"E"verlasting Love

Recently, I was asked to lead the training session this summer on how to prepare your testimony, or the story of how the Lord changed your life. At the same time, during the past couple of weeks, our students at Tech have been sharing their own stories. Finally, last week in my Bible Study I was given the opportunity to tell of how the Lord brought me into a relationship with Himself. Basically, it's been on my mind.

Below is what I shared with my Bible Study group, and hopefully an encouragement as you read about how the Lord changed my life about 5 1/2 years ago!

Have you ever seen the TV show “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” If not, it was a show that helped children learn about geography and other cultures through trying to catch the thief Carmen San Diego. Carmen would steal diamonds from Africa and then fly off to the Mexico and hide out in the Mayan temples. You never really knew who Carmen was as she was always on the move from country to country and was always trying to fit in to the culture she was hiding in.

In a way, minus the thievery part, I feel like my life somewhat resembles the life Carmen San Diego must of lived on the show. I grew up moving about every 4 years of my life. I lived in common places like Houston, Texas to not so common places like Indonesia. I felt like my family and I were always on the move. There were a lot of outward things that come with moving a lot, such as boxes, packing and travel time, but overtime, I began to see inward things that come with it as well. My life was focused around people and their perception of me. Like Carmen San Diego, my goal in a new place was to fit in. I didn’t want to stand out and be seen as a stranger in a new place, so I tried my hardest to be liked and accepted whether that was through joining a billion activities just like all of the other kids or through making good grades not to let my parents down. I’m not sure anyone, much less myself, really knew who I was. I found that my identity was found solely on whether I thought others accepted me. I found that as I began to feel accepted by people that it was time to move again and start the process of fitting in all over again. New people, new activities, new classes and grades. New place to try to be the perfect person.

College came around and this quest to be accepted continued. I tried anything from partying to going to Christian organizations because I so longed to be accepted by all people. Around this same time, though, a woman came into my life that accepted me not because of the front I was putting on, but because of who I was within. She challenged me to find my identity not in others view of me, but in the Lord’s perception of me. I had grown up around the terms God and Jesus Christ my whole life, but what she had to say about them brought whole new meanings to the terms.

She explained to me that God was not just someone far off uninterested in me, but that He loved me and created me to know Him personally. Nothing I could do would gain this relationship. Not my grades or how many friends I had or whether people liked me or not. My strive for perfection was actually what was preventing me from this deep relationship as it was rooted in my own sin, in other words my pride. It was if I was reaching for something more, but my own actions couldn’t quite grasp it. Then my friend explained the wonder of Jesus Christ. How He was God’s son, who came to earth, fully God and fully man, to talk the place of our sins. My sins. It wasn’t about my actions. It was about the gift of Jesus Christ that God gave us. We just needed to accept or believe in that gift.

The Lord used my friend in amazing ways in my life, but most importantly was through sharing these truths with me. The Lord began and is continually unraveling the doubts that I have in myself and is making me be confident in who He made me. I still move a lot. In the past year I’ve live in 5 different places literally all over the world. I’m still faced with seeking people’s acceptance of who I am. The difference now, though, is that my life does not have to be like Carmen San Diego’s. I don’t have to hide behind a façade trying so hard to just fit in. The Lord has given me a freedom that comes with a continued understanding of what it means to truly believe that I’m accepted by Him.