My Testimony

I suppose this is something good to have on hand, and I remember things I write. Since it's written, why not put it somewhere? It's longer than I'd like, but there's a lot to say. For years I thought I didn't have a testimony, or at least not one anybody would be interested in hearing. But that's because I've spent most of my life not actually having the faintest idea of what I was doing, at least in a spiritual sense. I was still as confused as many who had never prayed or stepped into a church. You don't get to read about a life of crime and recklessness, but hopefully my less outwardly dramatic account resonates with common folk.

I grew up in a Christian family. However, the church we went to for the first ten years of my life was not a healthy one. Through the family of a brother's friend, we started going to the church where my family still belongs today. At that church, I started to actually learn what Christianity was all about. In fourth grade I was baptized.

It wasn't until three or four years later that I actually started to change as a result of my faith. I wasn't the best kid in middle school. To cut to the point, I'll just summarize my middle school self as a malicious coward. At some point, it occurred to me that I wasn't living like Christians were supposed to. Primarily motivated by duty I began to change my actions.

By the time I graduated from high school, I was a much nicer person and had even occasionally talked about God to friends, but I never really understood it. Deep down, I was always just doing the things I was supposed to do, not the things I was excited to do because I had a personal relationship with the God of the universe. I fooled myself into believing that intellectual pursuit of God was my way of personally relating to him. I was very Bible literate and could put down most arguments against God, but all this knowledge didn't amount to much without personal knowledge of the God I supposedly served.

At college I joined a little house church that was part of a association of churches known as the Great Commission Movement. The people there loved God with their hearts, minds, and everything else they had. But things started to get interesting after winter break. My roommate and her parents had gone on a winter retreat with the Great Commission Movement and uncovered some serious mistakes made in the history of the movement. She and I and the third girl of our inseparable trio didn't know what to do. We prayed, researched, and talked with each other, our parents, and the leaders of the church for about a month of the most emotional pain I have ever endured. The church had become our home, and we were terrified that we would need to leave it. In the end, we arrived at the decision the church was safe. Yes, the founders had made some mistakes, but they had apologized and redirected themselves since then.

However, not all the complaints against the Great Commission Movement were valid. Some of the things people didn't like were things taught in the Bible that are simply more "extreme" than what most churches today ask of their members. They called for a faith and dedication that put God unreservedly at the center of every Christian's life. That wasn't something I had. In fact, there were all sorts of things I saw in my brothers and sisters leading the church that I didn't have and didn't understand. What was I missing about God? Thus began the often painful but spiritually vivifying pruning that extended through the rest of the calendar year.

The next significant phase started that summer. By June when I went to a youth conference as an adult leader, I knew things were amiss with my spiritual life. It didn't really feel like life at all. I had never really been close to God at all ever, and I didn't know what to do about it. I had set goal after goal for myself and fallen short of every one of them. I jumped on the opportunity to participate in a summer discipleship program, but even that became a ritual for me. While many of the others left feeling like they had grown, I left knowing more than ever that I was spiritually malnourished.

With the fall semester came the hardest and most rewarding lessons I've ever learned in my life. I began to read Crazy Love by Francis Chan and was convicted by the lukewarm Christian he described. His description fit me to a T, and I desperately wanted to change that. I just didn't know how to give up control, even though I knew I couldn't make it work on my own. I guess I didn't know well enough yet that I couldn't succeed on my own, because I kept on failing for a while and not really letting God work. At my college church's fall retreat I finally broke and understood just how much I really can't succeed spiritually at all on my own.

But the pruning wasn't done yet. For one thing, I still had never truly known what it was like to know God. The following weekend I headed back home to be a leader for the high school fall retreat at my home church. We read A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy. One of the last chapters was on the omnipresence of God. I got partway through and stopped. It made absolutely no sense to me. I knew omnipresence wasn't some sort of pantheistic Pocahontas sort of thing, but I hadn't a clue what it might be. If God was everywhere all the time, how come I never sensed it at all? I was rather frustrated with God at this point. I crossed my arms and rather irately prayed something along the lines of "God, this doesn't make sense. You've been hacking away at me for a while now, and I'd like a little comfort. If you're there, show me. But I don't want some sort of mystical feel-good experience. If that's all you have to offer, I'm not interested."

I can't accurately describe what followed, but even as I type this I'm starting to tear up at how powerful it was. My stubborn glare and crossed arms turned into sobbing into my hands with joy and I don't even know what else. God was there, and I knew it. It wasn't precisely a feeling or thought, but it was real. It was more real than anything. I'd felt "spiritual highs" after high school church conferences, and this wasn't it. This was something so much more real and yet so much more beyond my comprehension. God was there. I suppose he always has been and always will be, but I don't often know it the way I did on that chilly October afternoon.

Do I understand what omniscience is? No. Can I answer the other theological questions I've been unable to fathom? No. Do I know how to go about changing and surrendering to God? Still no, but that at least is getting better. The difference is that I no longer have to go through intellectual arguments every time I feel like life is hopeless and God an illusion. I can remember back to that day and other instances since then and know that God is real because I've been in his presence. I don't have to do things the Bible says because a book tells me to. I choose to try to do the things the Bible says because I love the God behind it. I'm still a coward who messes up a lot, but after that experience I was at the point where God could begin to help me do something about it.

I still can't get past the fact I can't tell you what it was like. I know it sounds trippy to anyone who's never been there. I, too, have heard people describe similar situations and rolled my eyes at what I interpreted as sentimentalism and an over-active imagination. I've sneered at people who claimed to have communicated with God and loathed the phrases I'd heard others use to try to describe the indescribable. And yet now I understand that the words don't exist to say what you mean. I'm stuck with things that sound absurd from the outside, hoping that my sincerity and the fact that I'm not prone to wishy-washiness will somehow make me believable to those who have never been there. You simply have to meet God on your own. There's no other way to understand. It's definitely worth it.