Life with Wayne and Jesus

I was raised in a really good Christian home on our family farm. We went to a great country church where the gospel was preached and we were given frequent invitations to accept God’s gift of salvation. Really, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know God loved me and Jesus died for my sins so I could live with Him in heaven forever.

I’ve always loved radio. Radio was a big part of our life on the farm—in the house, in the barn. We didn’t have radios on the tractor, but I produced hundreds of radio shows on the seat of the tractor while I mowed or plowed.

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be on the radio. I set up a little “radio operation” in my room and made my friends play radio.

I was a good little church boy. People would pat me on the head and say I should be a preacher. But I didn’t want to be a preacher. I wanted to be a disc jockey. In fact, I think my desire to be a radio announcer was what kept me from really getting serious about giving my life completely to God. I thought if you were completely dedicated to God, you’d have to be a pastor or a missionary.

So I held back. I was one kind of boy at home and at church. I was a different kind of guy at school. If my parents knew the language I was using and the jokes I was telling, they would have been seriously disappointed. But I wanted to be popular, and I wanted to run with the gang, so I lived a double life. Not that I got into smoking, drinking and sex. Not at all. But my life was a contradiction of church and school.

That all changed the summer before my junior year in high school. Several kids from our church youth group were coming back on a bus from Bible camp. We were yucking it up along the way until my cousin Bev started to cry. Now Bev was also a good church kid. Everybody thought Bev was OK. But through her tears, Bev confessed that she didn’t know if her sins were forgiven, and she didn’t know if she would go to heaven.

Well, once Bev prayed and received Jesus, God spoke to me. It wasn’t an audible voice, but God’s Spirit was saying something deep inside me. The deep impression from God on my heart was that there were thousands of good church kids like Bev who don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus. And God placed a call on my life to make the good news plain to good church people who needed Jesus.

Remember, I thought if you were really dedicated to follow the Lord, you’d have to become a pastor or missionary. So, here I go! I instantly changed my priorities and declared my intention to be a pastor. That following year we had a huge revival among the youth in our community. Our entire youth group was energized to share the gospel. We had special youth meetings. We organized prayer groups in our high school. Many of my friends came to Jesus as Savior, and several went into professional ministry as a result of that year.

So after graduation from high school, I went to a Christian university in South Carolina to study to be a pastor. It was 1,400 miles from our farm to South Carolina. My dad later said he thought he’d never get over my going so far away from home to attend school. But I was determined to get the best possible ministry training I could get.

When I came home for summer vacation after that first year in college, I discovered my mom had terminal cancer. She was 44 years old with five kids, including my 4-year-old sister. I immediately transferred to the University of Minnesota so I could be closer to home. In May of my sophomore year my mom died. It was a terribly difficult time for all the family. I’m still numb even now as I try to remember.

When I resumed my studies the next fall, I took an elective class in radio-television production. It was a lifelong fascination for me, and the class got me hooked. There was one guy in the class who had spent the summer working for a radio station in Montana. I asked him, “How do you get a job in radio?” He said, “You just go in and apply.”

That afternoon I drove to KTIS AM-FM in downtown Minneapolis. I asked to see the manager. The manager came out—Paul Ramseyer. He looked at me, a kid fresh off the farm with no radio experience. I’m sure he wondered what I was doing there. But they must have been desperate. A couple days later Paul called and offered me a job. They needed some poor guy to work from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays—plus Wednesday nights.

I took the job—for a whopping $1.50 an hour! They trained me “on the job,” and in two weeks I was running the station alone on weekends—reading news, playing records, monitoring the transmitter, recording programs. I was having a blast. I quickly warmed to the job and must have shown an aptitude because soon I was producing programs and filling in on the morning drive. Let me say, one could never step into a job like that today. Standards are much higher!

The following year I married Norma. She worked full time as a nurse while I worked 30 hours a week while finishing my bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota. The following fall I enrolled in seminary. The radio job was a great way to work my way through school—seminary classes in the morning, then off to the radio station to do the afternoon shift until 6 p.m.

Our seminary required students to spend their summers doing internships in area churches. Norma and I were assigned to a small church plant in North Dakota. Reluctantly, I took a summer leave of my radio job to serve as interim pastor of three country churches.

The summer flew by. I did visitation, youth ministry, preaching and Bible camps. We were always busy, but the job was never done. As I returned from the plains of North Dakota to the metropolitan Twin Cities, I went back to the radio station. I turned on the control board, opened the microphone and spun the music.

But Norma saw the lights in my eyes and the beginning of a problem. She wanted to be married to a preacher. I had just concluded a lackluster summer as a country pastor. It was the appeal of a major radio station that brought back my passion for ministry.

There was strong pressure at seminary to be a pastor. The denomination needed pastors. Why would you go to seminary if you weren’t going to be a pastor? Being a pastor is the best way to serve God. Anything less is inferior service. Besides, I had made a promise to God—that I would invest my life making the gospel plain to good church people who needed Jesus.

I was having this inner battle between what I wanted to do and what I thought God was requiring of me. So one night in our apartment, I had this “face-in-the-carpet experience.” On my knees, literally on my face before God, I said, “Lord, I’m tired of this conflict. I am willing to do whatever it is you want me to do, even to be a pastor in Wheatfield, S.D. I just want to be in your will and experience your peace about it.”

It seems now almost instantaneous, but I don’t recall the timing of it. But after that moment of total surrender of my life to the Lord, I experienced a sense of peace about serving God in Christian media. It was as if God had been waiting for me to declare my willingness to do anything and go anywhere to serve Him before He would release me to do what I was passionate about.

With total confidence of God’s will and God’s blessing, I told my seminary colleagues that after graduation I wasn’t going to be a pastor. Instead, I was going to stay full time in Christian radio. That was 40 years ago. God has given me this marvelous career doing what I was dreaming of doing as an 8-year-old boy. The hundreds of hours of radio I did on the tractor were now converted into production ministry, reaching hundreds of thousands of people with the good news.

Shortly after this transition from seminary to radio, I was discussing the two options with a friend. “You reach more people in one day on the radio than most pastors reach in their lifetime,” she said. It was later that I realized God was true to His calling to me on that church bus when I was 16 years old. Most people who listen to Christian radio are good church people. But statistics show that one out of three who listen have not made a conscious decision to follow Jesus. So God called me and placed me in Christian communication to make the gospel plain to good church people who need Jesus.

And now, after more than 30 years of radio work in Minneapolis followed by five years in Chicago, God has opened this opportunity to not only reach lost people in the U.S., but to reach unreached people in the farthest, most unreachable parts of the globe through radio. I never could have imagined where that still voice that spoke a life goal to me as a 16-year-old farm kid would all eventually lead.

Here’s what I tell young people whenever I have a chance.

Don’t hold back on committing your life totally to God for fear of what He might ask you to do. God is not just waiting for you to surrender to Him so He can put you in some miserable, unbearable place. He is waiting for you to place your life in His hands so you can be the person He created you to be.

He’s not interested in putting square pegs in round holes. He has created you with certain interests, passions, gifts and abilities so you can serve Him with effectiveness and enjoyment. He’s created you with a certain DNA and will allow that DNA of passions, interests and talents to be used for your fulfillment and His glory.

The psalmist said, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). Jesus said, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

So for starters:

· Receive God’s gift of forgiveness and eternal life which He bought for you on the cross and the empty tomb.

· Then follow Jesus with all you’ve got. Love Him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

· Then watch God work in you and through you as you love Him and follow Him. I can say from experience—it works!