My Personal Testimony

...or "How I came to love Jesus". This was part of an assignment in the discipleship course I've been taking at my church since last September. I am supposed to deliver this testimony to a specific person, which I will still do. However, it occurred to me that I can reach much more than that by posting it here. We were told to keep it to 1500 words, which is probably a good idea, otherwise I could have written 5,000 easily. This was actually slightly over, at around 1560, but I didn't want to trim any more from my first draft of close to 1,800.

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Jesus has always been a part of my life. My problem is that I never always acknowledged it, or even when I did, didn't give him the attention he deserved. That's the crux of my story. I've never really let him in the door until very recently in my life.

When I was child, I was raised and taught Sunday School lessons from an early age. I knew all the things you were taught, I even believed them, as much as a young child could believe things in the same way an adult can. I had several years of Sunday School perfect attendance when I was around the ages of 5-7. I could say the Lord's Prayer at an early age, and I was very much the proper young Christian boy. As time went on, my parents divorced (at 12yrs), and while I don't have a conscious recollection of that causing a problem at the time, it likely did, as it did upset many portions of my life. Not long after that I started to rebel in school, lost focus, and quite a lot of things didn't have the same flavor anymore. I used to sneak into my mom's bedroom on Sunday mornings, and turn off the alarm clock so we wouldn't have to go to church. I considered church an imposition on my Sunday morning sleep. At this point in my life, Jesus was never really an active thought. Not that I actively campaigned against him, or anything along those lines, it just was never an up front thought in my mind. Somewhere during this time, I stopped going to church completely, as I didn't feel connected anymore.

There were a few other moments after that where I had the chance to reconnect, but did not. There was a person who ministered to me in a church and asked me if I was saved, and told me that all it would take would be for me to accept Jesus as my Lord and saviour and let him into my heart. I said the lines, and the person said I was saved, but I didn't "feel it" in my heart. I also attended a Billy Graham Crusade and came forward at the end to receive Jesus. That was an opportunity and I didn't follow through on that, either.

Some years later, my family happened upon another Episcopal church led by a Father Edd Schultz. Father Edd was the first building block in my return to church in that he was young, and hey - he had Cable TV! A priest who had MTV was something cool to this teenager, so I bought into it. I enjoyed attending church there, and continued there until Father Edd left the church to move elsewhere in the country. At that point I more or less stopped going again. When I moved to Texas in 1992, and all of that was lost - I never went to church after I moved to Texas for awhile.

I got married in 1996; after that my wife and I attended a service at HTEC. We felt the church was nice, but due to my general laziness and desire for Sunday morning sleep, we did not return. At this point in my life, I had pigenholed my thoughts on religion into this. If I believed Jesus was saviour and my Lord, I would be saved. I didn't need to attend a church, and I didn't need all that other stuff. I believed, so I was good to go. It was my daughter who ended up leading me back to church - and she hadn't been born yet.

Late in 2004, my wife and I decided that since we were having a baby, that we needed to attend a church. As our families are about 1500 miles away, we needed a support system. After a couple of attempts elsewhere, we returned to HTEC, as that was the religion I was raised in. After attending several services, we felt very welcomed and comfortable; so we stayed. This was a seriously important decision, as it's here that I found Jesus for good, and let him into my life in a way that had NEVER happened before. In looking back, I always sort of paid lip service to Jesus. I believed, or thought I did, but it was't until after my daughter was born that I started noticing that I was feeling more filled, and more excited at attending church. That had never happened to me before. I prayed to God a lot during my wife's pregnancy, and those prayers were answered in the form of a very happy, and very healthy young daughter. Up until this point in my life, Jesus was mostly an afterthought, and he still blessed me with the best daughter I could have imagined. It was that realization that started me back without looking for a "way out" like I used to.

The big moment came when I was standing on the front lawn of my rector's house one evening. I had been there to fix a problem on his computer, and afterwards we were talking about a discipleship course he was going to soon be embarking on. I was not planning on doing it, mostly because I was (or thought I was) unprepared for the course. After hearing my reasons, the rector calmly told me I was full of shit - in those words! One wouldn't think that the turning point in one's religious life would be an obscenity delivered by a priest, but it was for me. God gives you what you need, and that's what I needed - a jolt like that to get my attention. On the drive home that night, I changed my mind and decided to take the course. It was a giant leap of faith on my part, as I really had NO idea what I was getting myself into.

As the weeks went along in the course, I found myself believing and reading scripture more than any other time in my life. I started being able to recite parts of it, and I found the course was nowhere as difficult as I anticipated it would be. I found that some of the things we were taught and learned about weren't the hollow things I thought they were when I was younger - these disciplines like fasting and prayer had real life meaning! As I let these things into my life more and more, I found that I had a deeper peace about various issues in my life that were never peaceful. I found that I did not stress internally about things as much as I used to. Now that's not to say I can't still run off the end of the stress meter, and I do from time to time. But overall, I've found great relief in simply allowing problems in my life to be turned over to Jesus. To a non believer, that might sound hollow, but the Holy Spirit has worked miracles in my heart.

The biggest changes have come in the last 5 months or so since I started taking scripture to heart. Oh sure, I could spend more time with the living word; and I still sin like everyone else, but I have an avenue out. The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. My most recent example is that I was lifted of my fear of praying in public. I used to dread that with a crippling fear that would stop me from any public prayer. In one of the discipleship class sessions, we had a big prayer group session, and I felt that something happened to me, but I did not know what. That was answered the next day when I had to take my wife to the hospital, and while driving there, I said a prayer for her healing with my hand on her head. Shortly after that, she told me that after I had taken my hand off her head, it felt like my hand was still there. This was a powerful moment for me, because it showed me what God had done in my heart, which was remove my fear of prayer. And as I've learned in James 5:16, "the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effect". I've felt no problems with praying for people any longer, and that is a blessing my life. I wanted to cry when I realized what had happened to me.

This discipleship course has given me so much more strength and peace than I could have ever believed I was capable of. Praise God for getting to me through my rector swearing at me, as I credit THAT as the reason I now am stronger than I ever believed I could be in Jesus. My wife has told me that the course has changed me externally too, which is nice to hear, since I cannot see that. I cannot wait for what else will come on this path I have chosen. It can be your path too. It doesn't take much to get started on the path either, if you have any questions on how, just ask me. May God bless you, as he has me.