Abraham: One Nomad's Amazing Journey of Faith

by Charles R. Swindoll

In Peggy Noonan’s book When Character Was King, one of Ronald Reagan’s daughters reflects on her father’s relationship with God. A lot of things he taught me as a child I didn’t reject, but I didn’t take them on big time until I got much older. He did have something special with God; he talked to God all the time. It didn’t mean that he was any more special in God’s eyes or that he believed that. We all are special with God. It’s not that God’s speaking to anybody more than anyone else, it’s that some people choose to listen. And talk back. And my father talked to God. That’s what I got as a child, I got that he just talked to God all the time. He just had conversations with God. And that’s the way I talked to God when I was a child. My idea of prayer was never that you sit down, clean up your room, clean up your act before you can talk to God. Never. It was always that I knew I could take my mess to God, I knew that I could just get down and talk to God like my father, all the time. When we’d go horseback riding at the Malibu ranch, just the two of us, I knew the way to get him to talk and to have a conversation was to talk about God. And talk about heaven, ask him about heaven—“What do you think God thinks of this?” “What do you think heaven is like?” If I went to that place we would have these wonderful conversations. . . . And he would just tell me sometimes, “Well I asked God about this and this is what He said back to me.” My father told me that my whole life. You as...