I’m going to tell you my testimony, and I’m just going to hit on the major points that made me give my life to Jesus, my Lord and Savior.

I was born Daniel Bertran of the Griffey family of Fort Worth, Texas. I mention this because of the circumstances of my condition at birth. I was born three months prematurely and weighed two and a half pounds. I had to stay in an incubator for a week to gain weight. No one thought I was going to live, not even my mother. She had had a miscarriage a few years before and did not want to get attached to a baby who all the doctors had told her probably would not survive more than a few days. In 1955 few premature babies survived the first week, and having one born three months prematurely, the doctors gave no hope to my family that I would ever leave the hospital.

Every day after he got off work, my dad would come by the hospital and holding me in his arms, he encouraged me to live with the words of his prayers. After a week of this and growing to a whopping five pounds, the doctors, in amazement, sent me home. Because they believed they would be filling out a death certificate, they hadn’t even taken the time to complete a birth certificate. That’s why my birth certificate reads five pounds at birth.
My mother and her sister came to the hospital to pick me up. They had brought a shoe box to carry me in. They were afraid to hold me because I was still so frail. At home, my brothers and my sister were on watch when the family cat was around because my mother had told them I was so frail and small that the cat might try to drag me off and eat me. But God had things for me to do; he did not intend for me to end up as cat food.
I was sick and frail throughout my childhood, with every problem you could think of—chronic asthma and epilepsy, to name a few. As a small child, I had to walk around with a string around my neck that ran through a big eraser, so that if I went into an epileptic fit, my sister or my brothers were to shove this big eraser into my mouth so I wouldn’t bite off my tongue.

For many years I could not play games with other kids; I could only sit and watch. This concentrated observation taught me to observe everything going on around me. When I got to be about four years old, my father, who was an author, would let me sit in his office and watch him write, if I didn’t make any noise. I saw him sitting there grasping images that were forming in his mind, like a blacksmith hammering his thoughts into words with every strike of the typewriter keys, as sweat poured down his face. This was Texas before home refrigerated air conditioning. All he had to cool the hot air was a swamp cooler. That image would stay with me for the rest of my life: the image of a blacksmith hammering out choice words upon a white anvil in an ancient blacksmith sweatshop. His mental muscles flexing with every thought burned itself forever into my psyche. This scene made such an impression on my young mind. I guess that’s why I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

In the ‘50s, television was a very new form of creative expression, so my dad watched it to see other creative people’s work. I would sit on the couch beside him. To keep me quiet so that I wouldn’t ask so many questions, he invented a game to play with me. We would watch the mystery programs and the first one that could explain the twists and turns the plot was going to take and how it would end was the winner. As a small child, through this television game my dad created, the Lord taught me not to get so distracted by events in the story but to see through those events into the actual message. This acquired training became crucial many years later in studying the Bible to discern biblical prophecy, and applying it to events that would happen during the Great Tribulation period.

Because I was very sickly and frail, my dad would tell me a story about a kid in his hometown in Kentucky who was much worse off than me. He had asthma so bad he could only take a few steps and then succumb to exhaustion and collapse on the floor. His father would carry him in his arms to the train tracks that ran by their house. After dinner there was plenty of fresh air on the tracks. The boy would take as many steps as he could as he counted the number of railroad ties to gauge his progress. At first, he could only walk five or six ties and then collapse to the ground. His father, with encouraging words, would pick him up in his arms and carry him back to the house. Every day the father and son would do this and he would add a few more railroad ties to his count every day. Much time passed and he began to run the ties; he ran faster and faster, day after day. This became a habit and the practice became a pattern in his life. Everybody in town watched as he ran daily, like the wind, on the railroad tracks. The townspeople knew the story of a father who encouraged his son, and a son who overcame great difficulties to achieve freedom of movement. My dad’s story ends with the boy becoming a very fast young man representing the United States in the World Olympics. Now I don’t know if this is a true story or a story my dad made up, being the creative person he was, but it worked to motivate me.
The latest information on premature babies has shown that they have difficulty in school because it is believed the development of their minds was not complete in the womb and their minds had to catch up as they grew.
School was very hard for me and this is no understatement, especially grammar school or elementary school. I found out that nobody wanted to be friends with one of the dumbest kids in the school, and every recess I couldn’t go out to play. I had to attend a special education class with about five or six other students.
At the end of the sixth grade, on graduation day, I looked back at my time at that school and realized that I only had one friend, a kid named David Ballard. On the last day of school, I found myself standing near a rail on the playground when all the other kids had long gone home. I was feeling dumb, friendless, and depressed. Even at that young age, I wanted more out of life than I had already received. It was then and there, in that state of mind, that I negotiated a deal with God. I told Him that if He would make me popular at the other school I was leaving to go to, a junior high school, then after that high school, I would someday give my life completely over to Him. To fast forward, that is what happened. My grades improved the following year, and my popularity increased with every grade and every year after that. I found myself with the whole school as my friend. No longer sick and weak, I even played football.

In my junior year of high school, things began to change. Heaven started pushing events around in my life to produce a decisive change. I was 17 years old, and Heaven sent me a dream that was a spiritual outline for the rest of my life. I knew when I had the dream that it was from God. It was to show me the future of the world, especially the biblical Tribulation period.
In this dream, I found myself stepping down a spiral staircase, each step representing the Lord directing the events of my life, leading to a room at the bottom of the stairs. In this room was a large table, like a kitchen table except larger. Around the table were a few women, no more than four or five in number. I sat down at the table with them and in front of us were Bibles. As we discussed the Bible, outside the room a loud horn sounded like a trumpet. When this happened, I looked up from my Bible and saw that none of the other people were looking up. I said, “Did you hear that?” They replied, “Hear what?” “That horn, did you hear that horn?” They said, “We heard nothing!” I told them, “I am going to find out what that is.” And I got up and went outside to see.

Outside I looked up in the sky and saw the sun, much larger than usual, and the moon and stars still in the sky. The sun and the stars became dark from one end of the sky to the other. And after that, they fell from the sky; only the moon was left. Then the moon turned blood red. People came running out of their houses like crazy people when this happened. They ran down the street, screaming all the time.
Then from different parts of the land mass, as far as I would see, people began to ascend out of the ground, straight from their graves into the air, their hands clasped in prayer, dressed in radiant white robes with their faces looking upward, singing the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Multitudes of them disappeared into the clouds. A horrible realization came to me that I was still on the ground and had not been, as the Christians predicted, “raptured off the planet.” The sins of my heart and mind all came before me, and I fell on my knees crying to the Lord God, “Have mercy on me and do not leave me behind!”

Then I found myself rising in the air. But I did not go into the clouds as the others, nor was I dressed in a white robe like the others. I was suspended below the clouds with many others; we were all still dressed in street clothes. After a large group had gathered, we began to move en masse over all the earth’s surfaces. We crossed over every continent and nation; as we did, people came out of these nations and began to float up into the air to join us. By the time we had crossed over every country on earth, our group had grown quite large. Millions of people flew in the air with us. We flew to the Middle East to the Holy Land.

End of Part 1 go to Part 2 -

This campaign is unpublished.