As time developed, in my teenage years, I became quite immoral. I began to get sexually involved with other girls in school. By the time I was eighteen, I got a girl pregnant and ended up getting married. It wasn’t a desirable marriage, so it turned out to only last about seven years. I had two children in the first marriage. It was a sad situation. During the marriage, I was also very unfaithful. I ran around on my wife. I was involved deeply in pornography and adultery, so that marriage failed, and it was primarily my fault.
So when I was twenty-five years old, I began to date my present wife. We were neither one Christians. Of course, we were immoral, too. She had been married before. I was kind of an unlikely candidate for Christianity. So we got married, and a few years passed by, and I began to be the same old guy that I was before, the same old Don. I began to have extramarital affairs. I was still involved in pornography, so more time passed by. Then by the time I was thirty-two years old, I got involved in another affair again. My wife had already found out about two of the affairs, and she had given me warning that she wasn’t going to live like this. So she found out about another affair I was having. I loved my second wife. I really didn’t love my first wife, but I did my second wife, as best I knew how as a worldly man. I did love her. So she told me on a particular Saturday, she had a talk with me and said, “When I come home, you need to have your things gone, and don’t come back. I’m done.” So when she left, I really came to a reckoning of my life. I said, "Here I am. I’m thirty-two years of age. That’s half of sixty-four. Where is my life going?" I just didn’t want to go through another divorce. I was tired and weary and wore out with sin and miserable.
So not knowing exactly what to do to meet God, I just went into the back closet of the house we lived in at the time. I grabbed a hold of those rails that you hang clothes on, and for the first time as a grown man, I just broke down and cried. So I called on God. You see, I felt like I had sinned so much that there really wasn’t any hope for me. I really felt that a guy like me couldn’t be forgiven or saved. So anyway, I cried out to God that day, and with all sincerity, I asked Him if He would save me and show me what I needed to do to be saved. I didn’t know. I had heard, you know, I had heard the one-step plan and two-step plan and the three-step plan of salvation from different people. I was confused. So I said, “What do I need to do?” It seemed like the Lord was hesitating with me as if He was reluctant for a moment. I was becoming more desperate as I cried out to Him. So (me being the very shy, backward person and antisocial person that I was), I went ahead and said, “Well look Lord, if you will show me the way, not only will I do it, not only will I do what I’m supposed to do, I will even tell others.” I was surprised at myself to say such a thing, but I was in such a desperate state, and then it seemed as though something released in my heart. It was almost like God was saying, “You got yourself a deal. I will show you the way, you will do it, and then you will tell others.”
So, that was thirty-one years ago. I’m sixty-three now. I was thirty-two then. So, the first thing I did was I started going to church with this man that I had met. He had been real nice to me. In fact, he had given me some hope of God being merciful. That was one reason I had enough hope that day to cry out to him. My wife, she let me stay home on the condition that I was going to walk with God. She had already become a Christian, but she had hidden it from me because I was such a hostile person and such a cold person toward the things of God. She had actually kept it a secret from me because she was afraid that I would be critical of her and that I’d give her a hard time about it. So when she found out that I had given my life to the Lord that day in that closet, in 1979, in late 79’, she was very happy about that.
So we began a new journey together. I think I was like a lot of men. They see their wives as a sex object more than they see them as a person that has a soul, has a heart, and has feelings. As I began to study the word and meet with other people that had more maturity and had more sense than I did, I began to see how to love my wife through watching others. I also began to observe my own selfish nature, and so I began to treat her more tenderly.
Over the years, from that point in time where I used to be pretty cold and hateful with my wife, I was more like a dictator than I was like a loving husband. I went from being that dictator (I used to say I was like Saddam Hussein at one time, how he was such a dictator, such a harsh dictator) that’s how I sort of ran my family in those days. I went from that to where my wife and I now, we’ve been married now for thirty-five years. We have the most wonderful, happy, loving, passionate relationship. We’re like two little teenage kids in love. We are always texting each other or calling each other. We have at least one or two dates per week. We go off every so often for a long weekend like a honeymoon. There’s no other love in my life. I love her with all of my heart, and she knows that now. It took a time, a period of time, for me to learn how to love her. Now we try to give this hope to other couples that they really can have a great marriage. Even if there have been problems in the past, God can heal all things and turn them completely around.
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