My Testimony

My Testimony

by Larry Parker

I was born June 28, 1952 at around 7:30 am (roughly same time of day as both of my children) in Fitken Memorial Hospital (now Jersey Shore Medical Center), in Neptune, NJ to John P. (deceased December 23, 1973, of ALS - Lou Gherig's disease) and Rita Parker. I am the eldest of their five children, four boys and one girl. My sister is smack in the middle of the four brothers, between the second and third in age. Nearly fourteen years separate me from the youngest. The six of us that remain are quite close; though three live in NY, we gather for major holidays and family events.

I grew up in Red Bank, a small but prosperous commercial town on the south shore of the Navesink River. I enjoyed many winters skating on that river, which froze for anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks each winter, among a bevy of speeding iceboats, something of which my younger readers will not have seen or heard. Iceboats are like giant two-man sailboats, with runners, two in back and one in front that swiveled to steer, in place of the rudder. Often the pilots of these "boats", which traveled in excess of 70 mph, would trail tow ropes behind that we would try to catch hold of, for the ride of our life. Summers on the river would bring hours of fishing and rafting fun.

I was raised and educated in the Catholic Church, graduating from Red Bank Catholic High School in 1970, 54 in a class of just over 300. I served first in the choir and then as an altar boy, in St. James Catholic Church, until I left the church at age 16. I had trouble reconciling the dogma I was taught with what I was able to glean of God's grace and mercy in His Word. I was blessed with many spirit filled teachers who showered His love all over me in my twelve years in that school system. But in the end, I left the church to seek God everywhere He was not. I did not head back toward the church until my children were born and began to approach school age.

I went, for two years, to Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, NJ; mostly to escape the draft and put off deciding what to do with my life. I followed, officially, a general liberal arts course of study. Unofficially, I studdied the fine art of drug dealing, and revolution. I dropped out in May of 1972 to return to Red Bank to ply such trade as I knew. The drugs I abused most regularly were alcohol (every generation struggles with that), marijuana, and all sorts of hallucinogens. My abuse of that class of drugs was going to have some decidedly dramatic physical consequences in later years. My drug use tapered off as I entered my present profession and got married and began raising children of my own, dropping everything before my daughter was born.

I was trained in COBOL programming, under a now defunct, scandal ridden government program called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA, in a place that has since been reabsorbed into its insurance company parent company, called INSCO Systems, in 1977. In the beginning of Spring of the following year, I married my children's mother, in a double ceremony with my cousin and her sister, in a Unitarian Church in Lincroft, NJ. Neither marriage survived the trials that were to follow.

The first of our two wonderful children, Phil, was born on September 19, 1978, in Riverview Hospital (now Riverview Medical Center) in Red Bank, NJ; the same hospital in which all of my brothers and sister were born. His sister, Sara, was born in the same hospital, October 15, 1982. Phil graduated from Freehold Borough High School, in June of 1996. Sara lives in Freehold with her mom and the man she married, and works at and attends Brookdale Community College, here. Phil lives and works in Denham Springs, LA.

As I entered my mid thirties, the effects of years of drug abuse began to manifest. I began to experience two terrible cognitive disfunctions. The first involved my understanding of electronically rendered speech. Specifically, I could not understand what people said to me on the telephone. Though God has healed me, I still have trouble if the connection is weak and people speak fast; but then I simply ask them to slow down, and it is fine. The second, even more frightening problem had to do with internal mapping; that is, with knowing where I was, where I was going, and how I was getting there, when I drive. I would set out knowing exactly what I was doing, but then partway through a journey, my cognitive disfunction would hit and I would not recognize where I was and could not remember which way to go on which road, next. Fortunately, it would not last long, and I would regain the function, before I went far astray. Needless to say, these troubling disfunctions would make me quite irritable, much of the time.

On my fortieth birthday, on the way back from a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, to which we had taken our son as an eighth grade graduation present, their mother informed me that she wanted me to leave at the end of that year, when a key debt was paid, and enough money was free to support my living elsewhere. I was understandably crestfallen; but it was not until the second night in the apartment to which I moved, a mere five blocks from our home, that I finally recognized that I had made a complete mess of my life, "doing it my way"!

