A Lost Boy and the Hippie Jesus Revolution: Greg Laurie's Story

On this episode of Our American Stories, Pastor Greg Laurie tells the story of his life.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we do a lot of stories about faith because
faith is such an important part of American life and
has been since our founding. Greg Glory is the founder
and senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, one of the

(00:31):
largest and most influential churches in America, with campuses in
California and Hawaii. Greg has written more than seventy books,
including Jesus Revolution, which was also released as a film
starring Kelsey Grammar. The movie is the true story of
the Jesus Hippie movement in the early nineteen seventies in
southern California. Here's Greg Glory with his story.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
So I was born in nineteen fifty two. That seems
like ancient history now, Yes, I was actually alive in
the fifties. Eisenhower was president, we had just come through
World War Two. There was this buoyant optimism in our country.
Everything had this sort of futuristic look that now we

(01:17):
call fifties design. But in the day it was supposed
to look like the future, and it was actually a
really great time to be alive. I read a survey
a while ago that said, if people could live in
any era, what era would you pick? And the most
popular choice was the fifties. But it wasn't long until
the fifties turned to the sixties, and then the sixties

(01:39):
turned very dark. I was born in Long Beach, California,
in nineteen fifty two to a woman named Charlene McDaniel.
She was from a very large family with many siblings.
They were from Friendship, Arkansas, old fashioned values, and as
you look at the old photographs of my mother with

(02:02):
her siblings, she stands out. It's not that the siblings
weren't good looking men and women. It's just that my
mom was extraordinarily beautiful, literally a Marilyn Monroe look alike,
and so she ran away from home at a very
early age. My mom was a rebel at heart, and

(02:23):
she would wear pants when you weren't supposed to wear pants,
and to show you how what her home was like,
her father, Charles McDaniel, once saw her wearing pants. He
made her take him off. He cut him up with
scissors and threw him into the fire. That just fueled
my mother's rebellion. And my aunt Willie actually helped her
pack a suitcase and she eloped with some guy and

(02:46):
off my mother went to her series of what would
become seven marriages that would take her all around the
United States. So along the way she met a guy.
I found this out later. His name was Barney. He
was a sailor in the US Navy, and they had
a one night stand, a fling, and my mom got pregnant,

(03:07):
and she married another guy named Kim and put his
name on my birth certificate, and I believed he was
my father. So my mother just went on a series
of marriages and divorces. She was a raging alcoholic. She
was a literal man. Magnet men were always coming to her,

(03:28):
so she had a lot of boyfriends in between the husbands.
And I went along for what we might describe as
Charlene's wild Ride. You've heard of mister Toad's wild Ride
at Disneyland. It was Charlene's wild Ride. But at times
she would leave me to live with my grandparents. So I,
now as a little boy, was living with the parents
she rebelled from. And it's not just that they were older,

(03:51):
they were from another generation, but they were strong disciplinarians.
They forced me to adhere to standards and rules, which
was actually kind of good for me, because up to
that point I felt like I'd been raised by wolves almost.
I really didn't have any absolutes or standards to live by,
so it was a stable time in my life. But

(04:13):
they would take me to church and I was bored,
and I remember drawing on the little church bulletin. But
in the house where my grandparents lived, there was a
little portrait of Jesus hanging up on the wall, and
I would often find myself just staring at that portrait.
There was something about Jesus that fascinated me at a
very young age. Another thing that we used to do

(04:34):
is watch television together. They had these two big lazy
boy type chairs and I had a little stool in
the middle, and we would watch this little black and
white TV and watch Bonanza and gun Smoking, all these
popular shows of the late fifties early sixties. And I
remember we also watched a preacher named Billy Graham, and
I really liked him. Sometimes that night, after my grandparents

(04:58):
went to bed, I would pull a cover of for
my head and I would talk to an imaginary character
I had invented and I named him mister Nobody, and
I would just kind of pour my heart out to him,
tell him what was troubling me, what was bothering me.
And I think in my own little kid way, I
was reaching out to God. You know, the Bible says
God has placed eternity in our hearts. And I knew

