Please Note: This post is NOT going to follow my traditional "Past, Present, Future" formula. At the moment (even being 8-ish months since the last time I updated my road to getting into the missions field) I am not ready to post an update. God continues to work on me, and in me. And really, I feel like something AMAZING could be coming to me in the next few weeks/months. But I'm not ready to spill the beans just yet on anything. Hopefully I'll get to give some news soon. But this time...I'm posting about a little project I gave myself this year.
Testimony Attempt #1
So right before the new year, I decided to do something that I don't normally do. I made a resolution. Trust me...as much as I can be a bit OCD about things and can be organized when I want to be. I can NOT plan ahead for the life of me. Not gonna lie...this is a pretty big problem. So...my resolutions I made at the end of 2014 are pretty astonishing in themselves.
One of those resolutions was to write out my testimony and share it 4 times. Sounds doable, right? But the problem is...I wrote out my testimony shortly after I rededicated my life to Christ before my sophomore year of college. Crazy enough...there's been quite a bit that has changed within my story since that time. My goal was to write out my testimony with FULL details. Everything from the good, the bad, the ugly, the "probably needed to be there to understand it", and the "probably should never tell anyone this". I planned to put it ALL in there.
Really, in the back of my head...I kind of planned to share this testimony with people from the church I was part of when I lived in Charlotte. Why them? (Sorry, Ohio friends). Mostly because I've lived in Ohio now for 25 years. If anyone is to not necessarily know the majority of my story, it would be them. So...I also wanted to include in my testimony an "adequate" depiction of northwest Ohio, and more importantly, my mostly unheard-of town of Elmore.
I probably should have known I had taken on more than I could handle when my testimony took me 4 months to write! Yep...started it right before Christmas, and ended it right after my birthday. Okay, so I didn't necessarily work on it EVERY day. There were several very tough and dramatic things to have to write in there and I had to take a few days (or a week), and get enough courage to put them down on paper. Yes, paper. I hand-wrote the whole thing.
When all was said and done...my testimony was (brace yourselves) 54 1/2 hand-written pages long. Actually, the writing itself was pretty therapeutic. But then I realized something. 54 pages either needs to be read or spoken. I'm practically to a mini-novel. Would anyone really like to read that? And more importantly...the service at my church in NC is about an hour long. IF I ever got the opportunity to share it...would I feel good enough to share all those things with people out loud? Would they want to hear it? And really, would they gain anything from it? Not gonna lie...over the next couple weeks, I tried to practice telling my testimony. But by about page 10, I was ready to be over (it's probably not a good sign when you don't even really want to tell your own testimony).
Over the past few months, I have heard several tips on sharing your testimony. And...sadly...mine pretty much was a good example of what you're NOT supposed to do. Short? Nope. Makes a certain point? Nope. I just wrote to be able to write. And...another place where I'm not gonna lie...it's all drama. When I realized that my testimony was 50+ pages long, I actually wanted to create it into a book ( I was already part way there, it seemed). I mean come on....others have done that! It was so dramatic...I actually started creating character names for everyone in my life so I didn't have to use their real names in my book. Seriously, after finishing my testimony, I attempted rewriting it into a novel. And again...I got bored with it before I got to chapter 2.
So over the past few weeks and months, I've been working more diligently on some Bible studies. Especially on faith. For some reason I've been on a mass faith-kick. If I hear of a book talking about faith, I read it. If I hear the word faith...I look up the Bible verses they're talking about. To date, I finished reading Lysa Terkeurst's "What Happens When Women Walk in Faith", re-attempted Beth Moore's "Believing God: Experiencing a Fresh Explosion of Faith", am currently in the midst of Lee Strobel's "The Case for Faith", my Bible study is in a new book by Cindy Bultema called "Red Hot Faith", and I've also read Hebrews 11 (sometimes considered the "Faith Hall of Fame") in multiple versions of the Bible. From all my studying on faith...here's what it boils down to:
Faith is trusting in the unseen. And realizing that even in our darkest moments, God is still there, blessing us. And that, my friends, is the greatest testimony of all.
A month or so ago, as I was reading all my faith books, I came up with my own analogy of what faith is. Here's a nutshell version:
Life is like a puzzle with no picture on the box. All the pieces are there to complete it. However, as humans we try to put the pieces together to fit our needs. Ever done that? Just like when you put 2 puzzle pieces together that don't go together...the fit may seem right, but the picture isn't. Same in life. Just because THAT job and THAT career path and THAT salary and THOSE friends seem like a good fit...the picture isn't right. And as we go on, putting these pieces in ways that make us happy...we generally end up with a mess. Faith, is taking a step back and trusting God...the puzzle-maker...to put those pieces together. He is the one who knows what the final picture looks like. But...just like in life...it's going to take time. (Just this past Christmas, my mom and I attempted to put together a 500-piece puzzle during Christmas afternoon. We thought a couple hours and we'd be done...it took us the better part of 2 days to complete). That's what faith is. Letting God put the pieces together. And in the end...it makes a BEAUTIFUL picture.
So...I have decided to rewrite my testimony. This time, instead of focusing on the drama, focusing on how God has used my sorry attempts at putting my life puzzle together to create something even better. This testimony is focusing on the blessings...not the drama.