On Tuesday, January 19, 1993, in the living room of my one bedroom apartment, I pulled a dusty St. Joseph's bible, a confirmation gift from my sponsors so many years earlier, off the shelf on which I kept it, and began reading the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John. As I read these words, "If you abide in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." With eyes full of tears (tears of joy, my friend, for His truth had indeed made me free, at last), I oh so gratefully placed the reins of my life back in His capable hands, asking our Lord and Savior Jesus to take His rightful place, once again, on the throne of my heart! I asked for and welcomed back, His Holy Spirit, who immediately set about dismantling a fortress in which my heart had been imprisoned and tormented (another story I shall tell elsewhere). He showed me all the judgemnts which had built that prison and guided me in forgiving those who had hurt me, repenting of those judgments. Many relationships were restored to health, as a result of those sessions with the Holy Spirit.

Well, to bring it up to the present, I'm going to take you through a six year whirlwind. Their mother invited me back four months through the separation, because she saw and liked the changes His salvation was making in me. But the reality of living with me revealed that those changes could not proceed rapidly enough for her unregenerate heart. So she left at the end of that year; and subsequently divorced me 21 months later. She remarried just five months after the divorce, which is why she lives a block away, in his house. Meanwhile, Jesus has taken my shriveled spiritual heart and bathed it is His precious blood. He offered to imbue each of the three strands that remained of my original heart, which He surrounded with such a strong structure that He says will never tear (and He recently proved that to me), with one of His marvelous characteristics. The first characteristic I asked for was a servant's heart. As I learned to walk in that, He had me choose the second characteristic. I asked for a giving heart; and no sooner had I learned to walk in that, when He asked me to choose the third. That was tough, but He finally led me to ask Him for a heart that loves the way He loves us!

My physical healing is almost as remarkable as the spiritual and emotional healing I just described. In a little less than three years following that fateful Tuesday evening in January of 1993, my beloved Lord and Savior secured the complete removal of allergies that were so severe at the age of 17 that in September mornings my eyes would crust shut. Although they were no longer so severe, 23 years later; they were still quite debilitating every fall. By the fall of '95, they were gone for good! Oh! Glory to God! Of even greater delight to me, was His complete healing of my arthritis! Due to various injuries, first to my knees, when I was younger; and then later, in my 20's 'n early 30's, injuries to my wrists & hands, as well as ankles & feet, working on our cars in sub-freezing temperatures; I had arthritis in all those areas. I was one of those people who could tell you the weather by his knees. I had literally no use, whatsoever, of my hands outside, in freezing weather. Our oh so gracious Heavenly Father slowly and steadily healed and strengthened every one of the joints in which I was afflicted; so that by the winter of '95 - '96 there remained no trace of the severe pain I had once experienced in my joints. God is oh so good! All of the time!

When their mother left, I started attending and subsequently joined, the church I'm in now. My brother and sister had been there at the time. She's since moved north, by my mom: and he's in another church, here. My church is, as you learned on my home page, called Shore Christian Center. I have been active there in Youth Ministry, Street Evangelism, our food pantry, and the choir. I was still involved with the last three. I see my children occasionally and, though they no longer attend Shore with me, preferring to go where their friends go, I have an excellent relationship with them both. God has been so much better to me than I could ever have been to myself. I have seen Him heal the sick on whom I have laid hands and prayed, restore sight to a blind man over whom I and two brothers prayed in faith, bring countless people into salvation to whom I've witnessed.

Finally, in February of 1999, my company of nearly 18 years, due to declining economic conditions (especially in the Computer industry) forced me to resign because they could no longer find me work. I began to lose most I had in this world at that point; starting with my house (November of the following year), my car (irreparable Lincoln- June of 2002), and finishing with most of my worldly possessions and my ability to stay in New Jersey, near my church, this year; as I moved in with my sister and niece (her youngest) in Rome, NY, to start over from scratch!

The next chapter starts in 2004 with the Bank of New York offering me a programming job starting in January, in Syracuse. That turned out to be a curse disguised as a blessing. It enabled me to move to a nice apartment in Liverpool and pay off all but two of my moldy debts. It enabled me to buy a new Saturn Ion and then move to a larger apartment. I also found a wonderful church: Victory Christian Center Four Square Gospel Church (which you can see when you click on "my church" to the right). The job itself went from bad to worse when my coworkers complained of my asking God to bless them all the time, which led to a severe degradation of my reputation, which ultimately led to a complete lack of technical support from that company. My temperamental responses to that led them to fire me on February 14, 2007.