(05:21):
that God was out there somewhere. I just didn't know
who he was or what his name was. So fast
forward now and we're in the turbulent sixties and youth
are starting to rebel against their parents, and I joined them.
And there was a saying of the day, never trust
anyone over thirty, And that ring truth for me, because

(05:42):
all of the adult role models that I was exposed
to disappointed me. And there was not one adult that
I admired or looked up to or wanted to be like. Now,
I left up one of my mother's seven husbands she
was married to divorce seven times. He was different than
all the other husbands. His name was Oscar Laurie. He

(06:04):
actually took the time to adopt me. He treated me
as a father should treat his son. He disciplined me,
he gave me an allowance, He took time to help
me explain things to me, and I really loved him,
so it was really a big shock when one day
I came out of school in New Jersey where we lived.
He was a practicing attorney, and our Cadillac was loaded

(06:24):
up with luggage, and I asked my mother, where are
we going. She said, we're going to Hawaii. Well, I'd
never been to Hawaii before. I was very excited. I said,
where's Dad. She said, he's not coming. So we got
in the car. We went to the airport, we landed Honolulu, Hawaii,
and there standing before me is this very tall man
named Eddie, and this was my mother's new husband. How

(06:46):
she met him, how this came about, I did not know,
but I remember one thing. They literally had recreated the
room I had in New Jersey in Hawaii, which I
found very surreal.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
And you're listening to pastor Greg Glory the story of
his own life, A surreal life, is right, And he
said something so so haunting. I had not one adult
I admired or looked up to or wanted to be
like in my life. What a sad thing to hear,
But in the end it would fuel who we'd become
when we come back more of Gregloriy's life here on

(07:21):
our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our
American Stories, the show where America is the star and
the American people, and we do it all from the
heart of the South Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can't
do this show without you. Our shows will always be

(07:43):
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, consider making a tax
deductible donation to our American Stories. Go to our American
Stories dot com. Give a little, give a lot. That's
our American Stories dot com. And we continue with our

(08:10):
American Stories and the story of Pastor Greg Glory's life
told by Greg Glory himself.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Let's pick up where we last left off. This man
Eddie was very violent. He and my mother would drink
every night and they would start hitting each other. And
one night I was in bed and I heard a
loud crash and a thud, and I came out. My
mother was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Eddie was standing over her, holding on to it. I

(08:39):
remember it distinctly, a don Quixote wooden statue, which were
very popular back in those days. I have no idea why.
And there was blood on it, and he said, go
back to bed, it's just catch up. But even as
a little kid, I knew this was real and I
knew he had hit my mother. I thought she was dead.
I climbed out of the window of my bedroom to

(09:00):
a neighbor and the ambulance came. And we left Hawaii
and moved to California. Well, now I'm in high school.
I'm at Corona delm Or High School. I know everybody
in campus. I'm the cartoonist for the school paper. I
started to correspond with Charles M. Schultz, creator of Peanuts,

(09:20):
and I would send him my cartoons and ask him
to critique them, which he very graciously did. I have
no idea why he took the time to write letters
to me, but I can tell you when I got
a letter from Charles M. Schultz, it was like getting
a letter from heaven because I would open it and
it had a little snoopy and Charlie Brown drawing on
the envelope. I still have one. I actually framed it,

(09:40):
and he would talk about my art work. Hey, this
is looking good, Greg, And one time I asked him,
can I have a piece of original art who asked
for that. I did, and he sent it to me
one of his comic strips, which actually quite large, those
panels he would draw that would be in the newspapers.
So the whole drug culture's coming on strong. And I

(10:02):
was a big fan of the Beatles, and the Beatles
now are in their drug phase, singing things like I'd
love to churn you on, and we're hearing about LSD,
and I decided that I wanted to change my life.
I decided I didn't want to be the person I was.
I was kind of this surfer, preppy ish kid in
this very affluent high school. I was affluent, and I

