It was August of 2000.
I had just dismissed my bilingual (Spanish-English) kindergarten class.
I matched up the last student with the last parent.
Now it was time for a month-long break
in our year-round elementary school in Fontana.
I closed the door. I turned around.
I heard a voice.
"Go to Chick Publications at 3:00."
There was no one in the room.
What would you do, if it happened to you?
Hi, I'm David Daniels from Chick Publications.
Here's what I did.
I got out my cell phone and called my wife Deborah.
"Deborah, the Lord just told me to go to Chick Publications at 3:00."
"Well then, I think you'd better go to Chick Publications at 3:00."
Deborah's very direct like that.
As I turned to go onto Archibald Avenue,
where Chick Publications is, I said, "Lord, what's he gonna do?
Offer me a job?"
I was preparing to be a 30 year teacher, like my mother.
I wasn't prepared for what would happen next.
I had no way of knowing when Jack (whom I called, "Mr. Chick")
was going to be in his office.
In fact, I'd only seen him about 4 times before.
I had no idea even when he was there,
unless he came over and spoke to me.
I went straight to my friend Ron's office,
and I wouldn't even walk around.
And that was only when I was invited in.
And though I'd written articles for the Battle Cry newsletter
and published the King James Bible Companion
5 months earlier, I didn't feel I had
any special privileges to just "walk around."
So I entered into the small bookstore in front and stood there.
There's a sign on the inner door that says
"Please do not enter unless invited."
I took that seriously.
So I stood there, just for a moment, thinking to myself,
"Okay, what do I do now?"
Just then, former nun Donna Eubanks,
who worked at Chick, saw me.
"David, come on back!"
That's unusual.
Okay, but I still had no idea what was going to happen.
I followed her in to the art department,
where the drawings and the text are put together into the tracts.
She sat down at her desk, and I just stood by it
for a few seconds.
Then Jack came into the room.
"David, come into my office.
I want to talk to you."
I am totally intrigued.
I followed "Mr. Chick" into his office.
He had a white notebook open on his desk.
It had his text and full-sized art for a tract
called "In the Beginning."
"I want you to read this and tell me what you think."
So I read the tract.
When I finished, I said,
"Well, the only thing is this one date.
When I studied evolution under Dr. David Jacobs at UC Irvine,
he said it was "145 million years ago."
Do you have a computer where I could go online and see
if they've changed the date?"
Jack showed me to the customer service room,
where they had one computer open.
I looked it up, then came back.
"No, they haven't changed it.
That's still the date."
Jack said, "David, how would you like
to work with me?"
How many of you would have said, "No"?
Yeah, me neither.
I couldn't wait to start!
I was just beginning a month of vacation,
and I got to spend it with the very guy who wrote the tract,
This Was Your Life! that God used to save me!
But we didn't start out writing, right away.
Jack had some things on his mind first.
(For this part, my wife Deborah and I only found out a few weeks ago
the full story of why Jack asked me
to work with him.)
As I told you, Jack prayed about everything.
That's how things run here at Chick.
Well, Jack had come to where he wanted someone
to work with him.
But it couldn't just be anybody.
It had to be: 1) someone who was there to help,
not to tell Jack what to do; 2) someone who wanted to learn,
not pushing his own agenda; and 3) someone easy to work with,
not overly serious, except serious about souls.
Deb and I found out that Jack could hear when Ron
(who's worked with Jack since 1970) and I would talk in Ron's office.
(I wasn't as quiet as I am now.)
Another of Jack's close friends actually suggested to Jack
that he ask me to work with him, for a number of reasons.
But Jack just responded, "I've got to pray about it."
And he did.
Now he was going to see if was going to be a "fit."
So for the next three days, Jack just sat me down in front of him,
and he proceeded to tell me his life's story.
Jack's friends are long-term friends.
I found out from them that Jack was always forward-looking.
He was always looking to the next tract,
the next comic book, the next project, always forward, never backward.
