The Ray Renner Story

Ray Renner was one of the leaders of the Jesus Movement in the Anderson area. He was deeply influenced by the Anderson Revival, so much so that it entirely changed the direction of his life. Ray has been blogging about those early days on his own website.

You can read more here:
http://web.mac.com/ancilray/iWeb/FromWhereISit/PersonalBlog/PersonalBlog.html

You will have to visit his web page to see his photos.

Ray has given me permission to copy his testimony to this blog, here it is. Ray will write more in the future. I for one am looking forward to "The Rest of the Story"

Michael McDonald - editor

My Story:

I was born in Billows, KY in 1947. As the pictures above show I was a pretty skinny kid until later in life. I grew up in Somerset where I attended school until I finished my junior year in high school. My family then relocated to Indianapolis, IN where I graduated from Washington High School in 1965. We won the state tournament in basketball that year and then again four years later when one of my brothers graduated. You’d have to understand high school basketball in Indiana in the 60s (before class basketball began) for that to be meaningful.

Soon after graduation I applied for and received a job at Eli Lilly, a leading pharmaceutical company headquartered in Indianapolis. I started out in the service department mopping floors and taking out trash. In fairly short order I interviewed for and received a job as an assistant lab tech and began what was a dream job for me with a lab of my own working for a chemist. I was in heaven I thought. It was short lived as I was drafted into the army in 1967. Hell was on the way.

My entrance into the army was during the height of the Vietnam War. By early March of 1968 I was hiking through the jungles of SE Asia as a member of the 101st Airborne division. Shortly before leaving for ‘Nam I prayed a desperate prayer that went something like this “Lord, if you’ll bring me back from Vietnam alive I’ll do anything you want me to do for the rest of my life.” A huge sense of peace settled over me though I was not really living for the Lord at the time. Nevertheless, somehow I knew I was going to survive Vietnam.

During my year in Vietnam my unit saw a good bit of action. Barely two weeks into the country, I was wounded in a fire fight during the middle of the night. We had set up an ambush along a well worn jungle trail. Shortly after dark all hell broke loose as a company of North Vietnamese soldiers came walking down the trail with their rifles slung over their shoulders. In the first few minutes of the fight I was struck in the hand by a bullet from an AK 47 while feeding ammunition into a machine gun for my partner who was in charge of our position. My hand was in front of my face at the time. The Lord spared my life that night and I spent the next month in the hospital with a bullet wound to my hand. When I returned to my unit a month later I was assigned as a radio telephone operator (RTO), a position I held for the rest of my tour. While that meant that I was carrying an extra 24 lbs on my back it also meant that I knew more about what was going on than most any one else in the company since it was my job to facilitate communication between our company commander and/or first sergeant and our rear command structure. This included calling in artillery and air strikes to support our field operations.

Vietnam -March 1968-Feb 1969

During my year in ‘Nam my unit was first located at Phouc Vinh which was a short drive (not that we were driving) from Ben Hoa Airbase. Later we went on operations near Cu Chi in the Mekong Delta and to a fire base near Dak To in the Central Highlands. The last part of my tour we spent in the northern part of the country. First we went on operations near Hue/ Phu Bai and finally we were stationed at Camp Evans, just north of Hue and south of the DMZ as I recall. Other than an occasional walking patrol near our base, virtually everywhere we went we traveled in helicopters. I don’t have many pictures or artifacts from Vietnam because most of what I sent home (not much) was burned up in an apartment fire of a young lady I was seeing before I left. Most of the pictures I have left are on this page.

While I still remember the general gist of my year in Vietnam the details have long since faded. Our unit moved around a lot, got into a number of fire fights and then moved on again. We never held any ground we took for very long though we often had men killed or wounded in the battles. In my opinion it was a senseless way to fight a war. Many Vietnam vets became embittered by the senselessness of it all as well as the carnage to which we were subjected. It didn’t help that, when we returned home, we were treated as the villains of the war, though the decisions for fighting this war were made by politicians in Washington and not soldiers on the ground.

I’ve seen pretty much all of the Vietnam era movies. Most of them had elements that represented the story I lived though none of them captured it exactly. The hardest one for me to watch was “Deer Hunter” because it reminded me of how little human life was valued in the war by both sides. I was visibly shaken after the movie and asked my wife Carol to drive us home.

I returned from the war pretty messed up in my mind. I had taken a lot of drugs (they were easy to get and cheap) and was drinking a lot to kill the emotional pain though it only masked it temporarily. Upon returning from ‘Nam I was stationed at Ft. Riley, Kansas for the last few months of my time. I got out of the army in September ’69 and returned to work at Lilly’s. Soon, however I decided I needed to continue my education. I applied at both Purdue and Anderson College (later Anderson University). I was accepted by both and had pretty much decided to go to Purdue when, at the very last minute, I changed my mind and decided to go to Anderson. I think a praying mom; family and friends had a lot to do with that (in fact I’m sure it was their prayers that brought me home alive). I arrived at Anderson College in January 1970 in time for second semester to begin. That innocent enough decision would turn out to have major ramifications for my life. That’s beginning of the next chapter in my life.

The “Revival of Love”

February 22, 1970 was destined to be a significant turning point in my life; perhaps the most significant one of all for it was on that day that I had a revolutionary encounter with Jesus.

I could not have known when I awoke that morning with a hangover from drinking too much the night before what lay ahead for me. I had been drinking heavily since exiting Vietnam a year earlier. This day, however, would be different. I slept late that morning in my college dorm room. By mid-afternoon the dorm was abuzz with stories from a local church in town. It seems that the meeting at South Meridian Church of God went longer than normal; instead of getting out at the usual hour of noon the meeting went until 1:30 PM. This was clearly out of the ordinary. On top of that there were stories of strange happenings at church that morning.

