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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Dean Cullinane

Father of the Fatherless

Father in heaven, Lord, all of us here gathered this evening have sinned against you and against heaven.

And Father, we are not worthy to be called your daughters or your sons.

But Father, Your Son will forever be worthy to be called our Savior.

And so we ask that it is He and not me that speaks this evening.

It took us about 7, maybe 7 and a half hours to come to drive down from North California.

And at 1 point we thought this is just going to take way too long.

And we had a really cool experience, or at least I felt we did.

And We just started singing as the sun set.

We took out our hymn books and our phones and we're just praising the Lord.

We were here maybe a minute or 2 early, but maybe my watch is a little fast.

I recently shaved before I looked about 45 years old.

I was born in the Republic of Ireland in a city called Galway.

And I left Galway in the year 1999 with my mother and with my younger brother.

And I stayed in London until I moved here to Weimar, or to California, January 1st last year.

So hence why the accent is slightly jumbled up.

But I want to share with you the story of how the Lord won my heart.

How he managed to come to where I am and reach me and change my life completely.

A lot of that started when I had finished secondary school.

So we finished school in the UK when we were 16 years old.

And then after that education is optional.

My grades were good enough for me to be able to choose where I was going to study next.

I wanted to go into investigative journalism.

And another opportunity had opened up during that summer where I was making these decisions to go to a football academy.

And by football I mean the real football, The circular 1, not the egg-shaped thing that you guys throw with your hand.

So I ended up deciding to go to this football academy and put my educational studies to the side and just focus on sports.

And this is all I wanted to do, this is what I dreamed of doing as a child.

I wanted to be a football player or to help you visualize it a soccer player.

And I remember starting there and everything was going so well And about 2 or 3 months into my experience there, I was maybe 16 years old, I tore 1 of my quadriceps.

And that meant that I couldn't really do any strenuous physical activity for maybe about 4 months.

Now, 4 months is a long time when you're talking about sports season and I had to regularly, in fact every day of the week past Sunday, I had to go to the physiotherapist there at our football academy and he would do some gamma-ray technology kind of thing on me and then I would have to stay and sit and watch all of my fellow teammates train for the whole day and I had to attend all of their matches and it was excruciatingly painful mentally, not just physically.

And I got really, I don't want to say really depressed because I'm only 25.

I was maybe as depressed as I could have been at that time for someone my age and with someone that had the life experiences that I had had.

It was at that age, about 17 years old now, where I got involved with a young lady.

And this was my first, maybe serious relationship.

But 6 months when you're 17 years old, that's a long time.

People get married and divorced in 6 months.

So this was serious, this was a life-changing relationship that was taking place.

And I liked the girl and we got together and life happens, that's the best way to put it and I found out the more I got into the relationship with her that she had a few issues that I wasn't capable of sorting out You know how sometimes when you come into someone's life you think you can fix all their problems?

Neglected my own problems and tried fixing someone else's and it just wasn't happening.

It turns out that she had really severe, How do I put this politely?

She was kind of insecure and she had good reason to be.

When she was but a young girl, her mother committed suicide and left a note, you know a suicide note?

She left a suicide note, but in that note she only mentioned how much she loved her little sister and she didn't mention her.

And so as you can imagine she had some security issues from that.

And the relationship went places that I wasn't willing to go.

It required someone that I wasn't willing to be and so I stepped away from that.

But at this time I was still at the football academy and I was still trying to do my thing and again another injury struck me and I wasn't playing for about another 4 or 5 months again.

The academy that I was at, they paid for my college on the side.

And So we would study some sort of science.

I was studying biomedical science, physiotherapy and nutrition.

And in order to progress to the academy to the point where you're getting paid to be a player, you needed to graduate from the school.

There was like a working relationship between the 2.

And it came to the final semester of my school.

And the way the school was run was a little bit strange.

In that all of the work throughout the whole semester would be handed in on the last day of school.

So it's not handed in throughout the semester, it's handed in right at the end, you come, you bring this big portfolio, and that's marked, and you get your results maybe a month or 2 later.

Now what had happened was, a week before the last semester, my house was burgled.

Someone brought, all right, let me step back.

2 weeks before that, my house was burgled.

But the people that came in, they didn't take anything.

I remember the police officer coming to my house after I'd called him came and he said he said well it doesn't seem they took anything he said don't worry because Nobody is dumb enough to come to the same house a second time.

And I thought, he's got a 0.1 week later, that person decided to come back.

And when I say everything, I mean anything that would fit out the front door.

We've got small front doors in England, but anything that would fit out the front door, they would take it, they took it.

In fact, my first thought was, my schoolwork, I need my schoolwork, and so I ran upstairs, I saw that my computer, not my laptop, my computer, my desktop, my hard drive and my screen and my mouse and my keyboard, Everything was taken.

So I said, oh, yes, I know that I've got a backup.

I went under my mattress to get my hard drive, and that too was gone.

Turns out that the person that took our things actually knew us pretty well.

And so I remember going into school and I told them, I said, look, my house has been burgled.

I don't have any work to hand in this semester.

And I said, okay, okay, maybe you don't believe me, maybe that's the thing, because you know teachers don't trust students these days, maybe they do here, they do in my school most of the time.

And so I thought, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to get 1 of those crime reports from the police.

So I got the crime report with the crime reference number I brought out.

I was like, look, my house was actually burgled.

And they said, no, we believed you the first time.

If you don't have work to hand in, then you're not progressing.

So I ended up being kicked out of the college.

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Father of the Fatherless

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