“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” John 8:36
I was raised in a dysfunctional family with a father who was addicted to alcohol. I lived in fear of him and eventually everything and everyone else. In school, I became a target for bullies. My family attended a Catholic church, but the idea that anyone was more powerful than my dad was lost on me.
By the time I was an adult I had given up on God. I traveled down many roads (and made some bad decisions) to try to find happiness and spent 10 years in counseling in an effort to come to terms with my troubled childhood.
Every road led to more emptiness.
In the summer of 2012, I was an unemployed single mother with no direction when I was invited to attend the Reformers Unanimous program one Friday night at Valley Forge Baptist. It was there that I heard about God in a different way than I had before. As I listened, I heard the words forgiveness, restoration, and salvation. I heard about the saving grace of Jesus Christ. I heard that I could be free from addiction and from the guilt and shame of my past.
At first, this seemed too good to be true… but was it? Was this the answer to my lifelong search for contentment? I had nothing left to lose, so I answered the knocking I sensed within me and opened the door of my heart to the Lord. I experienced an instant peace and my soul found rest.
What I had been trying to satisfy was a spiritual void that wasn’t being filled by anything the world offered.
After that first night, when I accepted Christ’s forgiveness and received salvation, my life would never be the same. Within just one year God gave me a new job and then the love of my life, whom I married in October 2013 in a beautiful ceremony. Some people might call this a lifestyle change, but I call it a miracle.
Nineteenth-century British preacher Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
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Article by Emily Myers
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