My Testimony

From doubt to trust.

The opposite of doubt is not certainty, but trust. — Sheryl Paul

Given last week’s piece, I thought it might be helpful to share this piece from last year once more. When I first published it, I had 250 subscribers and now I have over 600. So the majority of you haven’t read it yet!

I could almost hear you asking me after “Good” People do Terrible Things, if I truly believe what I said, how do I live in any kind of peace or happiness? Well, what follows is my answer.

It’s been some years since I came face to face, not only with the evil of humanity, but also with the evil of this particular human. That is to say, me. It all happened in quite an unusual way, but happen it did, and with that knowledge came peace. Because it meant that God’s Word was true. And since God’s Word was true, I was never expected to face my own evil and conquer it alone. I had the help of the Lord of Hosts.

This means that if I am willing, God will come to my aid. He will save me from my own self-deception so long as I perpetually ask Him to do it and often times, even if I don’t. He will deliver me from evil. He will deliver you from evil if you repent and call on the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Continue on to read or click play below to hear me read it to you.

A psychologist I sometimes read said something true a while back. (I know. Shocking, huh?) Her name is Sheryl Paul and she said, “The opposite of doubt is not certainty, but trust.”

This is true.

Several weeks ago, I hosted our church’s ladies fellowship. About one day before the event, I got asked to share my testimony with the group. I was so busy with preparations for the event and half a dozen other things, I didn’t have the time to write it all down in any organized fashion. The result was that I was quite dissatisfied with the way my account rambled hither and thither.

The reason I’m finally writing this all down is simple, really. It’s because I haven’t heard many testimonies like mine before, and if I’d had the chance to hear a few like mine in my youth, I might have been spared years of suffering.

Let us begin with…my grandparents. Last week, I told you about my Sicilian great grandparents who arrived in America in 1912. They were, not surprisingly, Catholic. At some point in my Grandpa’s childhood, there was some falling out between the Barbera family and the church, and they stopped attending any church at all. I have no details on the nature of this falling out other than that it happened. Grandpa didn’t attend church again until he met my Grandma who had begun attending the United Methodist Church in her teen years. In her words, she had a conversion experience there when she “prayed through” at a revival meeting. Not sure exactly what that term means, that’s just what she called it. So my dad was raised in the United Methodist Church from a baby until the time he proclaimed himself an atheist. You can read more details about how my dad became a Christian here in the eulogy I wrote for his funeral. (And I would love it if you did, because my dad was a one-of-a-kind sort of fellow.)

On my mom’s side, her parents also attended the United Methodist Church until their daughters were grown. I believe their attendance fell off at some point, but my mom’s childhood memories are full of a sense of reverence in the church sanctuary.

By the time my parents met and began dating, my dad was now a doubting atheist and my mom was a bit of a wild flower child of the 70s variety. Within a few months of being married, my Dad proclaimed his allegiance to Christ which annoyed my mom because now he wanted to read the Bible all the time which was a real drag. But God had designs upon her, and within a year, my mother had fallen to His pursuit as well.

Now, where to go to church? It seemed obvious. They’d both been raised in the Methodist church, so to the Methodist church they returned. Unfortunately, the Methodist church was no longer the church of John and Charles Wesley. Even then, the denomination had begun its slow slide into liberalism. My parents dug into their Bibles, eager to find the truth waiting for them there, and they couldn’t help but notice that some of the things spoken from the pulpit didn’t quite match up to the words they were reading. It all came to a head when the minister stepped to the pulpit one Sunday morning and began reading the opening verses of John 1. But with a little twist.

“In the beginning was the evolutionary force, and the evolutionary force was with God and the evolutionary force was God.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Mom and Dad left the Methodist denomination and never looked back. But did they ever find home? That’s somewhat debatable. They went to a slew of Bible and Baptist churches, mostly. By the time I came along, we were holding steady in Bible churches.

My parents were earnest in their desire to see all of us kids raised in the faith and to know Jesus for ourselves. To that end, my dad brought the entire family to church faithfully every week for morning and evening Sunday services and Wednesday night services too. He conducted family devotions every other day of the week where he’d lead us all in a hymn or two, open his Bible and teach us from it, then prayer. At times in our family’s history, this happened morning and evening.

I was steeped in the waters of the Gospel. I practically swam in them. When I woke too early in the morning before daylight, the lights were on in the living room, and there mom and dad would be reading their Bibles and praying. I often, as in too many times to count, heard my name on their lips and I knew they were praying for me. Praying that I would know Jesus, praying that I would become a woman after God’s own heart, praying that God would send the right man into my life at the right time to be my husband.

And so, it isn’t surprising that I would have made an early profession of faith.

