simplerich

I've been trying to figure out how to start or write this part. You see people give their testimony at church, and on TV and it's touching and moving and sounds so inspirational and moving. I don't know that this is like that. There weren't any bright lights or voices coming from above or anything like that. It was sort of a gradual process.

I was raised in the church until I was 11 or 12 or so and then we quit going to church. It was a geographic thing and not a huge rejection of church or Christianity. We just lived a long way away from the nearest church so we didn't go.

High School happened, and then University and the things I'd believed as a kid were being replaced with things I was finding out in school. There was no Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny wasn't real, my parents didn't really know everything and couldn't make everything better all the time, and maybe, this Christianity thing was over-rated. So, it just receded to the background. It was never rejected as such, just dismissed and put away as I had done so many of the childish things I'd found weren't true any more as I grew up.

I went through a hard spot in my middle twenties, my life was in the toilet. I really didn't think it could get any worse. I kept saying that, and every time I did something else would happen to prove me wrong. In the years between college and what I later came to call the long dark night of the soul I'd looked into Qabalah, yoga, wicca, and just about every other new-agey thing going out there. Right now, when I really needed them though. They weren't helping.

Sitting in my apartment, after a series of things that just kept trying to prove to me that they really could get worse and I should quit saying they couldn't, I prayed for help. I just couldn't do it any more. I'd been trying to do everything myself. I'd taken on the world and the world was kicking my face in. Out of despair I prayed for help. I was begged for help. I don't remember making any promises. I just remember sitting on the floor sobbing into a winter coat and thinking that the crying was making my nose stuffed up and it was already more than a little congested from a cold.

I started going to church again though. I found a Baptist church near my apartment (I'd lost my car to being reposessed by now.) and that was it. As slowly as I'd drifted away I moved back. I've managed to get my life back to normal, at least I've managed to stop the screaming descent into darkness and pulled up and climbed into the light... and I didn't do it myself. I didn't do anything. That was the secret I think that finally worked. I let God do it for me. Yeah. I still go to work and I work hard for the things I want, but I know that doing them by myself isn't going to be enough.

You know those bumper-stickers that say God is my co-pilot? It's kinda like that. The poem every Christian bookstore has a dozen pictures of in various frames, footsteps I think it is? That's it too. I still have troubles, and I still run into difficulties, but they don't run my life now. They're things that happen in my life. Faith is what runs my life now, and when ships are crashing into the rocks around me I hand the rudder over to God and let Him do the steering.

I'll have to re-write this a couple of times. I've left out Gramma completely, and it's her quiet faith, and reading the Bible to me when I was there over summers as a kid that I thought of when I was sitting on the floor that afternoon. She took great comfort from her faith, and was/is a person I look up to. She passed away, and I know she knows this, but I wish I'd had the chance to tell her myself.

Love ya Granny. :)

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