My long testimony

Here is mine......sorry if it seems a bit long.
_____________________________________
TESTIMONY

Before I became a christian and gave my life to Jesus, I can only say that my life was full of sadness and anger. My whole life, right from when I was a baby all I can remember was feeling like I was stupid, had no self-worth, no confidence and for some reason I felt like I had no rights or any reason to feel happy. It wasn’t really anything to do with my parents. My father and I never particularly got on very well but that’s a different story altogether. I remember cousins and relatives playing with my younger brother and sister and I felt left out a lot of the time. That contributed to my lack of confidence too. I suppose you could say that I was a people pleaser – always trying to do what other people wanted me to do instead of what I wanted. It was like I felt that I didn’t have the right to have confidence or to be happy.
Going through school was somewhat similar. I didn’t have many friends and I tended to keep to myself most of the time. The friendships I did make were short and didn’t last long. I just didn’t feel that I wanted to live at all. I spent a lot of time in the library reading books by myself.
Once I was older and started high school, I made a few close friends. Two of these people are still friends of mine today but sadly one of them passed away in 1993 from a disease she was born with a disease called cystic fibrosis. When I was about 15 years old, my self confidence went down so low that one night when everyone in my house was asleep, I found a full bottle of my brother’s asthma pills and swallowed what I thought would be enough to kill me. Unfortunately all they did was give me heart palpitations and make me break out in a sweat all night. I felt like I was on a high. Nothing changed after that – I still felt the same way.
Shortly after this, I started having a relationship with my first real boyfriend. I had gone out with boys since I was about 14 but this was serious. We moved in together and my alcohol addiction started around this time. I also started getting into the new age scene and my mother, my aunts and I spent a lot of time at meditation meetings, spiritualist churches, getting our palms read. I bought myself a pack of tarot cards and did readings from them. One day I found an old witches spell book in a second hand bookshop and I used it regularly to do spells from it. I thought I was psychic and one time (which scared me) I went into a friend’s house and felt death in that house. I asked my friend “have you ever had anyone die in this house?”. She said “yes, a man was murdered one night right in the spot where you are standing”.

Of course that freaked me right out but I carried on with my lifestyle thinking that I was on the right track. I also use to watch lots and lots of horror movies on video and I thought nothing of it. We also believed in spirit guides and new age healings (like Shirley Maclaine).
My mother and I use to hold each other’s jewellery or personal possessions and see if we could get a reading from it. I didn’t believe in the devil as I was always brought up to believe that there was a God but I didn’t know how to get to him. I didn’t know that you could have a personal relationship with Jesus.
Anyway my then boyfriend was using drugs and drinking alcohol too much and then verbally abusing me so I ended it and moved home a bit more wiser about the world. I was still into the new age scene though.
Unfortunately I met a few friends through work and a technical college I was attending and we soon became party animals. We would go out at night and quite often not get home until the next morning not remembering what had gone on the night before. I would use up most of my wage to support my alcohol addiction and I was spending up to $300.00 in one night.
It was around this time that my mother gave her life to Jesus and started going to a christian church. My family and I went to see her baptised and my immediate thought about all this was “oh no, my mother is going to become one of those religious nutters who shove their faith down everyone else’s throats – one of those bible bashers”. But she didn’t. Instead my mother became more nicer and caring than she already was. I noticed a change in her – she wasn’t into the new age stuff anymore like I was. And the people at her church were really nice and they didn’t look down on me or force their beliefs on me. My mother said to me one day “do you realise that your new age stuff is actually detestable to God?”. She showed me deuteronomy 18:10 which says:
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.

Wow, that verse really spoke to my heart because all this time I thought that I was doing God’s work – hey, the people at the spiritualist church said so. But I knew the bible was God’s own word and he wouldn’t lie about something like this. It was like a light went on in my head and I realised I had been deceived.

I knew then that my mother had been praying for me for quite a while.
She helped me to burn all my new age possessions. The only problem was, they wouldn’t burn in our fireplace so I had to start up a real fire in the middle of summer with wood and paper just to get it to burn.
A few weeks later after another one of many failed relationships with a boyfriend had ended I realised that I needed God in my life as it probably wouldn’t go anywhere if I carried on with my lifestyle.
I had recently attempted suicide for the second time but for some reason I just couldn’t go through with it – I felt that someone or something was stopping me.

I went to my mother and I said “mom, I need God in my life, can you help me?”. Well, my mom cried and said “of course”. She helped me to say the prayer of repentance and then helped me to ask Jesus into my heart.

The next morning when I woke up, I felt different. It was strange. The sky looked bluer and the grass looked greener – I felt like I was looking at the world with new eyes. And I had this amazing feeling of peace and love in my heart. And another thing was that I didn’t feel the need to drink alcohol or to take drugs anymore. It was like the need for bad things had been taken away from me. I just couldn’t believe that God could do this for me and I cried when I thought about how Jesus had died for me….wow that was amazing. I started going to church with my mother, made some new christian friends and met my future husband, Mike at a party one day.
He and I clicked, he became a christian too – thanks to my mother telling him about Jesus too. Six months later, we were engaged and six months after that we were married. Now we have three blessings from God and if it wasn’t for God, we would have never made it this far. We have been married for 8 years and God has helped us through many hard times and good times in our lives. If it wasn’t for God I wouldn’t be here that’s for sure.
Now when I look back on my life I wonder why I had waited so long to give my life to Jesus.