At some point before I turned five, I have a fuzzy memory of being at home with mom. She was working in the kitchen, cooking or canning or baking bread, while listening to a cassette tape. (Yes, I’m that old!) On the tape, a woman was giving her own testimony of salvation. She had been in despair, leading up to her salvation, crushed with guilt and suffering over the many abortions she’d had. This story troubled me while I listened. Mom noticing I wasn’t acting my usual self, sat down to find out what was bothering me. I don’t remember anything that was said during that conversation, but I do remember kneeling down with Mom in front of the couch and asking Jesus to save me from my sins.

I was baptized at around eight years old. I understood that being baptized was a step of obedience to Christ, a way to demonstrate that you were not ashamed to be called His, and I wanted to do it.

And that was it! I was saved. Life went on.

Until I turned twelve. Twelve is just a terrible time. You’ve got puberty and bra shopping (dreadful) and menstruation and school is getting harder and if you’re a sensitive soul like I was, you have a tendency to reflect and/or ruminate on past failures. And boy, did I. That time at the couch with Mom seemed ages ago. I barely remembered it at all. In fact, I didn’t remember it any better then than I do now. Then there were all those times I lied to my parents, disobeyed, snuck food I didn’t like off my plate and into the trash, swiped candy, was mean to my brother, and about a million other things I was ashamed of. Do people who are really Christians do things like that, I wondered? This all lead to something like a panic attack one night in church and a weeks’ long bout of doubting my conversion.

In our Christian circles at the time, great emphasis was put upon an individual’s subjective experience of salvation: what emotions were experienced, memories of the day salvation occurred. Date, time, location, recorded in the back of the Bible.

I heard two kinds of conversion stories growing up.

The first kind went roughly like this: “I remember it like it was yesterday! I was sitting in the third row from the front of the church, the fourth seat in. I was in such conviction and I wrestled in my heart. But God finally had His way. I got up when the preacher gave the invitation, knelt and asked Jesus into my heart. I had such joy, such peace and such happiness flood over me in that moment, and I have never doubted it since!”

The second kind went roughly like this: “I went forward at a Bible camp/church service when I was really young, because I didn’t want to go to hell. I prayed a prayer, but I didn’t really mean it or understand it. So, I thought I was a Christian. But then when I was fifteen, I was under conviction for the first time and I realized I had never been saved, so I finally repented of my sins and was converted.”

(Incidentally, my parents’ accounts of their conversions were not in either of these two categories. You’d think that would have helped me. But humans are funny that way, and often overlook what’s right in front of their faces. I certainly did.)

The “never doubted it since” sentiment is sometimes expressed for this kind of conversion but often, these souls continue “getting saved” at regular intervals, every two to three years or so.

About now, you can imagine what I was beginning to suspect.

My dad was very good to me during that time, trying to help me through it. We went through the book of I John, reading about what gives assurance of faith. I went round and round in my head. Did I really understand back then? Did I experience conviction? Couldn’t remember. Did I believe I was a sinner back then? I did now. Did I really believe that Jesus was God back then? Mr. Jones remembers the month, day of the week, the time of day and his location? Why can’t I? (I wasn’t even five yet, that’s why. It took me until I was at least ten to reliably remember which direction is right and which is left. I doubt I knew whether I was on Monday or Friday when I was five.)

After many miserable days of uncertainty, my dad finally suggested, “You know, you can just ask the Lord to save you now if you want. It might help put it to rest in your mind.”

So, I took his advice and asked Jesus to save me again. I came to an uneasy truce with my doubts. Very uneasy. I kept them at bay through most of my adolescence.

It all came crashing down once more around the age of 20. You might say I suffered from a convergence of events.

Various churches had failed my family several times. After my dad was ordained a minister, he took a church in Minnesota. We were there for all of six months before the strain that place put on my mom forced my dad to resign. This church fought him at every turn over quite basic, non-controversial Biblical teaching. It was awful. Several years after that, we moved from the beloved home and community of my childhood, a place called Freedom Farm, to Ypsilanti, MI, where my dad intended to plant a church. A year later, my grandmother suffered a debilitating stroke and we uprooted once more. We moved into my grandparents tiny home in Kalamazoo, MI so Grandma could come home instead of living out the rest of her days in a nursing home. We were packed in like sardines in a can. I had no place to call my own with lots of restless, sleepless nights. My dad and my brother snored like you wouldn’t believe and we were crammed down in the basement together. Sometimes I escaped to the couch, sometimes a recliner chair only to awaken when my Grandpa would get up in the middle of the night and clomp around the house, talking to himself. He was deaf as a fence post and never understood how loud he actually was.

Dad tried to make a go of the church once again, but it slowly fizzled and died. Some of the people who attended the church were, and I don’t say this lightly, toxic in the extreme with a heavy dose of Bill Gothard influence. Most of this family is now dead (high speed car chase ending in a shootout with police), apostate, or in prison (same run in with police). Going to church with that poisonous cloud hanging over us was suffocating.

