My Testimony

“He brought me up out of a horrible pit [of tumult and of destruction], out of the miry clay,

And He set my feet upon a rock, steadying my footsteps and establishing my path.”

(Psalm 40:2) AMP

“I was sliding down into the pit of death, and he pulled me out.

 He brought me up out of the mud and dirt. He set my feet on a rock.

He gave me a firm place to stand on.”

(Psalm 40:2) NIRV

Giving my testimony on how I came to Christ has always been difficult for me. I consider myself a strong person and giving in to thoughts of suicide is not something I thought would ever happen to me. But it did. I have experienced first-hand the utter depths of darkness and despair you can plunge into no matter how strong a person you are.

The Holy Spirit has also dealt with me on the issue of keeping it hidden. First and foremost, it is about Him, not me and my story is a testimony to His power. Secondly, having been down in that dark pit, I can now understand and help those who are going through a similar thing.

At the age of 25, I had come out of a failed marriage, relocated to a new city to work for a recording studio, was carrying tremendous guilt about taking vows in front of God and then getting divorced, deeply lonely, and in a dark ever downward spiral of depression. One evening I collapsed on my bed and told God that it was too much and that I was going to take my own life. I was coming to Him whether He was ready for me or not. Finally fell asleep, exhausted and spent from crying.
 

The next day one of the composers who recorded in our studio came to my office and asked me to go for a walk with him because he needed to talk to me.  I did not know much about him, other than that someone had told me he was nice but a “little strange” as he was a born-again Christian. It was apparent he was extremely uncomfortable and finally said he was just going to blurt it out. If I decided he was nuts so be it.
 

The evening before he had been in church and a few minutes into the service, he suddenly pictured me. He said it was so real it was as though I was standing in front of him. The Holy Spirit told him that I was planning on ending my life. That he needed to reach out to me and tell me that there was nothing I had done or could ever do that was so bad it would cause God to turn away from me. That God loved me, and I was to come back to Him, He was waiting for me.

At that point, he stopped talking and just looked at me. He had the same expression on his face my puppy has when it has done something on the carpet. “Please say something and put me out of my misery.” With absolutely no emotion, I simply said, “yep, you’re right.” At that point he plopped down on to the grass in relief. He said he knew he should have reached out to me the night before, but the whole thing was so weird, nothing like this had ever happened to him before, so he was convinced he had totally missed it. I had also always seemed happy and cheerful with absolutely no sign of any angst about life. He had spent a sleepless night, knowing that he should have tracked me down immediately and not left it. That morning he drove into the parking lot terrified my car would not be there. He said the overwhelming relief at seeing it, made him decide that he would talk to me no matter what. He was not going to go through another night of turmoil!

He then asked if I wanted to go to church with him that Sunday. The answer was, “duh, yes” and that Sunday I accepted Christ. Nine months later I was working for the church and two years later I married him.

The standing joke at the church after that was that you needed to be careful who you brought to Christ because you might end up marrying them!