I worked my way, literally, through seven years of higher education and ended up with this wonderful doctorate of divinity degree, which is not very useful out in the secular world. I'm the first college-graduated member of my family except for my grandfather way back when, who also happened to be an Episcopal priest. All the way through this experience I didn't really believe any of this Christian stuff. It was all so bizarre to me. So I tried all of these things but nothing worked.
Nothing fails like prayer.
Here I was. They taught us in seminary that you should base your sermon on those. Well, I would sit there and go through those things and try and figure out something in there that was relevant to talk about. It's interesting, too, that when I was going to seminary they used to say our job was to make the gospel relevant. In 1972, I finally had reached a new stage.