Posted in Faith Builders
JESUS IS COMING SOON! MARANATHA LORD!
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For example, in the apartment next door to us lived a family that had some very serious problems. The mom was mentally ill, the Dad was out of the picture, and it is clear that both of the children had suffered extreme sexual abuse. The older of the two kids was in her teens, and the other child was about two years older than I was. I spent a lot of time playing at their house, and when I was three years old, I was sexually abused there. This continued to happen regularly until we moved away sometime when I was around seven. I hold no grudge against them because the one girl was too young blame, and the older one, while old enough that she should have known better, had clearly been raised in such a way that this kind of thing probably seemed normal to her. While I hold no grudge, I also have to acknowledge that these things had a deep impact on my life. My life took a different direction from here on, the innocence of my childhood was gone, and I never got it back. There was a relative of mine who was also molested at this house; she was two years older than I was. Because we were related, I did not lose contact with her when I moved away from there. As children who are abused often do, we acted out our abuse in our play together so the abusive atmosphere continued from this point on.
Another thing that stands out is something that happened when I was about five years old. I was in the care of an adult, and I did something that made the adult angry. There were three neighbor kids present at the time, two girls and one boy; and my punishment was that I had to take off all my clothes in front of those friends, and had to stay in the room with them and play. I cannot describe how this made me feel, except to say it was a combination of feeling embarrassed, wishing I could disappear, and feeling like I was disgusting and dirty. I remember begging to go to bed so I could cover up, and being told no. I remember hiding in the bathroom and being scolded and sent back into the room. Something in me hardened that day, as my friends looked at me and I tried to ignore their stares and continue playing. Something changed, petrified, in my heart. I reached a point where I did not care anymore. I put up a wall in my heart and decided that no one would cross it again. That is not to say that I stopped caring about people, but I decided that their opinions just could not matter anymore. I decided it didn't matter if they stared, I just didn't care. After what seemed like hours, my friends went home and I was finally allowed to get dressed. This event taught me how to retreat within myself and shield myself from hurt and from shame. I ended up using that tactic a lot in the coming years.
Sometime when I was around seven, my family moved. We were not in our new house for long before my parents got divorced. Afterwards, my mom seemed to lose her mind. She started drinking all the time and doing drugs. Men cycled in and out of her life. One of those men, “Steve”, moved in with us and was supposed to watch me while my mom went to work, but instead taught me how to smoke marijuana. This marijuana use continued throughout the rest of my childhood, and eventually both my mom and my dad also encouraged the habit in me. Steve also had a lot of pornography around and saw no need to hide it from me. I saw many magazines and several very hardcore movies while he lived with us. This started me down a road that took over thirty years to get off. Still, I was attached to him; I cared about him; in some way, I loved him. One day he told me that he and my mom were breaking up, and he would moving out the next day. When I heard that I went into a rage and started screaming and hitting him and telling him that I hated him. The next day, when he tried to walk out the door, I held on to him and begged him not to go, and told him that I loved him. He left anyway, and after that, I never grew attached to another of my mom’s many boyfriends. I was determined to remain indifferent to them.
My family moved a lot, I never stayed in a school long enough to make friends. I won’t mention every time we moved to a new house, a new neighborhood, instead I’ll just point out that after my parents divorced when I was seven, until I was twelve, we lived in five different houses. That averages about one a year. Each move took us farther and farther away from where my dad lived. Nevertheless my dad continued to make the increasingly long trip every other weekend to bring me to his house to visit.
One summer we took a trip to visit relatives in Utah; I could not have been much older than eight or nine at the time. While we were there, I had a very bizarre experience involving “pretend” worship of Satan that I later realized was not so pretend. I do not know exactly what happened on the spiritual level, but I know that something did, something dark. There were spiritual forces at work. I do not want to spell out and repeat everything here, but just want to say that this event had a huge impact on me. When we left Utah, my mom’s stepbrother, “Randy” came back with us. He became my mom’s boyfriend and moved in with us.
Once she took to me to a Christian concert and I went forward to accept Christ, but I did not really yield to Him at that time, I had what I have since come to know as a false conversion. I wanted what Jesus could do for me in this life. I really did not understand at this point that I personally, was a sinner in desperate need of a savior. I understood in a general sense that nobody was perfect, but I reasoned that since no one was perfect, I was no worse than anyone else was, and I figured that God would, of course, forgive me. I certainly did not think I had done anything bad enough that someone would really have to die to pay for my sins. When I went forward to accept Christ, I was doing it more because it seemed to be the thing to do, and because I thought that maybe, if I was a Christian, my life would improve. It was not because I saw myself headed for certain ****ation without Christ. Shortly after that, we moved and I stopped going to the Bible studies. While I had not truly given my life to Christ yet, the seed had been planted, but it had been planted on stony ground, it would be many years before my heart was softened enough to let it grow. I mentally believed that Jesus came and died to save sinners, and that mental knowledge would be used by God years later to draw me to Himself.
One day I met a “Ken”. He was much older than I was, around eighteen. He had blue eyes, brown curly hair, and a dimple on his chin. I was enamored with him. At first, he treated me like the annoying little kid I was, but eventually he started to yield to my advances. One day he kissed me and held me. My heart started pounding and began to tremble all over and I thought this was love. We were physically involved, and while we did not “go all the way” we did go way too far. We continued to see each other for a few months, but eventually, he started seeing someone his own age, and went back to treating me like an annoying little kid. I was crushed. I went back to Ted and continued to see him until the next time my family moved.
When I was twelve, my family went to a carnival. My mom, my older sister, and I all hooked up with carnies. My mom started going out with someone called “Red”, my sister was flirting with and clearly interested in a young man in his early twenties who was called “Kid”, and I was involved with “Alex”, a kid a several years older than I, who was working a temporary job at the carnival. When the carnival left town, Red went with it. Alex was not a traveling carny, just a kid with temporary summer job, so Alex and I continued to date.
Kid had been fired and since he had been traveling with the carnival he was now homeless. Kid moved in to my family’s home. He proved to be very charming, a smooth talker, and very seducing. One night when everyone else was sleeping, I lost my virginity with him, I was twelve. I was not completely innocent in this event, I knew what I was doing was wrong. At the same time I do feel that I was too young to be put into this situation, that the adults in charge of me should have protected me from it. But I was a child left to herself, and I made shameful choices. I think my mom could tell that something was going on because a few days later she bought Kid a bus ticket back to his hometown, so he could go home to his parents. He said, “You don’t have to do that for me.” My mom’s response was, “Yes I do, because I want you away from my daughters.” I did not tell Alex what happened, and later when Alex and I were intimate, he thought he was the first one.
Within days of moving in with my Dad, I met “John”, a twenty-eight year old man who didn't see anything wrong with dating a thirteen year old girl. I started going out with him, and he introduced me to PCP. I would go out with him and not come back for several days at a time. Understandably, my Dad did not like this very much and told me that I could not see him. I did anyway. Eventually my Dad let me go back to my mom, who now lived in San Gabriel. In theory I moved in to my mom’s house, but in reality I alternated between staying at my mom’s, staying with John, staying on the street in San Gabriel, and staying wherever I happened to find myself, with whoever I happened to be with. In this time, I did many things that I am not proud of at all, things like prostitution, drug dealing, and other abominations. I took almost every drug in existence at the time, Angel Dust and Super Kools (both forms of PCP), Acid speed, cocaine, crank (methamphetamine), hashish, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and anything else I could get my hands on. About the only drug I declined to do was heroin, because I did not care for needles, but the mainstays of my habit though were PCP and marijuana. Eventually I left San Gabriel altogether and moved in with John. Meanwhile, my Dad had the police trying to find me. It had been over a year since I had left my Dad’s house, and I had not been really living with my mom much at all, so overall I was living as a run-away for about a year and a half.
