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Annie64 -> RE: Our Testimonies (3/3/2008 6:18:11 AM)
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I have loved reading this thread! My testimony is undramatic like Beth's, except that it took me so much longer to respond to the Gospel. Given my Christian upbringing, that's nobody's fault but my own.
I grew up with both parents in a Christian home. My dad was a minister. The most unusual thing about my family was it's size--10 kids. I am the eighth. I always loved getting reactions from people when I tell them that![:D]
When I was 6, my dad took a pastorate which required us to move from a very rural setting to a small town. I hadn't gone to kindergarten, so my first school experience was among complete strangers in a place larger than any I had ever known. I had never been away from my mother, and was of a very nervous temperament. I responded to school with so much fear that I wet my pants, and not just the first day: neary every day for the entire two years I attended that school. Though I did see a doctor about it, the problem was never solved, and it's devastating results on me have been lifelong and incalculable. I learned, at the same time I was learning to read and with the same proficiency (I was one of the better readers in my class), that no child in their right mind would want to be friends with me. [&o] Even typing in now, 37 years later, I'm surprised at the emotional response it causes in me.
It became very important to me to have approval, but I despaired of getting it from my peers. Instead, I became the ultimate good girl, trying to get approval from my parents and teachers that I couldn't get from anywhere else. I also tried very hard to get approval from God.
There were a couple of times in my childhood that I prayed to receive Jesus, but I think those times, too, were more approval-seeking than anything else. I was trying to do all the right things. And in trying so hard to be good, it bothered me that people around me didn't seem to care so much about doing good. I thought I was so different from my peers I couldn't get approval from them anyway, and I began looking down on people. I became a pharisee, and when I look at the things Jesus had to say to pharisees, it's a wonder that He would have anything to do with me!
When I was 17, signs began going up in my hometown about a big city-wide crusade that was going to take place. Organizers began to recruit counselors, and several of my friends went to the training classes to do that. I wanted to--once again, a "right" thing, but somehow, I couldn't get to the classes. I do not remember the reason, but I believe to this day that my inability to get there was providential.
My family attended the crusade every night for the week it was held. On the first night, I remember the Gospel seeming more real to me than ever before, and I wondered how anyone could walk away from it. "But," I told myself, "I'm already a Christian. Look at all the Christian things I do!" At the time I was teaching Sunday School, was president of my youth group, and at my public school, I hung out with mostly Christians. I read my Bible and I tithed. I didn't do any immoral things. And I answered my own question that night by walking out without the Gospel making a difference.
Then came the second night. I don't remember any of the message until the end except that it was about being born again, but I do remember that the same realization came over me of how true the Gospel story is. And then the evangelist described a lady who had "come forward" in one of his crusades who testified that she had been active in church all her life but had never been born again. And I finally realized that he was describing me. So I did what I was supposed to do--I responded to the altar call, and was so thankful, given that some of my friends were counselors, that a stranger approached me. That was October 26, 1981.
I would have thought that my life would have gotten better after that. Now I had the Lord to help me with my need to know that I was okay. Instead, it got worse. Way, way worse. And it happened by my getting the thing I had thought I had most wanted.
In my junior high and high school years, my biggest desire was for a boyfriend. I thought that it would prove once and for all that I was an acceptable person if a boy thought I was worth taking out on a date. But I reached my senior year without having had a single date, and I took that as proof that I wasn't acceptable or worth spending time with. But shortly after that crusade, that changed. A neighbor for whom I babysat sometimes introduced me to the son of a friend of theirs, and we began dating. He also was a preacher's kid, though from a very different denomination. His denomination was very strict and legalistic, and also preached tongues, which mine didn't, and which I was very much afraid of. And somehow all the differences and questions in my mind about what was really right became such a stress on my mind that I nearly had an emotional breakdown. It was my senior year of high school, and otherwise everything was going well for me. But mentally, I wasn't okay. I was scared all the time--afraid of irredeemably losing my salvation, afraid that I was going to be left behind in the rapture, afraid that I was going to commit the unpardonable sin. This last fear was the reason I was afraid of the whole topic of tongues, and when I went to one of my boyfriend's churches, I couldn't escape the issue. Looking back, I can't explain what happened any other way than I explained it at the time--it was Satan. I lived for the next six months, until after my high school graduation and after I broke up with my boyfriend, under a cloud of fear I could see no hope of escaping. I literally wished that I would die. I wasn't quite suicidal, but only because I was afraid that if I did that I'd go to hell. But I wasn't far from it. I talked to everyone I knew looking for answers to this. But the answers they gave would only make sense as long as I was with the person I was talking to. As soon as I was by myself again, fear would take over again. I spent a huge amount of time praying and reading my Bible, searching and begging for answers. And finally, when the stresses were out of my life, the clouds began to lift. I was able to go away to college that fall, though the spring before I went it certainly looked to anybody who knew me that I was in no emotional shape to do anything like that. I still wasn't all the way over it, but Lord was already healing me. And going to a Christian college after 12 years of public school was like a breath of fresh air.
I am grateful now for that time, because during that time of fear and searching, I learned some powerful lessons that I could not have learned any other way. I learned that God has the power to keep me and I don't have to keep myself. God is big enough to hold on to me.
My second year there, I met my husband. I've always been grateful that he is a year younger than me, and so didn't come my first year, when I was still not really over the emotional thing I had just come out of and I wouldn't have been ready. As soon as we began dating, the relationship had such a different feel than the relationship I had had with my former boyfriend that I knew that this was of God. I did question that for a while, I think because I couldn't believe God would let me have anything so good!
But He did let me have something so good. And after 21 years, eight months of marriage, and three kids, it's still amazing that God has given me the desires of my heart.
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