My Walk With God - Continued
How God Is Guiding My Ministry
by Brooks A. Harris
As I look back on my life I can now see many times where God has led me and protected me for His purpose. I truly believe He has provided Guardian Angels for me at several points in my journey called life. I believe that God created me with a purpose. He has had a plan for me for a long time, but I am just now beginning to see parts of His plan. The following paragraphs will summarize how I see God’s involvement in my past.
I was a shy child growing up. So I now see how God used my ten years in the Boy Scouts to teach me a sense of accomplishment, self worth, and gave me experiences in team building and leadership. He also used my four years in a military high school, Castle Heights Military Academy, to teach me communication skills, teamwork and leadership skills.
When I graduated from Southern College of Optometry in 1985 and began my optometric practice in Ripley, TN, I had to begin talking to local groups to advertise my name and professional skills. I learned that I enjoyed lecturing on a subject in which I was very familiar.
I had attended church pretty regularly as a child, but only occasionally during my college years. My wife and I joined a church in 1985 and have attended pretty regularly ever since. In about 1997 I asked God to help me read His word, the Bible, more regularly. About two weeks later someone asked for a volunteer to teach the Jr/Sr High Sunday School Class. I had never taught before, but I knew I enjoyed working with kids and I wanted to learn more so I said OK. I found out quickly that when you teach you really have to study and learn the information to be ready to teach it to others.
Now here is the interesting part. Although I had the above experiences in church, I still had doubt in God’s existence. I wanted to believe but I was not absolutely sure. I believed that the Bible was a good instruction manual and good to teach from, but due to my scientific background and other factors in my past, I did not know if God truly existed. Eventually He used my doubt to make me research, and boy did I research.
In 1999 I began reading many creation science materials and quickly realized that science drastically supports the creation story as recorded in Genesis, but true scientific findings cause many problems for the theory of Darwinian evolution. It made me realize that all the stories in Genesis were true history and not just symbolic tales. Further studies in science, history, archaeology and reading study Bible comments, made me realize I could trust the entire Bible.
I began writing about what I had learned. Before too long I had a 16 chapter book nearly ready to publish, but before I could, my computer crashed three times. After about two years of writing and the third crash I decided to not do a book. I took it as a sign from God as if He was telling me that a book was not what He had in mind for me. So instead I turned all the writings into individual handouts. I gave several people varying handouts over the next few years (and I still do). After adding handouts from other people I finally put a collection of all my handouts into notebooks so people could borrow and read what they wanted. I made about fifty notebooks but only have a few left.
In January of 2008 I purchased several books on creation science, history, and Christian questions and answers and set up a catalogued library for people to check out. It is not used much but comes in handy when someone is really interested in a certain subject. I also purchased several small Bibles, books, and booklets to give away for free to interested people. My favorite book to give away is a "365 Bedtime Bible Stories" book for children and their parents to read.
In the spring of 2008 I tried to organize a small group of Christian men who were interested in sharing the word of God. I called the group CHRIST PALS which stood for "Christians Helping to Restore the Importance of Scriptural Teachings by Providing Affordable Literature and Scripture." We have met once but I anticipate future meetings.
I started giving lectures on scientific evidence for creation in about 2000. I’ve only given about ten so far but again I found that I really enjoy talking to others about subjects which I really understand. In the fall of 2008 a Baptist pastor asked me to speak in December. He said that their church had power point capabilities so I began playing with power point on my computer for the first time. After well over 100 hours of preparation I finally was able to give my first power point presentation. God was guiding me to do several things I had never done and never would have believed I would do.
In the winter of 2009 God led me to research and write an article entitled "Evidence For Biblical Reliability." This took a few months to finish. This article, compiled from several sources, was designed to show multiple evidences for the truth of the Bible. I used the acronym SHAPES to stand for shaping your acceptance of the Bible by studying the SHAPES of Biblical Reliability. These are evidence from Science, History, Archaeology, Prophecy, Epistles/Manuscript preservation and Structure & Statistics. I researched several web sites and found some of the best and most concise articles which demonstrate how reliable the Bible truly is. In the article I listed several web sites, web articles and even books for more information.
In January of 2009 I mentioned to my daughter’s boyfriend that it would be neat to get this article and other articles on the internet. So in order to share my articles he set me up with a blog site: http://biblicalreliability.blogspot.com. I did not even know what a blog site was at that time. I did nothing with it until May of 2009 when I entered about 55 of my articles including "Evidence For Biblical Reliability." I then felt called to get this information to people, so He led me to begin advertising with flyers, card, mailings, etc.
So this is where I am at this time. I truly believe that all along it has been God’s plan for me to show as many people as possible that the Bible is very reliable and should be trusted. I am still trying to listen to the will of God. I only wonder what He has in store for me in the near and distant future.
