This is my personal testimony about my faith and my belief in God. I wrote it in response to questions being asked by a Mormon friend of mine, and I wanted to share it with everyone else, since it's really the core of my being and the one thing in my life that is stable and dependable. Please feel free to send me questions or comments on this!
If you'd like to see the doctrinal-side of my beliefs, they can be found at the CRC website (click the "Beliefs" link on the top left). However, the topic of my faith is a lot more personal and, in my opinion, a lot more telling of who I believe God is and how this belief is acted out. It's also takes a VERY LARGE number of words to explain, so please bear with me. I'll share that here:
The most important aspect of God is that He is a personal God - His desire is to have relationships with the people He has created. This has been very obvious to me lately, due to my prolonged sickness. There are many people praying for my physical recovery, but the results of their prayers and my own searching has led me closer to Him despite physical suffering. He answers prayers that are in accordance with His will, such as my prayers to overcome my pride and apologize to a friend for some un-Christ-like behavior and my prayer to not be overcome by the temptations that haunt me due to my bipolarism. He makes no promises in the Bible about our physical well-being, but instead says, "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away." (John 6:37) This promise is that, no matter what happens to me physically, God will never forsake me or let my soul be lost.
These words are inadequate to describe my relationship. It's hard to describe, since so much of it is the sense of His presence and the results of me acting and praying according to His will. There have been several times in my life when I have had a very obvious sense of His presence. These were when I went on mission trips with my high school youth group from church. We would travel quite a distance (Kentucky, Washington D.C., Colorado and Costa Rica, for instance) and spend at least a week doing intense manual labor as well as evangelizing through local children's ministries and door-to-door discussions. Each trip was a challenge for me, not because I got homesick or frightened of the location, but because I would feel very much alone and incapable of the work. Each time, however, I felt God's presence constantly. He was strength for me, physically, emotionally and spiritually. I would pray all day, my thoughts being a constant discussion with Him. I felt at peace inside no matter what was going on outside and felt His guidance in every task, whether pounding a nail or discussing my faith with a woman that only spoke Spanish. These experience have been wonderful confirmations of the underlying truth that He is always present and always guiding me if I will listen.
However, there have been many "deserts" for me, as well - times when I could not feel His presence (despite the fact that He was present) and had a difficult time sticking to my faith. I have had a lot of physical hardships (I have 4 major, chronic, incurable physical and mental ailments) and my prayers for physical relief have gone seemingly unanswered for a very long time. My relationships with other people have been constant rollercoasters and my emotions have been even more erratic and confusing (due to depression and bipolarism). I've had several losses, including people that have died and people that have abandoned me (such as my father, who "ran away" unexpectedly and a youth group leader that tried to sexually abuse me after a long and good relationship). These experiences tax my beliefs that God cares for me and wants to have a personal relationship with me - if He cares so much, why does He let me suffer? I am constantly reminded of Job during his physical suffering and King Solomon during his anguish about the purpose of life.
In these times, all I can cling to are memories of His presence and the promises He gives in the Bible to not abandon me. It is very difficult for me to realize that He loves me unconditionally and will not run away from me or withdraw from me due to my poor behavior or poor physical and emotional condition. Over time, though, I have reached several pivotal revelations in my life that confirm that perseverance through these deserts and through physical and emotional distress are not only essential but also nourishing to my relationship with Him.
For example, looking back at the experience of my father leaving, I realize that much of who I am today would never have come about had he stayed. The strength I have developed from having to live without him and his support has helped me learn not to rely on myself or any other human, but rather on God and His promises. Also, my father was a dishonest and misleading man, both in his day-to-day behavior and in his role as a pastor. His relationship with God, in retrospect, seems non-existent, and his preaching was not a fountain that would help people to grow, but rather more like a sponge that sucked away the personal aspects of God and left only doctrine and tradition and "rules" for being a religious Christian. Even he disbelieved the validity of his own preaching - I remember very clearly (although I was probably only 5 at the time) a sermon he preached on adultery, divorce and remarriage. I remember the way he explained it, using examples of people we knew and how different behaviors would be sinful. Then he went and did all the things he had preached against - having an affair with a married woman, leaving his wife and causing the woman to leave her husband, and then marrying the woman. Had he stayed, my faith would most likely (but for the grace of God) be non-existent, and my spiritual strength might never have progressed to the point where I can say, even now during some of my most trying times, that God loves me and is with me.
So, instead of being lost and without hope, I have been grown and tended spiritually, best described by the passage in John 15: "every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." Sometimes it feels like there's a lot of pruning going on and not a lot of fruitfulness, but when I look back at all my life experiences, I would rather have suffered and been drawn closer to God for it than to not have suffered. Even now, when depression drags me down without reason, or when mania tempts me to do dangerous or sinful things, my relationship with Him and my reliance on His strength is growing, and that makes these hardships bearable. I have gotten to a point where physical suffering and chronic pain don't really matter to me anymore - what matters is the condition of my soul and how it relates to God.
It's rather ironic, actually - the times that I have earnestly prayed for God to make me whole and to cleanse me (and at these times I was thinking in terms of physical restoration), it has seemed that everything has fallen apart instead and gotten worse. But, in retrospect, I realize that God was doing what I asked Him to do - He was making me more spiritually whole and cleansing the pride and self-reliance out of me. I am reminded of the "Jars of Clay" song, "Worlds Apart" - the lines that hit me most often are: "Take my world apart - I am on my knees. Take my world apart - broken on my knees." and "Watch the world I used to love turn to dust and fall away." More and more, the physical life on this earth is turning to dust, and the "treasures in Heaven" are taking its place. In a sense, God's love is painful - my pastor describes it as being like a surgical procedure where a doctor has to cut away the bad parts in a person to make him well again. My mom and I have a joke about it - "I wish God wouldn't love me so much right now!" But the truth is, these experiences are precious and the times when I feel most in the desert may very well be the times that I am closest to the fountain.
So, that's the heart of my faith - God loves me and wants to be with me and draw out the image of Himself that He put into me when He created me so that I can be free of my sinful nature and my pride and live the way I was meant to live.
There's a lot more I could talk about, such as the importance of the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit) and how each aspect is necessary for my relationship with God, my beliefs about salvation by faith and the impact of good works on my salvation, and other points of doctrine. These things are all important, but none of them would matter at all if there was no personal relationship with God.
If you've got any questions about the lengthy testimony above or points of doctrine (as mentioned in the previous paragraph or that you may find on the CRC site), I'd love to discuss it all with you!
