Testimony

Testimony
Several years ago, a young lad sat in a tent watching grown men of incredible size, break blocks and boards with their hands, and listening to them preach the Word of God. Let me tell you if you place an impressionable teenager in that kind of situation you will get results. So I went forward and accepted Jesus as my personal savior.
I went back to my home church and wasn’t encouraged and soon fell away and quit attending church altogether. By the time I was nineteen fast cars, girls, and alcohol had more of an influence on my life than the Sprit of God. It continued this way even after I’d started my on family. It was then that God beginning showing me my relationship with my children as an example as the relationship that He and I had. I began to hear the things that I said come out of the mouths of my little ones and I didn’t like it.
It was at this point in my life that God chose to
call me back into the fold. On a cold January day I got a call from my dispatcher, asking if I would help fix her son’s car. Now you have to know that the dispatch office was connected to the garage where the mechanics fixed the trucks that I drove. To keep the trucks we drove running, these fellows were good mechanics. She had just as good a relationship with the mechanics as she did with me. I don’t know why she called me instead of a mechanic, I suppose that she saw the kind of junk I drove, and figured that if I could keep them running than surely I could fix her son’s car.
I told her that I would and I went out to fix the car, which just happened to be parked in the parking lot of a church. We worked on the car for an hour, while I questioned him what he had done recently to the car. He told me that he had replaced the fuel filter on the car. I removed the filter from the carburetor body and realized that he had placed it in backwards. I turned it around and low and behold the car started. How he ever got it that far with that filter backward I do not know.
While we were working on the car the pastor of the church was watching us from the window of the parsonage. After the car was running he came and asked if we would like a cup of hot chocolate. We took him up on his offer and warmed ourselves with his hospitality. He then asked if we would like to see his church and I agreed to go, after all, he had offered us a cup of coca it seemed only right.
He took us into the church and showed us around and told us of the plans that the church had for the building and the ministry they hoped to accomplish. Our journey ended at the alter, as it always does. Little did I know that my journey was about to be renewed. Behind the alter of this church was a full wall mural depicting Christ, you know the one, of Him knocking on the door with no knob. At that moment that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I know that I could go back there now and it would be just a picture. It was at that moment that God reached down into my life and reminded me of the promise I had made to him in that tent so many years ago. It was then that He had left the Ninety and nine and went and sought this one lost sheep to bring me back into the fold. The pastor continued talking and after awhile realized that I was no longer listening to him, but that I was staring at that mural. He came around in front of me to gain my attention. He asked do you go to a church? I told him no. He said, you may not come here but you will be in church somewhere, I see it in your eyes.
After that moment God installed in me a hunger for His Word. I could not put it down. It went to work with me and I read the Word of God every opportunity I got. As I read the words of Jesus I had never heard anyone speak with such authority and wisdom. The more I read I was so sure that Christ would return before I had a chance to finish His Word that I would pray, “Lord don’t come back yet, I have so much more to learn.” Soon I found myself in a small country church with my family. I began to open my mouth and someone thought it a good idea if I spoke from the pulpit. Soon I was a lay speaker than a district lay speaker. I felt led to a bigger church and soon was teaching a Sunday school class, working with the youth, as well as preaching whenever called to do so. All the while I felt God wanted more of me.
It all came to a head one night at work, when my dispatcher told me, “I don’t know what’s bothering you. But you need to make a decision.” He did not know what was going on in my heart or my head he only knew that I was troubled. I left work that night and turned on the radio to hear a preacher tell me I needed to decide who I was going to serve. I surrendered saying, “Lord. What good would it do to win souls for your Kingdom, and lose my own family?” For I had seen pastor’s families destroyed. God brought back the words that I had given to my daughter just a few weeks before. She asked me what it was like to invite Jesus into your heart? I told her that it was like inviting someone into your house and giving them access to every room. She wondered what if you kept jewels and money in one room. I told her that if you trust Him you will trust Him with your precious things. It was that words that he brought to me. “If you trust me you will trust me with your precious things.” So I give up, and asked Him to care for my family while I was doing His work, and declared as a candidate for ministry in the United Methodist Church.
Work took me out of town for a week at a time, so I put a lot of things on hold for awhile. I would come home on the weekend and still would teach at church and led the youth group. Until my wife told me that she no longer wanted to be married. I was hurt, confused, and angry. I was embarrassed to go back to doing the things I had been doing. I mean here I was a man trying to serve God and a leader in the church and I couldn’t keep my own family together. I ran from the church, from God and from the town I grew up in. I told myself and anyone that would listen that I wasn’t mad at God, when in fact I was. I didn’t feel that I could trust Him anymore. It wasn’t until four years later that I admitted to God that I was mad at Him. I told Him I felt that He had let me down, we had a deal. I trusted Him to keep my family together. It was then He began to heal me and show me that it wasn’t His fault that my marriage failed. I can look back and see several factors, that I was blind to at the time, that contributed to divorce.
Since then the desire to go back church has returned, and I find myself once again in a small country church. God has given me a new wife, who has showed me what marriage is really like. For the first time in six years I stood in the pulpit and preached the Word of God recently. What does the future hold? I don’t know, but I know who holds the future.