Before I knew Christ, I lived a life that was focused on how others saw me. I lived a life where I would put on one mask to please one person and then take that mask off and put on another that would fit in with another group.
By doing this I never let people in, and felt so alone. It wasn’t the way I should be. I even wondered: “if I died, would anyone really miss me?” I actually came close to dying when a part of my small intestine blew up. I spent two weeks recovering where God showed me the people who truly cared about me. Some of them were from my youth group at church. God gave me a group of friends who truly cared about me and were there for me when I was at my lowest.
I went with the youth group to a camp the summer after my freshman year of high school. There I learned that God loved me the way I was, and he created me that way. I also learned that I don’t need to try and be something I’m not–that his grace fixes anything I do wrong in my life. I accepted Christ into my life and I am still not alone.
Before He was in my life, I struggled with being accepted by others. After Christ was in my life, I knew that I didn’t need to be the way others wanted me to be–that I was accepted by someone greater than they.
This thing at camp was not just a one-time thing. Accepting Christ in my life and has changed me. My life does not revolve around me or what I want but around God who filled that emptiness that no one ever could. I no longer feel the need to put those masks on, because I know that I have been completely accepted be my Savior.
I cannot remember a time when I did not have some idea of who God was. Ever since I was a baby, my parents brought me to church and taught me the truths of the Bible. I went to Sunday School and Christian schools kindergarten through my senior year of high school. My father has been the pastor at my home church for over thirty years, and my mother was also involved in the church. Most of my extended family also attended the same church or one in their respective areas. Needless to say, I have been blessed with a rich spiritual environment and know very much about the Bible.
Sadly, however, knowledge does not necessarily equal a life led by faith and filled with love for God. During my high school years, I began to notice that while I knew so many things about the Bible, there was something still missing. I went to church and recited passages, but it didn’t really mean very much to me. These thoughts secretly began to undermine my values and beliefs about who God is and who I am as His child. To anyone who did not know me, there was not much different about me than any other person around. I gave in to sinful habits, starting with using bad words and gossiping about others. I began to give in the coarse joking and sexual innuendos that are so common in secular society, and I believed it to be ok, because I went to church every Sunday, and my thinking was, “It’s not really all that bad. It’s not like I’m having sex or doing drugs or getting into trouble. In fact, this really isn’t that sinful at all.” If I only I could have known what destruction this thinking would bring upon my faith.
All sin begins in the heart. I let this false belief that sexual impurity was just fine really take a hold in my life. I let other values go to make amends for these. I started dating, and my faith took even bigger hits. I thought I needed a boyfriend to make all my problems go away, and I believed the lie that the only way for a guy to like me is to give away a part of my heart. My longest relationship was the climax of my sinful living. The lies concerning sexual purity had mounted so much that I thought as long as I wasn’t having sexual intercourse, everything else was ok.
But it wasn’t. I was so far away from God. I was not participating in my relationship with my Savior. Finally, He had had enough. He loved me too much to let me keep going in my sinful ways. He made it clear to me that I needed to break up with my boyfriend and to flee from sexual and other temptations and sins. He wanted me for Him and His will alone, although I did not realize this at the time. All I knew was that He didn’t want me living that way anymore.
God brought me to college in Minnesota State University-Moorhead, because He knew it would be the start and development of the journey of His servant. After a few months of confusion as to who I was and where I fit in, some of my new friends invited me to attend Campus Crusade for Christ. I was very skeptical at first, but grudgingly went along. What do you know, but I loved it. I began to attend regularly. I made many wonderful, strong Christian friends, and attended TCX, the winter conference in Minneapolis over Christmas break.
But I wasn’t golden yet. I still didn’t really understand God’s will for my life yet, or what it really meant to be in a relationship with Him. So God decided it was time for me to begin to understand that. He shoved it on my heart to go on summer project with Cru to Medora, North Dakota, in the beautiful Badlands. I thought I was going out there to do mission work, which happened eventually, but not right away, and not even in the way I imagined it. There He revealed to me that He is so in love with me and wanted me to be transformed. He was calling me to follow His will, to live to glorify Him, not because I have to, but because I want to, out of thanks to Him. I read a book called “Crazy Love” by Francis Chan that summer, and my eyes were opened to how lukewarm I had been, and I was filled with an overwhelming desire to live for Him. I accepted Christ the summer of 2009. This doesn’t mean that I just believed He was real or knew of it, but He now owns my heart and my passion and my life. It can never be supposedly just mine, ever again, because He will not let go!!