(10:26):
thought I want to become a hippie because I thought, hey,
if I start doing drugs, maybe I'll find what I'm
looking for in life. So I literally transferred to this
other campus called Harbor High School, also in Newport Beach.
No one knew me there, and my objective and goal
was to become a different person. So I started using
drugs quite heavily. I was smoking marijuana every day, taking

(10:49):
LSD on most weekends, and living my altered state of existence.
I noticed that my artistic skills were going down the tubes.
I noticed my creativity. He was being sapped. I realized
I was not the person I used to be, and
I didn't like the person I was becoming. So one
day on my high school campus at Harbor High, I

(11:11):
see this cute girl. Her name is Chrissy. So I
noticed she had a textbook for class and a notebook,
and then I noticed she had one of those Bibles,
and I thought, oh no, she's a Jesus freak. What
a waste of a perfectly cute girl. And when I
transferred to this campus, all my loady doper friends said, careful, Greg,

(11:32):
there's a lot of Jesus freaks on this campus. I said,
the last thing you'll ever see is Greg Glory becoming
a Jesus freak. Famous last words. So one day I'm
walking along and there are a group of Jesus freaks
sitting on the front lawn of Harbor High and they're
singing songs about God, and Chrissy is sitting among them,

(11:55):
and I was looking around at them, and I was thinking,
these people are delusional, they're crazy, they're weird. But there
was one problem because one of the people there, his
name was Bill. I went to elementary school with him.
I knew Bill was a normal person and he used
to be a good friend of mine, and he had
become a Jesus freak, so I couldn't completely dismiss it.
And then this guy stands up who had joined them.

(12:17):
He was from off campus. He had long hair parted
down the middle and a full beard, and this kind
of flowing hippie shirt that almost looked like a robe. Frankly,
he looked a lot like Jesus. He got my attention
and I thought, well, what's going on here? But he
made one statement. He said, Jesus said, you're either for
me or against me. And I looked around at the

(12:38):
Christians and I thought, well, they're for him and I'm
not one of them. Does that mean I'm against Jesus. Well,
I don't want to be against Jesus. I always admire Jesus.
So Lonnie says, you're either for me or against me,
and if you would like to accept Jesus Christ, get
up and walk forward right now. Next thing I knew,

(12:59):
I was up there praying with a group of people,
and then the school bell rang and we all had
to go back to class. So one day some guy
sees me walking across the campus and he yells out,
brother Greg. He hasn't really loud him. Bro. I'm like, uh, yeah, what,
and he goes, I saw that you prayed and accepted

(13:19):
Jesus the other day. And I'm kind of resentful and
sort of yeah. So hey, Bro, I got you a Bible.
And he gives me this Bible that is the most
obnoxious looking bible I think I've ever seen. It had
two popsicles to ex glued together in the shape of
a cross. Bro, it's the Bible here. And I took
it from him. I just wanted him to go away.
I shoved it him the pocket of my coat I

(13:40):
was wearing. And I hadn't been over to see my
old friends. And we would always go over to this
guy's house at lunchtime and literally get high and go
back to class high. And so I walked in the
door and as I was walking in that I can't
walk in with a bible. So I pulled this Bible
out and he had a little hedge in front of
his house, a little planter with a hedge. So I

(14:01):
hid my Bible in the hedge and I walked in
and my friend said, Greg, GLORI they call me LORI actually, Laurie,
where are you been? I said, nowhere? What have you
been doing? We haven't seen you for a while. I
said nothing, and they said, hey, you want to get stoned.
They said, no, you don't want to get stoned. No,
I don't want to. Why I just don't want to?

