A Life Story Greg Reinert

A Life Story Greg Reinert

A Life Story Greg Reinert 

I just got off the phone with my cousin and I am a bit dazed, to be honest.

Greg is dying and in hospice in Minnesota.

I talked with his mom, my Aunt Joan the day before, and she said Greg would like to hear from me so I called him right away that night.

I had not talked with Greg in a long time so I was a bit hesitant at first.

What do you talk about with someone that has only a short time to live?

Since I am a decent writer and write articles for a Christian Apologetic website and do interviews for a podcasting organization, I decided I would do a written interview with him, if he felt up to it, on his life story.

I set up a time with him for me to call him the next day when he had more energy.

He became very animated and thought it would be a great idea.

Who doesn’t like to talk about themselves, their history, and their family?

This journey would be interesting to unpack for him and me both because our lives intersected so many times in our younger years.

I am a Born Again Christian now but I was a very nasty atheist until I was 30 years old.

I understand what it is like to have a burning hatred toward God and want nothing to do with Him.

I did not believe in an Intelligent Designer behind the creation of the universe but at 30 years old I could not argue with science.

The Big Bang says the universe was created 13.8 billion years old, so if that is true, who pulled the trigger?

Who set time and space into motion at one point in time in the cosmos?

The universe could not just pop into being from nothing.

I started our interview by asking Greg when he was born?

July 22, 1958, was his answer, Evanston Hospital was the location, in the town of Evanston, Illinois. 

I asked him, what was your earliest recollection as a child?

He said he remembers riding his bike and falling off and hurting himself on a Cul-de-sac where they lived on Huron Ct. in Arlington Heights in Illinois.

He also remembers putting on ice skates after an ice storm and skating up and down his street.

Grandma Detzner holding Greg as a baby.

Greg 3 years old

Greg at grandma Detzner’ house – 1 1/2 years old

Grandma and Grandpa Reinert, Uncle Jack (Tony’s brother) and Mom and Greg 4 1/2.

Mom and Greg. Greg’s about 4.

Greg, Grandma Reinert holding Nancy. My and mom. Grandpa Reinert. 1970?

Mom, Nancy, Greg, Linda and dad. 1970?

Greg 2nd grade

Greg 4 and Mom 

Greg, 4th grade 

His father, Tony, was a dentist and he remembers going to his dad’s office and his dad showing him what he did for people when it came to having their teeth fixed.

Tony did all own lab work as well as working on dentures.

Greg said he was fascinated by that and thought that at the time he would like to do that work also and maybe he and his dad could work together someday.

He remembers his dad taking him to lunch from time to time.

When Greg told me this story, I remember going to see my uncle, Tony, when I needed work done on my teeth as a teenager and young adult.

In my junior and senior year of high school, I worked for a photography studio and the studio needed help photographing a wedding, so I remember asking my uncle Tony, who I knew was interested in photography, if he would like to photograph a wedding.

Tony took Greg with him on a couple of these weddings and Greg told me he remembers doing that very clearly and that he liked it so much he started a photography club in Junior High and High School.

I had no idea!

Greg 13 years old

Mom, Dad, Greg, Linda and Nancy. Greg 14 years old

Greg said he went to school his freshman year at Hershey high school in Arlington Heights and then his last three years at Buffalo Grove.

He said he remembers graduating from High School and how proud he was and how proud his parents were of him.

He said he entered a junior college soon after graduation but did not graduate from that school.

Greg said he was a bit aimless at that point and a friend invited him to meet with an Army recruiter, which he did.

He members thinking, “What do I have to lose”.

He liked the visit and learned much about the military.

The recruiter asked him what he like to do and he told them, working with computers, was a fairly young field at the time.

The Amy recruiter had him take a few tests to find out his strengths and interests.

They said the Army would be a good fit for him and would train him in computers as well as electronics.

He decided to join and went through basic training.

Greg said that basic training was quite an experience all by itself.

He said he was not too surprised at how hard the drill sergeant was on all the recruits because he had watched some movies before he went in.

The Army taught him mainframe, and computer repair and made him responsible for maintaining two generators to power the computers, in a semi-van.

He remembers going back to see his mom when on leave and she would take him to church in his uniform.

She was so proud of him he said.

US Army Bases in Germany

He was stationed at different locations in the world but his favorite was in Germany where he was for 3+ years.

He said he lived on base with other German Nationals.

Greg said he made some close friends.

“I miss many of my German friends to this day” 

He remembers getting a Euro Travel Pack for the train and he would travel all over Germany for next to nothing.

He enjoyed the people and the lifestyle in German very much.

“It was more laid back than the US and more friendly” he said.

When he would sometime travel near the DMZ, the border between Germany and Russia, and the tension was always very high.

When ever there was an alert between Germany and Russia, all the US personnel were required to drop what they were doing and pare up with the German military and be ready for action.

