Happy hump day! We made it to Wednesday! It has been an interesting time of late. I honestly feel like God has been refining me in the last couple of weeks, because the trials of life have felt intense! But I have been thanking God through it all, as it has been helping me to put my faith into practice. Because at the end of it all, how do we know how we are doing in our walk with God, without the testing? I have learnt soo many lessons which I will share in another post, but for now, as promised, here is my testimony I got to share recently. I always say it’s good to go back to the beginning and remember how retched your life was before Jesus saved you. Maybe you just happened to stumble across this post not knowing a thing about Jesus, or how much better your life could be if only you just invited Him in. I pray that my journey will draw you closer to being in relationship with Him. Because that is what being a Christian is all about! It’s deep, meaningful relationship with Jesus. He desires to be known by you; He desires your heart!
Galatians 5:19-21 says this (in the MSG translation) “ It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.” Paul goes on to say that if you live this way you will not inherit God’s kingdom. This pretty much sums up my life before I knew Jesus. November 2026 will be 7 years since the Lord redeemed me and I became a child of God. If you had asked me 7 years ago if I was a sinner, I would have looked at you like you were crazy, because I believed I was good.
I don’t come from a church background. My earliest memory of church was being taken to Sunday school with my aunt when I was small. I can’t tell you what kind of church it was, who was there, or what was happening. I just have a vivid memory of sharing a gold cup of wine while kneeling at the front of an altar and taking communion. Sadly, my aunt stopped going to church, which meant I stopped going, and later she rejected God altogether. Growing up in a broken home, witnessing domestic violence and becoming a child of abuse, I did not see a good God, nor could I understand the concept of a sovereign God. I was smart enough to know there was a higher power, a creator of sorts, but I didn’t subscribe to religion. I was spiritual. I was open to spiritual things; I had spiritual experiences growing up. But if you asked me about the bible, I would tell you it was written by man so you couldn’t trust it; it was sexist and written to control women and make them seem weak; it was a book of rules used to oppress people. I believed there was nothing good in it.
As I grew into an adult my ignorance of the bible intensified. I started to believe that all religions were worshipping the same god, they just didn’t know it. I thought, if everybody’s god was good, then they must be worshipping different personalities of the same god. It’s ridiculous, I know, but that’s how lost I was, thinking I knew everything, when I knew nothing! The problem was every time I would encounter a proclaiming Christian (it wasn’t often) I had these questions that they could never answer concerning their bible. Their lack of knowledge and understanding of the god they claimed to follow, left me feeling even more self-righteous and puffed up. I thought, they don’t even know what they believe. I remember being told I was going to hell a couple of times.
Entering my 30’s, my life was spinning out of control. I was trying to find meaning and purpose. I had made terrible life choices in relationships, experiencing more abuse at the hands of men. I was looking for love and ways to love myself through as Paul put it “cheap sex.” Loneliness started to seep in and anxiety started to creep through my door. By 2018 Anxiety had moved in and made itself at home. I had never suffered with anxiety or depression before, so when it came, it hit hard! It got so bad that I had to be signed off work by my doctor because I wasn’t fit for duty. It was the darkest time of my life, something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. To manage it and get back to normality I had to take medication. I had to cut out a lot of things in my life because of fear of being triggered. I accepted that this was going to be my new life now. But God had other plans.
The beginning of 2019, I was addicted to this karaoke app called smule. Singing was something I did in private, most people around me didn’t even know I could sing. I would have crippling anxiety at the thought of singing in public. Smule became my world, the place I found peace. I had friends around the world on this app who I would sing with. It was that year that I met a new group of friends. They were believers. One I grew close with, and we developed a friendship outside of the app. He lived in New York. He knew I wasn’t a believer and he never tried to convert me or pressure me. I respected his belief and he respected where I was at. But as we got to know each other and become friends, he would share stories of the bible, but in a way that made them current. For some reason they would sound familiar to me, and I would quickly work out that they were bible stories. This led to me being able to ask my impossible questions about the bible. And for the first time, I met someone who was not only able to answer them but would tell me about the bible in its context and help me to understand it. It was clear that he read and studied his word. Every time he answered a question, I was humbled. I felt stupid in my ignorance and that didn’t feel good. I was always used to being right. It was at that moment that I realised that I didn’t know anything about the bible, how could I, I had never read one before. I always saw myself as a fair person, and I realised I wasn’t being fair. Now, I still believed the bible wasn’t good, all my views on it hadn’t changed. But for me to debate it and point out all its fallacies, I needed to see for myself so I could show my friend why it was bad.
Unbeknownst to my friend, I ordered my first KJV bible from amazon. I was set and ready to get stuck in. When it arrived and I opened it up to Genesis, I was confused and did not understand it. I messaged my friend and told him I had bought the bible and had planned to read it. He was shocked but then laughed when I told him what version I got. With his guidance I got a translation I could understand, and he offered to read it with me. This was the beginning of November 2019. We combed through the pages of Genesis everyday of that month, four hours a day. I waited patiently to get to a part of the bible that I could highlight for my arguments, but it never came. I instantly knew what I was reading was truth. The words came alive and for the first time I realised that I wasn’t good, I was a sinner. By the end of the month, I said to my friend “I think I am a Christian.”
My story isn’t a crazy one. Although my life wasn’t great, I wasn’t looking for Jesus. I didn’t even know I needed Him. Hebrews 4:12 says “For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.” The word showed me myself in a way I hadn’t seen before. I instantly knew that everything I had been chasing in this world to fill this void in my soul wasn’t working because I needed Jesus. That space was always reserved for Him. That was the relationship I needed that would heal everything. He has saved me in more ways than one. He plucked me out of the pit in his perfect timing, because If I didn’t find him when I did, I would have never survived the pandemic the way my anxiety was set up. His way has proved to be the best way, and this is the first time in my life where I have felt whole and complete.
The pandemic was a good thing for me because it created space for me to sit in God’s word for the whole year of 2020. The world was closed but my world opened. I studied God’s word diligently everyday with my friend who discipled me. Before the year was up, I realised that my mind was being renewed by the word because I had been healed of my crippling anxiety. My desires changed and became His desires. I had been so radically changed that my friendships changed, and people became distant with me. I lost relationships, because I was no longer friends with the world. I lost things that no longer served me, but I gained something better, my very great reward!
MY CONVICTIONS 