Prompt: Please describe your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, including the moment you trusted him as your personal Lord and Savior.
People often talk about trusting God “as your personal Lord and savior”, but for me, at least, those were two very different decisions. Allow me to explain. I grew up in a Christian home. My parents and grandparents were all Christians, and my dad was a pastor. From the time I was born, I knew all about God and how much He loved me and how He sent His son to die for me. Then, when I was six years old, my parents decided to become missionaries. My little six-year-old mind decided that if I was going to tell people about Jesus, I needed to know Him for myself. So I asked Jesus into my heart. I never really forgot about that day, but I did make the same mistake many Christians make by treating it a bit like fire insurance. I had prayed the prayer, and now God would save me from hell. I just needed to be a good Christian for Him, and everything would be cool. As they say in Poland, to wszystko. That’s all.
When I was thirteen years old we had come back from the mission field and I went to a church camp. The speaker talked all week about Isaiah 64:8 and how as Christians we have to surrender our lives to God so He can mold us into who He wants us to be. They had a pottery wheel set up for kids to mold their own clay, and on the very last day the speaker took a bunch of spare pots that had been made and threw them on the floor so that they shattered. Something about that image stuck in my mind, and I began to realize for the first time that “giving my life to Christ”, as it is so often called, was really just that. God wanted to use me for something incredible, but He could only do that if I gave Him complete control of my life and let Him make it what He wanted it to be. I was going to have to let Him “break me” and mold me back into what He wanted, into a usable vessel. That was the day that I promised God that my life was His to do with as He pleased. I had trusted God as my savior when I was six years old, but it wasn’t until I was thirteen that I began to make Him the Lord of my life.
Since then my relationship with God has been a bit like a rollercoaster ride. When my parents felt themselves being called back to the mission field when I was fourteen, I spent a year struggling with God over why He would bring us back and give me such incredible friends, only to rip me away and take me somewhere else. It felt as if God had more or less disappeared from my life, and there were a few months where I felt completely empty inside. Then one day I was reading the story in Genesis where Abraham is ready to sacrifice Isaac, and I began to realize that God was making good on the promise I had made him nearly two years before. He was testing me, seeing if I was really willing to trust Him with my life no matter what. When I finally came before Him on my knees and told Him that my life was His, even if it meant leaving everything I knew and moving to the other side of the world, I suddenly had a peace and a joy about it that I’ve never felt before. No matter what happened, I knew God would take care of it. I had always known that God would do what was best for my life, but that was the first time I had been given the chance to trust Him on it. When I was sixteen my family finally moved to Krakow, Poland, and looking back I can see that it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me on every level of my life. I think I have grown closer to God in the last two years than in the rest of my life put together.
The last two or three years have been full of lessons. God is teaching me how to trust Him with my life, how to praise Him not matter, how to lean on Him when life gets hard. He has also been teaching me things about Himself: about how much He loves me and about how there is so much more to Him than the Sunday school version that created the world and “loves the little children”. The more I learn about Him, the less I seem to know. God is so huge and so incredible that it blows me away every time I think about it. I will never understand why a perfect God would send His beloved son to suffer one of the cruelest forms of death in the history of the world so that He could be with selfish, sinful, imperfect me. I will never understand why God would allow someone as small as me to have a place in His plan. I will never understand, but I will be forever grateful.
God has shown so many faces of Himself in my life. He is my comforter when no one else knows that I’m hurting. He is my rock when I cannot do it on my own. He is my friend when I need someone to talk to. He is my Prince of Peace when I don’t know what to do. He is my strength and my shield, my protector and my redeemer. He is the father who gave His son for me, and the Lord to whom I owe everything. He is the best friend who will never let me down. In short, God is my everything. I honestly do not know what I would do without Him in my life.
Being human, my relationship with God is far from perfect. There are still times that I turn away from Him, far more than I’d care to admit. But He always takes me back, thank goodness. I find it amazing that He continues to forgive someone who screws up as often as I do. But I am incredibly glad that He does.
Living for God is not a one-time decision. It is a decision that must be remade every moment of every day. Similarly, walking with God is not a simple choice, but rather a life-long journey. I have given my life to Jesus Christ, my King, and I am doing my best to live every day for Him and for His Kingdom. As time goes on, I feel that I am beginning to catch glimpses of what God wants for my life, and I find it very exciting to finally begin to understand why He has given me the passions, experiences, and friends that He has. I am very eager to see where God leads me as I continue on my journey with Him.
Update: As most of you know, in February my friend Ryan shot himself. (Please continue to pray for his friends and family.) I have been severely struggling for the past (almost) two months with being depressed, being hurt, and being angry at the world and at God. But I'm trying to get back in the Word, and I'm hopeful that things may begin to get better. In a way, I think this is growing my faith even more. I heard a TV show character the other day say this about life: "It hurts like hell. But that's how you know it's worth it." In a way, I think he's right. We need the pain to apreciate the joy, to understand that the things that hurt are the ones truly worth fighting for. I'm praying for everyone who reads this, that God will show himself to you and help you through whatever it is that you're struggling with. I love you guys so much. Take care.
-Ash
No comments:
Post a Comment