Well Happy New Year! I hope welcoming in a new portion of life has gone gently and peacefully for you! I pray you have so many hopes and dreams that you are expecting from 2025! I know I do! If you’re like me, you are more easily motivated when working toward a goal or have something to look forward to! I see lots in store for the new year and I am surely excited about what all I am sure God is going to do!
Having said that, I will be addressing some thoughts on the new year soon, possibly in my next post. I still have some thinking to do on that one but it’s in progress. Today I will continue with my recalling my years of struggling to understand true salvation. I will wrap it all up in Part lV, but for this moment I will let you in on a very impressionable time in my life, my teens. I know you’re probably thinking that this time is certainly impressionable for everyone and that is surely true. But all I know to give you is my experience which set many of my beliefs and had much influence from my church, the people there, and especially my youth group.
I do want to address that in recounting all these times over these past couple of entries, I have not addressed two quite major components of my childhood, those being my parents’ divorce and my personal diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. I will definitely talk about these things in days to come. I just wanted in these few posts to share my salvation story. I want you to know as we continue to spend time together that I do know Jesus! I pray that the things that I say are always based on the authority of HIs Word. So more on those other issues later. For now, let’s talk about salvation!
By the time I reached my teen years, I had been in church the majority of my life. I had made two professions of faith, hoping that at least one had worked. I continued to try to be the good girl, the best that I could be religiously, wrapped safely I thought, not in purification but in my own attempt at perfection. I don’t think I didn’t want to believe in the finished work of Jesus, I just didn’t know or understand that is what true salvation is.
When I was fourteen years old our church hired a new youth minister. I was excited and hopeful as our previous leader had been very passive and non-chalant and just not a lot of fun. I had become so disenchanted with his leadership that I had even skipped out on church for several months, which was so unlike the reputation I was trying to portray.
This new minister seemed to be engaging, and it wasn’t lost on all the girls that he was handsome as well. He also had a beautiful singing voice and led our church music as well, which also made us younger congregants happy too. I knew that there was something special early on about Bro. Todd and his sweet wife, Melody, but I had no idea at the time just what a difference they would make in my life!
As I continued to grow up, I was heavily involved with our youth group. Another anomaly about me is that I did not get my driver’s license when I turned sixteen. I was eighteen when I first got a learner’s permit. I will tell you more later about how I was actually twenty-six before I learned to drive and got my driver’s license. Because of this, time with school friends was limited and my church group became my only and true friends and the ones whose beliefs were the ones to shape my own. Unlike what many would say of their teenage companions, I consider this a great blessing from that time in my life. Along with those friends were the words of affirmation that Todd often gave me. One night after church a few of us were standing around talking about the Bible and I’m not sure if Todd read or quoted Isaiah 40:28-31 to us. He then said, “this describes Lisa so well”. I was astonished and never asked him what he truly meant by that statement. However, if you’re familiar with the verse, you know it talks about waiting on the Lord. And if you know me today, you know that I am better at most anything than I am at being patient and waiting. Todd also lauded me as the leader of the youth group and once wrote me a letter declaring that I was the kind of person churches are built on. He often called on me to make phone calls when contacts needed to be made for a particular reason, and I made sure I was always reliable in that task. In fact, I loved being asked because it meant someone believed in me. With all that I was doing at church, it seemed I was achieving my goal. Surely everyone thought I had this salvation and Jesus thing down. I was being noticed, and the accolades surely meant my salvation was intact, right?
But as my teen years started winding down, I still needed to know that I was accepted, important, believable, saved. It would take a few more years to finally nail down this GIFT of salvation and realize that it was all in God’s hands and not my own. More on that next time.
Happy New Year!
Blessings,
Lisa