God's Amazing Grace
"I am TJ Slayman...and for the last 10 years have been working toward translating the Scripture into the ******* language of Southeast Asia."
TJ and his family are home on a short furlough, enjoying the fresh country air and their great American freedoms. He has been successful in getting a good portion of the Bible translated, and is looking forward to finishing it. His “sticky rice gang” has caught a vision for their country and are planning some great things in the near future – with God’s help.
I am TJ Slayman, husband to Kham, father of Jedidiah and Tabitha, and for the last 10 years have been working toward translating the Scripture into the ******* language of Southeast Asia. I was NEVER a good little boy, and I was NOT from a Christian home.
My family first met Michael Pearl about 16 years ago. I was then just an 18-year-old hillbilly freak with a long ponytail hanging down my back. My parents and I were dope heads living with my 3 younger siblings in an old broken-down school bus that we had jacked up on blocks. We grew a weedy garden which included marijuana. Two years earlier, my dad and mom started reading the Bible together on their long commute back and forth to work, and Dad figured he could get saved if he could just find a Jew that would tell him how to know God. I remember him calling Israel once looking for someone to talk to about God, but ended up talking to a nun who barely knew English and thought he was asking the price of eggs. We all laughed for days about that.
Later, my dad was visiting an Amish minister, trying to convince him to start a commune, when Michael Pearl came into the house and joined the conversation. He turned the conversation almost immediately to Christ. A few weeks later, my dad and I met Mike at a home Bible study. It was a mixed lot of people from different beliefs, all trying to convert each other. They took turns preaching their points of view. When it came Mike’s turn, he just preached Jesus. It was that night back in the Spring of 1990 that I understood the Gospel for the first time and was joyfully born again. Dad was speechless, and had no idea what to say after hearing what GOD HIMSELF had done to save us. Later that week Mike, came down to our camp, and while sitting around the evening fire together, he began to teach us the book of Romans. He came several times every week for months.
We still spent our days hunting, fishing, smoking dope, and talking about what we were learning from the Bible. My dad really wanted to know the Lord, but years of confusion and sin made it hard for him to understand. I was just a young man, so I sat back out of the way, but I listened and began to understand more fully God’s entire plan for mankind and His program of events from Beginning to End. Even when our pack of German shepherds attacked Mike one time, chewing him up pretty good, he still came to teach us the old, old story of Jesus. Before the year was out, my family had all come to understand what forgiveness of sin through the shed blood of Jesus meant to them personally.