Kalamazoo was a progressive town. I had never met so many progressive people in my life, all eager to proclaim how backward, bigoted, intolerant and stupid people like us were. (They never said it to me, only about people like me. Nice, white progressives, and all, who lacked the chutzpah to just come out with their venom. They don’t have this problem anymore, I’ve noticed.)

The last factor was thus: For the first time, I was online interacting with complete strangers via a now defunct blogging platform called Xanga. It was the time of the New Atheists. Richard Dawkins had just written his “God Delusion.” I met many of his acolytes online and they were…mean. Insulting, mocking, and cruel, once again eager to tell me how stupid I was and how smart they were.

Added to this were my continuing bouts of OCD-like thought patterns left over from my childhood run-in with PANDAS. (I’ve written about this before here.) I ruminated, obsessed, and compulsed constantly over anything and everything, including things of a spiritual nature.

When the floor, the last bit of assurance I had left, collapsed beneath my feet, it collapsed completely. It all happened in a moment…at a Christian youth conference in Pennsylvania, ironically enough. I was at a conference run by a group of rag tag refugees from various Anabaptist backgrounds—Hutterite, Mennonite, Amish, Beachy Amish, Brethren, Old Order Mennonite—all led by a former Baptist hailing from Hyles Anderson Bible College. Picture a sort of Amish/Mennonitish gathering with the funny clothes and head coverings for the girls, but with a high-intensity revivalist atmosphere a la Charles Finney or Billy Sunday.

I was sitting, listening to a sermon one moment. The next moment all assurance of salvation and my faith was gone. Terror swept over me, adrenaline surging like lightning through my body. I tried to talk to some of the counselors there, but nothing helped. The terror wouldn’t leave. I was a puzzle to them.

Some of you reading this right now, know exactly what Christian movement I’m talking about. Please know that I think fondly of those people to this day. This is not an indictment of them. They were nothing but kind, warm, caring, hospitable and compassionate to me. But I never went back. The experience I had there was so painful and so jolting, I chickened out at every future opportunity.

Four years.

Four long years after that moment, I wrestled with my doubts and my questions. There were very few people I could confide in. The church we were going to at the time was full of people looking for false conversions, already. The pastor and many in leadership would advise the doubter to just get saved. Well, I’d done that once before, and here I was once again. So, I didn’t bother talking to them.

I talked to my mom, my sister, and my brother-in-law who was and still is a pastor. I read every Christian apologetic book I could get my hands on. I devoured C.S. Lewis. I watched seminars. I sought out critics of Richard Dawkins. I listened to sermons about assurance on Sermon Audio. I wept. I begged God to help me. I read my Bible. I memorized Scripture. I paged through the hymn book and sang the songs to calm my racing heart and still the ache in my chest. A gnawing in my stomach developed and within a year, I had constant abdominal pain and gut upset. I went to bed each night with a heating pad because pain kept me awake. I wished to be unconscious because my mind would not stop tormenting me.

I talked to my dad. My goodness, my poor dad. He was up all hours of the night with me, trying to help me through this, until 1 or even 2 in the morning sometimes. He’d open his Bible and show me from Scripture what constituted a genuine conversion to faith. He pointed me to the account of the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion in the book of Acts and how simple it was. He believed and was baptized right there on the spot. He showed me the evidences of conversion in the Bible: Christians are not comfortable in sin. Christians do not lie and say they have no sin. Christians repent. Christians love other Christians. Christians grow in all the fruits of the spirit. Christians believe that Jesus is God. Christians walk in the light. And at the end of each conversation, I always felt better. I saw the evidences of faith in me. But by the next day, my mind had undone it all.

My mental habits of ruminating did not help me come to any clarity about where I stood with God. My thoughts tread in a big loop, leading inevitably back to the original question—Did I really belong to God, or was I just deceived into thinking I was?

Here’s how the loop usually went:

“Did I really get saved all those years ago kneeling by the couch with Mom? Well, to be saved you must repent of your sins and put all hope of Heaven on Him because He is the only sinless one. Okay. I think I did that. I think. Except that I can’t exactly remember if I really understood what happened. Did I really repent of my sins? Can’t remember. Okay, scratch that. Who am I believing in right now? Well, it’s definitely not me because I know I’m a sinner. So, it’s Jesus. (Big sigh of temporary relief.) But what if the Bible isn’t true like those atheists say? What if God doesn’t exist? What if Jesus never even lived? What if sin isn’t even real and it’s just some concept people made up to keep everyone else in line?”

Remember that OCD-like anxiety I dealt with since I was a kid? In the end, it saved me. No, not like Jesus saved me. It saved me from the loop. How?

