I was the second born to two Christian parents. My parents were very active in our church. God lead them to our church home before I was born. They found a church family in their new home state far from where they grew up. I grew up in that church ever since I was born. I accepted Jesus in my heart when I was 6 and was baptized when I was 9. We lived in a home my parent’s bought a few months before I was born. I attended the church I was brought up in for 45 years. I recently left both my parent’s home and my church home after my husband and then both of my parent’s passed away within 1 year and 10 months of each other.
Growing up I was in church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. I loved church. I loved attending VBS every year. My friends were all from church and families of my parent’s friends. I knew the bible as much as a kid is taught. It was definitely sugar coated in my church. I was familiar with bible stories and people in the bible. I could see God’s standard lived out in most of the people around me. My parents, other couples in the church, my friends. I knew the 10 commandments. I loved to be in the plays and sing about God’s word. I hated memorizing scripture in GAs but for the most part I knew God’s standard. My mom liked to retell the story of when I was saved. We were driving in the car and I was pretty much lamenting that other people knew Jesus better than me and that I want to know Him too and I want him to know me. My mom pulled over right then, “in front of Mrs Kings house” and she asked me if i wanted to pray the sinners prayer so I can have a personal relationship with Jesus. I said yes! I felt so seen that she had heard my lamenting and responded so seriously. I prayed repeating after her. As we started driving again I wondered what Jesus was going to do to get to know me. My 6 year old egocentric self couldn’t even begin to understand how God and Jesus already knew me, loved me and had already done so much for me.
Psalms 139:1-6 NASB1995[1] O Lord, You have searched me and known me. [2] You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. [3] You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. [4] Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all. [5] You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. [6] Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
Heaven and my mom rejoyced that day as I wanted to know and follow Jesus. Another life experience that drew me to seek Jesus was when a family in our church who my parents were friends with and had kids mine and my brother’s age had a tragedy when the father committed suicide. It was shocking, disbelief. The middle school minister at the time gathered us, my best friend and her family and Another family with kids our age and we all went to Pizza Hut to “love and support them.” I loved going to Pizza Hut and we often went with one of the families there that day for lunch after church on Sundays. That day was solomn. We just sat with them in shock, disbelief and sorrow. It was hard to think about what they must be feeling because they had to endure something that was so awful, overwhelmingly heavy and it was through no fault of their own. Nothing they did to cause it. Nothing they could have done to prevent it, but now they had to endure it. I didn’t know that sitting with them and eating with them, gathered together for them could be so important in blessing them with comfort. I’m glad the middle school minister did. I learned later this is known as ministry of your presence. The major lesson I would need in my life would come from watching the widow, their mom. Wrongfully, our church as a congregation in general rejected this family. Not allowing their kids to play with their kids, not supporting a widow. I saw her seek Jesus with hunger due to so much pain and trauma. I got to be a witness to what God did for her because my parents were a friend to her. They didn’t foresake her. I got to witness the peace that surpasses understanding. She was given provisions. He strengthened her and comforted her. She was blessed for her faithfulness. After my parents died she told me many times how my parents were there for her in dark times and her friend. She became such a blessing to me when my husband, dad and then mom died. She was there for me when my parents couldn’t be and I knew she would be able to understand and she was there for me. That’s the church.
When I was a young teenager I chose to walk away from God and church. I remember the day in 8th grade I was at the library with friends on a Wednesday for school and I was begging my mom to stay instead of leaving to go to Wednesday night church. She had grown so tired of pleading with me to go she said yes and that she wouldn’t make me anymore. I was so excited, but deep down I knew that had broken her heart and this was not good. But, I had grown apart from the church and didn’t even know a lot of the people anymore and they didn’t know me. My friends were at school. My church wasn’t there for me anymore. I wasn’t fed through relationships anymore which is how I met Jesus and learned about Jesus. To me church without the fellowship was nothing. I went where there was interpersonal relationships. It didn’t matter to me then they weren’t based on Jesus as long as I was included. The problem is, the church walked away from me before I walked away from the church.
After I had accepted Jesus as my Savior from myself I wanted to get baptized. I went down front with my mom during Sunday morning service’s call to the alter a couple of times and the pastor would say I wasn’t ready. I’m sure I Gad difficulty expressing myself, but all I knew was my belief, calling out to Jesus and wanting him to be Lord was not believed and next steps denied. I wasn’t baptized until 3 years later when I was 9.
