Ye Must Be Born Again!



In one of my past blog post, I stated that sometime in the future I would like to tell you all about how I became a Christian. The following writing is a copy of the autobiography I started writing while I attended college a few years ago. I have tried to use this autobiography to give folks a little background on my early life and also some highlights on how I got saved as a young adult and what happened later as my life progressed.

Enjoy!

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AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE RUSSELL

OH HAPPY DAY!

That which is born of flesh is flesh, that which is born of spirit is spirit, Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again.

On Easter Sunday, April 2, 1955, in South Boston General Hospital, a daughter was born to Harry and Mary Seigla.  She was named Alice Marie and was preceded by a brother named Harry, Jr., and later having two other brothers named Tim and Joe, it was a blessing to have a daughter.  In 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.  Billy Graham was the most successful; probably the most aggressive evangelist at this time, and Elvis Presley began mesmerizing thousands of people. Among these people was my mama.

First of all, I must tell you where my last name “Seigla” came from and about my family.  My granddaddy was born in Oklahoma to a Cherokee Indian family, and at a young age his parents were killed in a massacre out West.  Some German settlers by the last name “Seigla” adopted him and raised him as their own.  Later, he married my grandmother Ruth whose family lived in Virginia.  He died when I was two years old, but I do not remember him.  My daddy and mama decided to take care of grandma, so we lived in the household together.  In our house on Hyco Road,
there lived grandma, daddy, mama, four of us children and two girl cousins whose mother had left them.

How many of you are familiar with the “Redneck Jokes”?  You know, “You know you’re a redneck if your family pet dog is allowed to sit between you and your wife in your pickup!”  Well, my family was a combination of redneck and redskin.  I remember daddy going to the local “dump” as it was called back then.  He would take our trash there, but would always bring something back with him.  We were poor, and this was a means of helping out the family.  Daddy would make his own fans and other things for the household from items he found at the dump.  We were the family that would use old tires for planters and swings.  I remember daddy coming back from the dump one day with a rubber foot that looked like someone had run over it.  He was trying to make mama believe that someone had run over his foot!  Daddy had a good sense of humor.  One time he tried to smoke a pig in an old car; of course the pig was dead!

 On my birthday, at the age of nine, instead of getting some fine gift, daddy bought me a goat and I named him Horace, because he looked like a boy that I knew in school.  But the best thing is how we got Horace home.  Guess what, we put him in our old car and he rode down through Riverdale with his head sticking out the window.  I wasn’t embarrassed though.  I thought this was a natural occurrence.

Now, I will tell you a little about grandma.  My grandma would cook chitterlings, and when we came home on the bus, you could smell them from the road.  How embarrassing.  Talk about discrimination, we had a bus driver that called us “crowfoot” when we got off the bus!  We didn’t mind because we didn’t know why he was calling us that.  Later in life, I realized it was because we were mixed Indian.  Grandma also took us children in the woods to pick blackberries.  She would come home and make a blackberry dumpling.  She made the best chicken and dumplings I ever ate, besides my own. But grandma had a mean streak!  She was very straight forward and outspoken.  And I was told that she was the first woman to wear a pair of pants in the town of South Boston.  Grandma taught us children how to play “setback” and “rummy” and other card games, and when we caught her cheating and said so, she would practically knock us out of the chair!

 
All of the adults in my family smoked, except mama.  Whenever my uncles and aunts visited, we children would sneak cigarettes, and beer, cuss like sailors and really have a time. We did a lot of cussing even when the uncles and aunts didn’t visit.  We were known as the Hyco Road gang.  My brothers and I walked everywhere we went or rode bikes.  We would pick up drink bottles along the road and take them to the store for money.  This was the only money we had besides working in tobacco. As I said, my daddy was poor, and mama didn’t work.

