Click the play button below to listen to the audio
My Personal Testimony
College became a new beginning for me.
I found new friendships, and for the first time — unlike in high school — I began to excel in my studies.
Like my father, I chose to pursue a career in music education, with a secondary focus on music therapy. In many ways, I was walking in his footsteps…yet sometimes, the shadow of his absence pressed down on me.
I should have been happier, but I wasn’t.
Instead of feeling connected to the joys of my earliest years before my father’s premature death, I often found myself living under a cloud of negative thoughts. The unresolved trauma and emotional pain from high school still followed me. Shame and fear accompanied me, and anxiety was a constant companion.
So, I kept myself busy. I practiced my music for hours each day on my instruments, hoping the music would drown out the thoughts I didn’t want to face.
Around the same time, I was drawn to the emerging hippie movement, identified by cries of “love, not war,” experimentation, and the search for freedom. Yet in striking contrast was another movement rising: the Jesus Revolution. Some say it was the last Great Revival in America. It was a period in history of soul searching, of looking inward.
Many were trying to figure out who and what they were, and where they were going as a human race. I too was searching—though I didn’t know what for.
Evangelical Christians, also known as ‘Jesus freaks,’ was a term that originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s counterculture, used pejoratively for those who believed in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord
His Pursuit, God’s Relentless Love
Jesus’ mission on earth was to seek and save the lost… and that was me!
Oftentimes, God allows us to reach a place of brokenness. I guess He thought it was time to rescue me from myself. He didn’t want me to continue dwelling on feelings of abandonment, hopelessness, dejection, lack of self-acceptance, and fear.
He longed to be the Father I had never fully known or appreciated growing up. And even though I did not yet know Him personally, something within me was still crying out, hoping He would hear.
A musician friend — a fellow flutist — began sharing the Gospel of Christ with me. “Are you saved?” she asked. I wasn’t even sure what she meant at first.
“Born again, you know. Don’t you?”
“Uhhhh, what?” I stammered. But truthfully, I didn’t know.
That was the moment when God began relentlessly pursuing me—
His love chasing me down—refusing to let me go.
God had me squarely in his sights, and although I ran from Him; he did not give up on me, and neither did my friend. Because of His very nature, which is love, He sought a relationship with me, and He would not give up until I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior.
“Are you born-again?”
The question gnawed at me.
After a while, it became like a song stuck in my head that goes round and round. One psychologist describes it as an earworm. The most interesting thing about earworms is that they show a part of our brain that is not in our control, and they refuse to leave when we tell them to.
There was nothing I could do to prevent God from pursuing me. No distance could I run that would keep God from loving me. From the moment I was born, God had been pursuing my heart. It was His greatest longing for me to be in a relationship with Him, and because I could not reach him through any effort of mine, He would orchestrate events that would cause me to seek Him.
But questions gnawed at me. Was there really a God and did He have a way for me to let go of all my burdens if I believed and trusted in Him?
Could I have the assurance of going to heaven when I died and not be left behind?
This last question seemed to weigh most heavily on me with a sense of urgency attached to it.
I often visited New York City and waited at the corner of Mrs. McGrath’s house for a bus. It was the last stop before the city, so the buses were usually packed. When one finally arrived, I climbed aboard and spotted a seat toward the middle. Holding onto the overhead metal hand ropes as the bus accelerated, I stepped carefully toward the back.
Suddenly, the bus lurched, and I nearly fell into my seat.
.I settled in, but did not look at the passenger next to me. His head was turned away slightly looking downward, reading something. I glanced momentarily and saw that he was reading a Bible and returned my gaze to my lap. Then he looked up and said my name.
“Oh, hey Mark,” I said, not knowing where the conversation would lead. “You’re not one of those, uh, Jesus Freaks, are you?”
It was rude of me to ask, and I knew it, and I guess didn’t care, else I would not have said it.
But Mark was not offended. Instead, he leaned into the opportunity, and for the rest of the bus ride into the city, he shared the “Good News” of Jesus Christ with me.
It was then that I realized God just wouldn’t quit pursuing me
A few days later, when I sank to a new low, I pulled a favorite Leonard Cohen album from my family’s hundreds of records.
Music had always been my escape.
I slid the LP from its jacket and placed it carefully on our high-end Audio Research turntable, holding it only by the edges to avoid fingerprints. Back then, it felt worlds apart from the old box record players with ceramic cartridges.
I lifted the tonearm and dropped the diamond stylus into a random groove. The speakers burst to life as I turned up the volume.
You’ve got to be kidding, I thought.
No sooner had the needle touched the vinyl than the first words filled the room —
“And Jesus
… was a sailor when He walked upon the water.”
Of all the places for the needle to land, it had to begin with His name. The one name I didn’t want to hear.
. I wasn’t looking for Him. I was looking for escape.
I lifted the needle. The music stopped mid-phrase. The speakers fell silent except for the faint hum of the amplifier — but in my head, His name kept echoing.
This couldn’t be a coincidence.
The words I had been hearing for days — Are you born again? God loves you. Jesus is the way, repeated in my mind like a broken record. I couldn’t shut them off.
Well, that totally blew my mind—a commonplace saying among others like “I really can’t hack it anymore.”
So I hastily lifted the needle from the turntable and ran from the house.
I jumped into my old forest-green ’68 Volkswagen Beetle and backed out of the driveway
Anywhere. Just anywhere. Had to get away.
I was confused and rattled. The music, the questions, the incessant echo in my head—Are you born again?—plagued me. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was supposed to do. I only knew one thing: I had to keep moving.
