Hello 360 world!

I still check in here from time to time and see how others are and what has been going on in your lives. The last 1 1/12 years have been devoted to developing a business with the hope this is what God has given me to do with my hands so that I can earn my own living and work away from receiving insurance disability pay.

The site is not quite finished, but should be within the next week or two. There is however, enough text and graphics to give you a clear understanding of the business I have begun.

Here is the web address;

http://www.MasterpieceEngraving.com

and I can only hope you will enjoy it enough to visit from time to time, purchase if you are able, and tell your friends and family about it.

God's peace to you all,

Stan

for how I lived today?

I’d like to keep good records

of what I did and had to say.

You see, I’ve begun to notice

that sometimes I do judge,

and don’t think well of others.

I must admit, I even hold a grudge.

I tend to think too highly

of myself and my desires,

as if I were the only soul

that ever walked through fires.

I know in the quiet of my heart,

that place where You relieve me,

that other’s lives aren’t always simple

and they also yearn to be.

Should I live in harmony

I’d still like my receipt,

then each success that I record

I could try my best to repeat.

written by Stan Hines, © 2000

I was raised in a nice, middle class home and enjoyed the lifestyle and environment that was portrayed on the TV show Happy Days.  That unshakable belief that nothing bad would ever happen, or at least a naïve security that my world was safe and solid.  I had two older brothers and two older sisters, and a Mother and Father that were filled with an abundance of love for all of us.  We all went on family trips together, crowded in the car for long drives around the state of Arizona.   Those trips every year are memories that still have a power of goodness and untouchable wholesomeness I can feel even now… 

At the age of ten, just a couple weeks before my eleventh birthday, my oldest brother Mike and his girlfriend, and my sister Kathleen and one of her friends went horse back riding at one of the many stables in the desert around Phoenix.  Life was about to change for the Hines family forever and we blissfully walked into the dramatically painful transformation.  Mike’s horse became uncontrollable in the middle of the ride that day, at one point rearing back and throwing Mike to the ground.  His head cracked on the hard ground or a rock, causing trauma to his brain that would take his life by the next day.  That twenty-four hours or less seems like it was a matter of weeks in our family.  It changed each of us, and I can still feel the pain that surrounded us as a family, and individually.  I had never seen my father cry, and I had never felt loneliness nor alone, but that day Mike died I experienced those things.

My whole family changed.  I changed too.  Within a couple of years of Mike’s death, I began to run away from home, run with the wrong crowd, and loose touch with reality.  That may sound a bit strange, but I just didn’t know how powerful my poor decisions were at that time, nor how far reaching the effects of those decisions would be.  I began experimenting with drinking at twelve years of age, and I liked it a lot.  I don’t know why and I don’t analyze it too much anymore, it was simply an escape that allowed me to feel whatever it was I thought I needed to feel.  Marijuana came along shortly after the alcohol, along with other drugs, and Stan Hines was pretty much a done deal then and for the next 22 years.  I got involved with crime by the age of thirteen, and by the age of fifteen I was serving a three-year sentence in the California Youth Authority.    I succumbed to peer pressure in my environment and played the part of the young tough guy I thought I had begun to be.  I learned what it was like to be a racial minority, I learned what it was like to hate, I learned what raw fear felt like, and again I felt a desperate loneliness, and alone.

          I got out when I was eighteen and lived with my parents briefly.  Now I had a reputation and didn’t feel that I really fit in any longer with the “good” kids I use to know.  I was allowed into bars and began to find a kind of comfort and cheap thrill in biker bars.  My living brother and I now had alcohol and drug use in common and we began keeping the same crowd of friends.   The lack of morals and values provided one excitement after another.   Very primitive living I can see as I look back.  It’s a world of the senses; if it smells, tastes, sounds, looks, or feels good, it’s good, and if it doesn’t, it’s bad.  Very simple thinking…

          When I was twenty years old, I worked with my Dad for a period of a few months at a business he had bought and began to develop.  Life was hard for him during this time, but the business and time together offered him and I the first grown up opportunity to become friends and learn of eachother’s dreams.  He didn’t approve of my drinking, ever, but I think he really wanted to know what made his son tick.  He wanted to know the mixed up adult I had become.  That was a gift for me that has become priceless.  My Dad and I were on our way to a job early one Sunday morning and got in a traffic accident that took his life.  He didn’t understand my poor choices, but he sure loved me a lot and I still love and miss him deeply.

