dad divorced and I lived with my dad while my other siblings had to go live with my mom. That was a hard time for me…… my dad worked and I went to school, came home and took care of house chores, cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, etc. It was during one of these hard times, I was sweeping the front porch and I remembered from years before, an act of my father that I held against him for sometime. I remembered my uncle Wally, my aunt and my cousins were over to our house and us kids were playing hard and “making a lot of noise” when all of a sudden my dad said, being upset, Terry, stop that yelling, as he threw hot coffee in my face. It's a gift of God how your mind can go from the
present into a situation that had happened years before. A year after my
dad and mom divorced my dad said he was sorry that he had threw the hot
coffee in my face. You see I use to follow my dad around the house, I
wanted to know everything that he did, what he would say. I wanted him to
touch me and hug me, but he never would……. He just got in his car and
left me, making broken promises to me, while he went to the bars to drink.
After the hot coffee in the face, I stopped following my dad around. It
took three years before he told me he was sorry. I held a grudge against
him…........... I was becoming a teenager
Years later, When I turned sixteen I barrowed dads car and went out with my brother, picked up a friend and we picked up some beer. I decided that I had to much to drink so I let my friend, who had not had a drink that night, drive home. On our way home, my brother and I fell asleep and my friend that was driving ran off the road. When we hit a tree, I woke up and remembered “Terry, serve me, I need you”. Three months later I had barrowed the same car and went to see a girl. On the way home I totaled my dads car. My hard head hit the steering wheel and bent it into a “U” shape and the engine was in the passenger side seat. As I woke out of my being dazed, I remembered, “Terry, serve me, I need you”. By this time God had spared my life a
number of times but I still did not concede to the fact that I had told
God years before that I would serve him.
While
in my junior year of high school our home had been reduced to just my dad
and I and we were very poor. Most of the nights my dad would leave me to
go to his bars and I would fall asleep with out anything to eat, because
there wasn’t anything to eat. I made up my mind then that I would get a
job. I did get a job working at a service station pumping gas making $1.50
per hour. My first pay check I took me and my dad out to eat, this was the
first time that I had eat out at a restaurant and it was only a Burger
King. The week prior to that first pay check I had only one set of clothes to my name. I would hand wash them every night after I got off from work so that I would have clean clothes to go to school the next day. I say hand wash because our ringer type washer had broke two months before and we didn’t have the money to get it fixed. Things are rough when your poor, but God was training me for hard times. That last week before my first paycheck, was a bad week.
While waiting on the school bus one morning, a girl at the same stop was talking to some of her girl friends and as I was looking at her she blared out, “What are you looking at, you worthless scum from the sewer”. Hurt, from the statement, I said nothing, turned around and went back home, missing school that day. The next day I got up enough courage to go to the bus stop, that girl was not there, but her friends were and they just looked at me. When we got to school I went to my first
class, English Lit. I guess there is a school rule to have either
English or History as the first class of the day. I went into the classroom,
with my guts growling from not having breakfast, as was every morning, and
sat down. The teacher said, “Ok, class….. turn in the book reports”,
oops, I forgot that I even had to do a report, all that had been on my
mind was to eat, take care of the house at home and dwell on harsh
statements that others had said about me. (This
thought me something about people that I would remember later in life when
I became a teacher.) Everyone had their report except
me, and the teacher told me in front of the class, “Terry Hinchey….
You are a worthless person, you will never amount to anything”. Wow,
what a week! I was ready to just die!
The next day I decided to quit school. I told my dad and he said oh well just do what you want to do son. My aunt Kathleen, we all call her Kacky, came by to see my dad and seen me at home. She found out that I had decided to quit school and she said to me, “ Your are not going to quit school even if I have to take you to school and pick you up from school. Well, until I graduated from high school, my aunt Kacky did just as she had promised and I did graduate from Doyle High School in Knoxville, TN, in 1972. I now praise God for sending this woman, the mother of my cousin that had died years before, into my life to guide me in the hard years of my life. During these trying years I would have quiet times and the same old thought came to my mind, “Terry, serve me, I need you”. The marks on my two fingers were a
constant reminder to the fact.