One regret was he never got to meet any Russians.

One day, his Master Sergeant asked him if he would like to take over procuring Christmas trees for the different American bases all over Germany.

To see if he liked it, he went with his Sargent to see what it was all about.

It was so much fun that he took on that responsibility right away.

Greg said Germany goes all out celebrating Christmas.

This job took him all over Germany for a couple of years.

He met many great people in the process.

Boy Scouts in Germany would come in and decorate the trees on the bases.

Greg said he really loved this job.

Greg got the chance to drive a A1 Abrams tank

Greg got the chance to train with all kinds of automatic weapons including Grenade Launchers

Greg said he learned German right way and the language was not foreign to him because he remembers hearing his grandmother and mother speak it all the time while he was growing up.

This was something I remember also as a child and teenager. Whenever our families got together the older generation would speak German with each other.

While in the Army in Germany, the military on both sides would make sure you were proficient on many different weapons so they would pare him with different German Nationals for training and then receive a certificate.

He would learn both American and German weapons such as different automatic guns and grenade launchers.

Some machine guns would only fire off a three-round burst every time you pulled the trigger.

He said that was a hoot learning those weapons.

Greg also told me about the time they taught him how to drive an A1 Abrams tank.

He said “Not many people got a chance to do that”

He also said, the funny thing was that they would teach one side of the tread and someone else would run the other side unless they put it in automatic mode.

“The power and complexity behind that machine was amazing” he said.

He was separated from his daughter, Amanda, at this time in Germany and he tried to talk her into coming to live with him, but she did not want to go live there.

She ended up living in a foster home for a while so Greg asked for a transfer back to the United States so he could be closer to her.

Greg said “I was very sad to leave the many friends I had made and leaving Germany”

The military stationed him at Fort Campbell at the Kentucky-Tennessee border.

He retired from the Army at this location after spending 8 years in the military.

While he was stationed at Fort Campbell, Greg said he and his wife Anne bought a house and lived there for a while together with his daughter Amanda.

Greg said the US Army was very good to him.

Before he left the military, he applied for jobs in the private sector and landed a very good one doing computer repair, replacing motherboards, circuit boards, and keypunching as well as computer diagnostics. 

Greg and Matthew 2007 

Greg and Linda’s oldest son Steve. Last time we saw him in 2011. 

He said his relationship was not good with his daughter, Amanda, for many years but it improved before got sick.

I was able to gather this information on my first two interviews with Greg up to this point.

We had a third one scheduled but Greg went downhill at the hospice care very quickly.

The last conversation I had with him, he was in a lot of pain but he said he still wanted to talk because he still had information to give me.

I did not want to push it because of his frail condition.

I wish I had pushed it for his sake.

I did share my belief in Jesus Christ and what it meant to be born again from Jesus’s perspective and enter the kingdom of God.

I told him of my journey of finding God one spring and summer of 1982 and traveling up the coast of California and Oregon to a small community and church in the Little Applegate outside of Medford, Oregon.

This was a story of how I went from a nasty atheist to a believer in an Intelligent Designer and Jesus.

Greg liked my story and wanted to know more.

God had other plans for the end of this story.

I sure hope my cousin and I can finish it up together at some point.

Maybe, having lunch together on one of the moons of Jupiter.

I would like to invite my grandparents and parents to that meeting.

As I end this writing, I feel honored and blessed that my cousin Greg and I were able to connect and that he was in a place to share his life story, and that he could look back with fondness over his past.

What a journey each and every one of us are on!!

 

A Life Story Greg Reinert

Check out two other articles I wrote What Makes an Atheist and What Made Me Become Pro-Life

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From Atheism to Intelligent Design

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” Psalm 19

 

I was an atheist until I was 30 years old. My decision to be an atheist was emotional and not an intellectual one as I look back on my life. I suspect most atheists have become atheistic because of an emotional event or events that has happened to them in their lives.

Something that occurred when we were children or even later in our adult years. Painful experiences that have colored our view to such an extent, that we are no longer willing to even entertain the idea of a God. Angry at what has happened to us in this life at the hands of others or events out of our control.

 

How could there be a God if He would let this happen to me?

 

Many times, our anger is so great it turns into rage. A quiet rage is still rage nonetheless. The rock group Pink Floyd said in their song, ‘Time’, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”. Quiet desperation is deep seated repressed rage and it’s not just the English that suffer from this. Almost all of us have at one time or another in our lives.

God cannot get past this rage that has turned into ambivalence in many, unless we fall on hard times once again in our lives. Funny how bad things that turned us away from God have a way of turning us back to Him once again.

Everyday life has a way of beating down on us as we grow older, to the point that we start asking questions we thought were long gone.

 

There has to be more to life than this! 

The great Christian writer and philosopher C. S. Lewis once said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world”

The pain I experienced later in my adult life helped me to think a bit more clearly about this person called God. A crack appeared in my emotional front.