          I was in and out of jails all of the time for fighting and other drunken behavior, and eventually got involved in more felony charges, this time as an adult.  I spent months, then years in county jails as the justice system tried to provide me with every salvation short of prison.  By the age of twenty-four though, I had received every fair break that existed in the system and all that was left was prison.  I had simply violated probation, for the last of several times, and my sentence would keep me in the Arizona State Prison system for the next six years.  During those six years, I first felt hate like a physical thing inside me, then sought relief from that hell of hating.  What I discovered through prayer and meditation was that God did exist, and I would never question that again.  I was very private about my spirituality in prison, and still half believed that it was a weakness to believe in God.  None-the-less, I had accepted the existence of God as fact in my life, in my mind and in my heart.  What I have learned since then is how small of a step that part of the deal is.  As I have heard often as a Christian, even the devil believes in God. 

At the age of 30, I was released from prison and had every good intention in the world of becoming a “normal” person living in our society.  It’s kind of a big step to have a past though and do something as simple as make conversation with the average person.   Between the ages of 15 and 30, I had spent 11 years incarcerated and 4 years free.  So what did I have to talk about?  Don’t kid yourself into thinking that this shouldn’t have been a big deal.  Conversations are inevitable and necessary in building relationships, in getting along with co-workers, and in almost every facet of our daily life.  If you don’t have any normal recent experiences that you can bring to a conversation, you have a serious chasm between yourself and others. 

I started out ok, but got injured on a job a few months out of prison.  I had already drank a couple of times, and now was injured severely enough I couldn’t work for a few months.   I turned back to what I knew; alcohol, drugs, and people that accept about anything from eachother in the way of behavior.

Nothing really new here.  I drank and wrestled with drug use for the next five years.  I had a strange relationship with God, one that had been going on for years now.  I was almost always angry with God.  I didn’t blame Him for my alcohol or drug use, I didn’t blame Him for any of my actions over the years, but I thought He was responsible for life being so hard to live.  I thought it was always a struggle and that His design was to blame.   I didn’t like who I had become, and I often blamed God for turning His back on me.  In the next breath, I would beg Him to help me escape the darkness of addiction that I was finding out had a solid grip on me.  For the last year of my drinking and occasional drug use, I would swear it off nearly every morning, and drink every night.  I would lean on the sink in the bathroom many mornings, in tears, disgusted with what I saw in the mirror.  I would see only the weakness, the shadow of the person that was supposed to be in that reflection.           

  Then one weekend in May of 1997, God put in motion a set of circumstances that would lead to a Life He wanted for me and out of the darkness I had stumbled into.  It was a weekend of turmoil that is a long, long story of it’s own.    I hadn’t done enough drinking or drugs; I actually felt fairly clear-headed and began to experience hallucinations.  I didn’t know what a doctor could do, but I was scared enough to go ask.  It turned out he couldn’t do much but refer me to another clinic that would talk to me and attempt to evaluate what was wrong.  A nurse there began asking about my alcohol and drug use right away.  I was honest, almost relieved to tell someone about my excessive abuse of alcohol, and what drug use I did part take in.  This nice lady was experienced in this and plainly stated that I was certainly a severe case and that I was in trouble should I continue my lifestyle.  I was on a sure road to an early death, though I have always felt incarceration would have probably come first.  What a torturous outlook to know that the two possible and even probable outcomes to my lifestyle would be death or incarceration!  She offered an alternative; detoxification. 

Looking back, I cannot express strongly enough how God was truly at work.  How foreign to my lifestyle each step of this was.  To even consider getting help, it seemed ridiculous!  Yet, right then, put on the spot for a decision, I felt as a man that had been stranded on an island for twenty-two years, being offered a rescue ship.  I felt it with my whole being at some specific moment in that room, this was it.  I was soooo fearful trying to imagine how I could live without alcohol, it had never worked since I first began drinking; I had never quit with any success.  Now here I was, saying to this nurse, “yes, I want to check into the hospital to detox”.

 By God’s truly amazing Grace, I have not drank or used any drugs since then.  Of course it hasn’t all been easy, and I could stand here and tell you of a few even desperate struggles.   The worst struggles were not ones against any urge to get drunk or high, but struggles of how to deal with Life and the challenges we are sometimes presented with.  I had to learn how to live in the way my parents had tried to teach me all those years ago.  I thank God for their dedicated and selfless parenting. 

