I am an ordained minister and a Christian short term missionary and I have been born again most of my life.
I spent years sitting in church hearing others speak about their lives before they received Jesus into their lives and of the miraculous changes that God’s healing effected in their lives. I honestly thought that I had no testimony worth telling because my salvation experience went in the opposite direction of everyone else’s I had ever heard. I believed that since I grew up in church and had given my life to God when I was four years old and went through hell after that point and not before it that I had nothing to tell.
But as I have obeyed God and have told others about parts of my life I have learned that I have a story that is encouraging to others. So I have learned to love telling about how God brought me out of hell and enjoy seeing the positive changes in others’ lives that have come from that.
My family went to a church that didn’t teach on salvation or have altar calls because they believed that if you were a member you were going to Heaven and if you weren’t a member you were going to hell.
My first memory of hearing God speak to me was when I was around eighteen months old. It was a voice I was familiar with, because I’d heard it a lot but not audibly as I did this time. I have several memories of hearing the audible version of that voice including my salvation at four years old.
I was standing in the hallway between the two halves of our farmhouse trying to understand an abstract painting my mother had painted in school. I did this quite often. This time I heard that audible voice which told me, “You are My child. You are My chosen and I have something very special for you to do.” My response was immediate. Of course I would receive whatever this person wanted to give me because I already knew Him and trusted Him. I’d do anything for Him.
Even though my family attended church they practiced witchcraft which they had learned from their family. My salvation was not a very welcome thing especially since I had the disconcerting and irritating habit of telling them when they were lying. I saw what they did even when they were out of my physical sight and I would give them words of wisdom that I was hearing and that no young child of four or five would know.
I found out later that there was an additional reason for my family’s displeasure. I’m the oldest of our generation of the fourth generation since the witchcraft entered our family. It was my job to renew our family to witchcraft with an even stronger and higher connection. I went in the opposite direction and renewed our family to our even older roots of revival which came out of the Wesleyan revival in England. My sixth removed great grandfather was Charles Wesley’s attorney. He and his family were involved in the revival.
I left my family and my hometown when I was a young adult. Until then I had to come through murder attempts on my life, my own suicide attempts, numerous beatings, molestations, public denunciations by authorities, friends and family members, constant bullying throughout school, partial imprisonment by my family, slave labor, depression, obesity, disinheritance, injuries and illnesses and being disowned by one side of my family and stalked by the other side….
But for the grace of God where would I be? When I left my family by God’s direction, He sent me to a church that was connected to the church I had been in in our hometown. In that church I acquired three families who took me under their wings and helped me to learn how to be a normal human being.
I had been so isolated that I truly had no clue how to function in society as most of us know it. These families included me in everything that they did. They took me on their trips, one gave me a room in their home and two of them even called me daughter.
One of them told me that what I had to do would seem so abnormal and difficult to do. But she said that it was what I needed to do. I had no clue what she was saying at the time. But I do now, having come through the other end. She was right. I had to learn to un-become the person I learned to be growing up and to become the person that God had intended for me to be.
Because of the selfless time and extreme effort these three families put into rehabilitating my life I have a marriage that’s over thirty years old, a son who is alive and married and wonderfully functioning in the real world. I lost all of the weight and have kept it off and have been healed of all of my sicknesses and injuries. We have a ministry which is directed toward helping others who have been deemed unfit by others. We help them to realize their dreams or help others who are dealing with a difficult situation and just need some outside input.
Through the years I’ve been aware of other believers telling about their trips to Heaven and to hell. I’ve been to Heaven several times and have painted about the trips. But as far as I knew I’d never been to hell. One day I was talking to God about the fact that He had taken me to Heaven but didn’t see the need to show me hell. Then He said. “I took you out of hell.”
In 2004 we were attending a series of meetings in a church we were working in. I’d never met the speaker before or since. While I was sitting on the front row minding my own business I suddenly became the demonstration for his teaching. He was talking about how we would be more inclined to obey God and to change our ways if we were to not just hear God’s quiet voice, but His audible one.
He said, waving his hands around me, “What if a tile were to fall out of the ceiling and a golden light were to surround you, and an audible voice were to say to you, ‘You are My daughter, I am very proud of you and I have a very special job for you to do.’ ? Now wouldn’t that influence you to want to do whatever God wanted you to do?” And I answered, “It did.” Poor guy, he looked at me not sure of what he had heard and not sure if I had understood. So he repeated what he had just said and I repeated what I had said. He just looked at me, shook his head looking puzzled, and continued with what he had to say next.
After the meeting I told him what he had done without knowing it. I also talked with a friend who had been there and we realized that we both had seen the golden light all around me even though the falling tile and golden light weren’t in my original encounter.
Having come through what I have come through and becoming a totally different person than what I started out with I would encourage you that nothing is ever hopeless. As long as we are alive nothing is hopeless. It may not be painless but it’s not hopeless. By God’s grace, you can come through anything just like I did.