I Grew Up in a School Bus — Morgan Jackson
God Stories is a growing collection of real-life testimonies—ordinary people
sharing how they’ve seen God present, active, and purposeful in their lives.
Learn more and share your story below.
I grew up in the mountains of Southern California, in a little place called Upper Ojai — the kind of childhood most boys dream about. Bare feet, fishing holes, BB guns, forts in the woods. It felt simple and safe, the kind of life where you think the world will always stay that way. But God had a different kind of classroom in mind for me, one that would shape everything I would one day believe about Him.
My father had come to Christ in his twenties after a childhood spent in foster homes and orphanages. He didn’t grow up with stability or tenderness, but when he met Jesus, something ignited in him. He became a man who believed the Bible the way a drowning man believes in air. He didn’t just read Scripture — he tried it. Tested it. Lived it.
One day he was reading Answers to Prayer by George Müller, the man who cared for thousands of orphans by faith alone. And in the middle of that book, my father heard the Lord say, “I want you to do that”. Most people would have closed the book and gone on with their day. My father walked into the kitchen and told my mother — a farmer’s daughter who liked predictability — that God was calling him to sell everything, move into a mobile home, and live entirely by faith. She had four kids under the age of twelve. She wanted a Christian husband, she later told me, but not a radical one. But my father was already gone — gone in the sense that once he heard God’s voice, he didn’t negotiate. He obeyed.
So, in 1969, he bought a 1955 school bus and converted it into a house on wheels and pulling a little Volkswagen. And just like that, our family of six moved into a bus and drove to the Navajo Nation, where my father believed God had sent him to win the whole reservation to Christ. He failed miserably. Within months, we were out of money. No support. No salary. No plan. And that’s when God told my father to go out into the desert every day and read the Bible for eight hours. Nothing else. Just Scripture, silence, and obedience.
For six months he did that. He’d take the Volkswagen out into the desert with a lunch and a thermos of coffee, and at dusk we’d see him walking back out of the wilderness. And even though Kayenta was the most remote post office in the United States, people all over the country started waking up in the night with the same conviction: Send the Jacksons money. Checks arrived from people we didn’t know. God paid our bills. God fed us. God kept us alive.
That was my childhood. We traveled like that for four years — living in a bus, moving from place to place, watching God provide in ways that made the Bible feel less like a book and more like a living Person.
My parents didn’t hide anything from us. They told us when we had money and when we didn’t. They told us what they were praying for and how God answered. Faith wasn’t a Sunday activity; it was the air we breathed.
And then there was the milk miracle — the story that shaped my mother’s faith forever. We were down to seventy‑five cents. My mother told my father, “Don’t give our money tonight. We need milk for the kids.” But my father believed in giving, even when it made no sense. At church that night, the pastor took an offering, and my mother watched my father put something in. She was irritated but calm — until the pastor took a second offering. Then a third. Then a fourth. By the fifth, she was furious. On the silent drive home, she rehearsed the speech she would give him. We had no milk. No money. And three little kids. She flung open the refrigerator door for dramatic effect — and froze. The refrigerator was packed, top to bottom, with school‑sized cartons of milk. Jammed in so tightly you could barely close the door. A milkman — a man we barely knew — had been delivering to the schools that day. They’d given him too much. He didn’t want to waste it. He remembered our family lived somewhere nearby. He found the house, saw the lights were off, and let himself in. When he opened the refrigerator and saw it empty except for a few carrots, he spent an hour arranging the cartons like a puzzle until the fridge was full. My father fell to his knees praising God. My mother stood there stunned. And in that moment, she heard the Holy Spirit whisper, “If I can take care of milk, I can take care of you”. From that day on, she never doubted God’s provision again.
Those years taught me two things that became the bedrock of my life: God speaks. And God provides.
My father taught us listening prayer — not the kind where you talk nonstop, but the kind where you quiet your heart and wait for the still, small voice. He used to say, “It’s not a conversation if you’re the only one talking.”
So we learned to listen.
We learned that God cared about where we stopped for gas, who we talked to in a grocery store, and which family in a strange town was “worthy” to stay with. My parents would walk into a store and ask the clerk, “We’re missionaries. The Bible says when you enter a town, inquire who is worthy. Who should we stay with?” And somehow, every time, God led them to the right person — someone He was already stirring.
I watched God call a young father into ministry through a two‑hour conversation in our bus. I watched Him provide food, money, shelter, and direction. I watched Him speak to my parents with clarity and tenderness. And I watched Him protect me — a four‑foot‑eleven, seventy‑eight‑pound white kid in a Navajo school where everyone else was fifteen or sixteen and nearly six feet tall. They could have crushed me. Instead, they were kind. God’s kindness wore brown faces and long black hair.
By the time I was sixteen, I was still living in that bus. I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t invite people over. But I had something better — a front‑row seat to a God who was alive, speaking, and faithful. I didn’t know then what He was preparing me for. I didn’t know that one day I’d help bring His Word to hundreds of millions of people who couldn’t read it. I didn’t know that the lessons learned in a dusty bus and a desert wilderness would become the foundation of a global ministry.
All I knew was this:
If God speaks, you obey. If God provides milk, He can provide anything. And if you listen, He will lead you.
That was the beginning of my story — a boy in a bus, learning to hear with his heart.
-Morgan Jackson