And all of that leads me to the GREAT part of this story!  I would like to share with you all how God, our Father and Creator, Jesus Christ our Savior, Lord and King, and the Holy Spirit have worked together to make a dramatic change in one man’s life.  That Life would be the one given to me as a precious gift; the work in my life though must ALL be credited to our Creator Himself.

I made intentional choices over the years to mistreat my life, to waste it and let it slip by in a blur.  I was given gifts all of those years, I now believe it was the Lord trying to reach through my desperately warped free will and show me what could be.  Yet I pushed gift after gift aside, obnoxiously walking further and further into darkness with almost a proud saunter.  When I finally recognized the hell I was living, surrounded by and so hopelessly trapped in, I experienced a weakness that told me I could never crawl out of this hell.  When I was young I was an athlete, accomplished at many sports for many years.  I was an altar boy at our church and the priests enjoyed working with me, I even served mass for a Bishop, which was quite an honor in the Catholic Church.  I was a Cub Scout, and then a Boy Scout; I played in little league and in Pop Warner football.  I was an accomplished trumpet player that competed in several bands and private competitions for awards.  I did my chores at home and I mowed lawns and had a newspaper route to earn money.  I earned A’s and B’s in school for years.  HOW COULD I HAVE THROWN AWAY A LIFE THAT HAD ALWAYS HELD SUCH PROMISE?

I stand before you today and boldly tell you that I did not throw away anything.  I stand before you today and testify that I may very well be a miracle, though I tend to think I am just not big enough or strong enough to have damaged God’s Creation!  I lived a lie for years.  I tried to recreate myself into some worldly person that God NEVER created me to be.  God even used every year I could have wasted for His own Glory, so that I can testify to you today that HE IS REAL AND HE SAVES HIS CREATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF LIFE AND LIVING!

I stand before you today and tell you that God has repaid me in full for all of the years I foolishly wasted.  Did you get that?  HE DID NOT OWE ME, and I was in fact so unworthy of His Love and Blessings.  My Mother and other family members and friends have prayed for me for years without ceasing, and I myself begged God in my final year of misery.  He did not simply heal me of addiction to alcohol and drugs; He began to give me a life fit for a king!  That sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?  Let me give you a list of some of the gifts God gave me for accepting His healing Love.

For all of the years I should have been working on making a family of my own, the Lord gave me a tender Wife that already had a son.  My Wife Debbie is the closest friend I have ever had in my entire life.  She knows everything about me, and still she loves me so profoundly and in so many ways and so often that I just plane feel unworthy of her sometimes.   I sometimes express that I am living a love story, and I know it now as a gift from God.  Debbie’s son Eli was too old for us to become like a father and a son, but I know I could not love and admire another man as much as I do Eli.  We share a relationship beyond mere friendship that has been tested dramatically more times than I can remember, and not only survived, but thrived with a mutual love and respect.  Eli and his family, Christy, Tristin and Alexis have all rounded out the gift God presented me with.  I have a family that certainly was not created in the ordinary manner, God hand picked and pieced together this special collection of people and I feel so blessed and included in Life itself because of the love that is so freely shared amongst us.  It is amazing to me how we all struggle with our humanness so openly in my family, and how we all strive for and encourage eachother in personal growth.  Thank you God, for the Gift of my family.  And I thank each of them for their willingness to love me, even when I haven’t been so lovable.

Now remember, I’m sharing a list of blessings God has presented in my life for having accepted His gift of healing and salvation.  Out of the seven my birth family started with, my Mom, 2 sisters and I have grown closer again these last few years.  Sometimes one of us will feel the scars of the past years, but that happens less than experiencing a true love and appreciation of eachother and the desire to build eachother up.  Another gift from God, the rebuilding of my birth family.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to go back to school for a year so that I could change careers.  I did not qualify for school loans, but only found this out after completing my schooling, accomplishing my goals and being in a position where the school is accountable for the mistake and will have to carry my loans.  They chose to write of the largest portion of them without any prompting what so ever.   

I have been blessed financially with a quality of life that is far better than I had ever attained and is still improving.  Learning how to be a good steward of this Blessing continues to be a challenge.

 I have been blessed where it truly counts.  After two years of sobriety, God began a process that would lead to the salvation of both Debbie and myself.  We both believed in God, credited God with our changed life from alcohol and drugs, and prayed and read spiritual material.  Then I had an instructor that is a devout Christian.  Something about his conviction caused me to question my own beliefs when he quoted the Bible passage of John 14:6. 