(14:22):
And they'd seen something's happened to me. And I felt
very uncomfortable there where I used to feel very comfortable.
All of a sudden, the front door bursts open and
they're standing in the doorway is the mother of one
of the guys that lived in the house, and she's
holding my bible up and in a very accusatory way, says,
who does this bible belong to? And I look up

(14:45):
at it, and everyone in the room looks at the
Bible and they look at me. It's like, I think,
what's going on with this woman? Is there something wrong
with having a bible? It said? Kids are doing drugs
in her house and she's alarmed that there's a Bible
in her bushes. Who does this belong to? Everyone figured
out really quickly I was connected to it. I said

(15:05):
it's me And someone said, what is that greg? I said,
it's a Bible. No, Greg, what is that? What a bible?
A Bible? And one of my friends said, oh, praise
the Lord, brother Greg, are we going to start reading
the Bible now? And I said, now, I'm going to
hit you, is what I'm going to do. I hadn't
read the Bible yet, I didn't know I'm supposed to
love people yet. And I lived there realizing something very

(15:30):
significant it happened. First of all, I didn't want to
live this old life anymore. But what now? So I
was in sort of this no man's land where I
wasn't comfortable with my old friends and I didn't quite
feel comfortable with the Christians. They seemed a little intense
for me. And the Lord brought just the right guy
end of my life. His name was Mark. I didn't
know him from Adam's house. Cat just walks up to me. Hi,

(15:52):
my name is Mark. Oh hi Mark. Yeah, I saw
that you became a Christian. Yeah, I did. Well. I'd
like to take you to church and I said no,
that's okay, and he goes, no, I want to take
you to church with me. I said no, I don't
really want to go, and he said, where do you live?
I'll come pick you up. No, no, I don't want
you to pick me up. Next thing, I know, I
gave my address. He's at my house and I'm on

(16:14):
my way to church. And then someone comes out to speak.
And it wasn't Lonnie Frisbee, the cool hippie preacher. It
was an older gentleman named Chuck Smith. It turns out
he was a senior pastor of the church. And I thought, oh, no,
an adult. I just had this problem with adults when
I was in high school. I was always mouthing off

(16:35):
to teachers, always getting sent to the vice principal's office
for disciplinary measures, and I just had a whole problem
with authority figures in the adult world. This adult comes out,
opens up his Bible, immediately begin to close off. But
then I found that he was really understandable, and I
really enjoyed listening to him, and all of a sudden

(16:57):
I began to change and I thought, I actually really
like this.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
And we've been listening to Pastor Greg Glory, and what
a story he's telling us. Boy, the many marriages of
his mom. He comes to Los Angeles and he wants
to reinvent himself, and he's entranced by the music of
the Beatles, particularly, there's psychedelic music, and there's Jefferson Airplane
and Jimmy Hendrix, and well, psychedelic drugs and the like

(17:24):
are everywhere in southern California, and so he chooses to
reinvent himself through drugs. Only he knows that's not working
and there are those Jesus freaks. As he starts to
gravitate towards the beginning of his Christian life, he finds
himself caught between two worlds, not comfortable with his old
friends and not quite comfortable with his new ones. When

(17:45):
we return more of Greg Glory's story here on our
American Stories, and we continue with our American stories and

(18:10):
Pastor Greg Lori's story, let's pick up where we last
left off.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
And so my life started changing rapidly, and they began
to read the Bible. And what surprised me so much
about the Bible, I had a modern translation that I
was reading called good News for modern man, is that
this book related to me. I understood it. And so
I never had anything like that to guide my life by,

(18:36):
to have principles to live by. So my life began
to change, and I began to attend Calvary Chapel. Pretty
much every night of the week they had all kinds
of services going there. And it wasn't long after that
that I thought I would use my cartooning ability for
my faith. And I found out where Chuck Smith live,
so I went to his house. He had never met

(18:57):
me before. I said, hi, Pastor Chuck. I had tend
and I heard you give a message on the woman
at the wall, and I drew this little cartoon booklet.
He's looking at it and he starts smiling. He goes,
I love this, Hey, can you redraw it in this
other format? Why don't we publish it? Ultimately, I think
well over a million of those were printed. And that
was my entree, if you will, into what we'll call ministry.

