My Testimony

To begin, I think it’s important to acknowledge my past. I grew up in a very Christian household. We attended church every Sunday and even most Wednesday nights. I thought I had a good relationship with God, but I was wrong. Through my adolescence I was always a lukewarm Christian, I believed but I didn’t follow. When I was baptized, the thought that prompted me to do it was “why not”. It wasn’t out of love or even belief. As most teenagers, I had very few focuses in life. Sports, girls, and what career I would end up in, but God was almost never a focus. After graduation my life started to spiral and I abandoned God altogether, I started and finished several unhealthy relationships. I experimented with drugs and formed addictions. I was so far removed from God that He was even a thought in my day to day life. At least when I was younger I would attribute the good in this world to Him, but at this point in my life I couldn’t.

Depression took over me and I started to walk through life in a fog, like a dark veil was put over my face. The sun didn’t shine as bright and all around me I started to notice the impropriety of the world. I was so desperate for relief, that I began to look to other religions for comfort. I had completely turned my back on God. Every now and then I would have a brief moment of conviction where I knew I wasn’t on the right path, but those thoughts quickly left as I reentered the spirit of the world. Every act and thought God teaches against I welcomed, and in 2015 I began to hate God. All the bad that was happening to me, I blamed Him for it. In my mind, He was throwing me under the proverbial bus.

After and in 2017, my life started to get back on track but I still wasn’t following His teachings. I still had my back turned to Him. There was a short period where everything started to feel normal where I felt like I had a decent life. I was still living of the flesh and gave in to almost every sin in the book. Even now looking back on that time, I’m filled with shame because of the things I had done. And soon after my life would begin spiraling again.

I had lost my job and was waiting on unemployment, my car was on the verge of being repossessed. A global pandemic had just shut down the entire world and every day looked more bleak than the day before. For whatever reason though, this was the time God chose to nudge me to turn back around. I was on social media one day and came across a video talking about God, I quickly swiped past it only to find another and another. It seemed like I couldn’t escape God’s word. I finally decided to watch one of the videos and had never to that day been filled with that amount of conviction, shame and guilt. Years of neglect to Him. And crashing down on me and all I could do to keep from crying was to find my childhood bible.

I knew I had at least one, in my youth I had several as I’m sure most kids who grow up in the church do. However, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked for hours all over my apartment and still couldn’t find it. I was down to my last few dollars, just enough to get one from the bookstore. So I did the very next day, and for the rest of the day I read the books of Luke and John. I couldn’t put it, I was so captivated by the words and the message.

That night I prayed for the first time in almost ten years, and I had a lot to get off my chest. As I prayed I could feel His spirit wash over me, it completely enveloped me and filled me with a joy I haven’t felt well, ever. The longer I prayed, the more things started to make sense to me. Why I had been so depressed, why certain things kept reoccurring in my life. It was like God was saying, “I told you so”.

Later that night I was in my bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror and for once I didn’t hate the person looking back at me, I was smiling and loved who I was becoming. I could actually see myself and not the depression that sin had put me into. The devil calls us by our sin, but God calls us by our name.

Over the next several days I was still under an immense amount of stress because of everything going on in the world and my life, but I was still joyful. I was on this spiritual high that nothing seemed to be able to knock me from. I was reading my bible for hours on end and praying when I wasn’t reading. At the time, I actually couldn’t believe I had a prayer life again. Even the way I was praying had changed since my youth. Now, I was actually talking to God, not just asking him for things but truly talking to Him. I learned to put all of myself into my prayers, the good and the bad.

A few days after I had come back to Christ I was on social media and found a video which talked about God sending people messages through dreams. That night during prayer, I asked God if he would send me a message though a dream. At about four in the morning I was violently woken up and in a mostly sleeping state (I say mostly because I don’t really remember doing any of this) the thought of Zechariah 1:9 came to me and typed it into my phone before I lost consciousness again. All of this had to have happened in a matter of about twenty seconds. The next morning when I woke up I didn’t remember it and started my day as any other. It wasn’t until later that I found it. Until now I had never read the book of Zechariah.

My life hasn’t been the same since coming back to Christ, the spiritual high is mostly gone although I would say I’m still joyful. Now though, my struggle is much harder and wouldn’t have it any other way. My struggle is keeping on the narrow road, I don’t want to be with the masses anymore. To be honest, I don’t even want to be of the world anymore. God give us a task, to bring others to Him and to share His Word. So that’s what I’m doing by writing this, hopefully bringing other to Him.