Eventually my Dad found me and forced me back to his house, only to find out that I was pregnant. He pressured me to have an abortion, offering me no real choice unless I wanted to run away again. Abortion was something I absolutely did not want to do. This was one thing that I did not believe in, even in my sinful, unregenerate state, I knew this was wrong. My Dad kept pressuring, and eventually I gave in. I was so angry at my Dad about this. I went from loving him more than anyone else, which was how I felt about him before moving in with him, to finding him extremely irritating, to hating him with a passion in a few short years. My drinking took a new turn. I had always been a heavy drinker, but before I drank in an effort to have fun, and now I drank with a furious desperation, trying to drown my guilt and anger. My goal when I drank was no longer to “have fun”, but rather, to become oblivious to the world, to become totally unconscious.
I was still seeing John, and the more devoted to him I became, the more abusive he became. One time he beat me up very badly; he broke my ribs and gave me black eye. Another time I was mad at him and tried to leave his house and he pulled me inside and forced himself on me. Things like this were happening more and more often, and one day after a particularly bad beating, I told him if he ever again touched me in a violent way, I would leave him. A few days later, he pushed me down. That was it, I’d had it. It took time to get out of his house because he did not want to let me leave, but once I got away, I filed a restraining order and got him out of my life.
I continued to be involved with many different men and I did not care about most of them at all. There were a few I cared about as friends, but most I did not even care about in that way. In fact, usually, if I really cared about a guy as a friend, I would not get involved with him as a lover because I did not want to “mess up” the friendship. There was however, one exception, which was “Dan”. I cannot really say that I loved him, because I didn't really know what love was until I came to Christ. Nevertheless, as much as was possible for anyone to at that time, Dan had my heart. I truly cared about him. If at any time he had indicated that he wanted to be exclusive, I would have dropped the rest of my boyfriends in a heartbeat. However, Dan preferred things as they were; he was not looking for a relationship. He knew that he had my heart though, he knew that no matter what I was doing or who I was with I would walk away and go with him as soon as he came along. Once we talked about it and had agreed that someday, when we were both ready to settle down, we should think about moving in together.
I continued to drink with the exclusive goal of unconsciousness. I would not stop until I either ran out of booze or could no longer lift the bottle to my lips. One night I got really drunk and did something that was below even my despicably low standards, I won’t go into a lot of detail on this, but when I woke up in the morning, looked around, and realized what I’d done, I knew I had to stop drinking.
I lived with Bernie for about 3 months. Bernie had some very strange religious beliefs. He alternated between seeing himself as a prophet and seeing himself as the Christ. During these months, I read the Bible from cover to cover, but it really didn’t make much sense to me. All that I really accomplished with that reading was to gain enough Bible knowledge to enable myself to blaspheme God on a level I would have been incapable of before. Once while I was with Bernie, I took an oath in which I swore, in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that if I was lying God would strike my name from the Book of Life. Well… I was lying. As soon as I said those words, I felt a dread come over my heart. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I could not. My fear grew more intense every day. The quicksand enclosed around me, and I sank into the darkness of blackest night.
I returned to my Dad’s house where I spent the better part of each day praying, begging God to please forgive me. I called Miss Gray, who assured me that I could be forgiven, and that I didn’t need to wait or do anything to earn it, all I had to do was ask and accept Christ‘s death as the payment for my sin. However, I was not completely convinced. I prayed Psalm 51 over and over again. I was continuously in a state of absolute terror, sure I was going to hell. Years before, I had not really seen myself as a sinner dammed to hell apart from Christ. Now there was no question in my mind about my ****ation apart from the forgiveness of Christ. The barrier now was that I was not sure if that forgiveness would be extended to someone as evil as myself. What I didn't understand then was the beauty of the Gospel: that we are all on equal footing before God. No matter how good we think we are, God's standard is perfection, and we all fall short of it. All it takes is one lie or one lustful thought to fall short of God's standard. No matter how good a person seems to be, they still need His forgiveness, and no matter how bad a person thinks they are, Jesus has still paid the price for all of their sins. There is no one on earth good enough to not need Christ's forgiveness, and there is no one on earth so evil that they are beyond His reach, but I didn’t know that then. Therefore I wanted to die, but was afraid that if I committed suicide I would just end up in hell sooner. I kept calling out to God every day for hours at a time. I was in the dark and terrified, I didn't know that dawn was drawing near.
I was surprised when I got to AA because Dan was there, and he was not a regular at AA. I really hadn’t planned on seeing him. He still had the power to melt my heart just by looking into my eyes. He walked up to me and told me that he was there looking for me, and wanted to talk to me about something. We went outside and Dan told me that he had come into some money and would be moving into a beach house near Santa Monica and wanted me to move in with him. At any other time, this would have been the best thing I could have heard, but at this time, I knew I could not go. I told him that I was trying to get right with God, and that I couldn’t move in with him because I knew that God wouldn’t want me living with someone I wasn’t married to. Then Dan said, “Well, then lets get married. You’re 18, we can do it tonight.” My heart just broke, because I knew I could not think about marriage right then; I had to find a way to get God to forgive me first. So I turned him down, went home, and cried. I am sure that all of these unexpected events, especially Dan’s proposal, were Satan’s efforts to keep me where I was, and make me forget all about responding to God’s pull on my heart. There was a spiritual tug-of-war going on, Satan pulling me one way and God the other, and I wondered who would win.
One day I knelt down on the floor in my mom’s room, just as I had done so many times before. However, this time, I did not beg for Christ’s forgiveness and get up still fearful. This time I realized that I had to choose to put my faith in Him. I prayed, and asked Him to be my savior and Lord. I asked Him to come into my heart and save me. This time I was choosing to take Him at His word and trust in Him to save me despite my doubts. I still had doubt, and I admitted that to Him and asked Him to help me overcome it. I told Him that I was choosing to take Him at His word, and proclaim my Salvation through Him, and Him alone. I told Him that when doubts came I would rebuke them and remember that Christ had purchased me, and that I belonged to Him.
After this I began to grow, I was baptized, I read the Bible each day and prayed, knowing that God accepted me and was hearing my prayers. I had an overwhelming sense of peace and joy, and wanted to share that with everyone. Just like Jacob at Bethel, I had been shown the way to heaven, and had met my Savior. I started going on door-to-door outreaches with a team of people from the Church. Things looked good for me and it seemed like it was smooth sailing from here, maybe that is why I let my guard down, at any rate Satan launched a major attack, and I wasn‘t ready for it.
While the Bible teaches that sin is sin, and that God does not weigh sin or view one sin as worse than the other, we as humans do weigh sin. We all have some idea of what is the worst sin possible. All of us have one thing, or several things, that to us, according to our view of the world, our experiences, and our own opinions, are the most despicable things a human being can do. What this is may be different for each of us. For many people the worst thing you could do would be murder. For someone else it will something different. So here is what I want you to do, get that thing in mind, it does not really matter what it is, as long as you know it is what you personally see as the worst thing a human being can possibly do. Get that horrible deed in mind. Now, imagine that in a moment of utter stupidity, you have done that thing.
