I sometimes feel that my testimony is rather unexciting compared with others’ stories of visions, miracles, and powerful conversions. Both of my parents’ families have believed for four generations, so my brother and I grew up immersed in Christianity. I have been a regular at CFC since the day I was born, and there was never a time when I didn’t look forward to Sunday services. The story of my faith after 20 years, then, is neither spectacular nor heart-rending, but it is a testimony of God’s faithfulness and the bottomless riches of knowing and following Him.
All through elementary school, the main reason I looked forward to Sundays was so that my friends and I could play tag football in the side yard between children’s service and children’s choir. I looked forward to this not just because I could hang out with my friends, but because I was good! With my best friend David throwing to me, I even earned the nickname “Jerry” (a la Mr. Rice) from some of the older kids. Tag football, combined with the company of my closest friends (one of our favorite activities was to tease the girls, many of whom had crushes on us) made Sunday church one of my favorite times of the week.
Of course, this euphoria was not meant to last, not only because the girls matured and realized that we weren’t as cool as we thought, but also because along with the challenges of Junior High came some spiritual challenges that I had never faced before. After transferring to a small private middle school, I got to know my classmates quite well, and none of them were Christians. During this time, I picked up a number of bad habits, including a nasty propensity for swearing that undermined the faith that I professed on Sundays. A big question that nagged at me was, “If my friends at school are good people, perhaps even better than me, why should I be saved only because I believe in Jesus? If God loves everybody, why would He let some people go to hell?”
My mom, who has been a source of wise council my whole life, tried to assuage me and explain that God wanted us to choose to love Him, not just respond in pre-programmed ways like robots. I remember very clearly one conversation we had in my brother’s room that left both of us in tears but failed to bring me any peace. In my mind, a god who claimed to be loving yet sent good people to hell was not a god that I wanted to follow. Although I never stopped going to church, my parents would later tell me that they were very concerned about my wavering faith.
Looking back, I wonder whether I could really be considered a Christian at the time, which is why I sometimes hesitate when people ask me when I became a Christian. I certainly believed in God, and I believed that He loved me and that Jesus died for me, but whether I was a true follower of Christ was a different question. If a tree is to be distinguished by its fruits as Jesus says, then I was probably in trouble, because apart from my habitual church attendance, there were few indications of faith in my life. If I was a Christian, I certainly was not following my Lord very hard.
It is difficult for me to pinpoint the moment when I made peace with God and decided to follow Jesus because I’m quite sure that God effected this change in me gradually. The primary way in which God turned me around was through the tremendous influence of my counselors at Agape Youth fellowship. In particular, I really looked up to a second-year college student named Eddie.
Eddie and his college friends invited some of us middle-schoolers to play basketball with them on Sunday afternoons. As I got to know him better, I found myself unconsciously emulating him. For instance, I adopted his method of language-control, wearing a rubber band around my wrist so that I could snap myself with it every time I swore. Just as Paul urged the Corinthians to imitate himself, as I imitated Eddie, I was indirectly imitating Jesus. In this way, as I began following Christ, my struggle with why God sends good people to hell began to fade. I was beginning to experience first-hand that even though some of His ways might be hard to understand, the bottom line is that He is good, and there is great reward in following Him.
As I have grown in my walk with God, I’ve found repeatedly that even though I falter in my faith, just like I did in middle school, God welcomes me back into a relationship with Him again and again. Back then, I was unhappy with the consequences of God’s justice, but I found that in following Him, there is abundant grace as well. These days, sometimes I doubt God’s goodness and find myself straying off course, but every time I rediscover that there is utmost satisfaction only in knowing God. There are times when I am perplexed as to why He never gives up on me, even though I have such little faith at times. His grace though, is much deeper than I know, and the experience of this grace is worth living for.
Posted by Admin in My Story