This brings me to where I am now via the following changes: I was able to file for and collect unemployment benefits, which allowed me to stay in my apartment while I continued to look (in the local library) for programming work in the Syracuse area. When three months of fruitless searches led me to the end of my lease, I moved back to Oneida County, to my Mom's house in the town of Lee (my Mom had moved back to NJ to care for my ailing brothers and retired from DFAS then). I continued to look in the local library there (in Rome) for work and then almighty God in His infinite wisdom allowed me to be delivered from making car payments by allowing someone to run a red light where I was turning left on a green light and plow into my car amid the passenger side (thankfully I was alone), totaling my car. The wonderful insurance company (Geico), which I still have today, paid off my car loan and paid me over $1400 besides, which when coupled with my Bank of New York 401K plan which I cashed out for over $4600 (minus taxes giving me just over $4500), gave me money to buy the 1995 Dodge Intrepid ES I now drive and live a bit longer until KForce, the company that acquired Pinkerton and grew the remains of my Pinkerton retirement to over $105,000.00, asked me to accept it from Wachovia, from which I put it in a Banc of America IRA.

This brings me up to date with my financial situation. I did manage to move back to Liverpool, in a lovely townhome directly across the street from my old apartment. I also took my IRA from the investment side of the bank (Banc of America) to the banking side(Bank of America). The investment side used mutual funds which lost value and when they did grow from dividends, the banc people kept taking the dividends as fees. I now have it split between a twelve month CD and Money Market fund from which it is much easier to get money. I have been using about $2100 (after tithe and taxes) a month, with the help of an extension of my unemployment benefits. Of course that has run out and there is still no sign of the Job God promised me would be waiting for me when I moved back; so He advised me to take an extra month's allotment and buy this wonderful Dell computer and get Verizon FIOS for it, for about what I spent for my first computer, which it runs rings around. On this computer I have now brought this up to date and uploaded it to Geocities (which I think I'm moving to "My Web Space" at Verizon Central). On this, as well, I continue to look for work while I bring my HTML skills up to date and acquire new more marketable skills.

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever.
Ps 136:1

Return to my Home page.

