Paul A. Lindberg

A Brief Autobiography of the Author

I was born in 1947 just after the War. My parents were zealous Christians going to Seminary and preparing for the Mission Field. We first went to China, but in 1951 had to leave because of the Communist crackdown on missionaries. In 1954 we returned to the Orient, this time to the Island of Formosa off the coast of China. I loved it there, both the land and the gentle, kind Oriental people. This was to have some impact on my life, as you shall see.

In my teenage years we returned from the mission field and my parents started an Orthodox Presbyterian church in the Seattle area. I was only 17 when a Japanese family came to visit; missionaries from the Orient on furlough. It was clearly God’s leading that I fell in love with their oldest daughter. Six years later, right after my tour of duty in the Vietnam War, I married her. She has been God’s blessing to me ever since. I could not have written these volumes, indeed I could not have accomplished much of anything in my life, without her faithful love and support.

During my 18 years as a Boeing Engineer and while raising three lovely children, God was teaching me how to know His voice. My Godly parents had raised me with the firm knowledge that I belong to God, and I don’t recall ever doubting that. But that was just the first step. I was twelve when I first became aware of, and dealt with, my own sinfulness. But it really wasn’t until I was about 30 that I began to realize that God is much more than a Genie in the sky who protects me and grants me wishes. He wants a relationship. He wanted me to grow up, stop playing games with my life and learn to know Him. He wanted me to learn to obey His voice, learn to appreciate His majesty and authority, and really learn to worship Him.

So it was out of the comfortable Presbyterian churches we had been attending, and into a wild and woolly Pentecostal church, where everyone spoke in tongues and prophesied and worshiped up a storm in services that sometimes went on for hours. We both hated it; never felt so uncomfortable in our lives. God almost had to drag us back there every Sunday for a whole year. There was another church closer to our home; I literally pled with God for permission to make it our home church. But He said no, and we were learning to listen to His voice. Every Sunday when we would pray for direction, God would tell us, “Go back to Maranatha Chapel today.” We obeyed. We still hated the rowdy services, the wild (and too loud) music, and the boisterous people. But we were learning to love the preaching of the Word of God. It was no longer a detached intellectual theology, but a life-changing spiritual journey, and we were on it. The Word came alive to us; no longer just something to understand, but something to be and do, something God wanted us to live.

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