I began to slowly investigate with questions about An Intelligent Designer in this universe. I put my deep-seated anger on the back burner.

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

That is not to say I did not pick it back up again from time to time.

 

I wanted to be angry and pissed off. I wanted to be angry at humanity in general and my childhood. I became co-dependent to rage as that was the only emotion I trusted to make me feel alive. I trusted no human. I trusted no authority because I felt they had all lied to me throughout my life and could not be trusted. That is also how I felt about a supreme being called God. He was right at the very top of the list. I remember flipping Him off in the worst times of my life.

Sound familiar?

I caused so much pain and left a wake of destruction in my life from this anger that I harbored. I consider myself a smart man, but you would never know it from all the bad decisions I have made in those angry times. I was emotionally spent. I wanted peace in my life. I wanted to breathe.  

 

Why are we here? Is this ALL there is?

 

When I finally took a breath, those question surfaced among others. What was behind ALL of this. I always believed in the Big Bang or the start of the universe, but I did not really understand much of the science. How did it start? Who pulled the trigger? Was there an Intelligent Designer behind it or did it just pop into being all on its own? That didn’t make much sense.

To be honest, as I investigated my atheism, I realized that it did not make much sense either. It raised more questions than answers. My atheistic logic was failing. The crack was becoming wider and wider.

I began experimenting in different new age religions to see which ones fit my mental framework. It was like a buffet table of attributes that my mind could entertain. God could be like this and he could be a little sprinkle of that. I liked some of attributes of Hinduism and Buddhism especially reincarnation that they both shared.

There were many off shoots of this new age religious movement and I wanted to check them out since my mind was open to a god like entity. Could I be a god too or work my way to nirvana? 

I was exploring God or so I thought. At least now I was becoming a theist or someone who at least entertained the thought of a god behind the curtain. This was my first step and I think God honored that to some degree because I was now open to go much further.

 

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

When I deal with atheists,…

 

…I first deal with the idea of Intelligent Design behind the very fabric of the universe and life on this planet. I have heard some astronomers say the universe looks designed but its not. Biologist say plant and animal life looks designed but its not. Scientist say DNA and RNA looks designed, but they are not.

Where else can you go on this planet at look at something and in your mind say it looks like it was designed by something or someone, but it was not. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to play to come up with that conclusion unless you have already come up with a conclusion without really look at the proof.

One of the things that archaeologist does when excavating past civilizations at an archaeology site is to look at artifacts and other physical remains and decide if these objects appear to be different from the surrounding ground. In other words, were they designed or come from something else? What sets these things that they are searching for apart from the natural surroundings?

When the probes landed on Mars and began roving around this planet and snapping photographs, did they detect anything that looked like it was designed by other civilizations?

 

Now that would been BIG news!

 

Not only is the start of this universe a BIG question and how it began but also the question of Fine Tuning or the razor edge that all these elements sit to make life possible here on earth. The Fine Tuning of our small solar system on the edge of our galaxy called the Milky Way is truly remarkable in this Fine Tuning. All these pieces have to fit in just right without much playroom or life does not happen.

That is how you detect if the universe had an intelligent design behind it. When you take these and many more proofs of design in our universe and reject them out of hand then another emotional bias is taking hold.

 

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

Woman's Face Breaking Up

The story goes that the great Albert Einstein…

 

…and virtually all the scientific world believed that the universe was a static universe or cosmological constant meaning that the universe had always been here and not moving.

When he met Alexander Friedman in 1922 and then George Lemaitre in 1927, they introduced him to an expanding universe which would later be called the Big Bang.

The cosmological singularity is at that point at which the Big Bang got its start. In January of 1931, astronomer Edwin Hubble meet with Einstein and personally convinced him that the universe was in a state of expansion.

 

Why is this a big deal you might ask?

 

The fact that the universe began at one specific point in time was hard for many scientists to deal with because it came with a huge question. Who and what started it? Who pulled the trigger on the Big Bang? The expanding universe theory was not fully excepted by astronomers and the scientific community until the 1970’s for pretty much the same reason. Most scientist and astronomers are atheists and believe in natural causes. Darwinian Evolution piggy backs off this natural cause belief system.

That was the question that I had to grapple with just like the scientist and astronomers. I may not be as smart as them or have prestigious degrees like they do but, can reason things out really well once I study and research the core of something. Most people have this ability also if they really want answers.

Atheists have faith that there is no God and faith that the natural world will hold all the answers. Is it not interesting that this faith resembles a religion?

My next step went from Intelligent Designer to Jesus Christ. But that is for another time and blog post.

If you would like to read some interesting history about Edwin Hubble, AlbertEinstein and George Lemaitre and the Big Bang. What does it take to convince Albert Einstein he was wrong?

 

Go here for many more Interest Articles on our Blog

 

From Atheism to Intelligent Design

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