Imagine how you would feel about yourself.
Imagine how hard it would be for you to look in the mirror, to go on living. How hard it would be for you to admit, even to yourself, that you had done it.
If you are a born again Christian, imagine that you had done this thing AFTER coming to Christ, so that you could not even claim to have done it in ignorance, so that you could not even claim that it was the "old, unsaved you" who had done it. Imagine how tempting it would be to rationalize it, call it something else, put it out of your mind, and deny it ever happened. Imagine how tempting it would even be to deny that you were really saved when it happened, to tell yourself that you were still in an unregenerate state at that time.
Now that you are imagining all of this, you have an idea where I was. I had committed the sin that, according to my judgment, my take on the world and life, was, if not the worst, certainly one of the worst, despicable, disgusting, vile things a person could do; and I had done it after coming to Christ and putting my faith in Him. I had done many horrible things before coming to Christ, and I now hated those things, but I was able to live with them because I knew that I done them before being made a new creation in Christ. This thing hit me hard, because I had a new nature, and this action was something that was completely contrary to that new nature.
So how did I respond?
I ran. I ran back toward the darkness that I hoped would hide me. I denied it really happened. I tried to call it something else. I still felt the conviction about what it really was, so I denied Christ by denying to myself that I knew Him at that time. But, of course, He was still with me. All along, He was still with me. I could deny Him, but He would not deny me. He still was present in my heart, so I still felt a tug to fellowship with Him, and that tug would not allow me to walk away from Him completely.
So what did I do? First, I changed churches. I went to a special meeting one night at a local Church called Faith Fellowship. This meeting had a visiting speaker who talked about his work in the mission field. He described demon possession in great detail. As I sat listening to all this, I decided that this explained it. I reasoned that of course, I was possessed, and if possessed, then unsaved. They had an altar call afterward, and I went forward. They “cast the demon out of me”. It’s hard to explain the self-deception that was going on in my mind. On the one hand, part of me knew that I was not demon possessed. Part of me knew that I had been saved for some time. Another part of me would not face that reality. I may have been oppressed by a demon, and in fact, I am pretty sure I was oppressed, but I was not possessed. With all of the emotional hype and powers of suggestion, along with my desperation to distance myself from this sin, I was able to convince myself that it was a demon in me that caused me to do this evil thing. I did as those who were “casting out the demon” seemed to expect of me, and I probably committed worse blasphemy with those actions than I ever did before I knew Christ. Whatever else happened to me there that night, deep in my heart I was still on the run.
I ran for twenty years.
God still worked in my life. He blessed me with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He brought me a wonderful husband and three beautiful children. He taught me spiritual truths. He used me to share the gospel with my mom, and lead her to Him before she passed away. He moved me to Calvary Chapel, a good church with solid teaching where I could grow in Him. He used me in ministry. He gave me some moments of joy and a few times when the Holy Spirit moved in me, and through me, in powerful ways. Sadly though, for the most part, I was manufacturing the "spiritual life" through the "power" of my flesh. While I cannot deny that the Holy Spirit did work through me at times, I also cannot deny that a great deal of what I did for the next twenty years was just my own efforts in the flesh.
The heart can be so deceptive, that it can almost convince itself that a lie is the truth. I so wanted to believe that I had not done this thing as a Christian, that I almost believed that my Salvation had truly happened later. I would share my "testimony", giving that later date as the time of my Salvation. I was baptized again, saying that I had never been baptized since coming to Christ. I pointed out Faith Fellowship Church to my kids and told them that it was where I had become a Christian. I did and said these things without consciously lying to others, I had lied to myself for so long that I was starting to believe it. In my heart, I began to be truly confused about exactly when I was first saved. Twenty years of deluding oneself can be quite confusing.
For twenty years, I ran. For twenty years, no matter what happened, Satan stole my joy. Whenever anything good happened, when I would find myself happy, the voice of my accuser would say, "You don't deserve this! How dare you be happy! You are scum! How can you be happy after what you've done? How dare you experience joy when you have hurt others the way you have!" This is what happened for twenty years.
When I got the blood test back that showed that I did not have the deadly disease I feared, I was only happy for moment before Satan took that joy away.
At the time of my wedding, when I was caught up in love for the man God chose for me, in the back of my mind was the thought that I didn't deserve that man, that if he really knew all about me, he wouldn't be marrying me.
At the births of each of my children, as my heart swelled with love and joy over the incredible gift of life, the enemy was there accusing and taking that joy away.
For twenty years, this went on. Twenty years in the wilderness, twenty years in a desert, twenty years in choking darkness with no sign of light of at the end of the tunnel.
Then God said, "Enough!"
One day, I got a phone call from one of the people I hurt through my sin. This phone call gave me a chance to come clean and ask for forgiveness. Instead, I denied again what I had done, and tried to rationalize it and explain it away.
Then God blessed my husband with personal revival and my husband was telling me about it all the time. He constantly jabbered about how God was blessing him, how God was amazing and God's Spirit was so awesome. On and on he went, expounding on the greatness of God. I could not take this! My husband would not shut up about the awesome work of God, and in the meantime, I was feeling like a dried out piece of filth that was petrifying in the desert.
I prayed. "God, why am I so dry? My husband has such joy, why do I have no joy? Why is my spirit shriveled and dying inside me? What is wrong?"
Of course, God showed me what the problem was, and of course, I tried to run again. I tried to hide my pain and pretend to share in my husband's joy. I plastered a fake smile on my face and tried to act like nothing was wrong.
The message moved me, and I felt compelled to talk to Joel after service. I really did not plan to come clean about this issue. I had so deeply buried it that I was able to sometimes forget about it, and focus instead on surface issues. That is what I started doing that night. I confessed to Joel that I had drunk a few wine coolers a few days before, and had hidden them from my husband because I knew he would worry about me drinking. Drinking a few wine coolers was not really a major issue, I hadn't become drunk. I had gotten away with it and had already disposed of the bottles. I told Joel about it, and then I said, "You know, it's really messed up when you get away with something, but you don't really get away with it. You don't get caught, but you feel guilty, and your own guilt won't really let you get away with it."
Joel said something to the effect that guilt and shame were terrible burdens to carry.
Those two words, "guilt" and "shame"… those two words struck a chord somewhere deep within my heart. I said, "Guilt and shame, yeah, I know all about that. It's like having a weight hanging on your neck, dragging you down wherever you go, and having a thick cloud of darkness around you all the time, choking you so that you can't breathe."
I think Joel realized that I was talking about something more serious than drinking a few wine coolers in secret. He waited for me to continue. I told him that I had done something once, years ago, that I just could not get past. We talked for a while, and finally he turned to me and said, "Why don't you just tell me what it was?" I gasped. I shook my head. I looked around to make sure no one else was in earshot. I looked at him and opened my mouth but the sound would not come out. I wanted to run away. Finally, in a whisper, I told him. He did not condemn me; he just sat there still smiling at me. I covered my mouth as if somehow I could stuff the words back in. I was overcome with a sudden rush of sorrow, not of being caught, but of having done this thing in the first place. At the same time was a huge sense of release after having finally named the sin after twenty years. We talked more, and I do not remember very much of what we said. However, during the conversation, I purposely left out that the one of the people I had sinned against had once confronted me and I had denied the sin. My biggest fear that I would have to go to this person, or to another person who was actually the one most hurt by my sin, and ask for their forgiveness. I knew if I did that, I would be at their mercy, and if they wished to, they could cause great havoc to my life and especially to my family. Even though in one sense I had repented immediately after that sin, because I was sorry and never did anything like it again, in another sense, my repentance was not complete until I was willing to confess it and face whatever consequences there would be. The consequences could have been devastating, and I was just not willing to lay it all on the line for Jesus. Therefore, I did not tell Joel about being confronted before, I was afraid that he would tell me that I had to go to these people and seek reconciliation.
