|
My Testimony |
|
I was praying this Sabbath morning about what I should say and God said, "Our story is to be about Satan having complete possession of us and how God saved us from Satan and from ourselves." I had my own ideas but I am deleting it all and writing in the Spirit, let me tell you my story. I was a drunk who lost her children in a court battle. In 1993 I was certified insane without any hope of getting better by a disability court in North Carolina. I was so bad I was ordered out of the courtroom by the judge. Even worse I would go to the bar every night and get drunk. Everyone called me 22 because I always had a 22 ounce beer in my hand and the men knew how to get to talk to me…bring me a 22. I had several times danced on pool tables, seats, and around my pool stick like it was a pole. If any of you have ever read Project Sunlight that was my life. It seemed that the author was writing about me but I had never met her. With a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other hand and a Bible in my lap I started to study the Bible. I continued to go to the bar. Whoever started that rumor that angels do not follow people into bars is wrong. Ellen White did not say it. I checked before writing this statement. While in the bar angels were talking to me in my mind saying, "Look at that!" "Look at all these people. You do not want to be like that. Year after year you have been coming to this bar. The guys never find love and leave. That is not what they are looking for. Debra, you will never find love in this bar." Would you believe I continued to go! God had to take drastic measures. After all those times of protecting me by showing me what was in the hearts of the men that were hitting on me, he did the worse possible thing he could do. He let me fall in love with the lying-est, two timing-est, herpes carry-est man on the planet. I started seeing things here and there that taught me not to trust him but as a lot of women know, once you are in love it is too late. It will take a miracle to pry a woman in love from the arms of the man she loves, as was the case with me. Less than a month after I met him I had herpes. While thinking he caught it from some woman I still stayed. I thought, "Who would love me in this shape? I had no choice but to stay." Finally he came home hours late with a lame excuse. That is what we call "the straw that broke the camel's back" and I told him to leave. He would not leave. I started calling the police but he tried to take the phone away from me. The phone number had been dialed so I threw the phone behind the couch so he could not hang it up. He did not know that the police was listening on the other end. They heard everything, found my phone number, tracked down my address, and showed up on my doorsteps. Shane kept telling them he lived at my house so the police would not throw him out. I told them that he had a house in the next town. They verified that and dragged him out of my house crying. But hooked as I was on him because he was such a hugger and I longed to be hugged, I took him back again - for the hugs. Then I found out he was seeing another girl. She was hunting his truck and found it in the Huddle House Restaurant parking lot but he was in my SUV. She had hide and when I dropped Shane off and he had left the parking lot she did not follow him. She followed me. I saw a car following me. That is the way you are when you come from a criminal background. I turned around, went into a well-lit area, and jumped out of my Amigo with all billystick in my hand ready for a fight. I thought it was one of his sisters who were always trying to break us up but they did not know who they were messing with. One chased us down the interstate. My Amigo was a 4-banger. I knew I could not outrun her. In the situation I was in and the way the vehicles were positioned the only one of my famous maneuvers I could use effectively was to strongly tap my breaks, but not strong enough to leave evidence like a skid mark, so she would think she was going to hit me. She jerked her steering wheel, which was the classic response I had hoped for, and hit my boyfriend's truck. He deserved it. "Two for one special," I thought. She never bothered me again after that. But I thought she had gotten up her nerve to take me on one-on-one so I was ready. The girl that pulled into the parking lot was not one of Shane's sisters. It was a girl I had never seen before with small children in the back seat. Either she was stupid for taking children to a fight or she wanted to talk to me. It was the latter. She said, "My name is Sandy." I knew it! She had called Shane's house one day and asked to talk to him but he was in the shower. Shane said she was a family member but I knew he was lying. I just could not prove it. She asked me to leave Shane alone. She said Shane had told her I would not leave him alone. Hello, we were engaged! I showed her my engagement ring and told her that Shane had said the same thing about her. I asked her if she was the one who gave Shane the herpes. She did not know what I was talking about. She asked me on what day Shane had given me the herpes. When I told her she said that was her birthday and Shane did not show up and had given her an excuse for missing it. Work, I believe it was. But Shane was 240 miles away with me. Needless to say we both dumped him. I said, "Let's go together and confront him" but she would not do it, so my maze and me paid him a little visit on his job. Payback! For me to be chasing him so bad I had to take out a restraining order on him because he was banging on my window at 5:30 in the morning. Before it was served he was at my house again the next morning. I went to the Magistrate's Office to see if the restraining order had been served yet and I told them what had happened. They went straight out and arrested him. Although I did not know it, my neighbor that lived down stairs had run him off several times and had told him he had gone from trying to get me back to stalking. She said if he did not leave she was going to call the police. Then he started emailing me while shacking up with another girl. I emailed him back and told him that he was proving just how awful and untrustworthy he was just as I had thought. One time he sent me an email that said, "Oops!" Duh! First