So now what? Well, that wasn’t just the end, or the climax of the story, because I am far from there. My whole life is building and learning in Christ, and growing in my relationship with Him. My sinful flesh prevents me from reaching that perfection in relationship with God, but I can still grow in it with His help. God knew how much I would need Him in the months following Medora. I would need Him to get through stressful homework times. I would need Him to carry me through when it sometimes seemed as if I was the only one who cared about the salvation of others. I would need Him to hold me when I felt as if the world was crashing down.
I would need Him to pick me up the days following when my dad called me and said, “Mom went to heaven this morning.” It is a curiosity how life can change so dramatically in a matter of seconds. My mother died suddenly and unexpectedly of a ruptured berry aneurysm on December 4, 2009. Jesus promises, “And in all things, I work for the good of those that love me, who I have called according to my purpose.” It is so hard to believe that sometimes! Without my strong relationship with my heavenly Father, I would not have made it through. I would not have been able to be there to carry my dad and my brother, to be the strong one, helping everyone else first with their pain. I saw so many wonderful things come out of it. The God-given strength provided to me was a lighthouse to my friends, most especially those who do not yet have a real relationship with Jesus. I am able to sympathize with others, and help them lean on God through similar situations. I would be lying if I said that I never have days when I miss my mother more than you can imagine, or wonder why God would take her from me. But God gives comfort, and He holds me in his everlasting arms. I can never fully understand His ways or His will, but I know that only the best come of them.
God used to be a Sunday morning affair for me. But not anymore. He is the love of my life and He holds and cherishes my heart. I believe God will use my faith to glorify Himself and that others see Him shining through my lifetime dance with Him, and I pray that they come to know Him also. For what is life but a time to love God, glorify Him, and give up everything you hold dear just to see one other person come to the rich graces of the gospel.
“Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.”
I was, by my very nature, an object of God’s wrath.
This verse, Ephesians 2:3 is the perfect beginning to my testimony of what Christ has done in my life. It begins with God, his standard, and my shortcomings. The Almighty God created a perfect heavens and earth and then allowed human beings to live in it. But ever since Adam and Eve first disobeyed the Lord, the human race has been plagued with sin. What is sin? Sin is anything we think, say, or do that displeases God. God is God, so he sets the standard. I’ve fallen short. I was born falling short. My own human nature is disfigured in such a way that I will never be able to attain God’s perfect standard on my own. I’m an object of God’s wrath, and his wrath leaves no survivors.
But because I was confirmed…
But because I’m a good person…
But because I read the Bible…
But because I volunteer…
But because I believe there is a God…
Hardly.
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ!”
Ephesians 2 goes on to tell us the Good News of Jesus Christ. God’s mercy is available to everyone, even me with my sinful human nature. Mercy = not getting what you deserve. I don’t deserve a second look from God and I certainly don’t deserve new life through Christ. Praise the Lord for his forgiveness and mercy!
“Even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved!”
Verse five from Ephesians 2 reminds me again just how helpless I was, how helpless I am, in my sin. I’m not simply floundering out in the middle of the lake, hoping God will throw me a life jacket. I am DEAD at the bottom of the lake. Christ dives to the bottom, lifts me, up and breathes life into me! I am born again, but it doesn’t end there.
Philippians 1:6 tells me, “…He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” I have trusted in the Lord to rescue me from the consequences of sin. Not only that, but he invites me to share my daily burdens and questions with him. He is my Confidante, my Teacher, my Father, and my Lord. He has a plan for my life, and I intend to praise him in all that I say and do.
Before I knew Christ, my life was like a toy top. You know the kind that you get out of the vending machine? In high school, I was very involved in various activities. I did all sorts of things…baseball, drama, National Honor Society, band, and choir. I graduated from a class of about 330, and you could say I knew quite a few of those 330. I always sought after their attention.What my classmates thought of me was very important.