The next day I went through a very dark time, a time that included self abuse, and thoughts of suicide. Again just like Jacob, I was wrestling with God, fighting against what I knew I needed to do. Finally I came to realize that I needed to tell Joel the whole story. I called him up and told him about the conversation where I had once again denied my sin. He told me that we would pray and have more counseling over it to decide what I should do now.
Since then, God has showed me even more how foolish I was. I could have had a fresh start with Him at any point in time. All I had to do was finally obey Him and confess what I had done. But I was scared and stubborn, and so I wandered about in a desert of guilt and shame for twenty years. During that time, God did produce some fruit in my life, but that fruit was severely limited because I would not yield totally to Him. For twenty years, a lot of time that should have been spent in His service was wasted. Well, I cannot get those twenty years back, but I know that I do not want to waste another day by not yielding to His will. Through His grace, He brought me to the point where I was willing to lay everything on the line for the sake of my relationship with Him. He brought me to the point where doing what He was calling me to do was more important to me than anything, or anyone, else in my life. It was only through His grace, because in myself, in my own power, I could not reach that point. In my own power all I could do is run some more. He did it through me. It is all Him. All of it was the work of His grace. I had stopped wrestling with God, and then just like Jacob, I went from fighting Him to clinging to Him, never wanting to let go.
As I look at all of the blessings in my life today, all of the mighty things God has done in me and for me, I can say, just like the apostle Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “But by the grace of God I am what I am…” My prayer is that from this point on I will yield to Him, and allow His grace to work through me so that He can use me for His glory. So that I will also be able to truly say, just as Paul said in the second half of that verse, “and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” Paul was not worthy, and neither am I. Paul states his own unworthiness in context around that verse; “For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” The grace of God working through Paul is what enabled him to serve God, to labor abundantly in the cause of the Gospel. My prayer now is that I will not get in the way, but will allow His grace to move through me, so that I may be used in the cause of His gospel as well.
Since finally yielding to my Lord completely, I am so exhilarated in God's forgiveness. I feel like climbing up to the housetops and shouting out how amazing God's love is. I realize how God orchestrated things. How he drew my husband closer to Christ and used that to stir in me a sense of holy jealousy for that closeness to Christ. How He used Joel's teachings in Genesis to show me that just like Jacob, I have been on the run for twenty years. He has been working in my heart, through all of the circumstances, to make me ready to finally, at last, come out of the desert. Out of the darkness, and into His glorious light.
In this light, my sin was exposed, but in this light, I was also able to finally see, finally realize, that Christ had already paid the price for my sin.
God has made me clean. He has set me free. He has brought me into the light of His love and His truth, and I never, ever, want to go back into darkness again.
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Introduction
This is a Testimony of the awesome grace of God in my life, of how God drew me to Himself through Christ. In sharing this story, I do not want to take it upon myself to uncover the sins of others. It is my right to confess my own sins, but not my right to publish the sins of others without their permission. For this reason, throughout this account, names have been changed.The Hardening of a Heart
My childhood before the age of seven was fairly normal. I have many happy memories of family gatherings, Easter egg hunts, camping trips, fishing, hiking, playing games, family story telling, and one of my favorite memories, riding on my Dad’s motorcycle with him. So my early childhood was, in many ways, a happy time. However, there are a few memories that stand out in stark contrast to those happy times. For example, in the apartment next door to us lived a family that had some very serious problems. The mom was mentally ill, the Dad was out of the picture, and it is clear that both of the children had suffered extreme sexual abuse. The older of the two kids was in her teens, and the other child was about two years older than I was. I spent a lot of time playing at their house, and when I was three years old, I was sexually abused there. This continued to happen regularly until we moved away sometime when I was around seven. I hold no grudge against them because the one girl was too young blame, and the older one, while old enough that she should have known better, had clearly been raised in such a way that this kind of thing probably seemed normal to her. While I hold no grudge, I also have to acknowledge that these things had a deep impact on my life. My life took a different direction from here on, the innocence of my childhood was gone, and I never got it back. There was a relative of mine who was also molested at this house; she was two years older than I was. Because we were related, I did not lose contact with her when I moved away from there. As children who are abused often do, we acted out our abuse in our play together so the abusive atmosphere continued from this point on.
Another thing that stands out is something that happened when I was about five years old. I was in the care of an adult, and I did something that made the adult angry. There were three neighbor kids present at the time, two girls and one boy; and my punishment was that I had to take off all my clothes in front of those friends, and had to stay in the room with them and play. I cannot describe how this made me feel, except to say it was a combination of feeling embarrassed, wishing I could disappear, and feeling like I was disgusting and dirty. I remember begging to go to bed so I could cover up, and being told no. I remember hiding in the bathroom and being scolded and sent back into the room. Something in me hardened that day, as my friends looked at me and I tried to ignore their stares and continue playing. Something changed, petrified, in my heart. I reached a point where I did not care anymore. I put up a wall in my heart and decided that no one would cross it again. That is not to say that I stopped caring about people, but I decided that their opinions just could not matter anymore. I decided it didn't matter if they stared, I just didn't care. After what seemed like hours, my friends went home and I was finally allowed to get dressed. This event taught me how to retreat within myself and shield myself from hurt and from shame. I ended up using that tactic a lot in the coming years.
Sometime when I was around seven, my family moved. We were not in our new house for long before my parents got divorced. Afterwards, my mom seemed to lose her mind. She started drinking all the time and doing drugs. Men cycled in and out of her life. One of those men, “Steve”, moved in with us and was supposed to watch me while my mom went to work, but instead taught me how to smoke marijuana. This marijuana use continued throughout the rest of my childhood, and eventually both my mom and my dad also encouraged the habit in me. Steve also had a lot of pornography around and saw no need to hide it from me. I saw many magazines and several very hardcore movies while he lived with us. This started me down a road that took over thirty years to get off. Still, I was attached to him; I cared about him; in some way, I loved him. One day he told me that he and my mom were breaking up, and he would moving out the next day. When I heard that I went into a rage and started screaming and hitting him and telling him that I hated him. The next day, when he tried to walk out the door, I held on to him and begged him not to go, and told him that I loved him. He left anyway, and after that, I never grew attached to another of my mom’s many boyfriends. I was determined to remain indifferent to them.
Spiritual Forces
The years went by and my mom continued to drink and to be involved with different men. The sexually abusive play that went on between that relative and myself continued until I was around 10 and the relative was around 12, at which point we started to grow up enough to realize that behavior like that was not really normal, and we stopped.My family moved a lot, I never stayed in a school long enough to make friends. I won’t mention every time we moved to a new house, a new neighborhood, instead I’ll just point out that after my parents divorced when I was seven, until I was twelve, we lived in five different houses. That averages about one a year. Each move took us farther and farther away from where my dad lived. Nevertheless my dad continued to make the increasingly long trip every other weekend to bring me to his house to visit.
