Sharing my testimony has always been an interesting experience for me; it feels as if with each new lesson God teaches me, I look back on my past with a new set of eyes. Each time I give my testimony, it changes a little more as I interpret God's work in my life through His word and the new experiences He gives me.
I have always grown up in a Christ-honoring home. I had a very active conscience since I was young, and the weight of wrong on my heart was overwhelming at times. My parents thought that it was sweet when I would come to ask forgiveness late at night for some small or secret wrong I had committed that day. I felt differently - I felt trapped by guilt and fear.
When I was about ten years old, I became afraid of hell, so I asked Jesus into my heart, and was baptized about a year later. When I was thirteen, I was living a life that my parents were proud of, but I still felt this sense entrapment. I became even more afraid of hell, and rededicated my life to Christ as a fail-safe.
Here's a beautiful thing about Jesus: He can take something as warped as my fearful, selfish call for help, accept me anyway, and begin shaping me into who He's created me to be.
After this, my relationship with God was filled with inexplicable highs and lows, usually brought about by the nature of the environment I found myself in. During youth group I was very excited and motivated; during college I was disillusioned and depressed. My ideas of God and how He felt about me were totally dependent on the my circumstances.
It wasn't until my sophomore year in college that I was first able to hear God say He loved me. I had heard my parents and teachers say it before, I read it in the Bible, and I knew it was true, but for the first time I felt the truth of this knowledge in my heart. . I was sitting in a prayer chapel alone when God put this weight on my heart – but it was a different kind of weight, one that made me somehow lighter. I was loved no matter
what was happening in my church, school, or home. For the first time in my life, I was given a joy, peace and purpose that transcended my circumstances. Most Christians have understood this love their entire life, but for me it was new and life-altering.I praise God for not giving up on my heart that was curved in on itself – that He kept knocking and knocking until I let Him in.
C.S. Lewis called God the great iconoclast: constantly smashing down our concepts of Him and replacing something closer to the truth in its place. That is, I think, the essence of my testimony. It is a series of demolitions and reconstructions in my life and in my mind, slowly conforming it to the true image of God.