 

Around the age of ten, my cousin Ruthie, who lived with us, had a friend named Carol who owned horses.  My brother Jr., Ruthie, and I spent a lot of time with Carol riding horses (ponies) and visiting old haunted houses.  During these years, we did a lot of things that I am not proud of.  It was also during this time that while I was in the seventh grade, I tried out for cheerleading.  I was chosen to be a substitute cheerleader.  I had a friend named Patricia who really wanted to be a cheerleader, more than anything.  She cried when she did not make it, and since I was poor and realized that my daddy couldn’t “really” afford to buy the outfit that I would need for this endeavor, I gave Patricia the position that I should have had.  She was my friend, and I wanted to make her happy.  The sad thing is, when we both entered high school, she acted like she didn’t know me. 

In 1969, I entered the eighth grade at Halifax County Senior High School with fear and trembling.  It took me a while to find my way around.  There seemed to be absolutely no one that I knew.  As I previously stated, my friend Patricia was no where to be found.  This is where I first met a teenage boy named Sam Russell who would be my husband in the future. Of course, I did not know this at the time.  We were in the same homeroom class.  This was a class that every student had to come to first, so that they could be counted present.  While in the eighth grade, Sam also met my brother Harry (whom we all called Jr.) and was invited to our house to play touch football in the front yard.  What he did not know was that when my brothers played football, I played too. He tells me that when he first saw me it was “love at first sight”.  Of course, he thought that I would never like him.  I was good at sports, all kinds.  In high school PE, I played rover on the girl’s basketball team.  Sam would walk from his house to ours to play ball after school.  He thought we were the wackiest family he had ever met.  There was a dance that daddy would take Jr. and me to every Saturday night.  It was at Cluster Springs.  I could dance really well and always enjoyed going.

 As a high school student, I liked school and did well academically.  I took secretarial courses, and in the 12th grade enrolled in the ICT program in which I left school early and worked as a secretary for an insurance business.  It was at this time that Sam and I began getting serious about each other, and after graduation we were married on September 29, 1973.    After a few months, I decided to go to hairdressing school in South Boston.  It was there that I met Hilda!

Hilda was a woman that went to Centerville Baptist Church, and at that time this church was awed by all in the community.  Most had heard that the people there were very serious about salvation and living a separated life for God.  Hilda began a daily trek of telling us students about “hell” and how we needed to “repent” so we wouldn’t go there.  At first, I wanted to “cuss” Hilda out, and Sam would tell me to tell her where to go, and he didn’t mean heaven either.  But, I just couldn’t do that.  So I endured her, and finally the Holy Spirit began dealing with me about my life and what Hilda was saying.  I know that Hilda’s church was praying for my family and for Sam and me.  It was during this time that I began to think back to a night when I went with my friend Patricia to a revival meeting at Black Walnut Baptist Church.  That night the preacher preached on hellfire and damnation (for real) and I came under deep conviction.  I felt that I was going to die if I didn’t go forward.  The sad thing that happened that night is that I did go forward, but the pastor of that church did not tell me what to do in order to be saved from the burning hell the preacher spoke about.  So he sent me back to my seat...said something about rededicating my life to God.  But, I was no different after I went back to my seat, and I just began going in my own way.

One Friday night in March after going to bed, I lay there in the dark and began to think about all that Hilda had said.  I knew that she was right.  At that moment, I began to cry out to God to have mercy on me and forgive me of my sins.  I spent much of that time repenting of all that I thought was sin.  From that night on, I knew that God had heard my prayers and for Jesus sake had saved me.  The next day I found that Sam had done the same thing!!  I went to school and told (wrote her a note) Hilda that I had asked Jesus Christ to save me.  I don’t think she believed me, but that didn’t matter, I knew that I had been born again. As time went on, I realized that was the greatest decision I could have made in life.
 
The first thing I did was tell my daddy and mama that I had been saved.  That summer my daddy and mama both got saved and with daddy it was like turning a light on and off in a dark room.  There was a dramatic change in his life, and everyone who knew him saw it.  He later told his family and friends that he had become an alcoholic and knew that was his last chance.  As time went on, he found out that he had skin cancer.  I am so thankful that my daddy turned to Jesus Christ during this time, because I do believe that he would not have survived long.  The following year, October 20, 1974, my first daughter was born and I named her April because my birthday is in April and I always liked this month.  I had a lot of growing up to do.  A couple years later our second child was born, and I named her Elizabeth (Beth).