When something you love is gone! After
graduation I entered the air force and a lot of life changing experiences
happen to me and I’ll share those in the future, but briefly my life got
even lower than it had been back home. I started drinking heavily, smoking,
cussing and being an all around typical military person. I was lost,
without God. I didn’t even think of God much anymore unless people asked
me to go to chapel, and then I would make fun of those that went. But God
had not forgotten me! I would spend ten years in the Air Force and every
day God would shape my life without me knowing that he was doing it. When I was 20 years old I got married to a girl that was the sister of a friend I had met at my first assignment base, Kessler Air Force Base. I had been engaged to a girl once before. The week before we were to get married, I called her home and her mother told me that she had left town with another man and gotten married to him. Years later I found out that she had a very hard life. Six months after I had gotten married my mother calls me to tell me that my youngest brother had gotten killed in a car accident, his name was Danny. What a blow to me! Even though the military had gotten me loose from the introvert that I had become during my early years of life, I had closed up again. It took weeks after the funeral before I would open up to anyone, even my wife was not having any luck at all opening me up from my grief. Death has that kind of effect on most people. The relationship that a person had with the person that goes to sleep, not to wake again until that day of resurrection, is the true definition of the word LOST. I would look at my two
fingers and my life would pass before me, all the close encounters with
death, and I am still living but my brother was dead. He had polio from
one year old……. He had a hard life too…. He died just after his 15th
birthday. The thought still rang in my ears, “
Terry, serve me, I need you”.
During
the first four years of my military life family death became more
frequent. I have lost a lot of family members and every time the two
fingers still remind me of my service to God. The hardest of all of those
that I lost, that would hurt the deepest was my dad. I had not forgave him
for the Hot coffee in the face. At that point in my life I learned that it
is very important to God and fellow man to keep a clean heart, so as to
not be bound up in a knot when a person you have had words with, dies, and
you do not get release form the burden, a person needs to keep a clean
heart with all fellow humans. I did however years later have a
talk with myself at the grave of my father. “ Dad,
I forgive you for your actions, I know that you had a lot on you the day
that you threw the hot coffee in my face”, now rest in
peace. I
know that dad didn’t hear a word of that but I did and that made all the
difference in my life. I have peace now and that is what counts in a
Christian life, that is what clears the conscience of the human mind.
In the summer of 1977, my family and I were transferred to Naples Italy for a term of three years. This seemed to be a great thrill of being where people lived, since I had just came from a year of remote duty in Alaska. We got settled into our new home in a town called Castle Volturno, Italy and we were thinking that this would be a party city kind of time, but God was still working on me. On
September 20, 1977 two men from the
local Baptist Church came by to welcome us into the area. Small talk
turned into a defense about who I was inside and I didn’t like what I
saw. I seen a person who had been doing wicked things in the sight of a
most Holy God and as I looked at my fingers I remembered, ”Terry serve me,
I need you”. Those men didn’t know what my life was, they
didn't know my past, they only knew
that God had directed them to my home for the Holy Spirit of God to
continue working on me. Those marks on my fingers had convicted me for 14
years now and I didn't want to continue serving self any longer. After a matter of what
seemed like a few minutes, though it had been 2 hours, the Word of God
that they were reading to me, spoke to my heart and I accepted 1st,
The fact that I was a sinner of God’s eternal law in the sight of a Holy
God, 2nd, The fact that I could not do anything of myself to
obtain Christ’s salvation, 3rd, The fact that if I had died
that morning I would not be received into God’s Holy heaven, 4th,
The fact that I needed Jesus Christ to die for me, for my sin debt to be paid. That may sound confusing to you but those four things is what God
placed into my heart that I needed, to be changed and have a new life in
Christ. At that point in time my heart was needing to be filled with the joy that only Jesus Christ could bring, so I prayed and expressed to God what I was, who He is and what he could do for me. I believed that Jesus Christ changed my life, and He did. From that moment I did not want to Cuss, I did not want to drink alcohol, I did not want to smoke but what I did want to do was to read my Bible, go to church, pray and learn as much about the one that had for so many years wanted me to serve him. I also wanted to get baptized to show others the change that had occurred in my life. My friends didn’t understand when I told them about the change that had occurred in my life and they soon stopped being my friend. That didn’t matter to me because most of the time I felt very uncomfortable when their lifestyle clashed with mine. God was working on a vessel that could be used to serve him. The marks on my fingers now display to me the fact that I am a child of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
My life changed greatly and my wife was amazed. The first convert that I had to add to the kingdom of heaven was my wife. What a thrill to have a dedicated life for Christ, not only my life but my wife and family, also. We both began to become active in the church and in just 3 years I was working hard in the church, but it was time to go back to the states. I was impressed to extend for another year of service in Naples Italy, I did and they let me extend for another year.( God sees the future and plans our life to fulfill that which he wants us to do. Within that year God impressed upon my heart to go into his service.) God impressed me about teaching others. My thought at that time was, ok, a D- English dropout, wants to be a teacher of God’s Holy book. I thought, God I can not do anything of myself you will have to do the job, and it seem to be impressed upon my heart, “That’s right, you can’t but I can, trust only in me”. I shortly became head deacon in the church and in the next few months many things happened.