A “witness team” from Asbury College in Wilmore Kentucky had been invited to come and tell the story of a spontaneous revival that had taken place on their campus a couple of weeks earlier. So great was the move of God on campus that classes had been cancelled for an entire week at both the college and the seminary. Meetings had gone on around the clock in Hughes Auditorium as students and professors shared what the Lord was doing in their lives. Apologies were given publicly and forgiveness was asked for and granted in the meetings. The atmosphere was electric with the presence of the Lord. And now this same Spirit of revival had come to Anderson.

By evening a few of my friends and I decided to check out the evening meeting at South Meridian to see for ourselves what was going on. I went more out of curiosity than anything else. We arrived at the meeting a few minutes late and had to sit in the third row from the front because all the good seats in the back were taken. Within a few days you had to arrive an hour early to get a seat in the main auditorium at all. In fact at the height of the revival the church gymnasium was also filled as an overflow each night.

As we entered the building that night there was a “holy hush” in the air and the love and presence of the Lord was so palpable it seemed like you could cut it with a knife. We quietly took our seats and waited to see what would happen. We didn’t have long to wait. As each of the students from Asbury stood to share they had a similar tale to tell. It went something like this, “We told you everything we knew to say this morning and there’s not much left to tell.” I was getting more and more disappointed with each passing speaker. And then it happened.

A Mexican-American student by the name of Chris Sanchez stood to speak and started out like the others before her. But she went on to say something that none of the others had said. She said “ Jesus is the best friend I’ve ever had!” Wow, that was new and revolutionary to me!. I don’t recall that I’d ever heard anyone say anything like that before. Jesus wanted to be our friend. I had grown up in an evangelical/holiness church and had heard many sermons on how to get saved but I don’t remember ever hearing that Jesus wanted to be my best friend. I’m not saying that nobody ever said it , just that I never heard it. Maybe I just missed it. What an astounding thought it was to me. Not only did Chris say that Jesus was her best friend, she sang a song that went something like this

“Without Him I would be nothing,

Without Him I’d surely fail,

Without Him I would be drifting,

Like a ship without a sail.”

Then she sang the chorus

“Jesus, Oh Jesus, do you know Him today?

Please don’t turn Him away.

Jesus, Oh Jesus, Without Him how lost I would be!”

Then she sang the chorus in Spanish and that’s when things began to happen for me! “Cristo, OH Cristo!’ Immediately I had what even now seems to be a very mystical experience. I had grown up under the shadow of the “H” bomb and the constant fear of the annihilation of the world during the “Cold War”. I had always believed that there must been something that is so true that even if the world were blown away completely it would remain. I had suspected that the truth might be Jesus since I had grown up going to church. Now I was being challenged to believe that He was and is in fact the one eternal truth of the universe. The Lord began to speak to me in terms that were exceedingly clear.

He said “About 2 1/2 years ago you made me a promise. You said if I would bring you back from Vietnam alive you would do anything I wanted you to do for the rest of your life. I brought you back from Vietnam alive. What are you going to do with your promise?” At the same time He was speaking to me He showed me a movie-like playback in my mind of my year in Vietnam. It was as if I had been taken outside of my body and was being allowed to look down on myself as I walked through the jungles and rice paddies. I saw times when I could have been killed and times when I should have been killed and yet I was alive. He showed me at least a half dozen times when my life had been in imminent danger. Then He continued to speak to me. He said “Not only did I save your life in Vietnam but I bought your life at Calvary.” I didn’t even know at the time that the Bible says “You are not your own, you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19). Only later would I learn that the price Jesus paid for me was the shedding of His own blood.

He showed me another vision (a picture in my mind’s eye) of Jesus dying on the cross with the blood dripping from His hands and feet and I knew without a doubt that He had died for me personally as if I was the only person on the planet at that moment who needed His love. My mind began to reason something like this “If He saved my life in Vietnam and He bought my life at Calvary then on both counts He owned the rights to my life. I no longer could or did belong to me, I belonged to Him. Whatever life I had left I had to live for Him.” It was settled. I headed for the front of the church to the altar where I could pray. We were barely 15 or 20 minutes into the service. Unknown to me was the fact that a number of my friends from school had been praying for me. They quickly followed me to the altar to pray with me. I didn’t know any formal prayers and hadn’t even learned about the 4 Spiritual Laws and so for me it was a very logical prayer that went something like this. “You saved my life in Vietnam, you bought my life at Calvary, you can have my life!” That was it! No bells, no whistles, no choirs of angels. And yet something was different. In fact everything was different! I got up from that altar knowing my life was changed forever.

I was no longer addicted to drugs or alcohol or cigarettes. Where previously I had been filled with prejudice and hatred and bitterness and anger from the army and the war, now my heart was filled with love for everyone. I was radically different inside. I felt clean inside, washed, free! Though it was still winter and there was some dirty patches of snow on the ground the air seemed pure, the sky blue, the snow beautifully white. I felt like a bird that had been let out of a cage! I began to share what had happened to me to everyone I knew and I began to cry. Almost every time I opened my mouth for the next two weeks I cried. I now believe the Lord was doing an emotional healing in me from the scars of Vietnam though at the time all I knew was I couldn’t stop crying.

The revival at South Meridian lasted for 50 days. Five days a week there was a morning prayer breakfast at a local hotel, a noon prayer meeting in the city council chambers at City Hall and the evening meeting at South Meridian. On some weekends meetings were held on Sunday afternoon at a local high school gym. I even remember singing a solo at one of those gatherings (good grief-whatever was I thinking?). On most weekends I couldn’t tell you what went on at the meetings because myself and scores of others were scattered across the country on ‘witness teams” to tell what the Lord was doing in Anderson and in our lives.

To Be Continued...