(19:21):
And I remember one day I was walking along down
in Newport Beach and there was this woman about the
age of my mom sitting on the beach. And I'd
heard that we needed to talk to people about our faith.
So I walked up and engaged her in a conversation,
and much to my surprise, after I was done talking
to her, this woman said she wanted to accept Christ.

(19:42):
So I prayed with her and she put her faith
in Jesus, and I realized that God was putting a
call on my life to reach people a lot like
I was cynical, who had had rough lives, who weren't
raised in the church. And so so that became the
start of what was ministry for me. So I'm still

(20:05):
living with my mother. I go home and I decide
I want to tell her what has happened to me.
She didn't look very excited about it. I think she
went out of her way to keep me from ever
hearing anything about Jesus. I remember when I was a
younger boy, I once asked her what is Easter about?
She said, I don't know. She knew. My mother was

(20:28):
raised in the church. She went to church with her
siblings and mom and dad Sunday morning, Sunday night, and
even to a midweek study. My mother knew all about it,
and she was rebelling against it, and she didn't want
her son to know anything about it. But my first
attempt to reach my mother was not successful, nor was

(20:50):
it good. I think I was way too blunt, way
too harsh. I think I said something along the lanes
of you're going to go to Hell, so revent and
I realized I needed to move out of this house
because it was this drinking world of her still and
getting in fights with her husband every night and passing

(21:12):
out from a night of drinking. And I just was
really sick of it, you know, because I had to
be the parent through most of this relationship when I
was a little boy. Well now I'm like seventeen years old,
I'm about to turn eighteen. I don't want to do
this anymore. I don't want to live my mother's life anymore.
So I went home and I told my mother I'm
going to move out. I was really surprised to see

(21:33):
her be very sad. She teared up, but I had
to leave for my own survival. Well, coming back to
Lonnie Frisbee, the guy who was preaching, he' befriended me.
I was hanging around him and he took me once
up to a city called Riverside, which is about forty
five minutes away from where I was living. In Orange County.

(21:56):
There was an Episcopalian church that wanted their own version
of the g Jesus Movement. So they came to Chuck
Smith and said, could we have Lonnie come up to
our church? And he agreed, and Lonnie was up there preaching,
and I went up there a few times with Lonnie
and it grew to around three hundred people. And then
then Lonnie moves off to Florida with his wife to
work in his marriage, and this little Bible study started

(22:18):
being handed around to various pastors at work at Calvary
Chapel who were all around ten years older than I was,
and I would just hang around. I would do it
ever needed to be done. I'd do janitorial work, I'd
run an errand, and I had my drawing board set
up and I was doing my artwork. I wanted to
be used by God. So they would give me the

(22:38):
things that no one else wanted to do, like, hey,
somebody wants someone to speak at a home Bible study
two hours away, Greg, why don't you do it? And
so I literally went and did all these things no
one else wanted. But it was great experience because I
was being exposed to every kind of person in every
kind of setting imaginable. And so one day they're talking

(23:00):
pastors and one of them said, who's going to go
to the church this Sunday. The church was called All
Saints Episcopal Church. Who's going to go this Sunday? Well,
I'm going next Sunday. What about you? I went last Sunday, Oh,
well I don't want to go. And then they turned
to me and said, well, Greg, you want to go?
And I said I'll go. And so I went up
that Sunday and sort of the head deacon didn't know

(23:22):
I was coming. No one took the time to tell him.
So I said, hy, I'm here to preach tonight. Understand,
I'm an eighteen year old kid. I've here down passed
my shoulders full length spirit. I'm here to preach tonight.
He said, well, I don't know you. I don't know
if you've come from Calviy Chapel. We'll just wait until
the right guy shows up. I said, I am the
right guy. Well, no one else showed up because I
was a speaker. He said, okay, you can go ahead

(23:44):
and speak, which I did, and then I went back
to the next Sunday and the next Sunday, and before I
knew it, people started calling me pastor Greg. The last
thing I felt qualified to be was a pastor. But
I saw this little church was growing and it was
become a congregation, and I tried to find someone to
take it over, but no one wanted to take it over.

(24:05):
So then I started a midweek study and we started
teaching through books of the Bible. Greg I was literally
reading things for the first time in that morning and
teaching them that night. It was like on the job training.
And so that became the beginning of our church that
now just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Now, if you've seen

(24:28):
the Jesus Revolution film, which is on Netflix right now
and on the Apple streaming platform Amazon, you know, the
story is a little different in the film, but the
arc of the story is the same. Okay, So fast
forward many years now, we're in the nineties and I
have started evangelistic crusades again because of Chuck Smith. And

(24:52):
one day Chuck comes to me and says, Greg, I
think we had to take this to a larger venue,
and I think we had to do a Billy Graham
style crusade and have you preach at it. And so
we rented a venue called the Pacific Amphitheater, which seated
around seventeen thousand people. That's a big place. We were
in a church that seated around twenty five hundred, so

(25:15):
that's a big jump. But we booked the Pacific Amphitheater
for maybe five nights, and we had our first crusade.
We broke attendance records, and then the next year we
went to Angel Stadium. So my crusade ministry is now launched,
and I'm speaking around the United States, and I come
on the radar of Billy Graham and I became friends

(25:38):
with his son, Franklin, and Billy was doing a crusade
at Angel Stadium in nineteen eighty five and I was
asked to get up on the stage and pray, which
I did, and then I Billy and I became friends.
And he was kind of coming toward the end of
his evangelistic ministry as I was starting mine, and he

(25:59):
said that he wanted help with his sermon illustrations to
reach younger people. I'm in my thirties at this point,
and so I said, I'd be thrilled, I'd be honored
to help you in any way I could. So I
found myself traveling with Billy.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
And E've been listening to Pastor Greg Glory tell his
story and he discovers the Bible and for the first
time reads a book that is he put it related
to me. And then he started to attend church regularly,
Chuck Smith's Cavalry Chapel, and he used his prolific artistic skills,
his cartooning talents to help the church spread the gospel.

(26:37):
God was putting a call on my life, Brake said.
And then he had to deal with his mom. He
just couldn't live that life anymore, and he just had
to move out. And I love that part about him
talking about reading the Bible verse in the morning and
preaching on it in the afternoon. What courage that took,
What faith that took, and how else to learn but

(26:58):
to teach? And he just had the faith to step
out and do that and then began his crusade life.
And my goodness being able to have the helping hand
of Billy Graham. As Graham is ending his evangelistic life,
Greg Gloriy is beginning his. When we come back more
of this remarkable journey, this story of one man's faith

(27:21):
journey here on our American stories and we continue with
our American stories, and Pastor Greg Glory, let's pick up

(27:42):
where we last left off.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
I'm preaching the people at this point around the world,
and my own mom is not a believer. Now. I
found out later she was very proud of me because
my aunt said she kept like a little scrap book
and every time an article was written about me, or
I appeared some wherein it was interviewed, she would keep
a record of it. But she never said it to me.

(28:05):
She never said to me once I love you, or
I'm proud of you or anything. And so I thought she,
you know, wasn't even paying attention. But I was seeing
kind of that hard shell of my mother's start to
crack a little bit because her lifestyle had taken its tolls.
She was no longer a Marilyn Monroe look alike. She
was now a woman who had been ravaged by bad

(28:28):
choices of drinking, to access and smoking. And when she
was seventy, she looked like she was in her late nineties.
She was getting dialysis treatment, her kidneys were failing. So
one day I'm driving to church and God just spoke
to my heart as clear as day and said, go
talk to your mother. So I called my wife, Kathy,

(28:51):
and I said, I'm going to go talk to my
mom today about her relationship with God or lack thereof.
Pray for me. So I went over to my mom's
house and I walked in and she goes, what are
you doing here? I said, I'm here to talk to
you today about your soul. She said, I don't want
to talk about it. And this was her response every
time I brought spiritual issues up. She would say, I

(29:13):
don't want to talk about it. I said, today, we're
going to talk about it, and I pressed her, and
that conversation thankfully resulted in my mother making a recommitment
to the Lord. And little how was I to know
that one month later she would die. But I had
a full time ministry sharing the gospel with my mother's
former husbands. Oscar Laurie was the first. So I mentioned

(29:38):
earlier that we loaded up the car and drove to
the airport. And I didn't see him from my childhood.
But now I'm a young adult. Our church is just
starting and I decide I need to talk with him somehow.
So I found him. I located him. This is pre Google,
and I found him practicing law still in New Jersey.

(29:59):
So I called him on the phone. It's kind of
funny because I called his law office and I said, yes,
is Oscar Lorie there? And the secretary said, well, mister
Lorry's out to lunch right now. Can I say who called?
I said, yes, tell him Greglory called. She said, how
do you spell your last name? I said l A
U r Ie the same way he spells his. This
is his son. Well, I got a call not long

(30:21):
after that, and he said, oh, Greg, so good to
hear your voice. And I said, well, you know, I'm
going to be in New York. I'm going to be speaking.
I'm a minister now. I don't know what he thought
of that. And I said I'd love to maybe have
lunch with you. And he says, oh, come and stay
at our house. I'm remarried to a woman named Barbara
and we would love to have you come. And I said, well,
I'm married, I have a wife and a son, Christopher. Oh,

(30:44):
come on join us. And so I spoke at Central
Park at this event. Then we got on the train
and we made our way out to New Jersey where
he lived Red Bank, New Jersey. As I got off
the train, I saw him, and boy, it was just
like I went back in time. I still recognized him
though it had been many years. And so that night

(31:05):
we caught up on all that had happened since we
last saw each other. Before I knew it, I was
calling him Dad, and so was a great reunion. And
he actually told me he had tried to get custody
of me when he heard about the crazy decisions my
mother was making in the life she was living. But
she fought him tooth and nail, which had found ironic

(31:26):
because she never seemed to want to have me around.
She was gone so much. I lived with my grandparents.
I even did a stint in military school twice. But
I look back and I realized God was in control,
because if I'd lived with him, my life would have
probably followed a different course. So the next night, his wife,

(31:46):
Barbara made us a great Italian meal, and she said, Greg,
tell me how you became a Christian and a minister.
So I shared my entire life story and my dad
is sitting on the opposite and the table. Now remember
he's a lawyer. He spends a lot of time in
courtrooms and he was going to eventually become a judge.

(32:10):
The whole night he just sat there with his hands
up to his face, kind of folded, analyzing what he
was saying. So as I'm talking about what christ has
done for me. I'm thinking this is not going over well.
He's not liking this at all. Barbara was very responsible.
Oh that's wonderful, that's fantastic. He just stared and listened.
And at the end of the night he said, Greg,

(32:31):
will you walk with me tomorrow morning? Because he had
to walk every morning. And one part I left out
is he had had a heart attack. He was in
his later sixties at this point, and blacked out behind
the steering wheel of his current had driven into a
telephone pole. So now he's on medication. He has to
walk every day. He has a very strict diet. Will
you walk with me in the morning? He has I

(32:52):
said sure, Dad. So the next morning he knocks at
the door of my bedroom at six o'clock in the morning,
New Jersey time, three o'clock California time. I roll out
of bed, wiping the sleep out of my eyes. And
we're walking now, and the brisk New Jersey era is
in our face, and he says, Greg, I listened very

(33:12):
carefully to what she said last night. I said yeah,
And he said, and I want to become a Christian.
And I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I said, well, Dad,
let me go over it one more time so you
understand what it means. I went over again. He goes, yes,
I understand that. What do I need to do? And
we're still walking. At this point, we're in a park.
I said, well, you need to pray, and he drops

(33:35):
to his knees in this park on his knees. So
I too dropped to my knees. What do I do?
He said, well, we pray and I let him in
this prayer to accept Christ. And after we're done, Prainey says, Greig,
pray that Jesus heals my heart. So I prayed for
his heart. And after we're done, Prainey says, Greig, my
doctor's office says right over here, Why don't we go

(33:55):
over there? I want to tell him I've just become
a Christian and that God's healed my heart. I said, wait, Dad,
we don't know that God's healed your heart. Heause, let's
go over there, and so I go over with him
to his doctor's office. He walks in, Hey, doc, this
is my son Greg. He's from California. He's a preacher.
And I'm thinking, what is this doctor thinking? You know?
And he says to the doctor, I've just become a

(34:16):
Christian and I believe God has healed my heart. And
the doctor says, now, Oscar, we have to run some tests.
We don't know that your heart is healed. And they
ran tests on him, and sure enough, his heart was healed.
And he lived fifteen more years and got very involved
in his church. And I have never seen such a
radical transformation of a person's life. I was living in

(34:40):
California still, so I had to go home. I did
find him at church to go to, and when I returned,
maybe a month and a half later, I was talking
to him and sharing scriptures. He had pretty much read
the whole Bible already, because my dad would read these
really thick books on history that lined his bookshelves. So
this it was a deep thinker and intellect and he

(35:03):
was processing it all so quickly, so that was wonderful.
So coming back to my mother, she married a man
named Eddie that I referred to. Someone told me that
Eddie was really sick and wasn't going to live long,
and he lived in Hawaii while I was over there preaching,
so I had not really seen him since he had

(35:24):
knocked my mother unconscious and almost killed her. I had
a deep resentment towards him, and I didn't really even
want to talk to him about God. I didn't care
about him, but I felt bad about that, and I
knew I should talk to him. So someone said, you
need to go see him. He's not going to live
much longer. So I went over to his little apartment,

(35:45):
which was right across the street from the Waikiki show
where I was going to be preaching that night, and
I told him my whole story of how I came
to faith, and he just listened. And I said, would
you like to accept Jesus Christ? And he said, no,
you want to, you know, get closer to God? No, No,
he's just totally closed off to it all. I said, well,

(36:05):
I'm going to be speaking across the street over here,
which I like to come over and listen to me. No,
I don't want to. So it wasn't always successful, and
there were others that my mom was involved with that
I shared the Gospel with, with varying degrees of success.
But the point of it all is, you know, you
look back in your life and you can't control what
hand your dealt in life. All you can control is

(36:28):
how you react to it. You know, you can become
better or you can become bitter. And I decided to
go back to these rough times of my childhood and
try to do the best I could to reach people
with this gospel that had changed my life.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
Pastor Greg Laurie, who's the founder and senior pastor of
Harvest Christian Fellowship and it's one of the are just
and most influential churches in the country who campuses in
California and Hawaii. Greg is also the author of seventy books,
including Jesus Revolution. By the way, it streams everywhere. Watch

(37:12):
it with the kids, I think over fourteen or fifteen,
actually not too young, but a beautiful, beautiful movie about
his life and about a moment in time in America.
And that's of course, the early nineteen seventies where America
is in turmoil, the kids are up for grabs, it's drugs,
it's anti authoritarianism, it's America at one of its darkest times,

(37:34):
and up arises this youth movement towards Christ and towards
God and my goodness. He's preaching around the world, we learn,
but still his mom, his mom is not a believer,
and this is just aching his heart. He learns kept
a secret scrap book, and yet she had never, ever,
once told him she loved him. And of course his mission,

(37:58):
which he said so beautiful, God was putting a call
in my life to reach people like me, people who'd
led rough lives, people who are cynical like me. The
story of Pastor Greg Lauri here on our American Stories