Introduction

Floating on an inner tube at the beach when I was a boy, staring up at the sky with the sun warming my face and the still water cooling my fingers and toes . . . I had everything to daydream about and nothing to fear, because if I was drifting away from shore I would have felt the water moving through my fingers, right? Twenty minutes later, my daydreaming was interrupted by a faint voice whispering my name. I sat up and realized the person whispering my name was actually yelling to me from the shore that was now almost out of view.

 

I have come to realize that most of us don’t paddle away from God – we drift. We drift away with justifications and rationalizations that seem so insignificant at the time, we don’t realize where they are leading us.

 

As a man, I have just heard my name called again, and once more I am amazed at how far I’ve drifted. For years, my heart had been warmed by things that made me feel good, while my slowly shifting attitudes were like the water moving through my fingers and toes. I thought I was firmly anchored in the truth, but the truth, as I saw it, was slowly drifting along with the rest of my life.

 

None of my poor decisions seemed like a big deal at the time, but each minor compromise led me further from God. Pretty soon, I was so far adrift that when God called to save my life it only sounded like a whisper.

 

How I got so far from Him is difficult to put a finger on. Growing up on the Canadian prairies in a reasonably functional family, I somehow inherited a deep-rooted insecurity that I longed to leave far behind. My front teeth grew a lot faster than the rest of me, until I entered high school and went from the shortest kid on the volleyball team to the tallest in the district two years later. I was a gangly (but progressively less bucktooth) teenager trying to find a place for myself in a world that only seemed to welcome “normal” people.

 

Even without my “buckers,” I would have never fit the mold of “normal” anyway. Normal for me was building robots or helicopters in the basement. I was torn between trying to be cool and wanting to invent things that would change the world. Two goals, as it turned out, that made it pretty much impossible to fit in with the crowd. To make matters worse, I was growing so fast that I didn’t even fit into most of my clothes!

 

When I started prototyping snowboards in high school, I began to find more of my value in how good I was at building things. When I started racing and discovered that I had a gift for going fast, my identity became solidified as a teenage inventor with a need-for-speed. I never abandoned God completely or did anything all that horrible. I just started to place my confidence in my abilities rather than in God.

 

I built some progressive boards and won some international events, but I never really made it in that world. Was it because I didn’t have what it took? Or was it because God didn’t let me go too far in that direction because He knew He might lose me completely? I don’t know. I just know that if God had allowed me to become any more inflated with pride, I might not have made it back.

 

A few years after I hung up my snowboard, I invented a mountain bike suspension called the VPP (Virtual Pivot Point) with a friend of mine. The bike was critically acclaimed and is still in production with some great bike companies. As I reflect on what it took to get it there, however, I have to wince at the compromises I made.

 

I learned a lot of valuable lessons, but I also made a lot of poor decisions based on my fear of certain people who I thought had my best interest in mind. I found myself in a partnership that started at 50/50 and slowly morphed to 70/30 (with me as the “30”). I was even bullied into a side deal where half of my profits were to end up in someone else’s pocket.

 

I felt threatened and intimidated any time I expressed an opposing opinion. Instead of always standing up for myself or for what I believed was right, I went with the flow for the little things and only risked my personal safety and the stability of the company for issues that were undeniably wrong.

 

The biggest problem, which I had to lose everything to understand, was that I didn’t trust God half as much as I thought I did. I talked about Him a lot, but if I really trusted Him I would have done things His way, believing He would take care of me. Instead, I took my destiny into my own hands and settled for what I thought would work. I didn’t feel like I was living a life of compromise, because I would regularly take a stand for what I felt where major issues. But it was all the little things that I let slide, the “gray areas” of how we conducted our business that were gradually drawing me away from shore.

 

I had a justification for each of these decisions, of course. But God cared about me enough to let me see who I had become. He didn’t do it right away, or all at once. Just enough of the truth at the appropriate time so I would realize it in a way that would make me want to change. The truth about ourselves is that we only like to hear “the truth about ourselves” if it makes us feel good. If God had shown me how deluded I was all at once, I probably would have justified my actions, or simply denied the truth in favor of my pride. But if there is one thing I have learned about God, it is that He wants us to come back to Him by our own free choice. In my case, He allowed me to get so deep into my situation that I lived the devastating consequences of all my minor compromises.

 

I had done a lot of crazy things in the quest for speed or some other adrenaline buzz, so I never thought of myself as a fearful person. But the fear of letting everyone down in the bike company venture was a new thing that took everything in me to control.

 

Every time I disagreed with how the business was being run, I had two opposing things to consider. On the one side were the shareholders, many of whom where my close friends. On the other side were certain people running the company who would usually threaten to quit if I took a stand.

 

In psychology they call it a “double bind.” If I felt like a shareholder was being mistreated but I did nothing about it, I would lose sleep at night because of the injustice of the situation. On the other hand, if I expressed an opposing view, the consequences for the shareholders would be even worse if certain management people followed through on their threat to quit.
 

How’s that for a mind bender? It bent me to the point where the difference between right and wrong was starting to get very cloudy.

 

I tried, for years, to keep it all together by finding just the right compromises to keep everyone happy. The part I was missing in all of this was the faith to believe that God would take care of the details as long as I chose to do what was right. Fortunately, God allowed me to see my self-dependence, and eventually I cried out for Him to “set me free”.