Romans 10:13 NASB1995[13] for “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Later, in high school it got to where not just church was empty to me but so was God. I was sitting on the floor of my best friend’s bedroom and I told God he wasn’t enough. That I could fill my life better than He could and I didn’t need him. I had stopped living for God a few years earlier so I don’t know why I would think I’d be walking on a path of blessings. To know God we have to seek him. Matthew 7:8 NASB1995
[8] For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. I was an ungrateful, rebellious fool. I believed that same old sorry lie from the garden of eden that God is holding out on me and that it is a delight to my eyes to do what I think is best. I thought you don’t want to know me and your church doesn’t want to know me I don’t want to be bothered with wanting to know you. Though I now wanted to be the God of my own life, I never could deny that God is God. God was like see you soon prodigal.
1 Corinthians 15:33 NASB1995 Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.
My life got so much worse after that. My friends at the time liked to drink alcohol, smoke and dabble in recreational drug use. I desperately didn’t want to be left out. I idolized them. My friends wouldn’t tell me things because they said i wouldn’t approve which made me want to align with whatever they did so I wouldn’t be left out. They were also pretty boy crazy. I couldn’t lower my standard on was boys. I’ve never been boy crazy. Sexual sin is not my sin weakness. It wasn’t a temptation for me either. I remember telling them one day when being asked if I even liked boys? That the only lowering of the standard of no sex outside of marriage that I would do is: that I don’t have to be married to him- he just has to be who I would marry. As Bart Millard would say in his book I Can Only Imagine- remember this for later.
The arduous journey back from this disasterous detour was long with lots of suffering with self inflicted consequences and trials for growth and for my good. Romans8:28 My mom told me later in life that God said to her that I would not always be like this. The journey I had to take was one of self love. I thought so little of myself. Not how God saw me at all. I didn’t think I was pretty, or had good style, I didn’t think I had any skills or talents, I didn’t think I was smart, I didn’t think I was witty. I thought my friends were all of these things and I admired them so. Idolized. When focusing my thoughts on my friends instead of God I couldn’t develop into what God made me to be. I had been doing this my whole life and I needed to learn to LOOK UP.
Ive learned idolizing and insecurity attracks people who self hate even more than I did. Who cope through insulting, belittling and casting their negative thoughts of themselves onto me. Which i easily accept due to low self esteem. They usually hate themselves beyond what we can see, because they know what they’ve done in the dark and we don’t. In the self loathing people I attracted it presents itself as prideful, arrogance with a smile and a false offer of help and instruction, which I thought I desperately needed. Sounds like that old serpent in the garden, eh? I was right in that I desperately needed help and instruction I just received it from all the wrong people. I coped with my poor self assessment with trying to please those who had attributes I thought were strong and courageous. I needed to look to Jesus.
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn this lesson until after I got married. I fell in love with a guy and I had never been in love before. I thought he was all the things he said he was. I thought he had all the strengths where I had all my weaknesses. This is know in toxic relationships recovery groups as mirroring. They say they are all the things you love and admire. Then, eventually the mask starts to slip and the true nature is seen. After years of living with a mentally and emotionally abusive person, years of studying human behavior and gaining wisdom from God I have learned to recognize these character traits. I didn’t learn this from my parent’s or in bible school. I learned it the hard knocks way and so I am teaching my children. I’m sharing my experiences to teach my knowledge, understanding and wisdom I’ve gained through suffering and walking with God.
My mom got me into bible study after I finished my masters degree. She said “you are done with school, now you can study God’s word.” My faith caught fire like never before. I have a bachelor’s in psychology and a master in social work. I loved studying human behavior and helping others. I enjoyed studying it very much! Studying God’s word with Precept Bible study and Kay Arthur excited my brain even more than the study of psychology did. It also renewed my mind, comforted my spirit and gave me wisdom I was so lacking. It gave me my foundation back. God loves me. Never foresakes. He equipped me to raise my children to know Him and to be a good wife in a bad marriage. My parent’s had a marriage with a strong foundation. They were both Christians and followers of Christ. They put each other first. They prayed together, sang together, served together, raised their children together had the same friends, were faithful to each other, but I didn’t have any of that with my husband. Having parent’s with a good marriage didn’t mean I would have one and having saved parents didn’t mean I would be saved. That came from my own journey, my own decisions and my own growth based on what I was taught, how I thought of myself and what I learned beyond what my parent’s taught me. All the other influences in my life God uses to draw us to Him.
Lesson for Life:
We are not saved by our parent’s faith.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers!g Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?h 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.i 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’j I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.k Matthew 3:7-10
Romans 5:12
[12] Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—
For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15:22
God Has No Grandchildren – Answers in Genesis
Big Daddy Weave “My Story”
https://youtu.be/1TKAN-nAsu8?si=ksMLZp2dXXYj87mv
John the Baptist is my favorite Christian