It's a privilege to be here with my friends, so many friends here,

privilege to share the stories about Jesus and what he's done in my life.

It's not easy to do, but necessary.

Okay? I grew up in a little town over in northeast Texas that we call deep east Texas,

kind of a different culture over there, especially in the days that I'll be talking about.

We have a large family.

I have five sisters and a twin brother.

And everybody's always acting when I say I have a twin brother, they would say, are you

identical? I say I have a twin brother there so are you identical?

I say unfortunately for him no we aren't.

He only wishes we were identical.

And we were poor.

I know, a lot of people have poor stories, but we really were.

And my daddy was a farmer when he did anything. My mother and father's,

kids were growing up, were both alcoholics, radical alcoholics, especially toward the end of the time I'll be telling you about.

They drank every day. They were drunk pretty much all the time.

As you can imagine, some of you experienced that. I know that's nothing unique to our

family, but it was traumatic. My daddy was an angry drunk, a mean one when he was drunk. And so my mother lived with black eyes and

bloody noses and abuse a lot of our life.

The little place where I grew up was in a dry county,

meaning that alcoholic beverages couldn't be sold by law in that county

and there were many surrounding counties in those days over in each

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