So...here's my new and improved testimony (conveniently separated into 4 parts):
Part I: The Basic Background
I was born and raised in a Christian home. We did Bible stories and prayer before bed, prayed before all meals, attended church multiple times during the week, and participated in other church-sponsored events such as summer VBS. Over the first 10 years of my life, we switched churches multiple times. We were never necessarily denomination-specific (meaning, we weren't devout Lutherans and only switched to Lutheran churches...for example). To give a better idea, by the time I turned 10 we had attended a United Methodist church, a Christan and Missionary Alliance church, and a Church of God church. We switched to each of these churches due various reasons: jobs, travel times, or even current needs of our family or the church. In fall of 1999, we switched one more time to Grace Community Church in Fremont, this time looking for a church with a larger youth group as my brother was going into 7th grade. The first summer we were at Grace, in 2000, I attended Grace's VBS and that is where I made my initial decision to receive Christ through salvation. However, my salvation was brought on by jealousy. (My brother had gotten saved a few years before that, and I was jealous of things that he got to do as a Christian that I didn't get to do...like take communion).
Part II: The Next 10 Years
Because I accepted Christ due to jealousy and not because I wanted a real relationship with Him, I didn't understand what it meant to put my faith in God. As I said before, faith is believing in things not seen. Since I didn't have my faith and my beliefs in God, as life began getting harder through high school and even into college I was looking for a person, place, or thing to rely on, generally turning to my friends, which, in turn, hurt and sometimes even ended those relationships. I would try over and over to "fix" the relationship...but normally that didn't do much. I did this over and over for many years. When a friendship would end because I was relying on my friends more than on God, I'd just move on to find a new friend to call my own. The summer before my sophomore year of college, I found a few new friends when I decided to be an Orientation Leader at my college for the summer. I quickly became friends with a couple girls, eventually even joining the same sorority as them. However, about a year later, during summer orientation, I was beginning to feel like I had worn off the goodness of those friends and would be going through the same process for the millionth time or so. Struggling to figure out why all my good intentions were not working, I was in the midst of an online conversation with one of these new-found "best" friends when she said something that, at the time, made a huge impact on my life. All she said was "I'm not going to be here forever". At first I was hurt about those words, fearing that I'd screwed up the relationship again and would be alone very soon. I wanted to do something to change the path. I had been still going to church, so it's not like I didn't know what to do. And I decided I wanted to get baptized...something I had dreadfully avoided since becoming a Christian 10 years earlier. As I played out my new dream scene of my baptism, a problem became apparent. At my church, before you are baptized, the pastor asks if you are "trusting in Christ and Christ alone for your salvation". I realized that I wasn't. Sitting in my dorm room in August 2009, I rededicated my life to Christ and was baptized in an outdoor baptism a month later.
Part III: Trials and Blessings
Many people would leave their stories at that. Sadly, many people get the wrong impression that when one becomes a Christian, it's all happy days where nothing ever goes wrong again. I'd be lying if that's how I left this. Over the past 6 years since rededicating my life to Christ, I have been through my fair share of trials. But...as I look back on these trials, I can also see the great blessings that are only possible through faith in God. Here are 5 examples:
1. In June 2010, I got to travel to Thailand with my church. Numerous blessings came out of that including my feeling of the call into ministry and missions, as well as realizing that life isn't all that bad here in the US. Think it's crazy that you can't find a pair of shoes to go along with that matchy-matchy outfit? Most of the kids in our orphanages in Thailand had one pair of sandals, sometimes the hand-me-downs of another child, and some were even falling apart. What a joy for the kids when we bought them each a new pair of shoes. They sang praises to Jesus for new shoes, and the life they got to have in the orphanage that we provide the funds for. Although they didn't have as many material possessions as we have in the US, they had an amazing joy for the things they did have. What a load of blessings each of those sweet children had on my life!
2. Before heading to Thailand, I decided that I needed to do something about my monthly hormonal issues. So...I decided to begin going on birth control. Sadly, instead of my crazy hormone moods getting better, I ended up in a very deep dark depression for several months. As I kept wanting to go back to my old ways and relying on my friends to tell me what I should do to get out of this depression, sadly, many of my friends disappeared. I don't know if I've ever felt more alone in my life. To this day, there are very few friendships that survived that time in my life. It took me the next few years to discover where the blessing in that situation came from. As friendships began to be stripped away, I really only had one place I could go...to God. I even remember several times looking up to the sky and telling God, "Okay, it's just you and me...now what?"
3. In August 2012, I moved to Charlotte, NC. Although I was excited for the new adventure, I faced numerous struggles in the process of moving there...and then with jobs when I decided I couldn't continue my teaching job in Charlotte. The blessing, I discovered early in my adventure to NC, was that God brought me to a sweet church and an amazing group of people. Within 6 months of being in NC, I had many people from my church knowing about my dreams of going into the missions field, some were even anxiously awaiting my announcements to move overseas next. For 10 years, I had gone to the same church and had to actually tell people that I wanted to be a missionary. In less then 6 months, with not many mentions of my Thailand trip, I had people encouraging me to continue with that dream. In my mind, I believe that the "real" Bethany was displayed in NC. My true God-given dreams were on display. And since it was from God, I didn't have to try to talk anyone into believing me.
4. 365 days later, I moved back home to Ohio. Although I was pretty upset about going back to the land of cornfields and snow, I needed the normalities of home again. The blessing of coming back to Ohio has happened over the last year or so. I've found new passions, worked on new goals, become closer to God, and even mended a few relationships within my family and friends. How life looked like when I was moving back to live in my parent's basement and how life looks like now (almost 2 years later), is completely different.
5. Last fall, I began working a retail job, featuring a pretty steep pay cut from my last teaching job and part-time hours. But despite the financial and scheduling woes that came with it, there's been a great blessing from this job. I work with several devout Christians. I didn't just get co-workers. I found friends. Too many jobs in my past, I have had co-workers, but when I move on to the next chapter in life and away from that job, that's where the relationship ends. I don't see that happening with these girls. God's given me people that are more than just co-workers. They're friends. And part of His family.
Part IV: Wrap Up
Here's what it all comes down to: God can use even the toughest situations for His good and for the good of those that follow him.
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