For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage. This is an excerpt from my unreleased book, Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes.
A Community Of Two
After I left the Little Portion, many people have asked me why I went there in the first place. Shortly after leaving, my typical answer was, “God wanted to make me a holy man in His sight.” This is true, but that is also God’s agenda in every person’s life. After Barbara and I started dating and I began seriously thinking about marrying her, I started to see another reason for my time at the community—God wanted to work on certain areas of my life so they would not be a burden to my future wife. The Lord wanted to rid me of as much of my selfishness as possible, because if He was going to entrust me with His daughter, I needed to be in the right spiritual shape in order to treat her as God intended. My time at the Little Portion helped me do that, and it was a girlfriend from high school who showed me that I’d changed.