 

His answer came a year later during the development of a technology for the oil industry. It was a new type of pump I had invented a decade earlier after I moved on from robots and helicopters. It operated on a new principle of three-dimensional geometry and was capable of much higher speeds and flow rates than any pump of its size.

 

Millions of dollars had been raised for its development, and once again I was working myself to death for fear of losing it all or disappointing the shareholders. God did not abandon me, though, and through an illness that took my health for a few years, and a hostile corporate takeover that cost me everything but two bikes and two computers, I believe God provided a path for me to freedom.

 

The following few years were the most difficult of my life. I went through a long process of admitting where I had compromised and trying to make those things right. It was my loneliest time ever. Every direction I turned there was someone threatening or rejecting me.

 

Looking back, I believe God was walking with me through the consequences of my decisions so I would learn to do things His way instead. At the same time, He was always there with the right words of encouragement or support so I could gain the knowledge and courage to do what was right. Sometimes, He was there through the support of other people. Sometimes, it was through some insight or wisdom in the Bible. And sometimes it was a prayerful impression on my heart that was so strong I just knew it was from Him.

 

I hope to never be in that predicament again, but I am glad to have gone through it because I learned the most valuable lesson of my life. I learned that every time I trust God instead of giving in to my fear of people or consequences, He will always reward me with a stronger inner peace and a deeper knowledge of His genuine concern for me.

 

It took losing everything to learn that lesson, but it may have been the only way for it to go from my head to my heart. It’s as though God took away everything I was ever afraid of losing and then said, “So now what are you afraid of?”

 

“You, Lord!” was finally my life-changing answer.

 

Fear is often seen as a negative emotion in our society, but the Bible says, “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy one is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10). For me, the fear of God translated into a soul-deep knowledge that God had the power to change my life, and that anything else I put my hope in would ultimately lead me away from Him.

 

As the fear of my Creator began to replace the fear of anything else, something unexpected happened. I found that the more I placed my hope in Him, the more I began to walk in freedom and confidence like never before. Fear, in this case, became a life-altering positive thing for me, because it was now in a God who knew and wanted what was best for me.

 

I would love to take credit for finally focusing my life on God, but the truth is that I simply responded to what He was doing in my life. As a result, He has brought me to a far better place than I could have found on my own. He has impressed on me that He is someone to be feared. He has shown me that He is aware of my needs. He has proven to me that He is willing to take care of every detail. I just need to trust Him with each new step.

 

I still love to go fast. God has given me incredible friends and better inventions than ever. I rarely feel any stress, and He is constantly revealing new aspects of His character to me as I hand over my life to Him every day. I have more to learn than ever, and I still mess up all the time. But God has finally broken through to me with a basic understanding of who He is and that He wants to be involved in every aspect of my life.

 

This book began its journey about fifteen years ago, when I realized that God wants us to know him on a personal level.

 

At first, I just wanted to prove that God existed. But with so much confusion in this world about Him, I realized that what people really need is to understand His loving character and intense concern for each of us. More than anything, I want people to understand that God knows us all by name, and that He loves each one of us exactly the way we are.

 

My goal has become to present a clear and accurate picture of a patient and loving Father, the way God reveals Himself to us in the Bible. I believe that if we can understand who God actually is, then more of us will want to trust Him with our lives.

 

Not that knowing God means everyone will automatically love Him, of course. Many people would prefer to invent their own God, or even to see themselves as God. More tragically, there are people who take a look at their life and automatically dismiss the idea that a perfect and holy God could ever love them the way they are.

 

As an inventor who is still trying to grasp some basic laws of physics, I struggle to understand how some people could try to invent their own “all-powerful Force or Being”. Even as a person who constantly struggles with my pride, I also can’t understand how people could see themselves as being in control of their eternal destiny.

 

On the other hand, as someone who has made some serious mistakes in my life I am definitely tempted to see myself as unlovable at times. But God is full of surprises, and the biggest one for many of us is that He is not looking for perfect people. All He wants from us is a humble and willing heart.

 

I’m pretty sure the God of the Universe doesn’t need another book about Him. It just seems that He likes to use our best efforts to tell others what He has taught us. My understanding of our Creator is slowly getting clearer, but in the end, the best I can offer is only a very small picture. It’s the best picture I’ve got, however, and I can’t help sharing it. I love to tell people about my hero and my Lord.

 

It would have been easier to finish this project fifteen years ago when I thought I had everything figured out. Since then, I have seen things about myself that aren’t nearly as great as I thought they were. And I have had to admit that almost nothing about God can be scientifically proven “for a fact”.

 

In all of this, however, there is one thing that becomes more undeniable to me all the time. I have learned that God loves me and wants what is best for me, and He is willing to bring me through whatever it takes to help me understand that. I’ve been hungry and I’ve been full. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. I prefer full and rich, quite frankly, but I would trade it all, at any time, for the assurance I now have that God will always be there for me.

 

“Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the LORD is the one who goes before you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor forsake you." (Deuteronomy 31:8)

 

This is my book about God. It is born out of much pain, much loss, more mistakes than I can remember, and a first hand encounter with the Creator of the Universe who calls out to anyone who is willing to listen.