Radio Changed Our Life

by G. Edward Reid
Assistant to the President for Planned Giving

Radio has a special place in my heart. It was the radio ministry that brought my own family a knowledge of the gospel of Jesus and an introduction to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Shortly after the close of World War II, my family lived in a small logging town in northern California. There were no Adventists and, of course, no Adventist church. My brothers and I were preschoolers at that time. Mom and Dad found the radio program on our kitchen radio, and we would all listen on Sunday mornings during breakfast.

After listening to the program for a period of time, my parents took the Bible correspondence course and upon completion requested a visit from an Adventist pastor. The pastor gave them some additional studies, and they were baptized in the Klamath River. That is one of my earliest memories.

Over the years, I have thanked God that someone sponsored that radio program on a station that reached our little wooden mill-town home. Our family's life-focus changed dramatically after my parents' baptism. There was church school, academy, and college, and service for God's church.

With my background, it is easy for me to imagine other families in isolated places in the world - places where there are no Adventists members or churches - responding to the broadcast ministry of Adventist World Radio. The thousands of letters and e-mails received by AWR each year are a positive testimony that families are being reached by radio.