SPORTS
Skateboarder Richard Mulder: A New Way to Get High
By Barbara Cornick and Janet White
One Cubed USA for The 700 Club
CBN.com
– My name is Richard Mulder. I was born in West Covina, California.
I got interested in skateboarding when I was 10 years old.
Me and my friend were playing tennis, and the local skateboard kid named Tom Krauser came around and did a thing we call an “ollie.” You make the skateboard jump; you don’t use your hands. That looked like magic, and I was like, I want to do that.
I started on some really cheap skateboard. Sold my whole G.I. Joe collection to get this skateboard.
When I was 15, I pretty much became all that I wanted to. I wanted to be a sponsored skateboarder, travel, [and] get paid. I was already starting that experience.
But as I got there I recognized, I’m missing something. I was asking all these questions. I was like, why am I on earth? What’s my reason for existence?
I believe God used those hard questions to really make me seek for truth.
I really got involved with what every teen without a reason for existence gets involved in. I got involved with drugs. I began to search. I started wondering, what else is out there?
My dad was in the Navy. He always used to get these little Gideon’s Bibles. They used to be lying around my house. So at that time I pick a Bible, put it in my backpack along with my bong. I used to open up that Bible ‘cause I was searching for God.
 I believe God is such a good God that He began to reveal His Son Jesus Christ to me. It’s not in a church, not in a religion, just straight out of His Word. From there I came to Him how I was, and His Word began to do its job. The Word is supernatural.
I got confronted with truth, and now I’m like, what am I gonna do with truth? So I asked Jesus to be my Lord and Savior. God’s Word just began to change me, began to change my mind, and began to change the way I looked at things.
My friends [said], “Whoa, Richard’s not doing the same things.” I was known to be the one to initiate the bad things. But now I had a relationship with God and definitely people recognized it. It changed my whole status in the skateboard world. People now know me for being a Christian.
Now skateboarding is not my number one passion. The Lord is. I’m not a skateboarder first; I’m a Christian first and then a skateboarder. God still has me in a place where I can skateboard and enjoy the things I like. But it’s not for myself no more.
The things I do on earth don’t really matter if it’s for me. If it’s for a cause greater than myself, and if it’s for my Creator, then it makes it a totally different reason for living.
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