The pastor had to rotate out
after a stay of 5 years in Naples Italy. We had to call another pastor to
the church, so after the pastor left it was my duty to keep the church
going. It was hard at first getting people to take turns doing teaching
tasks at the church so it was left to me to teach an adult Sunday school
class, preach the Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night
messages for several weeks. Wow, what a learning experience. We did obtain
a pastor after four months and he took all that work from me. I decided to
keep up the study habit though and I obtained a lot of insight into the
Word of God. People in the church didn’t care for the pastor, he knew it, and in just 6 months after he got here, he was gone. I again had to take up the slack just before he left to go back to the States and what a weird feeling to preach to your own Pastor. I continued teaching and preaching until another Pastor was called. What happened over the next 5 months was a unique learning experience. We finally obtained a pastor and I served under him until I had to rotate out of Italy. Another year extension would have passed and a great deal of found memories of church and school building construction with our new pastor. He was a seasoned preacher and everyone liked him very much. So our little church grew and many lives were changed.
So what happened to the
other preacher. He love to go soul winning down at the docks, leading the
sailors to Christ one after another. He was just misplaced. He went into
soul winning work and is very good at it. I remember my first year as a Christian, going soul winning down on the docks at Naples, we were intensely witnessing and expressing our faith until evil seen what was happening. A prince of Satan, who was stationed onboard an aircraft carrier, stepped off a landing boat and was looking around. I fixed my eyes on him for some reason and within seconds it felt like someone had hit me in the chest with a sledge hammer, and I fell to the ground. I could hear everything that was going on, I just couldn't open my eyes nor move any part of my body. I may have died, I don't know, but what I do know is this. The soul winning night was over and my friends that I was with took and placed me in the van that we had came in, and rushed me to the military hospital. While in route to the hospital many prayers were being offered up to God for my sake. When we got to the hospital the doctors examined me, took x-rays and an EKG, while my friends were praying to a Holy God for my deliverance from the evil that had hit me. I still could not move or open my eyes, but I could hear everything that was going on. I heard the attending doctor say to a nurse, "Go and call in the Specialist, that is on call.", then they both left the room. Only my friends praying were left in the room, and seconds later I got up off to bed and said to my friends, lets go home. I got up as if nothing had happened and we left the hospital, leaving the doctors and nurses amazed as to what had happened. They seen dedicated people praying continually for a friend, that God would heal, and God did. Today I have several cyst's on my chest that remind me of that event. The reminder says to remember that evil is forever present to control this world and evil doesn't want Christians to witness to other people that they can have a changed life.
God's word or man's tradition! The military did not want me to extend again in the Naples area and they did not want me to maintain my current job. They wanted to cross-train me, but before I would let them do that I let God cross-train me instead. I got out of the Air Force and went to Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga Tennessee to their Bible Seminary. While going to school there I worked in Ooltewah, TN at the Collegedale distributors. These people were Seventh Day Adventists and sold health food substances. I learn a lot about the warehouse work there and worked up through packing, pulling, loading goods to finally checking goods. A person had to be very dedicated to their work and precise, to become a checker. There were other people that had been working there for 8 years and was still pulling orders. God taught me a lot about the Seventh Day Adventist also. There was a point in Naples Italy, while reading my bible, that I found that it was biblical, according to the Bible, that we worship God on the Seventh Day of the week instead of the first day of the week like all of the church denominations were doing. I approached my Pastor about this and he said that we as Baptist’s, honor Christ and his resurrection by worshiping God on the first day of the week. He said it is not really in the Bible clearly that we worship God on the first day of the week but it was more a tradition that we do so. At that time I accepted that, being a new believer in God, and God brought it back to me during the time that I worked for the Seventh Day Adventists and I again rejected the truth about the Sabbath. There had been other things that I discovered in the Word of God, that God pointed out to me, that I had questions about, and every time I confronted someone about these things, I was given a lame excuse or sometimes a complete lie about the situation, such as what happens when one dies, the so called rapture of the saints, the second coming of Jesus Christ and a lot of other things. I wanted deep down to know without a shadow of a doubt that what was in my mind about these things were either true or false. I have found that the Word of God shows us all that we need to know, the truth about a life consecrated to God and not man's tradition. Anyway, after two years of working at Collegedale distributors and going to school off and on, I left seminary to go to electronics school in Knoxville Tennessee, my home town.
Preparing to live in the desert! While at the school, Tennessee Institute of Electronics, a lot of things happened in my life. My family and I had been indoctrinated into the Fundamental Independent “militant” Baptist faith and that began to give us a problem. We wanted to find a church that would fit our life like a glove….. We conveniently didn’t find a "glove", church. After going to ten different churches we decided that we would just hold our own church services. What a thought from the devil himself. Even though we knew that we should be in church, we neglected the assembling ourselves together, so that the flesh could rule over our “Christian Life”. What happened then over the next 14 years would fill a book. We were departing into the desert of life. The summarized details of the next 14 years will be brought to light in the next section.
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