Ordinary Man, Extraordinary God: Stories That Reveal the Sometimes Unseen or Unrecognized Interventions of God in the Lives of Ordinary People.

By Mark Stephen Runnels

Have you ever wondered if God is real? Or do you sometimes question whether or not He knows you and is intimately involved in your life? And do you wonder if He hears your prayers and has your best interests in mind? If so, then this book is for you! Read how God has opened the eyes of an ordinary man to see the normally unseen supernatural workings of Jesus Christ in his life. Read about the divine appointments and divine interventions that God has orchestrated in Marks life that have clearly demonstrated Gods love for himthe kind of love God has for you and for every man or woman who feels as though they are simply ordinary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512726725

Mark Stephen Runnels

Mark Runnels is retired and lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota with his children, Matthew age 16 and Lillian age 14. He has served as a worship leader, adult Sunday school teacher and a prayer counselor. Mark has also traveled to Lithuania, India and Nepal as a short term missionary. His previous book is entitled, “The Secret of Contentment.” [e-mail] www.markrunnels.com/

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© 2016 Mark Stephen Runnels.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-2673-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-2672-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016900700

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WestBow Press rev. date: 01/26/2016

Contents

Prelude

Introduction

Chapter 1     Family Origins

Chapter 2     From Birth to Second Birth

Chapter 3     Born Again

Chapter 4     Discovering the Dark Side

Chapter 5     Seeing the Invisible

Chapter 6     The Miraculous and the Marvelous

Chapter 7     Indian Chronicles

Ordinary Man, Extraordinary God

About the Author

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my beloved children, Matthew and Lillian. It is my prayer that these stories of God’s amazing interventions in my life will inspire you to trust in and to serve the God I love.

Prelude

Many young people today are hungry for authentic Christianity. They want to know that there is something more to God than what they sometimes witness on Sunday morning. The question they are asking themselves is, Does God still work in peoples’ lives the way He used to in biblical times? Many hope that He does. Many want to hear life changing stories that will inspire them in their faith today. That is what this book is all about.

This is a series of incredible stories of God’s divine appointments and divine interventions in my life. The story begins four generations back and reveals the hand of God working in the lives of my ancestors and now in my life today.

Jesus was a story teller. He knew that telling stories was a better way to reach some people’s hearts than preaching a sermon. He taught about the Kingdom of God through parables or stories. He sometimes chose this as the best way to reveal the nature of His Heavenly Father.

When authors write books like this one, they run the risk of sounding like they are bragging about what God has done in their lives. That is not the desire of my heart. My intention is to describe how God has sovereignly worked in my life, with the hope of helping you know that He is doing similar works in your life. It is my prayer that this will be a faith building book for you.

Many of the stories tell of miracles. Some are deeply and spiritually profound. Some are fun little vignettes of things Father God has done simply to bless me. All of these stories reveal the sometimes unseen or unrecognized interventions of God in our lives.

I have written this book as a memorial of God’s faithfulness in my life. In Joshua 4:1-7, we read how God instructed Joshua to build a memorial of stones.

"When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, "Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight."

So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever."

And that is what I hope these stories will be for you – a memorial to the people of God’s glorious works in our lives today.

I have wondered over and over again why He has worked so extraordinarily in my life. I am merely an ordinary man - and I do mean ordinary. While growing up, I was a C student all the way from elementary school through college. I worked hard in school but I was nothing more than an ordinary student.

Physically I had my challenges. I never crawled and I learned to walk later than most children. I was healthy but I was neither strong nor coordinated. I was very poor at sports until my middle teens. By then my self-esteem had suffered so much that I largely withdrew from team sports.

As an elementary student, I dreaded outdoor recess when it involved playing a team sport. I was always one of the last kids chosen by a team captain; and understandably so, considering my lack of physical prowess.

Another issue that hampered me greatly was a very basic identity question; am I right handed or left handed? Confusion about something as fundamental in life as that also added to my coordination problems and my inability to do most physical things well. To this day my hand writing is atrocious.

I began having back problems at the age of 23. I eventually learned that I have an extra vertebra in my low back that accounts for the ongoing back pain that I deal with to this day. Besides this, I am what some doctors refer to as a migraineur; someone who has migraine headaches more than 15 days a month.

And, I must confess that I am as much of a sinner as any man. In fact I am more of a sinner than many. I have anger issues that get the best of me at times. And when I get angry, it is never Praise the Lord that comes out of my mouth. I am sure you can read between the lines of that statement!

In spite of all of my spiritual, emotional, moral and physical failings I have always had a sense - even as a child - that an incredible life awaited me. I did not know why or how it would happen. It was nothing I could orchestrate. Only God could and did.

I have concluded that it has been for the purpose of helping others to see and know that God is, in fact, at work in their lives as well. It just isn’t always as transparent as He has sometimes made it in mine. I have a sense that my life experiences have been for the purpose of serving as a beacon of hope for people who aren’t always so sure that God is actively involved in their lives.

