About The Author

Jim Van Rite

My dad never told me that he loved me until the last months of his life, and I don’t recall many moments of affection between mom and dad. I am sure they had those moments, but they just didn’t stand out as normal.

Maybe this is the reason for my not having much access to my emotions for most of my life.

My studies in college and seminary suggest that my situation is not unusual. Perhaps sixty percent of families in America and other countries in the west, are dysfunctional, one definition of which is a lack of good communications verbally, or nonverbally.

We didn’t go to church much until we moved to Weatherford, Texas in 1958, and I didn’t get a sense of closeness to God until I began to need Him as an adult. I am sure that there must have been some conversation about God in our home, but as with moments of affection between us; these didn’t stand out.

I began to ask questions of a God I didn’t know when my behavior as a Marine in Viet Nam conflicted with the moral norms that I somehow internalized from church and society. Not only was I using women as objects there, but especially after I began a career as an entertainer in my 30s, I continued to do so. I told myself I was looking for the perfect woman, but what I discovered was that I was looking for meaning in life.

I told God in a conversational tone, that if he was there, then I needed his help to change my way of living. I told him that I didn’t know to change me on my own. I knew by then that I had problems with women or really anyone telling me that they loved me. The reason was that I was embarrassed to reveal that I didn’t know how to respond in kind. I couldn’t say I love you because I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like. I once said that sometimes I felt as if others were like cardboard cut outs as I didn’t know the language of emotions being shared.

So, I began to implore God to fix me, because I had lived enough to know that no one on earth could do so. Again, it was if you are there God; I need help.

Oddly enough, that help came in the form of a call to ministry. Like Moses in the Bible, I was incredulous. Me, this emotional desert a pastor? How could that make any sense at all.

The truth is, I was somewhat effective as a United Methodist Pastor, and it was because God gave me a ringing truth in the beginning of my ministry. He told me that it was all about love. Now that made me very angry at God. It was almost like he was mocking me. Yet, I acted as if I felt this love for the sake of my parishioners.

Even so, I sometimes shouted at God as I drove e 60 miles to college in back from Palo Pinto, Texas, “Where is the love I am supposed to feel, you promised me I could love”.

Love did come. It came when I risked saying it and acting as if. I began a change that not only allowed me to experience love gradually, but also even after I had taken leave from the active ministry, I began to have more honest discourse with God and in that discourse in prayer and meditation; this book was born.

Somehow, God imparted in me a deep need to know of and experience the Kingdom of God in the now. He showed me that the kingdom is what is real in a sense that this world cannot be. It is created and us with it to offer us a chance to grow into being truly members of the kingdom of God forever. We are meant to let the world see Him through us and thus offer it transformation into God’s kingdom on “earth as it is in heaven” (Lord’s Prayer).

                                   It has been a long time coming, this book; but He has shown me more that I would ever have expected possible. I share that with you now.