|
I grew up in an upper middle class family in Houston, Texas outside of the influence of Christ or Christianity. I am the daughter of a German mother and a father from Alabama. Their backgrounds and cultures were too diverse and they eventually split up in an ugly divorce during my senior year of high school. I felt the need to bail out of a sinking ship, so I left home, dropping out of school about two months before graduation, and moved to another city to sort things out. During that time I read a lot of philosophy in my seeking to know the purpose of human life. I had been haunted for years by a gnawing sense of emptiness and the guilt of repeating yet another generation of people being born, educated, married, attaining differing degrees of success and then dying. Some left little evidence of their time spent here; others bequeathed an impressive legacy. Yet I wondered, “Shouldn't there be something more?” Philosophy could not give me answers, only more questions. I never gave religion a thought since its empty demand and hypocritical facade disgusted me from an early age. Although I had not considered God, His thoughts were toward me, and later that year I yielded to the magnetic drawing of my heart by the Triune God.
My salvation experience was a door into a whole new realm. At once I shed my entire former manner of living like an unnecessary cocoon and sought to follow my new-found Lord. The Christians who had helped me to pray and receive the Lord were a free group of mostly ex-hippies and free spirits disillusioned both by “the establishment” and by the alternative free love, drug culture. I joined with them travelling the country preaching the gospel of Christ, yet haunted again by the conviction that I now did not know the meaning of my Christian life. Why did Christ save me and so many others throughout time and space? What was His purpose in regenerating man? My desperate cry reached the throne of God and in a few short weeks I met a group of Christians on a college campus, where we were all mutually preaching the gospel, that could answer my question. They showed me a heavenly vision (Acts 26:19): “God saved you to make you a living stone and to build you up in Himself with others to be the local expression of the universal reality known as the church.” (1 Peter 2:5) This vision caught my attention and I submitted to the Lord and allowed Him to begin a work of transformation upon me that is a life-long process. And here I have been for twenty-seven years, meeting with the local church and enjoying a blessed life.
|
Main