MY STORY
The very beginning of it was in the second grade on New Years' eve of 2001. My paternal grandmother had been sick for quite some time and my father came home to tell us we needed to go shopping for black clothing for the funeral. My grandmother was not going to live through the night. Being eight years old, I was rather alarmed about buying clothes for a funeral of someone who was not yet deceased. I did not understand anything about what happens after someone passes away. My maternal grandmother wanted to be of some assistance and so she gave me a copy of the book What is Heaven? by Maria Shriver. The book gave me an overview about the concept of heaven itself, but of course I needed more.
We attended the funeral for my grandmother and it was all so new to me. We did not really have any Christian practices in my house. Experiencing the prayers and scriptures involved in the funeral gave me something completely different to grasp. The event ultimately resulted in me requesting to go to church.
We went to the oldest church in town, one under the United Church of Christ denomination. Unlike a lot of churches today, it still had pews and a choir as well as hymnals for the congregation to sing from. The pastor's never really talked about God or how to have a personal relationship with Him. However, it was here that I started really understanding stories from the Bible and the concept of the highest power all together. Yet still, there was a lot more that I needed.
In my late elementary school days, I made a good friend. This was very important for me as I often struggled finding a decent set of people to spend time with. This friend had a pastor for a father and in the sixth grade she invited me to a youth all-nighter at her church. As soon as I got there, being a young preteen, what I really paid attention to was the high school boys. The last thing I had on my mind was Christianity. And that is being completely honest. But when they began to do an opening prayer, I participated. That is, until my friend's mom, the wife of the youth pastor pulled me aside and said a prayer with me about accepting Jesus into my heart. However, when I did this prayer, I did not know what it meant. I thought it was sort of a ritual type thing to repeat what she said in prayer. And so I did not really have Jesus in my heart that time.
It was very confusing two days later when I attended the church service and my name was in the bulletin and random people were coming up to me and congratulating me. My mother had come with me and was asking me what was going on. I just did not know. At some point during the service I was called to the front of the church to write my name in the "Lamb's Book of Life" and to receive a mini tote bag of items such as books about Jesus, CDs and a Bible. It did not make sense to me. Why would saying a prayer cause so much attention to be drawn to me? I was only eleven years old so it didn't make sense to me why people were paying so much attention to me. And it didn't stop there. It seemed like every member of the church congregation mailed congratulatory letters to my house.
Over the course of my time with that church, I finally began learning about what Christianity truly meant. Although I had not really accepted Jesus into my heart, at least this church planted the seeds in my soul in regards to being a follower of Christ.
Things became a little scary with the church. They were very forceful in their teaching. Everything was a competition with one another. It was all about who could worship the best, who read the Bible the most, and who was most involved with the church. It was clear that a lot of the congregation was putting on a show for each other rather than putting on the show for Jesus.
At some point my friends parents, the youth pastor and his wife broke away from the church to build a church plant in a neighboring town. We attended that church to stay with my friend and her family. Soon enough, it became a little too forceful. They would reprimand me and my mother if they thought we weren't following Jesus properly. Also somewhat weird was that they would take attendance during the service and if you were not there, you could expect a call to your home demanding to know why. After putting up with this uncomfortable situation for some time, we decided we would break away from the church. Now in the eighth grade, I ceased attending any church regularly for about a year and a half.
In the tenth grade I had another good friend who was very involved with her church and youth group. Somehow I felt that I needed to go to church again, which led to me casually mentioning to her about how I wished I had a youth group to attend. Taking the hint, she willingly invited me to go with her to youth group. I liked going to the youth group. This church seemed a lot more balanced between the first church I regularly attended that didn't really cover any subjects about Jesus and the second church that I attended that reprimanded you if they didn't believe you were following Him properly. This church seemed to have the right balance in teaching about Jesus, but at the same time they did not force it upon you. I felt safe and encouraged in the teachings of Jesus. And so just a couple of years later, on April 16, 2013, I finally accepted Jesus into my heart as my Lord and Savior. Thus finishing a twelve year process.
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED
I believe one of the biggest things I have learned from my experience of coming to know God is that you cannot force people to know Him. I have been on the other side of it with my second church. The constantly pestered me to be better about faith and only seemed to accuse me of doing it wrong. It made me not want to be a part of Christianity at all. Hounding someone about their faith is just not the way to go.
It is important that we remember to act as Christians in sharing our beliefs and not pester the person. We cannot expect to convert people, however, we may plant the seeds in their mind that may build in God's time. It is not our job to convert, but it is our job to inform. Had I not gotten away from the church that did not seem to understand this ideal, I may never have found Jesus at all.
"Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains." James 5:7