you have to address the email to me, then you have to type the word "Oops!," and then you had to hit send. I told him if he sent me one more email I would tell his girlfriend and I told him where she worked so he knew I was not bluffing. That fixed that. After he was gone I feel into a deep depression. I laid in the bed, staring at my engagement ring, crying, and thinking of all the ways I wanted to kill him. Then I decided it would be worse on him if he watched me kill myself in front of him so I started planning that. I stayed in the bars getting worse and worse. I hated men and I wanted to give the herpes I was now carrying in my body to every man I met. After all I had seen how they treated women. But I knew they would be like Shane and keep having unprotected sex and would give it to all those unsuspecting girls. That is the only reason I did not do it. I had to protect the women. No one else would. Boy, did I blame God for all of this. I would yell at him, "Why did you let me go into that bar? Why did you let me meet Shane? Why did you not stop me? It's all Your fault! I hate You!" This is how totally possessed by Satan I was when the Lord found me. That is why I told you all this. Believe it or not, I would not trade all the money in the world for that experience now. God used that very situation to change my life. That was the only way He could reach me and now I can praise him for it. Eleven months after I got herpes I realized my life would never be the same. Knowing this I quit going to bars. Why go? I would never find love there or anywhere else again. I only drank in bars, so that automatically cured my drinking problem. I started again to read my Bible with my cigarette in one hand and a non-alcoholic drink in the other. With my head clearer God could reach me more easily. I had a question. Now that I am a Christian how can I be like Christ? That is after all what the name Christian means. The dictionary defines a Christian as "One who professes belief in Jesus as Christ or follows the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus." Since Satan knows that Jesus is Christ that cannot be the definition of a Christian therefore the definition must me "One who follows the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus," which means "to follow the religion based on the life of Jesus AND to follow the religion based on the teachings of Jesus." To simplify it means, "to live to be like Jesus who lived His teachings." I watched this Matthew video that quoted the Bible verse-by-verse that said, "With men this is impossible but with God all things are possible." I believed that so I wanted to know "the rest of the story," so I went on this quest to find out HOW to live to be like Jesus" I just read my Bible as usual and everytime I came across a verse about the "how" to be like Christ I wrote down the reference. Finally I went back, wrote out the verses by the references, and gathered them together by chapter. I started to see that the "how" is all over the Bible. It is everywhere in almost every verse. I finally understood. I took those verses and put them into a book. That is all I had, so I started to point out words that were important and help people see what the verse really said because I learned something a long time ago. For example, I read Romans 6:23 several times that says, "For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life." It's a small verse. I would read it and go on to the next verse not getting what the last verse said. The wages of sin is DEATH. It does not say the wages of sin is burning eternally in a fire where you will never die. "You will not die" is the first lie that Satan told Eve in the garden. "Eat it. God said you will die but you will not die." Then, again in Romans 6:23 the verse says, "The gift of God is eternal life." You do not need to work for it. You work to earn wages, but the wages is death. It says it right there in that verse "The wages of sin is death!" To not work is eternal life for it is a gift. It says it right there in the verse: "The GIFT of God is eternal life." I read that verse what seems like a billion times and I never got that. I figured the same principle would go for all those verses in my book. Therefore, I did for all those verses what I just did for Romans 6:23. God would open my eyes to see the words in the verse instead of the sentence. This totally changed the way I looked at God. I wanted to be just like Him. I do not hate or fear him anymore and I am learning more everyday. For example, today I learned that when people in the Bible asked God for something they did not say, "God please!" They said, "How can I please God?" I have a long way to go to be just like God but I know it will happen because God has promised it to me like you have read in this book. Like God said in His book, "God does not lie." God has worked wonderfully in my life. I do not smoke anymore but God had to let me keep smoking all that time, with all those church people insulting my love for God, so that when it happened that I did quit they would see that God is true and every man a liar. "I do not have to make myself quit. I cannot do it," I kept telling those church people who told me, "You need to try. God helps those that help themselves. You cannot do nothing and expect God to make you stop smoking." That is not what the Bible says. Those people watched me try and fail again and again. So when I did quit I told them in advance God said, "Today is the day I have chosen for you to quit and you will be a witness to all that behold you." And it was so. That day I quit smoking and has been over two years. I did absolutely nothing to force myself to quit and God did not force me to quit. Many people wondered and asked me to give my testimony at our church and our church academy. My quest will continue and rest assured that when I learn something I will write another book to let you know. I have big questions but God has big answers. A search for truth takes many years so if I can save you the trouble of having to start fresh I will. I promised God that when He teaches me something I would tell what I have learned. I am not trying to teach but to tell what I myself have learned. Read your Bible and remember that song, "What He did for others, He can do for you!" | |
|
|