He wanted to win souls.
Looking backward didn't accomplish that.
So they didn't get to hear about much of Jack's past,
or even know about it, except where they experienced it
with Jack.
But with me, Jack told me his life story.
It was almost as if he knew what the future would bring.
Or maybe God showed him something.
I don't know.
As I told you in the beginning, Jack told me the good, the bad,
and the ugly about his life.
He told me about being betrayed by Christian leaders,
the sinful behavior of famous ministers
and people he'd known, and other behind-the-scenes stuff
he knew about, lots of it because he was there.
He also told me about many of the events
I've been telling you in the last 12 videos.
So after 3 days of piling on as much gloom and doom as he could
(it seemed), he looked at me and said,
"I bet you're pretty discouraged right now."
I answered, "No!
I'm encouraged!
Because if God spent all those years of my life preparing me for this,
then I believe God's going to do something with us!"
I spoke it from the bottom of my heart.
And right after that, we started to write
the Bible series of tracts.
And Jack, who had been doing this
for 40 years, actually listened to my tract ideas.
For instance, one day I told Jack that
15 years before, my wife Deborah and I visited
the MCC, the Metropolitan Community
(LGBT) Church.
Its founder wrote a book.
I read it in the Fuller Library and wrote a report on my visit, for a class.
But I told Jack that MCC totally forgot a scripture -- Jude 7.
Jack listened.
Then I went online to verify that they were still saying that stuff.
They were.
So that became the tract, Sin City.
Jack largely let me write "The Outcast," "The Promise,"
and others.
He included my emotions about these topics
into the tracts.
Jack wasn't proud.
He was perfectly willing to listen to other people's suggestions.
And he let me make or be a part of
some major decisions from the beginning.
But in the end we wrote everything together.
And Jack had the final say.
We talked, acted out scenes,
and there was lots and lots of laughing.
And lots of acting, too.
I loved acting, from elementary through high school.
I was once even offered an agent as a kid.
But what I really love is telling stories.
And that's what Jack and I did together: we acted out stories.
Then we drew them on the white board,
and then Jack or I took the sketches down on paper.
And he totally encouraged me to write books.
He illustrated the first printings of Did the Catholic Church
Give Us the Bible, as well as Babylon Religion and
He let me write comic books, as well.
First, he asked me for my research and information on Mormonism
for the comic The Enchanter.
Then he basically let me tell the story, as well!
He just wasn't selfish.
He wasn't in it for the glory.
Here I'm a nobody and Jack lets me do all this.
When I asked, "So who is the character going to be,
who gives the information to the Crusaders?"
He said, "You.
You're the one who knows this stuff."
So Jack did the main work on Unwanted.
I got to research and write Jesuits and Black Angel,
interviews and all.
But we both researched and wrote Unthinkable together.
Jack didn't joke around.
He was all about getting stuff done.
He had an agenda every day.
But it doesn't mean it was all serious.
Jack had always been willing to pose himself or others
in positions that helped him to draw characters for the stories.
For instance,
This is from The Secret of Prayer (1972).
It's in The Next Step, p. 27.
This is from The Thing (1971), p. 15.
Wait till you see this.
This is the cover of Jesuits.
Now, for the first time ever, this is my picture of Jack,
to pose for that picture.
And this is the cover we didn't use!
God blessed me with being able to be the one
to introduce Jack to new technologies.
I always took my laptop to work, as well as my portable scanner.
Whenever a visitor had something interesting,
I didn't photocopy it.
I scanned it.
I'm so glad.
We might never have seen it again --and we usually didn't.
June 15, 2006 at Chick Fil-A, I told Jack how cell phones
could take your picture without you knowing it.
Jack said, "You mean you could take my picture
with that phone?"
"Yep, and I just did."
One day I was reading a spoof about Jack in The Onion,
called "Jack Chick Fil-A." And I asked Jack, "Did you notice?
We ate breakfast at Flappy Jack's,
and now we're having lunch at Chick Fil-A!"