One summer we took a trip to visit relatives in Utah; I could not have been much older than eight or nine at the time. While we were there, I had a very bizarre experience involving “pretend” worship of Satan that I later realized was not so pretend. I do not know exactly what happened on the spiritual level, but I know that something did, something dark. There were spiritual forces at work. I do not want to spell out and repeat everything here, but just want to say that this event had a huge impact on me. When we left Utah, my mom’s stepbrother, “Randy” came back with us. He became my mom’s boyfriend and moved in with us.
Seed on Stony Ground
When I was in sixth grade, I started to become quite disruptive in school. My class had a regular teacher, and a special math teacher, “Miss Gray” who was there to assist struggling kids. One day, for no particular reason, I turned toward Miss Gray and flipped her off. She ignored it the first two times I did it, but I persisted and the third time she assigned me to detention. Her idea of detention was to sit in the classroom with me and talk. She became a good friend, and eventually invited me to a Bible study she attended on Friday nights. I could tell that she cared about me, and I listened attentively to all that she said about Jesus. Once she took to me to a Christian concert and I went forward to accept Christ, but I did not really yield to Him at that time, I had what I have since come to know as a false conversion. I wanted what Jesus could do for me in this life. I really did not understand at this point that I personally, was a sinner in desperate need of a savior. I understood in a general sense that nobody was perfect, but I reasoned that since no one was perfect, I was no worse than anyone else was, and I figured that God would, of course, forgive me. I certainly did not think I had done anything bad enough that someone would really have to die to pay for my sins. When I went forward to accept Christ, I was doing it more because it seemed to be the thing to do, and because I thought that maybe, if I was a Christian, my life would improve. It was not because I saw myself headed for certain ****ation without Christ. Shortly after that, we moved and I stopped going to the Bible studies. While I had not truly given my life to Christ yet, the seed had been planted, but it had been planted on stony ground, it would be many years before my heart was softened enough to let it grow. I mentally believed that Jesus came and died to save sinners, and that mental knowledge would be used by God years later to draw me to Himself.
A Child Left to Herself
When I was eleven my little sister was born. It was clear from her appearance that she had Hispanic blood in her veins, and so could not be Randy’s child. So Randy left and shortly after this, my mom moved in with her stepsister and my two cousins. Home life settled down to a fairly normal one at this point. Outside the walls of the house was something else. I was eleven going on twenty-five. I drank whiskey straight from the bottle, I smoked cigarettes, and weed, and experimented with other drugs. I felt lonely and the first thing to enter my mind was that I needed a boyfriend. My first boyfriend was a kid from school named "Ted". We never did anything but sit around smoking weed and listening to music. On occasion, we would drink beer together, but Ted never did want to join in with my heavier drinking of hard liquor, and wasn’t all that interested in other drugs aside from weed. So I ran with many other friends in pursuit of a better high. One day I met a “Ken”. He was much older than I was, around eighteen. He had blue eyes, brown curly hair, and a dimple on his chin. I was enamored with him. At first, he treated me like the annoying little kid I was, but eventually he started to yield to my advances. One day he kissed me and held me. My heart started pounding and began to tremble all over and I thought this was love. We were physically involved, and while we did not “go all the way” we did go way too far. We continued to see each other for a few months, but eventually, he started seeing someone his own age, and went back to treating me like an annoying little kid. I was crushed. I went back to Ted and continued to see him until the next time my family moved.
When I was twelve, my family went to a carnival. My mom, my older sister, and I all hooked up with carnies. My mom started going out with someone called “Red”, my sister was flirting with and clearly interested in a young man in his early twenties who was called “Kid”, and I was involved with “Alex”, a kid a several years older than I, who was working a temporary job at the carnival. When the carnival left town, Red went with it. Alex was not a traveling carny, just a kid with temporary summer job, so Alex and I continued to date.
Kid had been fired and since he had been traveling with the carnival he was now homeless. Kid moved in to my family’s home. He proved to be very charming, a smooth talker, and very seducing. One night when everyone else was sleeping, I lost my virginity with him, I was twelve. I was not completely innocent in this event, I knew what I was doing was wrong. At the same time I do feel that I was too young to be put into this situation, that the adults in charge of me should have protected me from it. But I was a child left to herself, and I made shameful choices. I think my mom could tell that something was going on because a few days later she bought Kid a bus ticket back to his hometown, so he could go home to his parents. He said, “You don’t have to do that for me.” My mom’s response was, “Yes I do, because I want you away from my daughters.” I did not tell Alex what happened, and later when Alex and I were intimate, he thought he was the first one.
Rebellion
When I was thirteen my mom threw me out of her house and I moved in with my Dad. My Dad had been visiting me twice a month throughout my childhood, but he really did not know me very well. When I visited him, I would act like an innocent little kid, playing in the pool, building sand castles, and things like that. Now that I moved in with him he discovered that he had a wild teenager on his hands. He was shocked to find out that I smoked cigarettes in addition to marijuana, was sexually active, and drank heavily whenever I got the chance to. My Dad tried his best to straighten me out, but there were years of damage already done. He tried to set reasonable limits, but I had been looking out for myself since I was seven or eight years old. I had been deciding what I would do all this time, and the only thing that I had to be sure of was not to inconvenience or irritate the adults around me. If I didn't bother them, they didn't really care what I did. Now I suddenly had someone trying to parent me, trying to tell me what to do, acting as if he knew better than I did, and I rebelled. Within days of moving in with my Dad, I met “John”, a twenty-eight year old man who didn't see anything wrong with dating a thirteen year old girl. I started going out with him, and he introduced me to PCP. I would go out with him and not come back for several days at a time. Understandably, my Dad did not like this very much and told me that I could not see him. I did anyway. Eventually my Dad let me go back to my mom, who now lived in San Gabriel. In theory I moved in to my mom’s house, but in reality I alternated between staying at my mom’s, staying with John, staying on the street in San Gabriel, and staying wherever I happened to find myself, with whoever I happened to be with. In this time, I did many things that I am not proud of at all, things like prostitution, drug dealing, and other abominations. I took almost every drug in existence at the time, Angel Dust and Super Kools (both forms of PCP), Acid speed, cocaine, crank (methamphetamine), hashish, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and anything else I could get my hands on. About the only drug I declined to do was heroin, because I did not care for needles, but the mainstays of my habit though were PCP and marijuana. Eventually I left San Gabriel altogether and moved in with John. Meanwhile, my Dad had the police trying to find me. It had been over a year since I had left my Dad’s house, and I had not been really living with my mom much at all, so overall I was living as a run-away for about a year and a half.
Eventually my Dad found me and forced me back to his house, only to find out that I was pregnant. He pressured me to have an abortion, offering me no real choice unless I wanted to run away again. Abortion was something I absolutely did not want to do. This was one thing that I did not believe in, even in my sinful, unregenerate state, I knew this was wrong. My Dad kept pressuring, and eventually I gave in. I was so angry at my Dad about this. I went from loving him more than anyone else, which was how I felt about him before moving in with him, to finding him extremely irritating, to hating him with a passion in a few short years. My drinking took a new turn. I had always been a heavy drinker, but before I drank in an effort to have fun, and now I drank with a furious desperation, trying to drown my guilt and anger. My goal when I drank was no longer to “have fun”, but rather, to become oblivious to the world, to become totally unconscious.
