Before I came to know the Lord, I was confused about what it meant to be a Christian. I thought it was about being good enough and believed that you had to earn your way into heaven by following certain rules. I knew that I was broken and struggled with sin in my life, but I tried to cover this brokenness by achievement and success. The harder I worked to be successful in life, the emptier I felt. I did have some understanding of who God was as creator and I knew that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins, but I didn’t really understand what it meant to trust him.
As a young mother, I began listening to Focus on the Family, a Christian radio program. I heard examples of people confessing sin and admitting struggles. There was something different about how these people lived and experienced the Lord. Through the programs I was listening to, I came to realize that God was powerful. He desires that we walk through life in close fellowship with him, depending on him for our strength. This is not how I had been living. I confessed this to the Lord admitting that I was confused by this disparity in what I saw in these examples and my own life. I had assumed I was a Christian because I had grown up in church and had followed all the rules. I asked the Lord to forgive me for my sins and to show me what it meant to surrender my life to him.
I began to read my Bible on a regular basis and my eyes were opened to the false beliefs I had regarding my faith. God became very real to me and over time I began to rearrange my priorities which eventually led me to leave my career as a CPA and stay home with our three children. The Lord called us as a family to leave the familiar denomination my husband and I had grown up in. In our new church we experienced true fellowship for the first time and were exposed to Biblical teaching that satisfied my hunger for the Word. As I began to grow, the Lord challenged me to take steps of faith and serve in ways that I felt very ill equipped for. This taught me to lean on his Spirit and to draw my strength from his Word. I continue to be challenged in my walk with the Lord. Serving the Lord is not easy, but I find that it painfully rewarding. I say this because the process of becoming more like Christ is difficult as I realize my own depravity (painful) and draw near to Christ (rewarding). In this experience I find that there is great joy as I learn to trust in the Lord’s faithfulness.
