Colleen's Story...

I grew up with a 'you and me against the world' attitude. I had a difficult childhood. My parents divorced and our family split up, three children with mom and three with dad. I lived with my mom. My mom was bitter from the divorce and raised us girls to be independent and self sufficient. We didn't have the leadership of a male provider or protector, we were on our own. Adding to my independent spirit was the fact that I went to an all-girl high school and all women's college. In my world women did it all, I worked my way through two years of high school and two years of college. My mom was a praying mom and I learned how to pray by watching her and experiencing God's faithful answers. I really had grown up depending on God, but somewhere along the way I stopped giving God the credit and started thinking it was because I was tough enough to get by in this world.

I married young and we started out with no money, with a baby on the way. My husband was responsible and a hard worker, but life was still challenging. We, too, prayed a lot for God's help and had growing needs with two more children that followed shortly after our first. Life was hard, but we were making it. Remember “you and me against the world” now applied to my husband and myself.

Then my world changed when my husband's growing faith in God began to affect our lifestyle. We were always close and we had a good relationship with each other. We had made it through many hard years, working together and praying together, but our faith didn't grow together and I felt somehow left behind. We were still married, but there was a distance between us I couldn't explain. I figured if he were getting closer to the Lord, then we would automatically grow closer to each other. My husband was still loving, but I never felt so alone. It was down to “me against the world”, I had a lot of questions and very few answers yet I began to search for meaning to my changing world. My husband wanted to try a new church other than the one we had from our youth. I was hesitant at first, but then I came across a book called “Mere Christianity” by C. S. Lewis. It was described as an objective look at the basics of Christianity. Mere Christianity, nothing more, nothing less. So I began to read this book to be informed as we began to look at other churches. The book remained true to its objective and I kept reading. Then there was one sentence that really struck me. It stated “If you are a person with a good nature personality, that is not your gift to God that is God's gift to you.” That truth sank down deep in my heart I was unconsciously banking on my good nature personality to get me to heaven. I couldn't impress God with a gift He had given me. Then the book went on to describe that Jesus is God and He is the only one who is perfect. Jesus lived a perfect life that I could never live and He died on a cross for all the things that I have done wrong. Sometimes it's hard to accept and believe when someone provides generously for your needs, even if that someone is God. I believe that he hung on the cross for me so I could go to heaven. He was the only one that provided a way to get to heaven, this time I could not provide for myself. I needed a Savior and Jesus was God's provision for me.

It's tiring being self-sufficient and there is rest in receiving help when you are unable to help yourself. I discovered He is God and I wasn't and that's the way it's supposed to be.

God became my new partner in life, I didn't feel alone anymore. My new alliance with God changed my lifestyle, too. I'm learning to live a life of love instead of fear by unplugging my defenses and tearing down walls of isolation. He continues to change how I think and act as I learn to see the world through the eyes of Jesus. I now enjoy the Lord together with my husband and the Lord provides generously through my husband as well. My motto has changed from “you and me against the world” to “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” John 3:16.

Kris' Story...

I was always the class clown and a troublemaker most of my teen life. Getting involved with the wrong people and making poor choices always had me stigmatized as "Crazy Kris". People were always confused though because despite my actions I was genuinely a good person to certain people. I technically never hurt anyone, I sometimes attended church, and if I committed an obvious sin, I was forgiven for my sins by my priest, said my penance but then would end up committing the same sins over and over again.

I went through a period of time that I did not want anything to do with God. I started blaming Him for the problems that I was going through. Soon I met a man who is now my husband. Randy, at the time, was in the same spiritual place that I was. He had been kicked out of his church when he was eighteen years old, shunned by his family and friends. This situation got very interesting when we had our children.

Randy's family lived in Corning, New York, so we drove up to introduce them to the kids one day. His parents treated my husband as if he did not exist. This made him sad. When I saw how troubled he was over this, I decided to study his family's beliefs in an effort to get them back together again. They studied their version of the Bible and always made reference to their magazine. That seemed to be even more important to them than the Bible. Nevertheless, I had never actually studied Bible. (My religion was sort of "Understood". We learned about traditions, saints, and the meaning of our sacraments, memorized prayers and those kinds of things but we never read the Bible.)

They would show me scriptures that looked one way and they interpreted them in a way that seemed so contrary to what I was reading. The more I listened to them, the more my heart became burdened to find the truth.

I believed that somewhere there was a church that studied only the Bible that could help me understand. I studied with every denomination from A to Z and began buying every book I could find to research the Bible. Finally, I came across someone who spoke to me about eternal life and how only Jesus could give it to me. I had a stack full of text books in front her with a dozen questions requiring instant answers. She pushed them aside leaving only her and the Bible in my sight. For the first time in my life, someone was showing me Bible verses from their heart and only using the Bible. There were no reference materials and I could tell that she truly "KNEW" and "LOVED" God. She asked me if I were to die tonight and wake up before God and HE asked me why He should let me into heaven, what would I say? I told her that I was not a bad person and did many good deeds. She opened the Bible again and showed me many scriptures but the one that was the most meaningful to me at that time was Ephesians 2:8-9 "For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast".

