One of these days...

...I'm gonna learn to stop volunteering for things.  Until then, yall get to be my guinea pigs.

Two Sundays ago, they ask if someone in our Bible study class would be willing to give their testimony this coming Sunday (just to the class - about 20ish people).  Everyone just sat there starring at the Sunday School director like he was an alien, so I volunteered.

I'm still not sure exactly what I'm going to say, so I thought I'd babble a bit here just to see what it sounds like.

Here goes...

I was saved at the age of 8.  My family and I were sitting at home on a Sunday evening watching Dolly Parton's variety show.  I don't remember anything specifically about the show.  Nothing spiritual that got my mind working.

I just remember feeling an emptiness all of a sudden.  I didn't understand it, but I knew it had something to do with my need for God.  I told my mother and we knelt by my bed to pray the sinner's prayer, then she called our pastor to let him know & to get me on the baptism schedule.

I wish I could say that was the end of it.   That when I was saved from my sins at an early age I was also saved from a life of rebellion.

That's just not the case.

In my mid twenties I had a quarter life crisis.  Seems silly, but I didn't like where I was in life and I blamed God's timing for it all.  "I'll show Him." I thought, and went off on my own. 

I was the prodigal son, squandering the riches my Father had gave me.    I caused jmyself heartache after heartache, yet stubbornly refused to give up. 

(Here's the part where I would talk about marrying an unbeliever, and how even though I've been restored, my choice still causes me moments of pain.  But Jay goes to church with  me some and its not my place to discuss his faith with them.  Also its hard to explain how I can be so madly in love with my husband yet still regret that he's not a believer.)

Unlike the parable, God came after me. 

Last summer God took away my beloved.  In my quest for happiness and contentment I had began to worship myself.  Dieting and losing that extra pound became my focus.  Training, achieving that next thing, doing it fast than before had become my god.

Thanks to some random blood work I was diagnosed with anemia and with one flick God knocked down the world I had built for myself.

It sounds terribly superficial.  It was terribly superficial.

I felt like I had lost it all.  "But God..." those beautiful words from the Bible.  But God was there to pick me up.  He showed me how silly and meaningless my gods were.  Reminded me how incredible He is. 

Slowly, I'm learning to turn back to Him.  There are certainly those moments where I bow to the god of the mirror, but like the song says "He's still workin' on me."