I was born June 28, 1952 at around 7:30 am (roughly same time of day as both of my children) in Fitken Memorial Hospital (now Jersey Shore Medical Center), in Neptune, NJ to John P. (deceased December 23, 1973, of ALS - Lou Gherig's disease) and Rita Parker. I am the eldest of their five children, four boys and one girl. My sister is smack in the middle of the four brothers, between the second and third in age. Nearly fourteen years separate me from the youngest. The six of us that remain are quite close; though three live in NY, we gather for major holidays and family events.
I grew up in Red Bank, a small but prosperous commercial town on the south shore of the Navesink River. I enjoyed many winters skating on that river, which froze for anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks each winter, among a bevy of speeding iceboats, something of which my younger readers will not have seen or heard. Iceboats are like giant two-man sailboats, with runners, two in back and one in front that swiveled to steer, in place of the rudder. Often the pilots of these "boats", which traveled in excess of 70 mph, would trail tow ropes behind that we would try to catch hold of, for the ride of our life. Summers on the river would bring hours of fishing and rafting fun.
I was raised and educated in the Catholic Church, graduating from Red Bank Catholic High School in 1970, 54 in a class of just over 300. I served first in the choir and then as an altar boy, in St. James Catholic Church, until I left the church at age 16. I had trouble reconciling the dogma I was taught with what I was able to glean of God's grace and mercy in His Word. I was blessed with many spirit filled teachers who showered His love all over me in my twelve years in that school system. But in the end, I left the church to seek God everywhere He was not. I did not head back toward the church until my children were born and began to approach school age.
I went, for two years, to Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, NJ; mostly to escape the draft and put off deciding what to do with my life. I followed, officially, a general liberal arts course of study. Unofficially, I studdied the fine art of drug dealing, and revolution. I dropped out in May of 1972 to return to Red Bank to ply such trade as I knew. The drugs I abused most regularly were alcohol (every generation struggles with that), marijuana, and all sorts of hallucinogens. My abuse of that class of drugs was going to have some decidedly dramatic physical consequences in later years. My drug use tapered off as I entered my present profession and got married and began raising children of my own, dropping everything before my daughter was born.
I was trained in COBOL programming, under a now defunct, scandal ridden government program called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA, in a place that has since been reabsorbed into its insurance company parent company, called INSCO Systems, in 1977. In the beginning of Spring of the following year, I married my children's mother, in a double ceremony with my cousin and her sister, in a Unitarian Church in Lincroft, NJ. Neither marriage survived the trials that were to follow.
The first of our two wonderful children, Phil, was born on September 19, 1978, in Riverview Hospital (now Riverview Medical Center) in Red Bank, NJ; the same hospital in which all of my brothers and sister were born. His sister, Sara, was born in the same hospital, October 15, 1982. Phil graduated from Freehold Borough High School, in June of 1996. Sara lives in Freehold with her mom and the man she married, and works at and attends Brookdale Community College, here. Phil lives and works in Denham Springs, LA.
As I entered my mid thirties, the effects of years of drug abuse began to manifest. I began to experience two terrible cognitive disfunctions. The first involved my understanding of electronically rendered speech. Specifically, I could not understand what people said to me on the telephone. Though God has healed me, I still have trouble if the connection is weak and people speak fast; but then I simply ask them to slow down, and it is fine. The second, even more frightening problem had to do with internal mapping; that is, with knowing where I was, where I was going, and how I was getting there, when I drive. I would set out knowing exactly what I was doing, but then partway through a journey, my cognitive disfunction would hit and I would not recognize where I was and could not remember which way to go on which road, next. Fortunately, it would not last long, and I would regain the function, before I went far astray. Needless to say, these troubling disfunctions would make me quite irritable, much of the time.
On my fortieth birthday, on the way back from a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, to which we had taken our son as an eighth grade graduation present, their mother informed me that she wanted me to leave at the end of that year, when a key debt was paid, and enough money was free to support my living elsewhere. I was understandably crestfallen; but it was not until the second night in the apartment to which I moved, a mere five blocks from our home, that I finally recognized that I had made a complete mess of my life, "doing it my way"!
On Tuesday, January 19, 1993, in the living room of my one bedroom apartment, I pulled a dusty St. Joseph's bible, a confirmation gift from my sponsors so many years earlier, off the shelf on which I kept it, and began reading the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John. As I read these words, "If you abide in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." With eyes full of tears (tears of joy, my friend, for His truth had indeed made me free, at last), I oh so gratefully placed the reins of my life back in His capable hands, asking our Lord and Savior Jesus to take His rightful place, once again, on the throne of my heart! I asked for and welcomed back, His Holy Spirit, who immediately set about dismantling a fortress in which my heart had been imprisoned and tormented (another story I shall tell elsewhere). He showed me all the judgemnts which had built that prison and guided me in forgiving those who had hurt me, repenting of those judgments. Many relationships were restored to health, as a result of those sessions with the Holy Spirit.