At that moment everything seemed so real to me. Jesus' birth, Jesus' death, Jesus rising from the dead. All the stories that I had heard about all of my life became so personal as if the things that Jesus had done were just for me. At that moment, I asked God to forgive all of my sins, and acknowledged that Jesus was Lord and Savior of my life.

All of my life I was always unsure where I would go when I died. Basically I hoped that on a scale, God would see that my good outweighed the bad. 1 John 5:13 proved to me that this was why the Bible was written--so that I could know FOR SURE that I had eternal life in Jesus.

After I accepted Jesus so personally, my life began to change as I read the Bible with more and more understanding each time. I grow closer to God every day. Now my good works are not my attempt to earn my way into heaven but they are little thank you notes to God for sending His son to die for my sins and giving me the awesome FREE gift of eternal life.

Emily's Story...

My spiritual journey has truly been a "long and winding road." I was raised going to church and with the idea that if I "accepted Jesus and was a good girl" I would go to heaven when I died. I didn't have a problem with the first part of that axiom; it was the "good girl" part that would prove to be difficult. I was baptized when I was six years old and because I loved Jesus with all my heart, I was determined to "be good" so I could go to heaven and be with Him. Besides, the fiery alternative described by my pastor really frightened me. So I set about "being good" with the zeal of a bright and energetic child spurred on by an abiding sense of impending judgment if I failed. I tried so hard to "be good"-to follow all the rules-I tried not to argue and fight with my brothers and sisters, to mind my mother, to work hard in school, to not lie, not steal, not be mean. Loving Jesus in my conscience became one big THOU SHALT NOT and I tried to follow the letter of The Law. But I always fell short. Every Sunday that the rededication hymn was played in church, I was the first one down the isle asking forgiveness for all the terrible things I had done during the previous week or two. The concept of God's grace had not penetrated my young heart. By the time I was in my mid teens, I was weighed down with guilt and a sense that I would never be "good enough" to stand before God's judgment. More than that, I didn't see anyone else who was good enough either. Frankly, I didn't see how anyone possibly could be. I began to wonder how God could ask so much, how could He expect us to be perfect. I still did not understand that the perfection God sought had already been accomplished for me and had become mine the day I acknowledged Jesus as my Lord.

My response to this sense of total inadequacy to meet God's demand for perfection was to rebel. I didn't just rebel, however; I went through a major revolution. I stopped going to church, stopped believing in the divinity of Christ, and finally I decided I didn't believe in God. By the time I was 20 I considered myself to be an atheist. But, being who I was, I had to have some standard by which to judge myself and others, so in God's place I put my own ego, my own image of myself and what I could be. Instead of God, my standard became human potential-my own version of "Be all you can be."

I spent the next thirty years still driven by perfectionism, but now I was the final judge of whether or not I was living up to my standards. And you know what I discovered? I discovered that I couldn't even live up to my own standards. I set and met goal after goal and filled my life with accomplishment-an adult version of "being good." But, the more I accomplished, the more goals I set and met, the emptier I felt. I just couldn't understand why attaining my goals didn't make me feel better, feel worth while, feel "good enough." Something was definitely missing. When I came to the point where I could be honest enough with myself to be willing to admit that something was missing, I started searching for what IT was. It obviously wasn't money or position; I had those. It wasn't human relationship; I was then happily married, had great kids, and lots of friends. But I knew something wasn't right. There was an emptiness in me that none of those things could fill.

It wasn't a sudden revelation or a crisis that started me thinking about God again, but a steady pull that I couldn't explain. I started reading about different religions and cultures and their concepts of God. As I read and tried to be objective about it, the belief system that made the most sense or had the truest ring to me was Christianity. But this time I discovered something that had escaped me before. I discovered the good news of God's grace and the perfection that is mine through Jesus Christ. Ephesians 2:8 became real to me. The self-imposed burden of perfectionism that I had been carrying around all my life was lifted from me. Now I try to be more like Jesus every day, not out of a sense of guilt, but rather out of a sense of gratitude, understanding that one day I will be able to stand before God and be judged not just "good enough" but perfect because of what Jesus has done for me.

I wish I could tell you that the story of my spiritual journey ends here with me walking off hand in hand with Jesus into a rosy future filled with happiness and good times. But that is a fairy tale that Jesus never promised. In fact, in John 16:33 He says that "in this world you have tribulation." And I would say that tribulation describes my life over the last several years. My husband could not accept the changes brought about in me by my new relationship with God, what he described as my fundamentalist approach to faith. My focus had changed from career and life style to God and His will for me. So, I found myself in a new home away from family and friends, without a job, and with a marriage that was coming to an end. Amazingly, I have also found myself sustained by the strength of my relationship with God. John 16:33 has taken on personal meaning for me, but just not the part about tribulation. Yes, Jesus promises "in the world you have tribulation," but it goes on to say "but take courage; I have overcome the world." This is so real to me because over the last year I have with His help climbed out of the gray despair of depression and begun to work through the process of forgiveness. I know that I can walk into the future with the assurance that no matter how imperfect I am His strength and His perfection will carry me through. I claim and cherish the promise of God given in Jeremiah 29:11-14:

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you," declares the Lord.