“...I told him that I absolutely believe in the Lord Jesus and that God raised Him from the dead. I have been believing this in my heart for years by that time, but I didn’t know what to do beyond simply believing. So much that I had witnessed [throughout my life] completely turned me over to the Lord and I felt as though I were at His feet, giving all of my worries to Him. Immediately after digesting that verse, I just started sobbing, so overcome with emotion. I felt all of the anxiety and uneasiness that I’ve carried around with me for over a decade finally fall off of my shoulders. My uncle was ecstatic, saying that he would be praying for me and probably would cry tonight himself as he spent time with the Lord.
When I ended the call with him several minutes later, I tried to compose myself and walked from my bedroom to the bathroom across the hall to grab a tissue (or the whole box full). My mom, looking at me in the disheveled, undone and yet new state that I was in, asked what in the world I was talking about with my uncle (who had a track record for initiating deeply emotional conversations with me). All I said was that we talked about our faith, but in reality, it was in those moments that I finally became saved. Finally, God had answered my [prayer].”
…
Ever since that phone call with my uncle one February afternoon in 2017, I have been saved. But when I look back on that season of my life now, in 2021, I reflect on the aftermath of it all and can’t help but wonder just "how" saved I really was. I mean when it comes to salvation, I would argue that there are only three possibilities (as far as I’m aware anyway):
1. God chooses you and you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior at some point in your life; therefore you are saved.
Matthew 7:13-14 “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. 14 Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
3. You “were” “saved” but then fall away from your faith (or lose salvation) which ultimately means that you were never saved to begin with and therefore have a false sense of salvation.
2 Peter 20:20-22 “For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. 22 But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: “A dog returns to his own vomit,” and, “a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire.”
Although those roads all seem a bit daunting, for me at least, I was, am, and will always be saved from that point forward. But for the days, weeks, months, and even years (to an extent) afterwards, I didn’t always feel as though I had this so-called immediate spiritual transformation that everyone in the church talks about and I had been so desperately anticipating. My [lack of] complete transformation after calling unto Jesus often burdened me with doubt and confusion. It made me question the validity of my salvation as I knew that when we accept Him as our Lord and Savior, we are reborn in spirit and made alive through Him. With that sort of perfect and supernatural change taking place within you, wouldn’t you expect something in your life to change? I’ve heard remarkable stories of how alcoholics and drug addicts came to Christ and in that moment, their desire to smoke or drink or harm themselves in any way simply ceased to exist. But aside from feeling as though God was calling me and pointing to this moment in my life, frankly I didn't feel much of a change at all...
Sometimes when I reflect on that season in my life, I think of my favorite Bible verse (Proverbs 3:5-6) because it coincides with my lifelong struggle to truly and completely trust in the Lord with ALL of my heart and to lean not on my own understanding. If I surrendered to Him by accepting Jesus as my Savior and repented of my sins but then almost involuntarily resisted every direction He was leading me in, then how could I truly feel saved and be confident in my salvation? My desire to control every aspect of my life clashed with God’s intended direction for my life. It just didn’t work.
Now this could have been (in part) due to the fact that I was still relatively young when I became saved and was going to a school that rarely, if ever acknowledged God. So there were times where I found it difficult to fully obey Him as it was easier to merely fly below the radar in fear of being completely ostracized from every group at school (although most of my friends and peers were pretty accepting of my faith). But nonetheless, after that phone call I found myself still in more bad moods than good, still listening to angsty screamo music that I guarantee you is not Christian-friendly, and overall I just didn’t do much to show God that He was my priority now. I even admitted to my sister once that I had no desire to change and improve my overall self. Simply content with the vile creature that I was. At the very least though, I joined a City-wide, Christian youth-group ministry in 2018...so that had to count for something, right?...
...In fear of digressing into an entirely separate story that I wish to share at a later point, I’m going to essentially fast-forward my life to 2020. Because of course, while my walk with the Lord had improved and my faith did in fact grow dramatically between 2017 and 2020 (otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now), it wasn’t until the world shut down that I was forced to take a step back and evaluate my life in that brief but powerful moment of pure uncertainty and stillness.
As mentioned in one of my last blogs, I had been working on my senior thesis for the first few months of 2020. It was inspired by man’s brokenness and God’s divine comfort. A collection that was meant to reflect the life of someone before Christ enters into their heart and what a person’s life looks like afterwards. A 180 degree transformation. Pretty ironic, don’t you think? Anyway, I had been working on my thesis along with all of my other schoolwork entirely at home for the remaining months that I was in school. For whatever reason (probably because I no longer needed to commute 2+ hours into the city each day), I noticed that I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands and no idea what to do with it. So just as any other single, hopeless romantic, (admittedly slightly lonely) Christian girl would do during an unprecedented pandemic, I downloaded Hinge. And as perfectly articulated in the book of Ecclesiastes, I will confirm that there certainly is nothing new under the sun, lemme tell ya…
As much as my online romantic endeavors were proven to be unsuccessful, I did happen to come across one man who seemed to have made up for all of the other, uhh, "duds" so to speak (not that there weren't some nice guys but I will say that the unbelievers far outweigh the Godly men on those types of apps--comment Amen if you know what I mean)...Without going into too much detail, I will say that undoubtedly the single most attractive quality he possessed was his strong, unwavering faith in the Lord. Out of every twist and turn I can recall in my faith journey, getting to know this guy over the course of a few months was the true point in which my faith undeniably progressed. Looking back I had even told him that for a long time before meeting him, my faith had been growing horizontally. For instance, I thought by revolving my senior thesis around God and His ability to transform the hearts and minds of others that my own faith would subsequently improve, but in reality it was going nowhere fast. All throughout school I’d read the Bible only when I really had time (which was rare) and I read it for the sake of crossing it off of my To-Do list. I went to church, then (every once in a while) fought with my siblings on the drive back home. And it took me living in another country and psychologically hitting rock-bottom to finally put ALL of my trust in God, feeling worn out from fighting against His plan for my life. Why am I so thick-headed you might ask? Good question, I have no idea. But just know that you will always lose when fighting against the One who made you.
So apparently it took a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and my ultimate weakness (a nice, intelligent, attractive, Christian man) to genuinely prompt the strengthening and overall deepening of my faith. Though the man was a temporary part of my life as we only talked online for a few months until it inevitably fizzled out, his impact on me was not. I found myself wanting to know the Bible like he did, desiring to recite verses as if they were tattooed inside my brain, and most importantly remain faithful to the Lord. I wanted to pursue God with my whole heart now and it took me over twenty years to get to this point. Total, complete surrender. I really wasn’t the good Christian girl that I claimed to be all of those years which ashamed me, but now I had all of the time in the world to build my relationship with Him starting from square one.
...
To Be Continued