Count on God

Chapter 1.

My Story – Jack Sternik
(A testimony of my early beginnings)

Life began for me at the Holy Name hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey. I came into the world on March 15, 1947 (the IDES OF MARCH), to parents who named me John Sternik Jr. after my father, but called me Jack, the name which I go by even to this day. We initially lived on one level of a three-level apartment house on Riverview Place in Cliffside Park, New Jersey which had been up the street
from the local watering hole “Gill’s Tavern.” This place would become quite significant to my future. It was in the back room of this tavern where my infant Baptismal party was held. And then from eighteen years old on, for many-a-year, it became my daily drinking hangout. My father was a Steel Mill Foreman who died of cancer at forty-eight years of age, and my mother was a stay-at-home housewife who died at the age of eighty-two. When I was two years old we moved to the nearby town in New Jersey called Palisades Park where my dad with little outside help built our home. It was about one mile south of the George Washington Bridge and New York City. Here is where my brother and two sisters were born and where we would be raised. I left home for the army at nineteen. My life was typical European Polish American Roman Catholic in flavor and was made up of a lot of partying, music, and drinking with hard-working warm-hearted relatives and friends. The meaning of life to me took on a few forms. It either came in a skirt, a bottle, music, sports or working on the places I lived in and at whatever job I kept. God was probably there somewhere, but if he was He was totally insignificant to me. I visited the Roman Catholic Church occasionally on Sundays when I was young, and even served as an altar boy, saying certain prayers in Latin at Mass and assisting the priests. In spite of this, I could never say I
had made any personal connection with it or through it with God. By the age of twenty-two I had served two years and seven months in the United States Army. I was stationed in Korea and then received my honorable discharge, and still I had not made any connections with anything Godly significant. As you can probably imagine from sixteen till thirty years old I had a serious drinking habit. Drinking became my God; it owned me, and I worshipped it.

There was a time I tried to identify myself with God verbally. I remember calling out to the heavens at the age of ten or eleven years of age, from “The Great Auditorium” in Ocean City, New Jersey, while on vacation. I can honestly say, I couldn’t make a contact. I never allowed myself to take hold of experientialism anyway. God was probably out there somewhere, but He wasn’t communicating with me and I wasn’t communicating with Him. So from eleven years old till I was twenty-nine or thirty, He was just a passing thought or a neglected commodity. Life was generally okay, it had its ups and downs, and there were some memorable moments, however mostly I was just consumed in doing my own thing, making just enough money to survive, and watching and participating in sports. I liked football and baseball back then, and still do today. There are quite a few other details that I am not taking the time to mention right now, but basically this is what life was all about. It is probably best described as just being “a typical lifestyle”, at least for me it was.

Before going further in the narrative of my personal history I would like to state that I had been married at twenty-three, raised two sons through college while being separated in marriage at the age of thirty-six, and for the next seven years I earnestly waited, worked at, and sought reconciliation. I learned to say along with the late John Wesley, “I did not forsake her, I did not dismiss her, and I will no longer recall her.” At the age of forty-three, and with the absence of any reciprocal effort to reconcile from my former wife, we divorced.

Continuing on: during and after the marriage I had lived in many different locations and always maintained a responsible job. I was pretty self-consumed, having little or no vision for the future and spending much of my time working on property wherever I lived. When I was twenty-seven the family decided to take a vacation to a dude ranch in New York State where we met the Auger family. Their family resembled ours, and we became good friends over the years. Their two sons were athletes as were ours, and they were close in age; we all had similar interests until something drastic happened. George, through listening to Christian radio became a believer in Jesus Christ. That is when our worlds collided. Starting at my 30th birthday party, like you can imagine it was quite a celebration. The driveway was painted in 4 foot letters “the big 30,” and it resembled a college fraternity bash with a lot of loud music and plenty of food and drink, a typical day at the office. Well, it was typical all but for one thing. George was really out of character. I mean he was really something else. At a certain point I approached his wife and asked her what was wrong with him, but all she would tell me with great reluctance was, George had been fasting. “Fasting?” I said, “Has the man lost his mind?” Well, in less than an hour I didn’t have to be concerned about it anymore, at least not for that day, because George and his wife went home early.

The years that followed went something like this; our families still got together, but things had become much
different. You might understand this by me saying that George approached me early on and said to me, “Jack,
when we get together you like to talk about what you’re doing; don’t you?” I said I did. And he said, “Well, so do I. It’s just that my life has changed, and now it is mostly about
Jesus Christ.” I said, “Okay,” and he said, “I think it is only fair that you talk 50% of the time about the things you’re doing in your life and you allow me to talk 50% about the things I’m doing in mine.” Well, that’s when I started getting my regular dose of Jesus, because being a good friend as I tried to be, I thought it was only right to be fair, Quite frankly, when we first got started I didn’t really think anything was going to happen to change my views or my opinions. As a matter of fact I was quite adamant about it. One thing led to another, and one day George just hit me with this question straight out. “Would you do a favor for me?” I put my foot in my mouth again and said, “For a good friend I will do anything.” So this was followed with, “Would you read two books of the Bible, The Gospel of John and the book of Romans?” I told him I would, but that I refused for him or anyone else for that matter to tutor me in any way. I wasn’t about to be persuaded by some religious fanatic. He said that that would be fine, but asked me if I would do one other thing. He asked me that before I would begin to read that I first say a prayer. It went something like this: “God, if there really is a God, please reveal yourself to me in your Bible.” I said that I didn’t think that would hurt anything so I would and did. This is what happened.