Almost four years ago God used a special young lady’s testimony to open my heart, mind, ears, and eyes to our Lord. Later this same young lady became my beautiful wife. But this story is not about how God blessed me through salvation, this story is about how God blessed me before my salvation.
I am originally from Maine, my parents raised me catholic. I say raised because I mean that I was made to take the Catholic Catechism classes (we called it C.C.D. – Confraternity of Christian Doctrine). The only time I really ever “went to church” was when I spent the night with my grandparents, my grandfather would bring me and it bored me to tears.
The only test I knew of how to be a good “Christian” was trying to follow the Catholic rules and meeting regularly in the building. Since we were not concerned about doing either I came to the conclusion that this stuff did not really matter. I decided it was all a farce and thus I did not have to believe any of it. I continued going to C.C.D. for the sake of my mother and was later confirmed “Catholic” (whatever that means). At that time I neither worshiped nor believed in God. I would not say that I was an atheist, agnosticism was much more logical in my eyes, but I functioned like an atheist (of course, which agnostic doesn’t?).
So, that is how God blessed me before he blessed me. You see, through all this I became very skeptical. I turned to philosophy as my God and questioned nearly everything. I even started to question evolution before my salvation. When I would meet a Christian I would ask them why they believed what they believed, never did I receive a satisfactory answer – at least not one I considered logical enough to consider who Christ was.
They say (you know, those people who sit in little rooms saying stuff) that hindsight is 20:20. As I look back onto the days of my youth, I can see how God has used my skepticism to bring me closer to him.
Lew –
Thanks for sharing this. I look back on my past and see how the Lord is going to use it for His glory. I have always been one to question everything … not for the sake of being atagonistic, but because I just want to know and understand things. Because of that I have always challenged the status quo (many times to a fault, to be sure!) as far back as I can remember (and got in lots of trouble at home because of it!).
There are other things in my past that I know the Lord allowed because He is going to use it to minister to people — much of it is too ugly to go into here, but I already have seen Him use it and I look forward to seeing His work in the future.
Blessings!
~Heather