Salvation

The road to salvation is paved with as many good intentions as the road to hell.

Basically, if you answer yes to a series of questions asked to you by a pastor, you are saved. With less than one year of church under my belt, I was answering yes because I knew that's what I was supposed to do. My mother, at that point, was gentle. She was in love with Jesus. It made her more loving herself, more understanding, more patient. She was, in deed and action, the best her that I'd ever seen. Even dad saw it, and at the time, he didn't see much past what he wanted to see. Jesus was powerful and we witnessed that power.

My home had not been the best place to grow up. I held resentment for many years because of that environment. Jesus Christ came in and changed my home environment. In that first year alone, we had a peace I had never experienced, a home that I was ready to go back to. I didn't have to stay late after school coming up with reasons to delay my journey. I could go home.

To say anything more would be telling the stories of those who should reveal their secrets themselves. But I want you to understand that when I say that Jesus changed everything, I mean everything.

As much as I wanted those changes to happen in me, something was off and it stayed off for a long time. I went to college, I studied more, I read stories that had some of the same accounts as the Bible and when I read them, instead of thinking that every society had their stories, I read them as validating what I was told in the Bible.

I began to have a personal relationship with God, who I had been taught for the past two years, when I was 19. It was during the summer after my first year. I'd gone to visit Cleveland, the home of the guy I was dating, for a few weeks before returning home. When I got home, I realized that all the resources I thought I had for school, I really didn't. So I spent a lot of time praying to the God I only knew of in word. One night, I finally broke down before God and said that I had nothing to offer and no reason to get what I prayed for, but that I knew none of that mattered if God wanted to bless me. I fell asleep in my tears and woke up the next day to answered prayer. God wanted to bless me and had. My gratefulness knew no bounds. That was the first time God communicated with me on a level that was nothing short of miraculous. It was the first time I actually felt the peace of God that so many people had spoken of. It filled me and became me and suddenly, I truly did not think as I once did or see as I once saw.

That's when I started to believe God could do anything and He wanted me along for the ride.