I wanted to fit in and be liked by all. Because of this, my life had no balance…just like that toy top when you first spin it. It’s wobbling all over the place and for a second you think it’s going to fall right over. I was all over the place. I was getting drunk and doing drugs nearly every weekend my junior and senior years of high school. During the week, I played the “good kid” and got good grades, was in the band, and was even a part of a community program that visited elementary schools to help prevent substance abuse. I was living a double life in order to blend and cope with this nagging necessity to earn the approval of my peers. I didn’t know where my place was, and I was numb.
I entered college eager to make new friends, and truly discover who I was as a person. As a freshman, I continued to search for my place just like I did in high school. I changed my behavior to match my peers’ and in doing so, masked my true identity. One day, this guy from Campus Crusade for Christ named Dusty gave me a call. He asked me a couple questions from a survey I had recently completed and asked if I wanted to meet. We met up later and he got the chance to share the Gospel with me. I had grown up going to church with my parents, but I didn’t know what it meant to be in a personal relationship with God.
We had a somewhat argumentative conversation and after about 45 minutes Dusty finally didn’t have anything left to say. I went back to my room and thought about what we talked about. Dusty talked about my sin, and how I had sinned against God, and in doing so, had earned eternal spiritual separation from Him. Dusty shared with me how God sent His son Jesus into the world to take my sins, and pay the penalty that I earned, with His perfectly sinless body nailed to the cross. Dusty shared with me that it wasn’t enough to just know these truths…we needed to receive them and put our faith, hope, and trust in them. We needed to follow them with our hearts. I realized that Dusty was right, and I prayed later that God would come into my life and rescue me from the sins that I had committed and that I completely trusted Him with my life. I had no idea that from that day on, my life was changed forever.
After a few weeks I started meeting with Dusty more regularly and learning about God. We read the Bible and prayed together and he really showed me what it meant to be a follower of Christ. The winter of my freshman year God began to change my heart. He taught me that drinking, drugs, and partying could offer me absolutely nothing in comparison to the eternal joy that I have in Christ and the work He did on the cross. I was finally alive and I knew where I was supposed to be. God showed me that He was the only thing to hope in, because all else is broken and imperfect.
God is my constant in life. He is faithful. He is perfect and He is true. My life is now spinning in complete control, because I can rest in the peace that my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has rescued me and given me the hope of eternal life.
When I was young, I prayed that Jesus would come into my life, forgive me of my sins, and give me eternal life with him. At that moment, as it says in Psalm 124, I had “escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare”. Jesus freed me from the snare of my sin, and gave me the Holy Spirit, my wings to fly with him. But I didn’t live like it. I lived in the cage of my comfort zone, paralyzed by perfectionism, fear of failure, and a desperate dependence on the approval of other people. I gained happiness and security from my friends, and especially a boyfriend. Putting my hope in other people’s opinions of me made me miserable, because it kept me from meeting new people, trying new things, and from being the person I was created to be. And ultimately it was a false hope because I could never please everyone, and nobody could love me in the complete way I desired to be loved.
Then I went to a conference over New Year’s, and they talked about surrendering control of your life to Christ, to be all in with him. They asked us to picture ourselves on a beach, with Jesus up ahead, calling our names for us to follow Him. I found myself praying “Lord, I can’t do it. I’m not brave enough or strong enough to let go of all I’m clinging to. I want to follow you, but I just don’t have what it takes and I’m so sorry”. I felt like if I was really on the beach, Jesus would have walked away, shaking his head sadly. But the picture of the beach scene popped back into my head and something very different happened. Jesus came back for me and grabbed my hand. God used that image to show me I would never be enough, and I didn’t have to be. He had already made the way for me in Christ, and he would be right with me in each step of my journey, holding my hand.
Three weeks after I gave Christ control, my boyfriend broke up with me. It was hard, but Christ surrounded me with his unfailing love and taught me how to depend on him. Through Christ’s power at work in me, I’ve been able to face my fears and step outside the cage of my comfort zone. It’s here that I’ve experienced God’s love, his people, and growth in my relationship with Jesus like I never thought was possible. It’s a process and a journey, and I still struggle to let God have control in my day to day, but it’s okay. I’m not perfect, but Christ has taken care of my inadequacies and can even use them to demonstrate his power in my life. I am free to fly in him. And Psalm 139 guarantees that “if I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there [his] hand will guide me, [his] right hand will hold me fast.”
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