Well, to bring it up to the present, I'm going to take you through a six year whirlwind. Their mother invited me back four months through the separation, because she saw and liked the changes His salvation was making in me. But the reality of living with me revealed that those changes could not proceed rapidly enough for her unregenerate heart. So she left at the end of that year; and subsequently divorced me 21 months later. She remarried just five months after the divorce, which is why she lives a block away, in his house. Meanwhile, Jesus has taken my shriveled spiritual heart and bathed it is His precious blood. He offered to imbue each of the three strands that remained of my original heart, which He surrounded with such a strong structure that He says will never tear (and He recently proved that to me), with one of His marvelous characteristics. The first characteristic I asked for was a servant's heart. As I learned to walk in that, He had me choose the second characteristic. I asked for a giving heart; and no sooner had I learned to walk in that, when He asked me to choose the third. That was tough, but He finally led me to ask Him for a heart that loves the way He loves us!
My physical healing is almost as remarkable as the spiritual and emotional healing I just described. In a little less than three years following that fateful Tuesday evening in January of 1993, my beloved Lord and Savior secured the complete removal of allergies that were so severe at the age of 17 that in September mornings my eyes would crust shut. Although they were no longer so severe, 23 years later; they were still quite debilitating every fall. By the fall of '95, they were gone for good! Oh! Glory to God! Of even greater delight to me, was His complete healing of my arthritis! Due to various injuries, first to my knees, when I was younger; and then later, in my 20's 'n early 30's, injuries to my wrists & hands, as well as ankles & feet, working on our cars in sub-freezing temperatures; I had arthritis in all those areas. I was one of those people who could tell you the weather by his knees. I had literally no use, whatsoever, of my hands outside, in freezing weather. Our oh so gracious Heavenly Father slowly and steadily healed and strengthened every one of the joints in which I was afflicted; so that by the winter of '95 - '96 there remained no trace of the severe pain I had once experienced in my joints. God is oh so good! All of the time!
When their mother left, I started attending and subsequently joined, the church I'm in now. My brother and sister had been there at the time. She's since moved north, by my mom: and he's in another church, here. My church is, as you learned on my home page, called Shore Christian Center. I have been active there in Youth Ministry, Street Evangelism, our food pantry, and the choir. I was still involved with the last three. I see my children occasionally and, though they no longer attend Shore with me, preferring to go where their friends go, I have an excellent relationship with them both. God has been so much better to me than I could ever have been to myself. I have seen Him heal the sick on whom I have laid hands and prayed, restore sight to a blind man over whom I and two brothers prayed in faith, bring countless people into salvation to whom I've witnessed.
Finally, in February of 1999, my company of nearly 18 years, due to declining economic conditions (especially in the Computer industry) forced me to resign because they could no longer find me work. I began to lose most I had in this world at that point; starting with my house (November of the following year), my car (irreparable Lincoln- June of 2002), and finishing with most of my worldly possessions and my ability to stay in New Jersey, near my church, this year; as I moved in with my sister and niece (her youngest) in Rome, NY, to start over from scratch!
The next chapter starts in 2004 with the Bank of New York offering me a programming job starting in January, in Syracuse. That turned out to be a curse disguised as a blessing. It enabled me to move to a nice apartment in Liverpool and pay off all but two of my moldy debts. It enabled me to buy a new Saturn Ion and then move to a larger apartment. I also found a wonderful church: Victory Christian Center Four Square Gospel Church (which you can see when you click on "my church" to the right). The job itself went from bad to worse when my coworkers complained of my asking God to bless them all the time, which led to a severe degradation of my reputation, which ultimately led to a complete lack of technical support from that company. My temperamental responses to that led them to fire me on February 14, 2007.
This brings me to where I am now via the following changes: I was able to file for and collect unemployment benefits, which allowed me to stay in my apartment while I continued to look (in the local library) for programming work in the Syracuse area. When three months of fruitless searches led me to the end of my lease, I moved back to Oneida County, to my Mom's house in the town of Lee (my Mom had moved back to NJ to care for my ailing brothers and retired from DFAS then). I continued to look in the local library there (in Rome) for work and then almighty God in His infinite wisdom allowed me to be delivered from making car payments by allowing someone to run a red light where I was turning left on a green light and plow into my car amid the passenger side (thankfully I was alone), totaling my car. The wonderful insurance company (Geico), which I still have today, paid off my car loan and paid me over $1400 besides, which when coupled with my Bank of New York 401K plan which I cashed out for over $4600 (minus taxes giving me just over $4500), gave me money to buy the 1995 Dodge Intrepid ES I now drive and live a bit longer until KForce, the company that acquired Pinkerton and grew the remains of my Pinkerton retirement to over $105,000.00, asked me to accept it from Wachovia, from which I put it in a Banc of America IRA.
This brings me up to date with my financial situation. I did manage to move back to Liverpool, in a lovely townhome directly across the street from my old apartment. I also took my IRA from the investment side of the bank (Banc of America) to the banking side(Bank of America). The investment side used mutual funds which lost value and when they did grow from dividends, the banc people kept taking the dividends as fees. I now have it split between a twelve month CD and Money Market fund from which it is much easier to get money. I have been using about $2100 (after tithe and taxes) a month, with the help of an extension of my unemployment benefits. Of course that has run out and there is still no sign of the Job God promised me would be waiting for me when I moved back; so He advised me to take an extra month's allotment and buy this wonderful Dell computer and get Verizon FIOS for it, for about what I spent for my first computer, which it runs rings around. On this computer I have now brought this up to date and uploaded it to Geocities (which I think I'm moving to "My Web Space" at Verizon Central). On this, as well, I continue to look for work while I bring my HTML skills up to date and acquire new more marketable skills.
Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever. Ps 136:1

Return to my Home page.