II Corinthians 4:6-8 pretty well describes how I feel about myself.

For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

I am simply a, jar of clay, as this verse implies. But it has been for the express purpose of revealing God’s glory in the midst of my human frailty. There is truly nothing glorious or exceptional about me.

It has been in the life of this ordinary clay jar that God has caused His light to shine out of the darkness of who I am. It is in the contrast of who I am and who He is that He is plainly seen. Mine is a story of repeated divine interventions and orchestrations that clearly reveal God’s very existence and His love for all He has created.

Do you feel there is nothing special about you? Do you feel simply ordinary? Then Praise God! Listen to the wonderful words of 1 Corinthians 1:25-27:

For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

Jesus was a simple carpenter. Carpentry was considered a lowly trade when He walked the face of the earth. He was considered to be just an ordinary man in his home town of Nazareth. He chose ordinary men as His 12 disciples. And you can rejoice because He has also chosen you to be one of His followers, whatever your station in life.

John 3:11 says, I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen… And that is what I have done in this book. I have written of what I know. And I have penned an account of what I have seen. I pray that you will be encouraged as you read this testimony of God’s faithfulness in my life. Though it may not always seem like it, He is faithful in your life as well.

Introduction

The first man to journey into outer space and the first man to orbit the Earth was Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. His Vostok 1 spacecraft completed one orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961. I was in elementary school at the time and well remember this history-making event.

There were those who claimed at the time that Gagarin made a disturbing declaration during his maiden voyage into space: I don’t see any god up here. Gagarin’s friend Colonel Valentin Petrov stated in 2006 that the cosmonaut never said these words. He claimed that the quote originated with Nikita Khrushchev during a speech that he gave at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The speech detailed the Soviet’s anti-religion campaign and Khrushchev boldly proclaimed, Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there to prove his point.

Regardless of whether the quote originated with Gagarin or Khrushchev, sadly many men and women throughout the ages have doubted that there is a God. Many more have declared belief in God but have lived their lives as if there were none.

On January 9, 1966 - nearly five years after Gagarin’s historic flight - the front-page banner of the New York Times declared in bold letters, God Is Dead! It proved to be one of the most controversial news stories of all time. I was fifteen years old and remember this headline and the many discussions it spurred. I asked my fellow students and friends what they thought about the headline.

On April 8 of that same year, the front cover of Time Magazine asked the disturbing question, IS GOD DEAD? This created a spirited debate in our country and abroad about God’s very existence. Was God dead? Did He ever even exist in the first place? While I was growing up, it sometimes seemed to me that God was nothing more than a myth.

On April 4, 1968, Baptist minister and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, on June 5, Robert Bobby Kennedy also sadly lost his life to an assassin’s bullet. These men were heroes to an upcoming generation – my generation. To most of us, hope for a better world seemed lost and forever doomed after these fatal events. By the tender age of 17, I already felt that there was no hope for the world I was growing up in.

President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to visit St. Louis, Missouri - where I spent part of my boyhood - in October of 1963. His motorcade was scheduled to traverse a street not far from where we lived. So we joined the throngs along the route, hoping to catch a glimpse of our President. Later that day, it was announced on the radio and television that the President had become ill and would not be visiting our city. We later learned that a crisis had suddenly gripped the world that required his complete attention. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The President was compelled to remain in Washington, D.C. to face developments that could lead to world war and destruction of life as we knew it. From October 15 to October 29 the world anxiously looked on as the United States stood on the precipice of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and Cuba. It was the closest that the world super powers ever came to MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction. I recall the fear and anxiety that gripped our nation as our leaders in Washington struggled with this nearby menace. To me, the world had truly gone MAD, as impending annihilation seemed almost inevitable.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union both possessed the capability to destroy the entire world many times over. The end of life as we knew it seemed oh so near to me as a young teenager. And it seemed that way too many others as well.

As a young boy in elementary school during the 1950s, I remember that my elementary school staged air raid drills to prepare us to take cover in the event that an atomic bomb was dropped nearby. On November 18, 1956, while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev issued the threat, We will bury you! Indeed, those were frightful times and many of us wondered if we were on the eve of destruction.

A few years later, a terrible war rapidly escalated on the other side of the world in a faraway place called Vietnam. Many men lost their lives there and the war seemed like the precursor to an eventual third world war involving the Soviet Union and China on the one side, and the U.S. and its allies on the other.

It seemed to me that if there was a god, he didn’t care much about us mortals. He didn’t appear to intervene in our lives or answer our prayers. He didn’t prevent natural disasters or keep the super powers in check as they nearly brought the world to complete annihilation. If He existed, I didn’t think that He cared about me and the struggles I was going through as a typical teenager.

As I write this book, there is an atheistic group in Colorado Springs, CO., that I believe struggles with those same questions. They have erected several billboards around the city proclaiming that GOD IS AN IMAGINARY FRIEND. CHOOSE REALITY, IT WILL BE BETTER FOR ALL OF US.

