My testimony
I probably don’t conform to most people’s idea of a Christian girl. I love going to parties and I enjoy having a drink. I have a filthy sense of humour and often prefer being ‘one of the guys’ to hanging out with the other girls in the room. I know what it’s like to turn up at Church hungover, with a lovebite on my neck from the previous night, because even though I have struggled terribly with sin, I still love God so much that I can’t stay away from worshipping Him and spending time with Him.
God has done some amazing work in my life, and I praise Him everytime someone, on realising that I’m a Christian, exclaims ‘but you’re normal!’. Becoming a Christian does not mean that I have turned into some brainwashed shadow of my former self - rather God is giving me the freedom and the ability to become more who I am, who He meant me to be. I am normal, but I am also changed.
My God did not come for the healthy, He came for the sick. So here is the story of my sickness.
Born almost 3 months premature and very ill, I was given a 50:50 chance of survival. Needless to say, I survived and beyond a reduced lung capacity I have no health problems that I am aware of. Growing up I remember feeling the need to justify this, to somehow prove that I had the right to live and be fine when there are so many other prem babies with disabilities or who don’t survive at all.
I did well academically and was accepted to a selective school, which was where my need to prove myself became even more prominent. My already fragile self-esteem was damaged even more by the bullies who used to steal my things, vandalise my work, spread rumours about me and slap and scratch me when the teachers weren’t looking. I buried myself in my work because my grades felt like the only thing I had - but at the same time, oh, how I hated myself. At 11 I started self-harming, a habit that stayed with me until well after I’d left school.
I followed my then boyfriend to university (the relationship didn’t last the term before I left him for one of my friends). And so I fell out of a relationship with a devout atheist, who hated the fact that I was searching for something, and into a relationship with a very confused agnostic. Having attended an all girls’ school, where male attention was everything, I convinced myself that being wanted was a sign that I was worthy and rushed into sexual things far too quickly. I was vaguely on the fringe of Christianity, I had friends who were Christians and I went to church with them occasionally. It always seemed like a nice thing to do but I couldn’t shake the idea that it was just tradition, that it fitted in with their nice, middle-class and rather sheltered upbringing and wasn’t for people like me. If I’d been asked I doubtless would have said I believed in God - I’d progressed from my teenage agnosticism to a vague notion that God probably was actually real. That was as far as it went. The people I encountered who seemed *really* into their faith, who talked about the need to be saved and told other people about the gospel - well, they were just weird. Faith was a private thing, nice to have but not something to really tell people about.
In my second year of uni I spent several months in counselling after starting self-harming again and contemplating suicide. There were rumours that my boyfriend was cheating on me (with a man) and my grades dropped hugely. I was due to leave the country to study abroad for a year in September, and I was terrified of the idea. However, once I arrived in France, it was there that I encountered God for Himself. One of the first times I told this testimony to someone, they told me that it didn’t contain enough references to the Bible and Bible passages in it. But whilst it’s awesome to read about the lives of other Christians and the things God has done in their lives, that’s not really who this is for, and before I became a Christian I know I really didn’t appreciate Bible verses. Anyway, I didn’t become a Christian through reading the Bible, it was the film The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe that allowed God a way into my life instead. Something suddenly clicked, and for the first time I realised that no matter how lonely I felt, no matter how unlovable I thought I was, and no matter how much I thought that love for me should depend on my abilities and my success, God actually does love me. He loves me to an extent that I can’t even get my head around. I mean, seriously, who else loves you enough that they would die for you, even when you are a complete mess?
On 5th December 2008 I was completely buoyed up on God’s love and full of so many plans for the future. I was going to stop self-harming. I was going to stop having sex with my boyfriend. I was miraculously going to become one of those perfect Christian people who has everything together, because I had God now. I’d got over my unbelief, but I still hadn’t quite *got* it, because I failed to realise that with God, everything’s a journey, and things don’t always happen in the way you expect. I did stop self-harming (and have only self-harmed once since I became a Christian) and I did stop having sex with my boyfriend - who then dumped me 6 months later having spent 3 of those months cheating on me with a married woman. I found a church and was baptised and started working with the youth group - whilst once again relying on my grades and male attention to give me my worth, rather than God. In my final 6 months of university I achieved firsts in all of my classes, and fooled around with most of my male friends, starting a sexual relationship with one of the closest.
This is a tale of mess, and unhappiness, and sickness, and how I am actually completely rubbish at doing things by myself. God has been bringing me out of this, despite my best efforts at times to ignore Him. I have done many, many stupid things, but how I love God, because He has forgiven me for so much.
I think testimonies are kind of weird. As a Christian, it’s awesome to read/hear other people’s and think ‘Wow, God has done such amazing things in your life!’. As a non-Christian a lot of the time it’s ‘Ok, so, you’ve written a huge long spiel about all the bad things you’ve done and how your imaginary friend saved you. You want a medal or something?!’. The point is that this is me being real. Read one of the Gospels (Mark is a good place to start). What’s so captivating about Jesus is that at no time is He some fake who stays perfectly serene and for whom everything is perfect. He is completely genuine, and if something needs to be said, He says it. He gets tired, He cries, He gets angry, He gets mildly exasperated at the diciples when they just don’t seem to *get* what He’s saying to them.
I could let you look at the pretty things I post and think I’m another brainwashed person who has never known anything other than this little Christian bubble. Who doesn’t know what it’s like in the ‘real world’. God is not just my ‘imaginary friend’ - He is so much more than that. He gave me the ability to stop self-harming entirely after a 8 year history of doing so. He has transformed my life because now my past no longer defines me, my decisions no longer define me and I no longer have to look in stupid places in order to feel love.
If you’ve actually read all this, then wow. I hope it’s made you think, I hope it’s made you look at things in a slightly different way. If you have any questions or want to say anything, feel free to ask me. Or ask God. Or find out for yourself - I dare you to ask Him if He’s real.
Most of the world judges God by the Christians that they encounter and I think that’s sad - find out what He’s like for yourself.
You can read The Gospel of Mark online here: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark
