ISBN: 978-0-9824428-5-2
Category: RELIGION / General
Format: Trade paper
Trim size: 5 3/8 x 8 3/8
304 pages
Retail: $15.99 U.S.
Quantity 24
About The Book
For forty years I lived life on my own terms apart from knowing God or understanding any relevance the Bible had to my life. Frankly, I saw no practical purpose for the Bible other than as a table decoration or a book used by lying politicians swearing to act truthfully and in good faith. But God, through divine intervention placed a humble little country preacher in my path who taught the Word as if it was real and had application to my life. The first Sunday I attended that church the pastor said something that I will never forget: “God wants you (first person singular) to know Him face to face just like Abraham, Moses, David, Peter and Paul.” Well, I had never considered that to be possible. However, I wanted to find out if such a personal encounter with God could be a realization. But where and how was I to meet The Almighty “face to face?”
I wrote these stories in the hope of encouraging you to glean the riches from the mind of God found in the Bible which are practical for enriching our lives in every way. More importantly, within the pages of the Bible is an unfolding of knowing God “face to face.” West Texas is the setting with a list of fictional characters with some of the personality traits of people I have known, loved, respected, and sometimes tried to avoid as they interacted in everyday circumstances.
I have something fantastic to share with you; God wants you to know Him face to face just like Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, and Paul. I can assure you that if you will humble yourself and seek His face, He will find you (Psalm 27:8; 2 Chronicles 15:4). This is a neverending journey which I hope in some small way to share with you.
Yours in Christ,
G. Terrell Cotter
Author Bio
Terrell Cotter became a believer at the age of 40. He has a degree in Aeronautical Technical from Arlington State College (now University of Texas at Arlington), a degree in business management from Texas Christian University, and a master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. Terrell and his wife Jean have been married 41 years and have two grown children, a daughter Shannon Noel, and a son Kyle Matthew.
Prologue – The Journey
A little over a quarter century earlier Philip Cole had set forth on a journey to know God face to face. Not just to know about Him, or worship Him, but what some had called the audacity of hoping to experience first hand the living presence of El Shaddai (God Almighty) this side of eternity. His expectations were of an intense spiritual journey experiencing the depths and heights of ‘me and my God,’ a personal conquest, perhaps rivaling the adventures of Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Quixote de la Mancha, or some other heroic, comical, or somewhat less than perfect figure. But God (the divine initiative) had an entirely different plan for Philip, which was not at all the journey this loner from West Texas would have chosen.
After retirement from a business career in Dallas, Philip and his wife Emma moved back to his West Texas family farm. Spanning more than forty years, their marriage had been a discovery of the journey together; the depths, heights, length, and width of the bonds of love, and the weaving of two souls into one. Then again, as many a friend has said, “Philip married up.”
Emma came from strong Dutch-German stock where her dad had been a successful business executive and her mom a homemaker. She was still a strikingly handsome woman with azure blue eyes, having lost none of the personality and zest for life that made her so attractive from the first moment Philip had laid eyes on her. But much more, she possessed something transcendent, with principled goodness. Her diction and speech were sophisticatedly elegant; Philip’s having degenerated into one of the boys. She would have been perfectly happy with a vegetable plate. Philip insisted on some sort of dead animal on his. Her taste in music ran towards classical, leaving room for the old Christian Hymns. Emma was every bit Philip’s match in knowing the Bible, having been in leadership as part of an international woman’s Bible study for twenty plus years.
Philip on the other hand was a cat of a different stripe. He was in many ways a solitary being, a textbook introvert, who may have been a little schizophrenic, beset by shadowy bouts of depression. As a child raised in a ‘good’ home, his mother battled mental illness all of her life. That was well over half a century ago, and everyone knows one needs to ‘get over it.’ Most of us don’t —not on this side of eternity.
As a boy, Philip had done well in sports but poorly in academics, being told by his high school math teacher not to plan on higher education. But his one strength was tenacity, finishing undergraduate work by more effort than talent. In seminary, an eccentric Greek professor uncovered a profound learning disability. He once thought that the languages of Greek and Hebrew were combination works of the deepest pit of hell, mixed generously with God’s merciful grace. To this day, Philip couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the “c” and the “t”. But overlying an otherwise cantankerous, impatient, somber old man was an abiding trust that the Almighty could, and would, make all things right.
The old man had a habit of carrying a well-worn Colt Commander 38 Super. Thus, the locals tagged him with the handle ‘Pistolero Padre.’ However, he knew he wasn’t a real pistolero. That esteemed title was reserved for such legendary gunmen as Texas Ranger Capt. Jack Hayes and his entire company of men (more recently—Jordan, Keith, and Askins). There is no need to justify carrying a gun to those who will never understand, but in West Texas a gun is a tool like any other. Just as meaningful to those who do understand, it tied one to the history of the land and the people who lived and died there.
Philip had three hobbies, four if you include trying to keep Emma happy. He loved Bible study, his dog, shooting, and Emma (not necessarily in that order). Since becoming a believer late in life, Philip had developed almost an addiction to studying the Word. In the early days, Philip had been influenced by ‘real’ theologians like C.H. Spurgeon, Aiden W. Tozer, C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Louis Berkhof, Donald Barnhouse, J.I. Packer, Watchman Nee, and more recently, James Montgomery Boice, R.C. Sproul, Stanley Toussaint, John Walvoord, and Charles Caldwell Ryrie.
Dr. Ryrie had written, “The Bible is the greatest of all books; to study it is the noblest of all pursuits; to understand it, the highest of all goals.”1 Philip had more than his share of shortcomings, but he took those words to heart, and studying the Word was a daily part of his early morning discipline when the spirit and the mind seemed to be a little clearer. But the journey was the goal. His old Prof in seminary used to say, “Transformation is the name of the game, not information.” So this journey would require lots of transformation in body, soul, and spirit.
