[1 John 2:25] And this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life.
His parents took him to a church in Ringgold. At twelve a prophet pulled him out and up front and said, you are like a cow; you will eat the Bible and bring it back up, like seven times in your life, and at the end of it you will understand the Bible. There was an old couple who lived on land with a long driveway and a river running through it, who ate clean, and to a boy it felt like Eden. The old man took him into a room and said, God told me to tell you to watch this, and it showed the earth once surrounded by water, and God bringing that water down in the flood.
In June of his thirteenth year, at a summer camp in Michigan, he begged God for the gift of tongues. Many of the children there spoke in tongues every summer, and he never had. Monday night, nothing. Tuesday, nothing. On Wednesday he gave up begging and worshiped anyway, on his knees with his hands lifted up, and his lips began to stammer, and he wept, because the Son of God had touched him with fire. That fall, in the seventh grade, the warrior pressed him all week in the lunch line: speak in tongues. You said you can do it. Finally one day he did, right there in the line, and the warrior said, that sounds right. The warrior did not speak in tongues yet himself. Now he is a full-blown prophet. He will face down a warlock. He is not afraid. In the eighth grade the way was schooled at home.
The house stayed at the House of God on the bypass. The pastor there was the firstborn of three sons himself, like the way. The way's word for every man who starts a church is this: if a man shows up and says God told me to start a church here, good, it is God's church. The second you think it is yours is the second it is nobody's. The way was the only one of the youth there who spoke in tongues. Prophets came through, and one laughed while he prophesied. One called the young men forward and looked at him and said, step forward; God has blessed this one right here with wisdom and knowledge above his peers, and he called the house to clap and rejoice. At about fifteen, back in Ringgold, another prophet said, I see you preaching to many people, and they keep asking, why does he look so young?
Then the House of God built an advanced class and shut the way out of the room, because the doctrine they meant to teach could not stand in a room with him. His father sat down with the pastor and said, we won't be back. You made a room the one who speaks in tongues cannot enter. The well digger did not walk through that door again for twenty-five years. After the house left, they heard that a leader of the young people there had called a young man up in front of the whole church for his sin and had them lay hands on him, and the next Sunday that leader stood and confessed he had done the same thing that morning. The young man never went back. Who would. Your testimony is not how wicked you were. Your testimony is how great God is. They also heard that people were throwing up at the altar after the house left.
His father had a dream about the House of God. In the dream he had to go to the bathroom, and he saw that pastor's car and went in. The pastor stopped him at the bathroom door and said, don't go in. His father opened the door. Weeks later his father saw the pastor's car and went in to tell him the dream, and the pastor stopped him and said, there was feces on the floor of the bathroom in your dream, right? Yes. And he knew it, somehow.
The Hydes had lived with the Lawsons for a little while, and when they were moving away there was a going-away party for them on a Friday. On Saturday there was a knock on the door, and Ben was standing there with the whole computer. Here. God wants you to have it. He had just spent about two thousand dollars building it. The way was fourteen. He learned on it, and that computer launched his life's work. His work is a testimony too.
The house moved to the house on the bypass, and from the hallway the way heard his father on the phone with the mother of a younger friend, the one who can hear and can see, the two of them wondering if the one who came out of the one was a true story.
His father went next to a Methodist house in Varnell, because its pastor spoke in tongues. At seventeen the way walked into another Methodist house himself, took off his shoes, and went to the front to worship, and a man came over him speaking in tongues. He said, this is a Methodist church, and they let you speak in tongues? The man said, I'd like to see them stop me.
At nineteen his father and mother believed God told them to move to Carrollton and sit under a woman's ministry there. They rented out the house on the bypass. The father went to work at a bakery and told his firstborn he had to get out. A family from the Bible studies took him in, then another. His father, whose business was still in the old town, came and slept on the floor beside him. The son said, Dad, take the bed. And the father said, I shouldn't even be here. He visited them in Carrollton, but he never rested in that house. It was a house that was not his house. That year he met a friend, the fighter, who kept the Sabbath. He had never heard of it. On Friday nights he would go to his house and stay with him and read the Bible, and from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday the fighter would not do anything. That opened his eyes. Without him he probably would not have seen the Sabbath pattern, or the new moons and the Sabbaths in the Bible at all.
In 1999 he graduated, and Dell gave him five thousand dollars of credit over the phone, and he spent thirty-six hundred on a new machine with a modem, a printer, and a great monitor. At twenty, at a design studio, he built a site for a great rug company, and in the meeting they joked he was too young to be in the room, he looked like a child, and his boss went with it and joked, he is a child genius. With a steady job he rented a three-bedroom duplex from a bank for five hundred dollars a month, and his brother Joshua lived with him.
At twenty-one he married. Out of respect he asked his mother's sister's husband, a Oneness man, to marry them. That man prepared a sermon and preached it in front of all the people, and in it he spoke the word divorce seven times. He planned it. When the way married, he made the brother named after Jesus move out. There was room. He did it anyway. Joshua got an apartment of his own, and their father came and stayed with him there, and they got a pool table, and the father and the brother named after Jesus played pool together. The way hardly went. He was busy. When the parents came back from Carrollton the father started a storefront church of his own in Dalton, and the way did not go to it. He lived in the basement under his father's house, and finished it with his own hands, barely in time, for his eldest son was born there in 2003, and his younger son after him. About 2004, in that basement, he went from Windows to the Mac.