I was still seeing John, and the more devoted to him I became, the more abusive he became. One time he beat me up very badly; he broke my ribs and gave me black eye. Another time I was mad at him and tried to leave his house and he pulled me inside and forced himself on me. Things like this were happening more and more often, and one day after a particularly bad beating, I told him if he ever again touched me in a violent way, I would leave him. A few days later, he pushed me down. That was it, I’d had it. It took time to get out of his house because he did not want to let me leave, but once I got away, I filed a restraining order and got him out of my life.
Struggling in Quicksand
I started making an effort to get my life together. I really tried to go to school every day, come home every night, stop drinking, lay off the hard drugs… etc. I recognized that my Dad’s expectations were reasonable and right and I tried to meet them. With some things, I would succeed for a few months, with some a few weeks, and with some only days… but I always failed eventually. I knew that I should be able to do what my Dad asked of me, but for some reason, I just could not maintain it. Eventually I would always fall back into my old habits. I felt like I was struggling in quicksand, and the harder I struggled, the deeper I sank. I gave up started spending most of my time at the local park, hanging out with a group people I felt comfortable around, most of whom were homeless. We sat around drinking, taking drugs when we could, and listening to my radio. I continued to be involved with many different men and I did not care about most of them at all. There were a few I cared about as friends, but most I did not even care about in that way. In fact, usually, if I really cared about a guy as a friend, I would not get involved with him as a lover because I did not want to “mess up” the friendship. There was however, one exception, which was “Dan”. I cannot really say that I loved him, because I didn't really know what love was until I came to Christ. Nevertheless, as much as was possible for anyone to at that time, Dan had my heart. I truly cared about him. If at any time he had indicated that he wanted to be exclusive, I would have dropped the rest of my boyfriends in a heartbeat. However, Dan preferred things as they were; he was not looking for a relationship. He knew that he had my heart though, he knew that no matter what I was doing or who I was with I would walk away and go with him as soon as he came along. Once we talked about it and had agreed that someday, when we were both ready to settle down, we should think about moving in together.
I continued to drink with the exclusive goal of unconsciousness. I would not stop until I either ran out of booze or could no longer lift the bottle to my lips. One night I got really drunk and did something that was below even my despicably low standards, I won’t go into a lot of detail on this, but when I woke up in the morning, looked around, and realized what I’d done, I knew I had to stop drinking.
Sinking into Darkness
I went to AA, and I did stop drinking. I had a few slips, but they never lasted long, for the most part I remained sober after this, at least as far as alcohol goes. I still smoked weed and took speed, and wasn’t opposed to harder drugs when I could get them. It was at AA that I met “Bernie”. Bernie was older than my Dad, and very eccentric. He always spoke in a cryptic style that made me curious. I started hanging around with him, and eventually I ran away again. Bernie and I lived in a camper at the old train station.I lived with Bernie for about 3 months. Bernie had some very strange religious beliefs. He alternated between seeing himself as a prophet and seeing himself as the Christ. During these months, I read the Bible from cover to cover, but it really didn’t make much sense to me. All that I really accomplished with that reading was to gain enough Bible knowledge to enable myself to blaspheme God on a level I would have been incapable of before. Once while I was with Bernie, I took an oath in which I swore, in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that if I was lying God would strike my name from the Book of Life. Well… I was lying. As soon as I said those words, I felt a dread come over my heart. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I could not. My fear grew more intense every day. The quicksand enclosed around me, and I sank into the darkness of blackest night.
Terror Before Dawn
Finally, one morning, I woke up and was so full of terror that I knew I had to do something. I knew I deserved hell. I knew that God had every justification for sending me there. I was afraid that I’d gone too far, that there might not be any hope for me, but, because of what Miss Gray had told me years before, I knew if there was ANY hope, it was found in Jesus Christ. I wondered though, if Christ could possibly come into a heart as filthy as mine. I figured I had to do something, some kind of penance, or to be good for some period of time before I could even hope for Him to hear me. I left Bernie that morning without really explaining why, though before I left I did confess to him that I had lied when I took that oath. I returned to my Dad’s house where I spent the better part of each day praying, begging God to please forgive me. I called Miss Gray, who assured me that I could be forgiven, and that I didn’t need to wait or do anything to earn it, all I had to do was ask and accept Christ‘s death as the payment for my sin. However, I was not completely convinced. I prayed Psalm 51 over and over again. I was continuously in a state of absolute terror, sure I was going to hell. Years before, I had not really seen myself as a sinner dammed to hell apart from Christ. Now there was no question in my mind about my ****ation apart from the forgiveness of Christ. The barrier now was that I was not sure if that forgiveness would be extended to someone as evil as myself. What I didn't understand then was the beauty of the Gospel: that we are all on equal footing before God. No matter how good we think we are, God's standard is perfection, and we all fall short of it. All it takes is one lie or one lustful thought to fall short of God's standard. No matter how good a person seems to be, they still need His forgiveness, and no matter how bad a person thinks they are, Jesus has still paid the price for all of their sins. There is no one on earth good enough to not need Christ's forgiveness, and there is no one on earth so evil that they are beyond His reach, but I didn’t know that then. Therefore I wanted to die, but was afraid that if I committed suicide I would just end up in hell sooner. I kept calling out to God every day for hours at a time. I was in the dark and terrified, I didn't know that dawn was drawing near.
Spiritual Tug-of-War
I think that Satan realized he was in danger of losing me. I think he knew that if he did not do something, God would keep drawing me, I would keep calling out to God, and that eventually God would get it through to me that He loved me and that through Christ I could be forgiven. Satan tried every tactic to get me to just forget about it and go on living as I had. First, out of the blue, Ricky, one of my old boyfriends, showed up at my door. He said he wanted to talk to me about something and we went out to his car where he said he had accepted Christ as his savior. Then he offered to smoke a joint with me and asked if I would want to move in with in with him. I will not comment on his salvation, but I knew that God would not want me to live with a man I was not married to and sit around smoking weed, so I declined. Over the next few days, I ran into several friends, who all seemed very eager to pull me completely back into the party scene. I decided I would be better off if I just left town. My mom had moved to Washington State a few years before, and I told my Dad I wanted to go to Washington and move in with her. My dad called my mom and made the arrangements. I would leave in two days. The next day I packed everything I could fit into the back of my Ford Pinto. Then I went down to the AA hall to say goodbye to some old friends. I was surprised when I got to AA because Dan was there, and he was not a regular at AA. I really hadn’t planned on seeing him. He still had the power to melt my heart just by looking into my eyes. He walked up to me and told me that he was there looking for me, and wanted to talk to me about something. We went outside and Dan told me that he had come into some money and would be moving into a beach house near Santa Monica and wanted me to move in with him. At any other time, this would have been the best thing I could have heard, but at this time, I knew I could not go. I told him that I was trying to get right with God, and that I couldn’t move in with him because I knew that God wouldn’t want me living with someone I wasn’t married to. Then Dan said, “Well, then lets get married. You’re 18, we can do it tonight.” My heart just broke, because I knew I could not think about marriage right then; I had to find a way to get God to forgive me first. So I turned him down, went home, and cried. I am sure that all of these unexpected events, especially Dan’s proposal, were Satan’s efforts to keep me where I was, and make me forget all about responding to God’s pull on my heart. There was a spiritual tug-of-war going on, Satan pulling me one way and God the other, and I wondered who would win.
