I'm extremely relieved to report I'm now starting to feel comfortable writing about the Bible. It's been two years coming!

I think what proved the final missing component was a simple $6.98 bargain-shelf book I picked up at Barnes & Noble last month, called "Titans & Olympians."

I had never before really studied Greek and Roman mythology. I had no real deep grasp of their beliefs and what exactly was going on in these cultures at the time of Jesus Christ and early Christianity.

There's so much now I want to share about what the Bible says, but I'm still not quite there yet. Hence, in the meantime, I've got an unusual profile of my dear friend Charlotte's soon-to-be-husband, Rick.

I plan on updating the site again very soon. I realize this has been a very spotty effort so far and I'm just glad to know people are still bearing with me.

Rick Kirby was sitting on the living room couch one hot Saturday afternoon, his front door open and radio blaring, when a woman carrying a Bible suddenly appeared walking up into his yard.

“She introduced herself, yada, yada, yada, and we got to talking a little bit about salvation,” recalls 34-year-old Rick, who now lives in a tiny town called Arab, Ala., but at the time was working as a carpenter and living by himself in the country about 15 miles outside Charleston, S.C.

“I was uncomfortable about it but she knew it was an uncomfortable conversation. It was slow, my pace, if you will. It wasn’t all bang, bang, bang—‘This is what I’ve got to tell you.’

"She ended up inviting me to this little white church just down the road that I had had an eye on. I went there that following morning and the preacher preached Calvary and the Cross of Jesus and the way to get into heaven.”

After the service, members of the tiny congregation of the King James Bible Baptist church talked to Rick from the front stoop, giving him a copy of the King James Bible everyone in the church read.

“I brought it home and flipped it open immediately,” says Rick, explaining he had read religious literature in the past but never owned a Bible and had frequently prayed that God show him which book to trust.

“I swear, I just flipped through the pages and stopped, because I was praying, and the first verse I read was II Timothy 3:16. It said, and I’m paraphrasing, that all scripture is inspired by God and is for ‘instruction in righteousness’ and is ‘profitable for doctrine.’ "That hit me right in the head and told me right there that it was Him speaking to me because He did it through His Word.”

That minute, Rick says, he “got saved—I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my Savior, that He died for my sins.”

Rick is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and was only three when his mother placed him in the first of many foster homes he would bounce in and out of growing up. She never told him who his father was or where he came from, just his name.

Throughout his formative years, Rick’s mother would do just enough to get her son back from foster care and then, after a little while, shuffle him off to a new foster family, usually around holidays, especially Christmastime.

In these different foster homes—stretching from New York to California—Rick was never treated very well and sometimes suffered from neglect and mental and physical abuse.

“No one ever told him ‘no’; it’s like he had no discipline, no direction, and yet he’s always just believed in God,” says Charlotte. “He basically grew up with this big empty feeling all the time. He just had a need. When I met him he was kind of an angry man at first because he didn’t trust me.”

Rick says he knew he believed in God from a very young child even without any instruction from anyone. He says he would cringe every time he heard caretakers and others around him say, “G-D and all this kind of stuff all the time.”

As an adult, Rick pursued answers about God, including listening to propaganda from Pentecostals, who believed in speaking in tongues, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. He says he knew there was something off about their beliefs and the literature they gave him.

“When I moved to South Carolina, and it was just me and my dogs, I’d just pray and pray and pray to God, ‘I know you’re there Lord, you’ve just got to show me which book is the real one,’ ” recalls Rick. “I’d studied the other ones and I didn’t know which one was real. I kept praying, ‘God, you’ve just got to show me which book is yours,’ but I always said it as a silent prayer—and unspoken prayer—because I thought the devil was going to deceive me and knock me around a little bit. Think about it, that’s his playground.”

Only two years ago, after a two-year, on-and-off search by Charlotte and Rick to find information about Rick’s father, they learned he died in 1977 at age 27 of Hodgkin’s Disease. Unbelievably, the information came from a book written in 1996 by former New York Times reporter, Judith Reitman, called “Blood Legacy.”

Reitman had been interviewing women in prison who were convicted of unlawful acts against their abusive husbands when she learned that the story given to her by one woman was untrue—that the imprisoned woman, in fact, was the abuser of the husband she murdered in their home. The woman happened to be Rick’s grandmother!

“Basically, we found out from the book Rick’s from a whole background of murderers, liars and thieves,” says Charlotte. “His grandmother was a famous murderer in Long Island. She murdered her second husband out in South Hampton and hid his body in the attic for five months. We found out he has an uncle who’s in Sing Sing and an aunt who was in hiding for awhile before she turned her mother in for the murder.” The book was the first information on Rick’s family on his father’s side.

“I went from not knowing any type of blood to finding out I’m from bad blood, bad blood, bad blood,” says Rick, chuckling. “And we’re talking about an immediate family member, no less. Shoot, that’s only one person off. It’s crazy!”

Charlotte says while Rick was “kind of glad” realizing he escaped this criminal family growing up, learning about his father’s death “tripped him out because he always wanted to meet his father.” Among the tidbits he learned about his dad's young life was that he served in the Navy.

“We figure being a Navy man there’s a good chance he believed in God because God is all through the Navy—it’s in their whole creed,” says Charlotte, explaining the hope she and Rick have that they'll see his father in heaven. “From all accounts we have from people who knew him, he did believe.”

Charlotte is convinced Rick has been guided by God throughout his life: “If you look at all the statistics on how kids in foster care end up, and then factor in genetics from a family full of murderers, it’s amazing he’s beaten all the odds.”

“Rick is a loving, good, hard-working man and that says a lot coming from the background he’s had. He’s not in jail, he’s not on welfare, he’s not homeless. He’s not a drug addict or a drunk. This is what happens to a lot of kids with foster care backgrounds—look it up!”

The way Rick himself sums up his upbringing, it was both humbling and angering, causing him to keep believing in God even while he remained unsaved.

“I always had an interest but I didn’t care to pursue it because I was fending for myself,” says Rick. “I didn’t know it was going to work that way, but it finally came into my life the way I know it needed to be. It was already carved for me—I believe that for sure—because, you know, I was humbled by the way I grew up. Jesus always talked about the humble being saved.”

As for placing his faith in the King James Bible as God’s only true book, Rick says, “My true testimony is how I know it’s the only true Book because I asked for it. Even silently, that was my prayer—“God, you’ve just got to show me which book is yours.” That’s part of my testimony that this Book is right.”

When Rick talks to people today who don’t believe in God or Jesus Christ, he says they often “throw arguments at me about how the Bible can’t be trusted.”

His response is: “They need to try. They need to put their heart in it, though. That’s why they’re not getting answers; because their heart isn’t in it. They’re snapping their fingers, ‘Give me what I want, Lord.’ If God holds His own Word above His own name, as it says in the Bible, something’s got to be meant there. It even says Jesus was the Word made flesh.”