When I was a little girl, about four years old, my parents would send the four of us kids to Sunday School each week. I don’t seem to remember them attending very often themselves but we kids would take the bus to the local Nazarene Church.
Sunday School was a wonderful time for me. I loved hearing the teacher talk about Jesus and how much He loved us all. My family was large but, sadly, there wasn’t much love in it. There was arguing and even worse pretty much every day of the week. I was as much of the problem as anyone, being sullen and unhappy. I would talk back and do things I knew would make my parents angry with me.
So, going to such a beautiful place and learning about someone who loved me was the high point of my week and even of my life. I looked forward to it and was happy to be learning memory work so I could say the verses to myself throughout the week.
When a child turned five at this Sunday School, you would graduate into the older group from the preschool group. Just before that date, my Sunday School teacher told us about sin. That it was breaking our Father’s rules. I understood that very well as I knew I was breaking my own parent’s rules. I didn’t understand, until that point, that I was also breaking God’s rules.
Even as a five year old, I felt convicted of sin as much as I have ever felt as an adult. I spent the following week so unhappy just thinking about how bad a girl I had been and how I could not make myself do anything to make it go away.
The next Sunday, the teacher told us how Jesus had died for our sins and asked if any of us wanted to accept Jesus and His forgiveness and ask Him to take control of our lives.
Though I was a shy child, in this case, I jumped up to be first in line. I remember bowing my head and asking Jesus to save me and make me a good girl. I knew that He had done so because I started being able to talk to Him within my thoughts and could feel His comfort and response. The next week I graduated and was given my own Bible to commemorate the event.
I would love to say that I started living a Christian life right then but, instead, we moved away for a year and did not go to church. When we moved back, church was not something we did on a regular basis. The only teaching I got at that point was from the Bible classes I could take twice a week when a local church sent a bus to sit just outside my elementary school campus.
When we again moved, that stopped and so did church of any sort. My parents were Christians in name only which is to say, they were not Christians at all. So, the days of my learning about the Bible were at an end, except for reading from the Bible I was given years before.
I soon began conforming to the world. I still felt oddly protected from much of what was commonplace for teens at the time. I didn’t drink or take drugs or indulge in the behavior that many of my friends were involved in. Even my next older sister and older brother were into all of those things. They tried to get me to do drugs and more but, I think, God kept His hand on me and protected me from all of this.
It was when my next older sister found Jesus and was on fire talking about him, that I actually started behaving poorly. I didn’t want to hear her but she simply would not stop talking. Anyone who ever knew my sister, Kiki, would say amen. She could talk and she loved talking about the love of Jesus and His salvation message.
She passed away last year and what I remember most about her was lifelong passion for Christ. She is responsible for bringing the word of salvation into our family. She was so persistent because she cared so much. She got my mother to start watching Christian television because, after she divorced my father, my mother would not set foot in a church.
As soon as I was able to, I moved out on my own. It was at that time that I started behavior that would bring my world crashing in on me. When it happened and my life bottomed out, I remembered what my sister had talked about and also about Christian television.
When, in desperation, I turned it on, the preacher, Dwight Thompson, was talking. It was as if he knew all about me and what I had done and what had happened to me. As I sat on my sofa and wept, he told me that Jesus still loved me, no matter what I had done or what had happened in my life. He gave an altar call that I responded to, flat on my face on my living room floor.
In the years and decades since then, I have always known Jesus as my Savior. There were times, even years, when I didn’t give much thought to Him and certainly very little time or effort in telling others about Him. I was too busy living life and raising my children.
God took a distant place in my life. When my son passed away after an almost two year battle with leukemia, I started placing God first once again but still did little to further His Kingdom. I did insert Him into my (now closed) internet business and, at His request, I told the story of my son’s illness and death and linked to it from the first words on this business homepage.
This was the first time I had written specifically for God and at His request. Even though that business is closed, we still keep the story where others can read it. This is David’s story: A True Story.
When I was brought back from the brink of death, I started looking back at what I’ve done with my life. It was the times when I, essentially, turned my back on God that I regret the most. My wasted years were those times when I could have been doing something, anything, to further the Word of His saving and healing power.
During the last few months, the need to take action on Jesus’ behalf has sat on me like a weighted stone on my chest. Here I was, unable to leave the house. Weak, dependent on oxygen 24/7, even immunosuppressed for a good portion of the time. The irony was evident to me, of course. When I was able to get out and about, I didn’t use my time wisely. Once I was ill and could not leave the house, that was when I wanted most to begin my work for Him.
Once I realized that I was supposed to write and found the subject that I was to write about, I questioned God as to whether or not this was His calling on my life.
His response was in the form of two questions. He asked if He could rely on me. Then He asked me if I was willing to live the life and to do the work He had called me to with the gifts that He had given me. Now, today, with no more waiting to be a better person, to feel a bit stronger, or to wait for a burning bush style sign from heaven. No more excuses, no more delays, no more fear of the unknown. His questions were: Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?
Here am I, Lord. Send me.
John 3:16-17 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.