Sam and I got involved in church and became very sincere in our life for Christ.  A few years later, while at a revival meeting, Sam surrendered to preach.  He was scared at first, because he has always been a quiet type person.  But, after he preached a few times, it was obvious that God had done a work in Sam.  I worked in the hairdressing field for a few years, but decided that being home with my children was more important. When April was ten years old, I had another daughter in which I named Grace after the song “Amazing Grace”.  Since we had always believed that the King James Version of the Bible is the only true bible, Sam and I got involved in a movement against Bible correctors.  During this time, we became heartbroken over the way the King James Authorized text had been changed, distorted, and many times the very words were opposite in the “newer versions”.  We were put in the path of the most popular defender of the Kings James Bible, Dr. Peter Ruckman, and Sam and I moved our family to Pensacola, Florida in order that he could attend Pensacola Bible Institute. 

During the four years that our family was there we became involved in street work (street preaching) in which we thoroughly enjoyed.  This became a recreation for our family.  Sam attended Bible College in the evenings and worked as an electrician during the day.  On the weekends, he preached when he was not in church.  I did some housecleaning and landscaping for some of the residents there.  This is when I injured my back, and I still have a problem with that today.  Before injuring my back, I played racquetball at the church gym and also played tennis in which I thoroughly enjoyed.  Both of our older daughters, April and Beth, were married during these four years.  April decided to come back to Virginia in order to be married to Chris Hamlett.  This was something that Sam allowed.  I really thought it best for April and Chris to stay in Florida with us and be married there.  But April had other ideas.  Beth later married Todd Lassitter who was also a classmate of Sam’s and a graduate of the Bible College.

After graduation from Bible College, Sam decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of going to Montana.  So we moved there in June of 1996.  We managed to find a good church there, and we put out hundreds of gospel tracts in Billings, Montana.  Sam was unable to find an electrical job so we moved to Havre, Montana which is about 40 miles from Canada.  It was extremely cold during the winter.  We experienced a blizzard in October and 40 degrees below zero temperatures in the winter.  We had to put a heater in our car motor and plug it up at night so that the engine wouldn’t freeze up.  When we went outside, our nose hairs froze up (literally)!!  It was here that Grace and I worked at the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen in order to help feed the homeless and American Indian as well as minister to these people.

In the spring of 1997, we decided to come back to Virginia.  My husband’s dad was diagnosed with cancer.  Sam and our son-in-law Todd decided to start a church in Clover, Virginia and we were in this church for four years.  Because of illness and a few minor family problems, Sam had to stop this church.  Also, it is during this time that Chris, April’s husband, decided that he wanted out of their ten year marriage.  This has taken a toll on our family life, especially since there is a daughter involved.  Sometimes I wish we had stayed in Montana and not come back here, but it is too late to turn back now.

I attended college at Southside Virginia Community College and worked toward an Associate Degree in Administrative Support Technology.  I have learned a lot since attending college.  I graduated in the early summer of 2006.  My advisor and professor, Mrs. Barbara Beard, nominated me to Who’s Who Among Students in Junior Colleges in America.  This is a prestigious award for which I am greatly thankful.  I was also been able to stay on the President and Provost’s list for consecutive terms since starting college.  I also intend to further study the Spanish language for future endeavors.  I enjoy growing herbs and am an organic gardener.  I have four grandchildren Amber, Ariel, Isabelle, and Annelise, and now a new grandson named Xander (Alexander) in which I enjoy spending time with all of them when available. 

In conclusion, I would like to say that life is full of decisions, some good and some bad.  One of the most important decisions one will make here on earth is where you will spend eternity.  My choice thirty-five years ago was to spend eternity with Jesus Christ.  I feel that it was the greatest thing I could have done in my life. 

I would like to quote the words to a hymn that sums up my feelings:

     Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me

I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved

How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed.

Through many dangers toils and snares, I have already come

Tis grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.
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As it is written there is none righteous, no not one.

Romans 3:10

For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Romans 3:23

If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

Romans 10:9