My Testimony

             We've had some wonderful testimonies this fall at the Bible study I attend. Like all the other groups around here, the study is a truly international group of women, and I've gotten to hear stories from people raised in Lesotho, Jamaica, South Africa, Canada, and Czechoslovakia (when it was still a country), among many other places. Zita's family had to hide the fact that they were Christians in a country where it was illegal. Ruth was among the first missionary women to give birth in a mountain hospital. Jenny participated in a march of reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa just before the first free and fair elections. It was my turn today, and I felt a little outclassed. But God work in everyone's life is something to share and celebrate. Since I'm not great at thinking on my feet, I wrote out my speech. Here it is, for anyone who is interested.   

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             I’ll begin my story around this time of year, in the late 1970s, when I was 7 or 8 years old. All the students at McGuffey Elementary School, of which I was one, were practicing for the annual Christmas Program. We still called it a Christmas Program then, even though I did not attend a Christian School. One of the songs we were going to sing was, “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” One of the lines in that song is: “With God as our Father, brothers all are we.” During that line, I quietly closed my mouth. I didn’t sing the words. The reason was that I thought my parents wouldn’t like me to say the word “God.”

            We didn’t believe in God in our house. My parents had never told me not to talk about God, but it was clear to me that He was not part of our life. This was not an angry rejection of God. We were just perfectly happy without Him. My mom had grown up in a Christian home, but had forgotten her faith when she married my dad. My dad came from a long line of really good people who didn’t believe in God, and we were like them. We believed in education – my grandma and grandpa had been to college and my grandpa’s sister had a master’s degree, which was very rare for a woman of her generation. My dad was a college professor and my mom was a school librarian. We were educated, and educated people don’t need God. We believed in doing good. When my grandpa’s business partner died, my grandparents took in the man’s three children. They helped revitalize the small town of Rushville, Indiana. We planted trees and took care of the environment. We went door-to-door collecting signatures on petitions for nuclear disarmament. We ate tofu instead of meat in support of efforts against world hunger. We were good, and good people don’t need God. Most of all, we believed in family. My parents were incredibly loving. They read to my sister and me. They took us on long walks. They played with us. They were the parents all my friends wished they had. Our family fulfilled us, and fulfilled people don’t need God.

            We were very happy. But God loved us too much to let us stay that way. I imagine us in a car, driving along, singing, playing games, eating snacks, and having the time of our lives, never realizing that we were headed in exactly the wrong direction. Because if the Bible is true, that’s our situation. We thought that we were fine without God, and if God had not stopped us, we might have continued blithely down that path, happily singing and snacking ourselves straight to Hell. Because if the Bible is true, no one is fine without God. We’re dead in our sins, whether we know it or not. So, though it may seem cruel, the kindest thing God can do for us is to show us the truth – and show us His salvation.

            This is how God showed us that we really did need Him. My mom, as I said, was raised in a Christian home. Her mom – my Grandma Elsa – never stopped praying for us. When I was 10 or 11, my mom went to visit Grandma Elsa. While she was there, she had a vision that terrified her. It actually wasn’t anything scary. She just saw a man standing at the foot of her bed, talking. When she opened the Bible on the nightstand, she read, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That experience somehow brought back to her all her Christian upbringing. She started to read the Bible hungrily, and she came home a recommitted Christian. My dad thought that she had lost her mind. I was angry with her. We had this wonderful, loving, perfect family, and she had to go and bring strife into it by becoming a Christian? Because strife is what her conversion brought. All of a sudden, she and my dad disagreed in a major way on something very important. She took my sister and me to church. My dad didn’t complain, but he didn’t come. I could hear them talking sometimes at night, arguing. I was terrified that they would get a divorce. But they didn’t. God used one of the very things that had kept us from God to bring us all to Him. My dad had been raised to believe in the importance of family. Not only that, he deeply loved his family. And he was going to wrestle with God for his family. But God wasn’t going to let my dad win. Basically, what he showed my dad was that the family belonged to God, and if my dad wanted to be united with his family, he was going to have to submit himself to God as well. My dad has told me since that one night, he was awake for hours, in agony, pleading with a God that he didn’t really believe in. One of my dad’s biggest obstacles to belief was his intellect. He had always thought that Christians were kind of stupid. This was a problem for a highly educated man from a highly educated family. After this night of pleading, he happened to turn on the radio. What he heard was the pastor of the Oxford Presbyterian Church. Pastor Harris was a brilliant man and a gifted speaker. My dad thought, “I could listen to this man.” And that’s what he told my mom when she woke up.

            We started attending the Oxford Presbyterian Church, and God used Pastor Harris to lead my dad to faith. By this time I was a young teenager, socially awkward, nerdy, introverted – so it wasn’t too difficult for me to see my need of God. Both my dad and I were baptized when I was in seventh grade. God used youth workers and pastors at that church to grow my faith. He has continued to put people in my life who have taught me more about Him: professors at Calvin College, good friends, and my husband and his family.

            I have now been a Christian for more than 25 years. I’ve been to a Christian college and I can write you a one-pager on the Reformed Worldview without batting an eyelash. I’ve taught at a Christian school, and I can tell you all about the Intertestamental Period and recite questions and answers from the Westminster Catechism. I’ve read the Bible through, and I even know the names of most of the kings of Israel and Judah. My family doesn’t miss church unless we are seriously ill. And I find that the trap I fall into now is exactly the same one that my family fell into all those years ago. Sometimes, religious people don’t think they need God. I am very thankful that God loves me enough to not let me be happy in my religion, and that he continually puts people and events in my life to remind me that my religion will not get me to heaven or even help me get out of bed in the morning or make my children turn out right. God continues to show me that it is the relationship with Jesus that is both necessary and sufficient. I need Him.