We laughed.
It hadn't occurred to us before.
We laughed, we acted, we joked -- but all that with a serious goal:
the salvation of souls.
We want to make tracts that make it easy for anyone
to become an instant soul-winner, even when he or she doesn't have
the time or the know-how.
We try to pack as much as we can
into a 24-page tract, but no more than 40 words per panel.
It takes a lot of prayer and a lot of hard work.
We work on the tract the best we can, and
check it the best we can, so that you can
focus on winning souls.
We even put as many scriptures as we can,
to give the soul-winner or the lost person
something he or she can look up and find answers
that lead the lost to forgiveness in Christ.
Okay, I have to tell you, Jack originally wanted me
to write a book, half about Jack
and half about me.
This is what Jack originally wanted the book
to be called: Little Jackie Chick and Me --
And, Oh Yes...
One Billion Gospel Tracts!
He'd even share his own biography!
Jack didn't mind being little in his own eyes.
Jesus Christ and His gospel -- that is what God wants exalted.
And that's what kept Jack motivated.
One day when we were writing a tract on drunkenness,
called Just One More, Jack asked me
to look up some statistics.
When he saw the number of people who die per day on average,
it really struck him.
He said, "All our tracts,
all the souls we reach for Christ are just a drop in the bucket,
compared to all that are lost and going to hell."
That kept him motivated to push forward,
even when he was tired and his body was giving way to age,
by putting this picture in his studio
at the house.
It is a zoomed-in part of one of Fred Carter's pictures
for The Light of the World film.
So now you've gotten a glimpse into the Jack Chick I know.
I want to close this with an offer to you.
After you've watched the series, if there is a question
that you didn't find answered, you can write to me at
dwdaniels@chick.com.
If I see a particular question is being asked
-by a number of people, indicating widespread interest
in that subject, I may select it to answer
and post the answer in a video or web page
so that others can see the answer, too.
So, if you bump into someone or read someone's
biography of Jack Chick, and it doesn't say the same thing
as I've just shown you over 13 videos,
you can look them right in the eye, just like I can.
And you can say, "You don't know Jack."
God bless you, and have a wonderful day.
For more infomation >> Silence
For more infomation >> Powerless | Teddy da uma volta pelo laboratório! | Legendas PT-BR - Duration: 1:00. 
For more infomation >> Powerless | Esqueça a existência da caixa! | Legendas PT-BR - Duration: 1:11. 
For more infomation >> Filhas da Noite ▪ Promo #3 - Duration: 0:46. 
For more infomation >> Georgia es declarado en estado de emergencia por un sistema poderoso de tornados - Duration: 2:01. 
For more infomation >> Powerless | Van recebe uma ligação do Batman | Legendas PT-BR - Duration: 0:48. 
For more infomation >> El Presidente Trump habló de una posible reelección en la ceremonia de juramentación de sus asesores - Duration: 2:26. 
For more infomation >> El Presidente Donald Trump no publicará su declaración de impuestos - Duration: 0:31. 
For more infomation >> Captado en cámara el momento en que policía de Fontana, California, dispara contra un hombre acusado - Duration: 1:40. 
For more infomation >> Hallan 70 cuerpos dentro de fosas clandestinas en Nuevo León, México - Duration: 1:57. 
For more infomation >> Avokado-ananas | Q&A - Duration: 7:34. 
For more infomation >> "Juntem-se à política!"- Intervenção de Safaa Dib do LIVRE na Marcha das Mulheres Lisboa - Duration: 2:58. 
For more infomation >> Luto en las grandes ligas del béisbol por la muerte de dos grandes peloteros dominicanos - Duration: 2:06. 
For more infomation >> Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F 2nd - [PV] "Double Lariat" (English Subs/Sub. Español) - Duration: 3:33. 
For more infomation >> There is no Plan B | Mike Boyd RAW 002 - Duration: 7:31. 
No comments:
Post a Comment