My Bethel
Once I arrived in Washington I started going to Bayside, an Assemblies of God Church. I was still filled with terror and dread. Every day I would get on my knees and beg God’s forgiveness, beg Jesus to come into my heart. Every day I would get up off my knees still convinced I was going to hell, still not able accept that Christ’s death was sufficient to cover the heinous blasphemy I had committed. Nevertheless, when I was at Church hearing God’s word horrifying dread lifted off me. The music soothed me, the message of God’s forgiveness and love started sinking in. I was slowly coming to understand the Gospel on a heart level, instead of just a head level.One day I knelt down on the floor in my mom’s room, just as I had done so many times before. However, this time, I did not beg for Christ’s forgiveness and get up still fearful. This time I realized that I had to choose to put my faith in Him. I prayed, and asked Him to be my savior and Lord. I asked Him to come into my heart and save me. This time I was choosing to take Him at His word and trust in Him to save me despite my doubts. I still had doubt, and I admitted that to Him and asked Him to help me overcome it. I told Him that I was choosing to take Him at His word, and proclaim my Salvation through Him, and Him alone. I told Him that when doubts came I would rebuke them and remember that Christ had purchased me, and that I belonged to Him.
After this I began to grow, I was baptized, I read the Bible each day and prayed, knowing that God accepted me and was hearing my prayers. I had an overwhelming sense of peace and joy, and wanted to share that with everyone. Just like Jacob at Bethel, I had been shown the way to heaven, and had met my Savior. I started going on door-to-door outreaches with a team of people from the Church. Things looked good for me and it seemed like it was smooth sailing from here, maybe that is why I let my guard down, at any rate Satan launched a major attack, and I wasn‘t ready for it.
Running for the Cover of Darkness
One day, in moment, without thinking, I did something awful. I will not say what it was because God does not call us to air our dirty laundry for all to see, He calls us to bring it to Him and let Him wash away every stain, but to help you imagine how serious it was, I want you to take part in a little exercise with me:While the Bible teaches that sin is sin, and that God does not weigh sin or view one sin as worse than the other, we as humans do weigh sin. We all have some idea of what is the worst sin possible. All of us have one thing, or several things, that to us, according to our view of the world, our experiences, and our own opinions, are the most despicable things a human being can do. What this is may be different for each of us. For many people the worst thing you could do would be murder. For someone else it will something different. So here is what I want you to do, get that thing in mind, it does not really matter what it is, as long as you know it is what you personally see as the worst thing a human being can possibly do. Get that horrible deed in mind. Now, imagine that in a moment of utter stupidity, you have done that thing.
Imagine how you would feel about yourself.
Imagine how hard it would be for you to look in the mirror, to go on living. How hard it would be for you to admit, even to yourself, that you had done it.
If you are a born again Christian, imagine that you had done this thing AFTER coming to Christ, so that you could not even claim to have done it in ignorance, so that you could not even claim that it was the "old, unsaved you" who had done it. Imagine how tempting it would be to rationalize it, call it something else, put it out of your mind, and deny it ever happened. Imagine how tempting it would even be to deny that you were really saved when it happened, to tell yourself that you were still in an unregenerate state at that time.
Now that you are imagining all of this, you have an idea where I was. I had committed the sin that, according to my judgment, my take on the world and life, was, if not the worst, certainly one of the worst, despicable, disgusting, vile things a person could do; and I had done it after coming to Christ and putting my faith in Him. I had done many horrible things before coming to Christ, and I now hated those things, but I was able to live with them because I knew that I done them before being made a new creation in Christ. This thing hit me hard, because I had a new nature, and this action was something that was completely contrary to that new nature.
So how did I respond?
I ran. I ran back toward the darkness that I hoped would hide me. I denied it really happened. I tried to call it something else. I still felt the conviction about what it really was, so I denied Christ by denying to myself that I knew Him at that time. But, of course, He was still with me. All along, He was still with me. I could deny Him, but He would not deny me. He still was present in my heart, so I still felt a tug to fellowship with Him, and that tug would not allow me to walk away from Him completely.
So what did I do? First, I changed churches. I went to a special meeting one night at a local Church called Faith Fellowship. This meeting had a visiting speaker who talked about his work in the mission field. He described demon possession in great detail. As I sat listening to all this, I decided that this explained it. I reasoned that of course, I was possessed, and if possessed, then unsaved. They had an altar call afterward, and I went forward. They “cast the demon out of me”. It’s hard to explain the self-deception that was going on in my mind. On the one hand, part of me knew that I was not demon possessed. Part of me knew that I had been saved for some time. Another part of me would not face that reality. I may have been oppressed by a demon, and in fact, I am pretty sure I was oppressed, but I was not possessed. With all of the emotional hype and powers of suggestion, along with my desperation to distance myself from this sin, I was able to convince myself that it was a demon in me that caused me to do this evil thing. I did as those who were “casting out the demon” seemed to expect of me, and I probably committed worse blasphemy with those actions than I ever did before I knew Christ. Whatever else happened to me there that night, deep in my heart I was still on the run.
I ran for twenty years.
God still worked in my life. He blessed me with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He brought me a wonderful husband and three beautiful children. He taught me spiritual truths. He used me to share the gospel with my mom, and lead her to Him before she passed away. He moved me to Calvary Chapel, a good church with solid teaching where I could grow in Him. He used me in ministry. He gave me some moments of joy and a few times when the Holy Spirit moved in me, and through me, in powerful ways. Sadly though, for the most part, I was manufacturing the "spiritual life" through the "power" of my flesh. While I cannot deny that the Holy Spirit did work through me at times, I also cannot deny that a great deal of what I did for the next twenty years was just my own efforts in the flesh.
The heart can be so deceptive, that it can almost convince itself that a lie is the truth. I so wanted to believe that I had not done this thing as a Christian, that I almost believed that my Salvation had truly happened later. I would share my "testimony", giving that later date as the time of my Salvation. I was baptized again, saying that I had never been baptized since coming to Christ. I pointed out Faith Fellowship Church to my kids and told them that it was where I had become a Christian. I did and said these things without consciously lying to others, I had lied to myself for so long that I was starting to believe it. In my heart, I began to be truly confused about exactly when I was first saved. Twenty years of deluding oneself can be quite confusing.
For twenty years, I ran. For twenty years, no matter what happened, Satan stole my joy. Whenever anything good happened, when I would find myself happy, the voice of my accuser would say, "You don't deserve this! How dare you be happy! You are scum! How can you be happy after what you've done? How dare you experience joy when you have hurt others the way you have!" This is what happened for twenty years.
When I got the blood test back that showed that I did not have the deadly disease I feared, I was only happy for moment before Satan took that joy away.
At the time of my wedding, when I was caught up in love for the man God chose for me, in the back of my mind was the thought that I didn't deserve that man, that if he really knew all about me, he wouldn't be marrying me.
At the births of each of my children, as my heart swelled with love and joy over the incredible gift of life, the enemy was there accusing and taking that joy away.
For twenty years, this went on. Twenty years in the wilderness, twenty years in a desert, twenty years in choking darkness with no sign of light of at the end of the tunnel.
Then God said, "Enough!"
One day, I got a phone call from one of the people I hurt through my sin. This phone call gave me a chance to come clean and ask for forgiveness. Instead, I denied again what I had done, and tried to rationalize it and explain it away.
Then God blessed my husband with personal revival and my husband was telling me about it all the time. He constantly jabbered about how God was blessing him, how God was amazing and God's Spirit was so awesome. On and on he went, expounding on the greatness of God. I could not take this! My husband would not shut up about the awesome work of God, and in the meantime, I was feeling like a dried out piece of filth that was petrifying in the desert.
