My Testimony

Cardboard Testimonies from College Park Church on Vimeo.

If you have been reading my blog for awhile now (or if you know me in person) chances are you're very much aware that I call myself a Christian. My faith is, without a doubt, the most important thing in my life. It influences every decision I make, every value I hold ... in a nutshell, my faith defines me. But you may be surprised to know that this wasn't always the case.

I do not come from a "Christian" family .. in fact, most of my family members are atheist or agnostic. As I was growing up, our family theology was basically that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. We didn't read the Bible or make worshiping God a priority and church was something we did every now and then, but it certainly wasn't a way of life. I grew up with an image of God as a distant deity who sat on a cloud in the sky, watching over the world. Sometimes God would intervene on our behalf if we prayed hard enough but I didn't think it was possible to know God or to experience God until a person died and went to heaven. The idea of God as a loving, nurturing, forgiving Father was impossible for me to grasp. When I heard people say things like "Jesus is alive!" ... I thought they were nuts.

When I was a teenager in high school, I struggled with issues of self-esteem. I won't go into detail because I could literally write pages and pages about my personal battle with weight, insecurity and relationships gone bad .. but let's just say that even though I put on a happy face and pretended that life was great; inside my heart was breaking. To deal with my insecurities, I became a control freak. I obsessed over every little detail of my life and tried to plan out my future from start to finish. I fooled myself into thinking that if I could control my life, I would be able to control what people thought of me. And if I could control what people thought of me, then I could make people love me. At the end of the day, like everyone else ... I just wanted to make sure I was loved.

At sixteen, I became good friends with a girl named Melissa. A deeply committed Christian, Melissa spent HOURS talking to me about Jesus and God's love for me. She told me that I mattered to God ... that I mattered so much He had sent His son (Jesus) to take the punishment I deserved (death) for the all mistakes I had made (sins) so that I could be made whole and be set free. She told me that no matter how "good" a person appeared to be, nobody was perfect and we all needed a Savior. She told me that true Christianity was about having a relationship with God ... God wasn't a distant deity, but He was right here by my side and He wanted to walk through life with me. I remember one day she posted this verse up in the school locker we shared: "For God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but will have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

Honestly, at first I thought she was kind of insane. But there was something special about Melissa ... she was so happy and nice and positive. Her life wasn't perfect but she accepted every situation with optimism and courage. I began to think that if being a Christian made her the way she was, it was something worth looking into. A year later, she gave me a copy of Max Lucado's book, He Chose The Nails ... and for the first time, I truly began to understand the meaning of Easter and the purpose of Jesus' death and resurrection. When I finished the book, I immediately began to read the Gospel of Matthew. By the end of that school year, I had come to believe that the Gospel was true and that lives really could be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sitting in my room late one night, I bowed my head and prayed for forgiveness and asked that God would transform me into the person He wanted me to be. I was seventeen years old.

Since becoming a Christian, my life has taken a complete turn. The Bible says that "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation ... the old has gone, the new has come!" (1 Corinthians 5:17). When you hear Christians talk about being "born again", we're not kidding ... I truly experienced a spiritual rebirth when I gave my life to Christ. I became a whole new person. I joined a church and became involved in ministry. When the time came to decide what to study in university, I chose theology. Now that my time at university is coming to an end, I look forward to working in ministry full-time and being a missionary. I absolutely LOVE sharing my faith with people and telling them all about Jesus and the wonderful things he has done in my life. He traded my insecurities with faith in His Word. He's taught me to find my sense of self-worth in Christ, instead of trying to find it in the superficial ways of this world. He healed the wounds of my childhood and gave me hope for a future. I'm not perfect, but I know that I am loved and that I matter and that God has a plan for me and a purpose for my life.

I know that Jesus is Lord because I have experienced it first-hand ... not only has my life been transformed, but I have seen co-workers and friends give their lives to Christ and experience the same kind of change. I used to work at a coffee shop and one day one of my co-workers asked me why I spent my lunch break reading my Bible. I invited him to come to a worship event at my church later that week, and He did ... by the end of the night, He was singing praises to God too! He quit drugs, went back to school and says Jesus is responsible. The testimonies you see in the video above are not unusual ... churches all around the world are FULL of people who all have stories to share. Stories of healing (sometimes physical healing, sometimes emotional healing) ... stories of forgiveness ... stories of renewed hope .... stories of families being restored, of lives being changed, of people discovering their purpose and going out in the world to make a difference. Every single one of us has a "cardboard testimony" in the works. And if you only have one side to your story, trust me when I say that God is anxiously waiting for you to hand over that piece of cardboard and let Him write the second half!

"May you have the power to understand, as all God's people should ... how wide ... how long ... how high and how deep His love really is." (Ephesians 3:18)