At periods of time throughout my life, I would have a steady stream of the most vile, reprehensible intrusive thoughts parading through my head all day long, every day. They repulsed me, they frightened me, and they reduced me to a trembling, sobbing mess, because they always involved me doing something wicked to someone else. At first, I took this as a dead give away that I was actually a psychopath. I thought they originated within me. Somewhere deep in the recesses of my soul, I must want to do these awful things. Why else would they be in my head? The day it hit me that clearly I didn’t actually want these things because they tortured and horrified me, was a banner day.

From there, I realized that every one of those awful thoughts were being carried out in reality by some flesh and blood human somewhere, perhaps even now, against real people. And that was profoundly evil. Even if the Bible had been erased from all human record and I had no knowledge of it, I would know that what I encountered in those horrible intrusive thoughts was pure evil. It was sin. And it seemed that Evil was after me, himself…that if he could not have me, he would at least get a kick out of terrorizing me. And then, like gears falling into alignment on a piece of machinery I realized the next thing and the next and the next.

If evil/sin/the devil exist, but God doesn’t, there is no hope for human beings. They must simply capitulate to whatever evil ideas comes across their minds, because will power is finite. Eventually, it gives way and evil erupts. However, the fact that evil and sin exists, corroborates what the Bible says from Genesis to Revelation. And if the Bible is accurate about that, it must be accurate about the remedy for sin. And who but God, would ever come up with the idea of putting Himself to death to atone for people who hate Him and sin against Him with abandon every single day? Humans don’t come up with ideas like that.

I felt a glimmer of relief. And yet, I could not shake the last uneasy notion that somehow, I had bungled my conversion all those years ago. Had I had faith? Maybe. Was it enough faith, though? Was I convicted of sin? Can’t remember. Was I convicted enough? Probably not. Did I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Yes! I think? Was it sufficient?

One more epiphany was before me. Through sermons, reading, talking with dad, it finally began to dawn on me that I was obsessing about whether I had done “getting saved” right when salvation was of the Lord and…not me. Instead of asking whether I had believed, been convicted, repented enough all those years ago, I should be asking myself who I was right now.

So, I did.

“Amanda,” I asked myself, “do you believe you are good enough, sinless enough, pure enough to answer and fulfill God’s mighty law?”

“No! Of course not. I have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

“Who is, then?”

“Well, Jesus.”

“Who do you trust to bring you safely to Heaven?”

“Jesus. That’s all I’ve got.”

Somewhere along the line, I had begun to read some old Christian authors with Puritan roots. One of them wrote that children raised in solid Christian families and converted to the faith young, often do not remember the moment this conversion took place. Yes, one moment they were lost and the next they were saved, but that instant may not be recalled.

Huh. Was that me?

After all these epiphanies, you’d think I’d have put my doubts to rest. But old mental habits of rumination and obsessing and compulsing die very hard. By the end of four years of my internal hellscape, I was exhausted, suffering from the physical fallout of this prolonged stress and about to experience the full effects of this in my body over the next fifteen years. My mind was beyond tired. I was angry and frustrated. In my frustration and anger, I spoke to the Lord.

“I’m done! I’m done trying to figure this out. I’ve looked at it from every which way I possibly can. I’ve tried to prove to myself that I am a Christian. I’ve tried to prove to myself that I’m not a Christian so I can finally just get saved for Pete’s sake! So, You’re going to have to figure this out for me. It’s on You now. You can do whatever You like with me, and I’m good with that. I will suffer with You or without You. So, I think I’d rather suffer with You.”

I imagine God smiling as I unleashed this rather undignified tirade. Because…that was actually faith. It was trust. I finally got it.

My doubts and fears concerning the fate of my eternal soul gradually faded from view. Nowadays if a body asks if I’m a Christian, I smile and say, “Yes!” If they follow it up by asking when I became a Christian, I say, “Don’t have a clue.”

The difference is that this last answer no longer disturbs me in the least, nor do the somewhat strange looks that answer sometimes elicits. Because the Bible never said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, if you remember the date, time and location of your conversion.” It also never said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, if you were immediately filled with overwhelming joy, happiness and relief.” (Though if those feelings did flood your soul at salvation, I think that’s marvelous and I’m happy for you.) It also never said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, if you came forward in a service and prayed a certain prayer.” Nor does it say, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and you’ll never doubt your salvation.”

The Scriptures just say, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

And it’s really as befuddlingly simple, and as hard, as that.

Nowadays, this is my song:

My faith has found a resting place, not in device nor creed. I trust the ever living one. His wounds for me shall plead. I need no other argument, I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died, and that He died for me.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

P.S. If you enjoy reading what I write, please consider upgrading from a free subscription to paid. What a help it would be! Crafty ladies, rejoice! I hope to present you with a round up of all the garments I’ve sewn or knitted next week. (I have been working my fingers to the bone in my garden this week as the weather is very fine and the weather next week promises to be foul.) So I hope to have a little girls’ Easter dress finished by then with lots of pictures to share with you. If not next week, then before the end of the month. Have a lovely week!