But God knew. Just like the song “Jesus Take the Wheel” by Carrie Underwood, Jesus took my wheel in that moment, guiding me—unbeknownst to me—to a place I never intended to go.
It was dark and raining when I pulled up in front of Mrs. McGrath’s house, whom I sometimes called Mrs. M, and parked my car across the street at the curb.
Remember the guy on the bus with the Bible?
[long pause] Well, Mrs. M was that guy’s mother, and this was his house too.
Coincidence?
For the next few minutes, I just sat there with the engine idling, the windshield wipers hypnotically swishing back and forth
What happened next, I don’t recall. It was as if that entire stretch of time was completely erased from my memory. And there I was, standing at Mrs. M’s back porch door. I must have knocked… hadn’t I?
“Billy, what are you doing here?” Mrs. M asked, surprised.
“Honestly,” I said, “uh, Mrs. McGrath, I don’t know.”
What’s really twisted is that I had no recollection of getting out of my car and walking up to her house.
One moment I was sitting across the street, and the next I was standing at her door.
Now, some of you are thinking that I went off the deep end…
And perhaps I did too at first. Just for the record, I wasn’t taking any hallucinogens, alcohol, or medications. I was completely sober
I tried to make sense of it.
It may sound far-fetched, but here goes. In the Bible, there are accounts of people being translated from one place to another—which, if you “eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” If this were a Star Trek series re-enactment, the dialogue may have gone like this…
“Transporter room, stand by to energize!”
A brief pause.
Then, in a flash I would have dematerialized. My subatomic molecules would have been sent along to another location, then rematerialized. This is the stuff of science fiction, right? Well… hold on to your seat.
Had I somehow been translated from my car to Mrs. M’s porch without realizing it?
In 2 Samuel 3:10, it carries the sense of transferring something from one place to another
And in Colossians 1:13, it describes being moved, delivered, from one condition into another
I didn’t know what to make of it. All I knew was that time — or at least my memory of it — had vanished.
And if it were not for God’s intervention, I had no plans of visiting Mrs. M that evening. When she invited me in, I hesitated momentarily, but by the grace of God I accepted her invitation.
She asked me into her living room where we talked for a while. Then, she asked me if I would like to pray, and I nodded yes.
I was comforted by her soft-spoken voice, and as I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her coffee table, I was drawn to the gentle flicker of candlelight in the room. The only sound was our quiet breathing. For a long moment, no words were spoken as I remained transfixed on the candle flame moving ever so slightly.
There was a silent presence that I could not name, and with it came a hope.
I contemplated what she had said, realizing her focus was not only on rescuing me from a distant place of punishment, but on saving me from a kind of hell already living inside me — the torment, the emptiness, the uncertainty, the loneliness of not knowing Christ, who had given His life for me.
Then, suddenly, the silence was broken.
“Billy, are you ready to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior?” she asked
Tell Him all your troubles, pour out your heart’s longings to Him, and believe me when I say—He will help you! He loves you. It is written: if we confess with our mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in our heart that He was raised from the dead, we shall be saved
Then, with my head bowed, I prayed.
Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room seemed to change.
I envisioned a pure white dove flying in and hovering above me. The vision seemed so real, that I dared to speak, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Mrs. M., do you see it?” I whispered, wondering if she had seen it too.
She nodded.
“Yes, Billy. He’s with you. He’s always been with you.”
At the time, I had no understanding of what the dove meant. Years later, I learned from Matthew 3:16 that when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him like a dove — a symbol of transformation and empowerment.
That same heaven that declared, “This is my Son…” awakened me to realize that this, too, was my identity in Christ: a child of God, a son forever held in the Father’s embrace.
Then, a peace unlike anything I had ever experienced before fell upon me. It seemed as if I transcended into His presence as I took wings and went to heaven, got saved, and came back to earth.
Although we really don’t take wings and go to heaven, get saved and come back to earth, it’s merely a figure of speech that shows one’s need to transcend our worldly life to a higher spiritual place in which we meet Christ as our savior. From that day forward I came to know God intimately as my Abba Father.
And so, “In my trouble, I cried to the Lord, and HE ANSWERED ME!” Christ came to rescue me—and mend my heart.
That night I exchanged my life for Jesus Christ’s life and was forgiven for all my sins. Jesus was now my Lord and savior, and I was a new creation.
So, on that dark and rainy night, feeling lost and depressed, I felt quite the opposite now. [clears throat] I left Mrs. M knowing that I had the assurance of eternal salvation.
Instead of feeling downhearted, I felt joy.
Instead of feeling dejected I felt accepted.
Instead of feeling fearful and anxious, I felt peace.
Instead of feeling hopeless, I felt hopeful.
Jesus Christ came to earth, died on a cross for my sins so that I might not only have eternal life after death but also to make a way for me to have an abundant life on earth with Jesus Christ, Here and Now. I couldn’t wait to tell everybody about my experience!
Let everyone give all their praise and thanks to the Lord!
Here’s why—He’s better than anyone could ever imagine
He’s always loving and kind, and his faithful love never ends.
So, go ahead—
let everyone know it.
Tell the world how he broke through and delivered you from the power of darkness.
He has set us free to be his very own.
Life changed almost 50 years ago for me, and I am FOREVER grateful
Copyright 2026 by Bill Hutzel
This audio narration was created using an AI-generated voice model trained on the author’s voice. The content and message were written by the author.
The introductory song passage at the beginning of this story was written by me in collaboration with John D’Elia, who beautifully arranged and produced the piece. His artistry brought the heart of the song to life, transforming what began as a quiet prayer into a musical offering of hope and endurance.
You can listen to We Cry Of … In Quiet Faithfulness in its entirety on Youtube. Click the link at the bottom of the page.