Well I am here to tell you most assuredly and without an element of doubt that THERE IS A GOD and that GOD IS NOT DEAD. And I know that HE IS NOT AN IMAGINARY FRIEND. He is the REALITY of all that exists. Listen to these wonderful words from Hebrews 11:6:

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

Dear reader, I have found that He truly does exist and that He rewards those who earnestly seek him! And I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears that He knows and cares about every one of us, including those who choose, for whatever reason, not to believe in Him.

I am about to take you on an incredible journey through some of the miraculous events that have encompassed my life – the life of an ordinary man. The stories of these events will inspire you and give you hope as you read how God has intervened in my life in miraculous ways. The story begins four generations back during a convulsive time in our nation’s history - the Civil War.

Chapter 1

Family Origins

Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn. Is. 51:1.

George William Reynolds and George William Runnels

On the fateful day of August 21, 1863, self-proclaimed Confederate Colonel William Clark Quantrill rode into Lawrence, Kansas with an army of approximately 400 men. From sunup until sundown he and his men murdered 169 unarmed civilian men and boys in what has been called the greatest tragedy of the American Civil War. Eighty women became widows that day. Two-hundred and fifty children became fatherless.

His followers were mostly teenaged men who for one reason or another had a debt to settle with northern sympathizers because of real or misperceived wrongs committed against them or their family members. Newspaper writers who were sympathetic to the northern cause commonly referred to them as, Southern Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers. These angry, young men eventually became known as Quantrill’s Raiders.

Before they rode into the booming Kansas town, Colonel Quantrill gave them the order to, Kill every man and boy old enough to carry a gun. Throughout the day they burned one-fourth of the town to the ground and carried off whatever caught their fancy. That day, they lived up to the Civil War code of leaving the women alone – at least the white women. African slave women did not fare as well.

Through the sad chain of events of one very violent day, they forever changed the face of American warfare. Innocent civilians had never before been purposely victimized in the Civil War or in previous American wars. That all changed that terrible day even though the Confederacy and the Union condemned Quantrill and his men for their acts of barbarism.

Some of those who rode with Quantrill’s Raiders became famous during and after the Civil War. Cold blooded killers like Frank and Jessie James, Cole Younger, William Gregg, George Todd and Bloody Bill Anderson. After the war, the James brothers were perceived by many in Missouri as Robin Hood figures, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.

In October of the same year, Quantrill’s Raiders attacked union troops in Baxter Springs, Kansas, killing and mutilating the bodies of approximately 80 soldiers and wounding another 18. One book I read claimed that the Raiders often mutilated their victims. Some historians have described Quantrill as a psychopathic killer. I agree with their diagnosis. He was also a brilliant tactician who regularly defeated Union troops through the use of guerilla warfare.

00080689ColonelWilliamClarkQuantrill.jpg

Colonel William Clark Quantrill

Another Raider was young George William Reynolds who was born in the year 1839. As a 16-year-old boy, he journeyed from Elk Valley, Kentucky to stay with distant relatives in the small town of Jamesport, Missouri. He had fled Kentucky after a quarrel with his stepmother. The quarrel must have been violent because he left thinking he had mistakenly killed her.

George was my great grandfather on my father’s side of the family. Quantrill gave him the rank of Lieutenant in his band of malcontents. In later years George told his children of seeing fellow Raiders, during the attack on Lawrence, riding with the horses’ reins in their teeth and shooting revolvers with both hands.

Prior to the Civil War, George met a young woman at a dance named Sarah Harriett Jones. George was a swashbuckling young stage coach driver who wore fancy boots and had long curls flowing down to his shoulders. The two fell in love and eventually married at the end of the Civil War. Sarah’s father, Dr. William Jones, was a breeder of racing horses in Mirable, Missouri. Jones was a southern sympathizer who owned two slaves – Rufus and Pearl, along with their three children.

One day during the Civil War, Dr. Jones set out for the small town of Mexico, Missouri and brought his grandson along with him. They also brought along four good samples of his breeding horses. Union Militia followed them and presumably thought that Jones was bringing the horses to sell or give to Confederate Guerillas operating in the area. They followed him and his grandson to the home of a friend. The Union Militia rode to the home when his friend was not there and demanded that he sign a Union Pledge of Allegiance, thus renouncing his allegiance to the Confederate cause. They also wanted to confiscate his horses. Dr. Jones, age 62 and a veteran of the War of 1812 refused both of these demands. He was promptly shot to death by one of the Union soldiers on his friend’s front porch and his personal effects were sent back to Mirable.

The Union Militia kidnapped his teen-aged grandson, who was then forced to fight for the side of the Union for the remainder of the war. Fortunately, he survived by keeping his head low and shooting over the rebels’ heads.

After Dr. Jones was murdered, the Union Militia troops who were responsible for his death came to his Mirable home. Sarah Harriett and two of her sisters were busily churning butter in a beige crock that was sitting on a