I prayed. "God, why am I so dry? My husband has such joy, why do I have no joy? Why is my spirit shriveled and dying inside me? What is wrong?"
Of course, God showed me what the problem was, and of course, I tried to run again. I tried to hide my pain and pretend to share in my husband's joy. I plastered a fake smile on my face and tried to act like nothing was wrong.
Wrestling With God
Then one Wednesday night Joel, the pastor of our church, gave a message. The scripture passage was about Jacob and Esau, and how Jacob stole his father's blessing from his brother. One of the points made was how Jacob argued with his mom as she planned the deception, how he told her that if his father caught him doing this, he would “seem” to be a deceiver and would bring on himself a curse instead of a blessing. Joel talked about how we are worried about our reputation, but God is concerned with our character. Jacob, rather than being concerned with the fact that if he did this he would truly be a deceiver, was worried that if he was caught he would "seem to be" one. In other words, he was more concerned with what others thought of him then with what kind of person he was inside.The message moved me, and I felt compelled to talk to Joel after service. I really did not plan to come clean about this issue. I had so deeply buried it that I was able to sometimes forget about it, and focus instead on surface issues. That is what I started doing that night. I confessed to Joel that I had drunk a few wine coolers a few days before, and had hidden them from my husband because I knew he would worry about me drinking. Drinking a few wine coolers was not really a major issue, I hadn't become drunk. I had gotten away with it and had already disposed of the bottles. I told Joel about it, and then I said, "You know, it's really messed up when you get away with something, but you don't really get away with it. You don't get caught, but you feel guilty, and your own guilt won't really let you get away with it."
Joel said something to the effect that guilt and shame were terrible burdens to carry.
Those two words, "guilt" and "shame"… those two words struck a chord somewhere deep within my heart. I said, "Guilt and shame, yeah, I know all about that. It's like having a weight hanging on your neck, dragging you down wherever you go, and having a thick cloud of darkness around you all the time, choking you so that you can't breathe."
I think Joel realized that I was talking about something more serious than drinking a few wine coolers in secret. He waited for me to continue. I told him that I had done something once, years ago, that I just could not get past. We talked for a while, and finally he turned to me and said, "Why don't you just tell me what it was?" I gasped. I shook my head. I looked around to make sure no one else was in earshot. I looked at him and opened my mouth but the sound would not come out. I wanted to run away. Finally, in a whisper, I told him. He did not condemn me; he just sat there still smiling at me. I covered my mouth as if somehow I could stuff the words back in. I was overcome with a sudden rush of sorrow, not of being caught, but of having done this thing in the first place. At the same time was a huge sense of release after having finally named the sin after twenty years. We talked more, and I do not remember very much of what we said. However, during the conversation, I purposely left out that the one of the people I had sinned against had once confronted me and I had denied the sin. My biggest fear that I would have to go to this person, or to another person who was actually the one most hurt by my sin, and ask for their forgiveness. I knew if I did that, I would be at their mercy, and if they wished to, they could cause great havoc to my life and especially to my family. Even though in one sense I had repented immediately after that sin, because I was sorry and never did anything like it again, in another sense, my repentance was not complete until I was willing to confess it and face whatever consequences there would be. The consequences could have been devastating, and I was just not willing to lay it all on the line for Jesus. Therefore, I did not tell Joel about being confronted before, I was afraid that he would tell me that I had to go to these people and seek reconciliation.
The next day I went through a very dark time, a time that included self abuse, and thoughts of suicide. Again just like Jacob, I was wrestling with God, fighting against what I knew I needed to do. Finally I came to realize that I needed to tell Joel the whole story. I called him up and told him about the conversation where I had once again denied my sin. He told me that we would pray and have more counseling over it to decide what I should do now.
Clinging to Him
Over next few weeks, I counseled with Joel a few times, and with the woman in charge of women’s ministries for our church. I also told my husband the whole story. God spoke to my heart, causing me to remember the times of sweet fellowship before this thing happened, causing me to have to admit to myself that I did know Him before this event. Most significantly, I finally obeyed God and called up the person my sin had hurt the most. I apologized, of course for having done this thing in the first place, but also for denying it before. I admitted that I had denied it out of fear, but had known the truth all along. I told them that I had been sorry for twenty years, and had let fear stop me from apologizing before. I asked for their forgiveness and held my breath. Then, this person forgave me. I hung up the phone and cried my heart out. There was such a sense of release and for the first time in twenty years I was able to really pour out my heart to God in prayer for those who I had hurt.Since then, God has showed me even more how foolish I was. I could have had a fresh start with Him at any point in time. All I had to do was finally obey Him and confess what I had done. But I was scared and stubborn, and so I wandered about in a desert of guilt and shame for twenty years. During that time, God did produce some fruit in my life, but that fruit was severely limited because I would not yield totally to Him. For twenty years, a lot of time that should have been spent in His service was wasted. Well, I cannot get those twenty years back, but I know that I do not want to waste another day by not yielding to His will. Through His grace, He brought me to the point where I was willing to lay everything on the line for the sake of my relationship with Him. He brought me to the point where doing what He was calling me to do was more important to me than anything, or anyone, else in my life. It was only through His grace, because in myself, in my own power, I could not reach that point. In my own power all I could do is run some more. He did it through me. It is all Him. All of it was the work of His grace. I had stopped wrestling with God, and then just like Jacob, I went from fighting Him to clinging to Him, never wanting to let go.
As I look at all of the blessings in my life today, all of the mighty things God has done in me and for me, I can say, just like the apostle Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “But by the grace of God I am what I am…” My prayer is that from this point on I will yield to Him, and allow His grace to work through me so that He can use me for His glory. So that I will also be able to truly say, just as Paul said in the second half of that verse, “and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” Paul was not worthy, and neither am I. Paul states his own unworthiness in context around that verse; “For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” The grace of God working through Paul is what enabled him to serve God, to labor abundantly in the cause of the Gospel. My prayer now is that I will not get in the way, but will allow His grace to move through me, so that I may be used in the cause of His gospel as well.
Since finally yielding to my Lord completely, I am so exhilarated in God's forgiveness. I feel like climbing up to the housetops and shouting out how amazing God's love is. I realize how God orchestrated things. How he drew my husband closer to Christ and used that to stir in me a sense of holy jealousy for that closeness to Christ. How He used Joel's teachings in Genesis to show me that just like Jacob, I have been on the run for twenty years. He has been working in my heart, through all of the circumstances, to make me ready to finally, at last, come out of the desert. Out of the darkness, and into His glorious light.
In this light, my sin was exposed, but in this light, I was also able to finally see, finally realize, that Christ had already paid the price for my sin.
God has made me clean. He has set me free. He has brought me into the light of His love and His truth, and I never, ever, want to go back into darkness again.
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If you have been touched by this reading, and if you are aware of God tugging at your heart, drawing you toward Him, you need to do some very basic things: First, you need to realize that you are a sinner, that you have broken God's law and are deserving of punishment. You simply need to agree with God that you deserve punishment, and believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to take the punishment for you. Ask Christ to forgive you, invite Him into your life and heart, and give your life to Him. Then make sure to get hooked up with a Bible believing church and tell others what Jesus has done for you. The Bible says in Romans 10:9-10 "that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation."
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