Ok, now that you know I was a total mess as a teen growing up in Niagara Falls, I’ll move on into new and not much different things.  When I graduated from LaSalle High School, since taken down and replaced by an empty field like much of Niagara Falls, I had no direction and no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.  So I worked at a number of Manpower temporary jobs in some of the lovely factories that have made Niagara Falls famous.  This got to be a little too much after a year, and I decided to attend college.

So in the fall of 1980 I enrolled in Concordia Bronxville just north of New York City.  A huge change of environment.  This was a great new beginning.  I embraced this new life with gusto.  I joined the Choir by the skin of my teeth (had to audition).  I had no real singing experience but the director took a chance on me.  I played on the varsity soccer team, again with no real experience but lots of effort and I joined a new experimental mime troupe.  Basically I made myself very busy to drowned out the pain and emptiness in my heart. 

I managed to pull a 3.65 that first semester but started to fall apart in the second semester and dropped out after one year.  Now it was not all the extra stuff that I was involved in that caused me to drop out, it was my empty all alone feelings that kept resurfacing on a regular basis. 

I recall sitting in the Pub on campus drinking a beer at the Christmas party thinking what the hell am I doing here.  I felt completely alone among the couple of hundred people sitting in the place.  I felt more and more isolated as the year dragged on. 

Both the choir and the mime troupe were bright spots along the way.  I love to sing and we sang a Bach song that truly touched my heart and a number of negro spirituals that I loved.  The director of the mime troupe was a very spirit filled man who challenged me to look for Jesus in my everyday life.  He actually joined the group together around me and laid hands on and prayed for me.  I think that this was truly the beginning of my new life.  I spent the next couple of weeks searching the scriptures in my huge study Bible that had the Apocrypha, and found a prayer that God used to touch my heart.  It was the prayer of Manasseh (not sure of the spelling here).  I spent an evening or two crying out to the Lord and gave my life to him. 

I still ended up leaving school after the spring semester because I felt like I had no idea why I was there and was already several thousand dollars in debt.  But God had used my short college career to drastically change the direction of my life...