When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, Your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.

Psalm 139:16, NIV

I remember standing out one night in my aunt's yard just looking at stars and thinking about the great God who created all things. At nine or ten years of age, I almost had a headache just standing there thinking, You mean this great God knows who I am?

It was incomprehensible to me that this great Creator knew who Jimmy Anderson was by name. I didn't think I really mattered.

My people are the Muskogean people, and they have the Creek name. In the early 1800s, the government force-marched our people to Indian Territory-Oklahoma-which now means "home of the red man."

My mother and father were both orphans. Their folks died early during the removal or from diseases that came among our people. My mother went through some difficult times in government boarding schools. My Dad went to an orphan school. He ran off from there and joined a circus and roamed around the country.

In about 1914–15, my dad bought a wagon and a new team of horses and for those days it was about like having a new Cadillac. My wife's uncle told me that he remembers my dad driving down the main street of Holdenville, a dirt street, and sitting up beside him was my mother. Their romance blossomed and they got married. On his 160-acre allotment there at Holdenville, he started a farm and they started their family. My dad moved off to Kansas City, Missouri, to get work in a steel mill, and my mother joined him. My brother and sister and I were born there in Kansas City, Missouri.

My dad started drinking. It got worse, and eventually he died of alcohol-related causes. My mother sold what furniture she had and moved us back to our people in Oklahoma. We had no place to go, no home. We got off the bus with what little possessions she had and saw one of my cousins driving past the bus station.

We got in his wagon and he took us to her sister-in-law's house, my Aunt Lily. I don't think she knew we were coming. We just went out there and said hello-and stayed 25 years. We just moved in. I grew up there in my aunt's house.

When we came back, we went to all our Green Corn dances, Ribbon dances, Stomp dances. I was raised that way, in the Indian way. We were taking medicine to ward off spirits of the dead, and we did things like that. I was happy being a little Indian boy-playing cowboys and white man.

One year my mother got desperately sick and they took her to the hospital. It was the kind of sickness that could have taken her life. There in that hospital, my mother turned her heart over to the Lord and promised that if God let her live long enough to see my brother, sister and me old enough to be on our own, that she would raise us in the Jesus way.

God heard my mother's prayer. She got well and we started going to the Many Springs Indian church. My mother kept her part of the bargain. For the rest of her life she proceeded to raise us for the Lord, point us to the Lord and make sure we were at church hearing the Word of God.

I went off to government boarding schools, and there they used to whip you and beat you if you spoke your Indian language.

In summer time, the church would have Vacation Bible School. As the preacher preached and I began to look into the Word of God, I began to understand that the things I was doing and what caused my father's death was sin. I began to understand that in my life there was a nature of sin.

On the last night of that week, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. The Lord stepped into my life. I heard that week that the Lord loves us and that He knows every one of us.

The preacher said, "God knows who you are."

I thought, "God knows who I am? My dad was an alcoholic and we don't even have our own home. We're living in someone else's house, and the whole world says I'm a savage. You mean this great God knows who I am?"

I accepted the Lord at age 13, but I was still in boarding school. I needed to be nurtured in the church. I got out of Haskell Institute, at that time a vocational high school for Native Americans. I went back to Oklahoma and eventually to Norman University in Oklahoma City. There I joined a little storefront Native American church that put me to work and made me a Sunday school teacher and choir director. I'd never done any of those things before. I found out something in that little church: To teach the Word of God you have to really study it. God began to speak to my heart.

In that little congregation, I began to be used of the Lord. I began to yield my life to Him and whatever I had; I turned it over to Him. When I got active for Him, God began to reveal some things to me. In that little church God called me to preach. There was an old street in Oklahoma City, Reno Street, and on that street there were many bars. When I was going to church on Sundays, I had to go across town to get back to our house. Going down by Reno Street on Friday or Saturday night, I began to see little Indian children, five or six years old, sitting on the curb late at night. I knew their Mom or Dad or somebody was in that bar drinking and here were these kids sitting out on the curb. And I began to think to myself, "That's kind of what happened in my life with my dad. Somebody needs to go in there and tell people that their children are sitting out there on the sidewalk."

God began to speak to me. "Jimmy, you tell them." I began to say, "Oh no, Lord. Not me.

"Somebody else who has good education, no boarding school education. Somebody who knows what he or she is talking about and can witness. But not me."

Little kids sitting out there!

God was burdening my heart. It took about three months of that and finally I just had to know if God was really calling me to preach. So, I just decided one weekend that I was going to fast and pray. I didn't tell anybody. I just said, "I'm not going to eat until God gives me an answer."

I started on a Friday. I didn't tell Mom I was fasting because the Scripture says, "Don't tell anyone. Just fast and pray." So, I began to fast and pray.

Mom would call me to supper and I would say, "I'm not hungry."

Here my stomach would be rubbing against my backbone but I said I wasn't hungry. I went three days that way. Sunday afternoon after church, I went into my room and sat in there and read my Bible and prayed. Finally, I just fought it through and came to the conclusion that God was calling me to preach. And so I said, "Okay Lord. I think You're making a mistake but if You can use someone like me, I'll do it."

Then I said something like this, "If You're calling me to preach, let me win as many of my people as You will let me."

This is an exciting adventure living for the Lord. It's exciting to see what the Lord has done in my life. I didn't choose Him. He chose me. Years later, my mother told me the rest of the story. When I was still little, after her almost-death experience, my mother had prayed that one day either my brother or I would be the preacher in our family. At that time, I must have been running around the church campus in buckskin pampers. "I prayed it would be you."

My mother lived long enough to see her prayers come true. I tell people that I'm here in the service of the Lord, partly because of my mother's prayer.