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God brought me down to nothing

Seventy-three years of living are etched into the grooves of Lou Sheppard’s face. Every line, every wrinkle speaks of his journey through life. As a young boy, Lou loved Jesus deeply. He left home at age 14 and moved to Saskatchewan to live with a Christian family and work on a farm. He accepted Christ, taught Sunday school each week, and sang in the choir.

By age 16, he was repairing trucks at a nearby garage. Upon high school graduation, he started working as an office assistant in a trucking company.

It didn’t take the ambitious Lou long to discover that the company was being intentionally overcharged by one of its suppliers. He was promoted almost immediately, and success and wealth began to come easily. Soon he started drifting away from his faith.

“When you have all the money you need, you don’t need God,” he said.

Lou married his high school sweetheart, and they had two children — a boy and a girl. They moved from Saskatchewan to Winnipeg, where he and a few friends started purchasing bankrupt trucking companies.

“A shareholder’s dispute in 1967 forced the sale of my company,” he said, “but I was able to salvage a small operation in Ottawa and Montréal.” After spending a number of years in Québec, the FLQ’s violence prompted him to sell off his business and move back west to Alberta where the economy was booming. On the homefront, though, things were not going so well. By this time, his wife had divorced him because of his “pride, arrogance and selfishness.”

About this time, Lou’s new real estate business in Edmonton was taking off. He continued to gain wealth and live the high life — until his life took an unexpected turn.

“The years of rich food, free-flowing alcohol, and lack of exercise had caught up with me,” he said. During a visit to his doctor, he discovered a heart condition. At 220 pounds, this five-foot, six-inch man learned that he would have to be on heart medication for the rest of his life. Determined to fight for his life, Lou decided to close his business. He moved to Banff and spent two years climbing, hiking, and skiing. Nothing would stand in the way of his recovery.

“I was used to getting everything I wanted,” he said.

Once he had recovered, Lou got back into the fast lane, this time in Black Diamond. His 14-year-old son moved in with him, and five years later, his daughter. Both abused alcohol and drugs, but Lou wasn’t overly concerned.

It wasn’t long before Lou started drinking again. The stress of his construction business, combined with living with a son and daughter who were well on their way to becoming alcoholics, caused many moments of utter despair.

“There were quite a few times during this period when I headed out to the mountains with every intention of taking my life,” Lou said. “But hiking out in that quietness, listening to the water flowing, I’d always end up turning around and going back home. I didn’t know why then, but I can tell you now it was God.”

But again Lou didn’t listen. He wanted all the perks money could buy. He began to build a cocktail lounge to satisfy his party lifestyle and to impress his colleagues. But his track record of success was about to come to an end. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the National Energy Plan and overnight virtually all construction came to a halt. Almost simultaneously, the lawyer who was arranging the financing for his cocktail lounge disappeared.

The lawyer fled to London with all of Lou’s money, leaving Lou in significant debt. “God had brought me down to nothing,” Lou said. “One would think that I would come back to God at this point, but I battled back on my own strength.” Gambling took the place of alcohol as he tried to satisfy his emptiness.

Slowly, Lou’s financial empire began looking up again. And then, he got “a taste of hellfire.” While he was building a ranger station in the foothills of southern Alberta, he poured gasoline on a pile of slashing—woody debris left over from cutting down trees. He went into the house to light an acetylene torch.

“When I came back out, I didn’t know the hot, muggy weather had caused fumes to roll out along the ground from the slashing pile,” he said. “Twenty feet away, I bent down to pick up a twig to start the fire. The lit torch in my hand caught the gasoline vapors and the entire area exploded in flame. My face and left arm melted under the severe heat.”

Lou began traveling to the hospital weekly to have the bandages on his third-degree burns changed. After the third week of treatments, he was completely healed. Not a single scar on his face remained, and just faint scarring on his arm. “Despite this,” he said, “my heart was still hardened.”

Two more devastating blows would follow. His fiancé, with whom he was building a dream home in Okotoks, broke up with him when she met a millionaire. Trying to find a fresh start, he moved to Calgary, and then his bank accounts were seized over a tax dispute.

This was the night Lou Sheppard’s heart softened toward El-Shaddai. Billy Graham happened to be preaching on television that evening, and when Lou flipped the television to that station, he could not look away. He had watched Billy Graham on television so much when he was a little boy. The family he moved in with at 14 had watched almost every Crusade that came on in their viewing area. Now, on this agonizing night, after his bank assets had been seized, it seemed like the evangelist was preaching directly to him.

“His words were aimed directly at my heart,” he said. Lou absorbed every word of the program, then he fell to his knees and begged God to take him back. Through his tears, he asked God to forgive him for forsaking his faith, for trying to live his life on his own strength.

“And when I got up off that floor, I felt something I hadn’t experienced for many years—peace,” Lou said.

The next morning, he received a call regarding the tax dispute. “Your appeal has been granted,” the caller said. “You owe nothing.” For the first time in his life, Lou was able to recognize where these blessings had come from.

Lou had been skeptical of church for some time, but as he began to see how his pride and self-importance were ruining his soul, he realized he needed to be part of a church family.

He started looking for a body of believers where he could feel at home. He found Center Street Church in Calgary.

“I realized that at this church, it doesn’t matter who you are, what color you are, or what you have done, there’s no condemnation,” he said. The support from his church community helped him to grow as a new Christian and to kick the casino habit.

Hebrews 13:5 has become a key verse for Lou.

“I am firmly convinced that ‘God will never leave you or forsake you,’” he said.

Fortunately for Lou, God was longsuffering, waiting patiently for 47 years for Lou to turn back to him.

“He was talking all that time and I wasn’t listening,” Lou said. “But now I’ve found total peace.”

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