Road to Salvation, Part 1

In the spring of 2007, Kent and I were faced with the reality that we were in financial ruin. As a planner, I went the route of finding a way out of the mess. Kent, who had never been strong in faith but was a believer, turned to God.


Although we weren’t sure how to crawl out of the hole we were in, Kent was very firm in his belief that we needed to go to church. He told me to pick a church and we would be going the next Sunday, the week after Easter. I was certain that going to church would not fix our problem, but agreed to give Kent what he wanted.

With as little as I believed or knew about church, I could not understand how sitting in a church building on Sunday morning would change anything that was happening in our lives. It was just a building. In fact, I looked at church as only a building and religion as just something people do.

At Kent’s request, I searched websites of churches in Lee’s Summit, not really knowing what I was looking for at the time. I stumbled onto the Summit Woods Baptist Church website only because it was at the top of the search list. Once on the site, I found the “My First Visit” section. Of all the information on the page, the sentence that stuck out like a neon flashing sign was “Don’t worry, we don’t ask our guests to stand up or do anything to cause attention!” That’s all I needed. Next Sunday, we would walk through the doors of Summit Woods Baptist Church.

I spent the entire week trying to convince Kent that we did not need to go to church. I explained over and over that churches were all bad and that the people in them would never welcome us. It was with great reluctance that I agreed to get married in a church and I had spent almost 10 years avoiding another visit to any church. Since I took responsibility for where we were at financially, I felt an obligation to do what Kent had asked. So, off to church we would go.