Mid-life crisis? No way! Not me! The best is yet to be! As I contemplate my 50th birthday, I am looking forward to the future! Why, you say? Because I realize that every day, week, month and year is truly a gift from God, and I know that when my life here is over I'm going to heaven. How can I be so certain of these things you may wonder? Let me explain.

I grew up in America with great parents that brought me to a very traditional church every week. For that I am thankful. I wanted to believe that the stories I heard at Church were true, but I remember wondering ...."is God real?", "Why would God send His Son to a cross?," "Can I be forgiven?" And many other such questions. I went to church as a religious habit, full of doubts and questions, wishing I knew the answers. The particular Church we attended did not particularly encourage personal Bible study or train us in it. I had access to a Bible, but I'm sorry to say I never opened it. Functionally, I was Biblically illiterate. However, in the midst of my doubts and questions my mother, in particular, prayed for me to know Jesus Christ by faith.

Then came the University years in which my pride, busyness, intellectual self-reliance and general arrogance kept me from even attending Church. I drifted in a fog of practical agnosticism, not knowing what I believed. My behavior reflected my lack of spiritual and moral grounding and my own poor choices, led to a quiet desperation in my heart. On the outside I may have appeared to have the trappings of worldly success, but inside I felt empty and I totally lacked peace. I mocked Bible-believing Christians and refused invitations to their Bible studies. Perhaps in my foolishness, I thought I was too smart for God or some such nonsense.

Fast forward a few years, now married, unable to have children and desperate for a child, I began to attend Church again and pray to the God I did not know, for a baby. He answered. I was then a married mother of two, attending Church and eventually Bible studies, wondering what the preacher and those Bible-studying women understood that I did not. I noticed that they had a peace and a faith that I lacked and I started to want what they had.

Then came sepsis, a potentially and imminently fatal blood infection that came into my body through a doctor's repeated misdiagnosis. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Those Bible-studying women, that I had previously held at arm's length, prayed for me and it led to a series of events that saved my life, with hours to spare. And I knew it.

About a week out of the hospital, still weak and sick, but alive, I pulled a dusty Bible that my mother had given me for my wedding years earlier, off of the shelf. I felt desperate to know if God was real. Somehow my Bible opened to John 14 and I began to read Jesus Christ's words. When I got to verse 6 , I read this, "I am the way and the truth and the life and no one gets to the Father except through Me."

Suddenly, I had an instantaneous understanding that the Bible was absolutely true, and that Jesus died on the cross to save me from my many sins. A dark weight of heaviness lifted off of my heart and it was as if a bright light shone into my mind's eye. My husband was sitting next to me in bed reading the newspaper. Suddenly I exclaimed, "You're not going to believe this, but the. Bible is TRUE!" I was shocked and amazed as I felt a peace I'd never known flood my spirit. I sat staring dumbfounded at the Bible as I realized that all of my doubts and questions had instantaneously vanished. I believed.

That day was April 11, 2002 the first day of the rest of my life. That day, according to the Bible, was the day that I was born again through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus said in John 3:3 that "unless a man be born again, he shall not enter the Kingdom of heaven." No ifs, ands, or buts. There are not many ways to heaven, there is only one way. All of my years of religious activity couldn't save me, none of my good works saved me, it was faith in Jesus Christ alone that came, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit through Bible reading, that finally opened my spiritual eyes. And I believe it was the result of many, many prayers that my mother and others prayed.

I am so grateful now for each day. I should have died in my sin, but God gave me a second chance to seek and find Him. Now I spend my time telling others about His love. Mid-life crisis? Not me! The best is yet to be! (It's the year of Jubilee!)

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