That passage reads,

”Jesus answered, ‘I am the way the truth and the life.  NO ONE comes to the Father except through me’.”

So I asked Debbie if I could use a Bible of hers that we kept mixed in with other books on a shelf and I started to read the Bible in the mornings.  I also started to learn how to pray differently.  Instead of just praying to God the way I had always done, I awkwardly lifted my prayers in Jesus’ name. 

          I was walking on clouds for a week!  I was just full of energy and full of this strange “joy”.  By the end of the week, I couldn’t deny the existence of this change, and inwardly I faced that the only difference in my life had been the way I prayed, and a sort of desperation in my heart for Truth.  I still doubted though, and asked Debbie to join what we now think of as our “Jesus experiment”.  We were so awkward at first, how do we pray right, what are we suppose to say if indeed there is a right and a wrong way? 

          I want to tell any one here that may still be doubting in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, or in any stories the Bible offers us; the answers are available, they are free, and you are welcome to bring your doubts!  Nothing is clearer to me now, looking back, that the only requirement for a successful Jesus experiment is self-honesty and a willingness to open your heart and mind to answers you will receive.

I have begun to experience the most profound of all of God’s gifts since beginning that experiment.  This gift will last at least for this earthly lifetime, and just gets better after that the way I understand it.  I am receiving the gift of true transformation.  The Holy Spirit lives within me now and has begun transforming me for our Creator.  How do I know this?  I am not the person I was in the past years.  I rejoice in the company of others where I once wanted only solitude to the point of extreme rudeness to get that solitude.  People did not approach me, I put up a barrier that was almost a physical thing, and it could certainly be felt.  I spoke with a foul mouth even when simply commenting on the weather; curse words were a part of nearly each sentence out of my mouth.  I suffered from an anger that even I detested, but had no control over.  There are many other poor qualities about me that I felt I simply needed to accept as flaws I contained as a person.  Funny thing though, the longer I nurture a relationship with Jesus Christ, seek to follow Jesus, and worship our Father God, the smaller those flaws become, slowly just disappearing from the person I know as Stan.

          Please notice I said slowly.  I have not arrived or become the person I would like to be, though it is more apparent that I am becoming the person God created me to be.  I continue to become aware of thoughts and actions in me that are rooted in my selfish nature, and I usually find I am trapped in these things called habits and addiction and that I must turn to God to look for escape and True change to again realize a deeper and more profound freedom. 

What I am trying to portray here is that I am in many ways a changed person, changed in ways that most of us believe cannot be changed. Just a few years ago, you would have met me and it would have been no surprise to learn I was an ex-con, and that I had spent time in a maximum-security prison.  You would have recognized the harshness and lack of regard for others, the way I looked out at the world as if the world and I were separate.  We are not separate.  We are NOT separate!  Don’t let anyone ever make you feel separate, don’t except that! 

          I looked in the mirror the morning I wrote most of this.  I put my hands on the sink like I used to near the end of my drinking days.  I looked into the mirror, leaned a little closer and really looked.  I found myself looking into my eyes, at first wondering what I was looking for.  I noticed near the center of the blue iris in each eye, next to the black pupil, the blue color lightens almost as if there is a light shining out of me.  I started to cry again like I use to, though it was with a great humility and gratitude that God would take me, and each one of us that asks Him, He will take us and redefine the creation He intended us to be.  He will again and continually breathe His Life into us, and light will begin to grow in those vacant, empty, and dark places we all create in our misguided attempts in this Life.  The Light of God’s Word is real, try your own experiment, shout your frustration to the heavens, and cry for your heart to be broken of barriers that hinder your relationship with our Creator.  Pray in Jesus’ name as He instructed us to in His Word.  Do SOMETHING to begin in the direction of Life if you haven’t yet experienced it?  God WANTS you to come home; He WANTS to have a relationship with you, that’s why He created us!  He will bridge the gap of our limited understanding if we just reach out to HIM!

          Stan (November 2000, with revisions made as God continues to work in my heart and renew my mind,  Very much in need of updating as of this posting.)

J

Psalms 116: 1-2

I love the Lord, for he heard my voice;

        He heard my cry for mercy.

Because he turned his ear to me,

        I will call on him as long as I live.