The Lord was faithful to my opening to Him!

I grew up attending either a Methodist or Baptist Church twice a year, Christmas and Easter.

Eventually, at college I gave up on going to any kind of Christian fellowship. I saw no evidence of God and had become agnostic, just shy of atheistic. I liked doing things that were considered sinful and had no desire to read the bible or pray. I didn't like religious music and never watched religious programming. Hell seemed to be fun and heaven seemed very boring. A couple of near death experiences in my mid teens shook me up quite a bit, but I felt lucky and did not seek any further.

While away at college several students were killed during an anti-government protest. By this time many things began to bother me. I had realized that I had deep seated prejudices, my closest relationships were very shallow and I didn't have a clue what I wanted to be when I grew up. Due to the shootings the university was shut down and my parents suggested that I visit my brother in Los Angeles.

It was with my brother and some others with him that I saw something very unusual. These people were happy, open, trusting, alive and seemed to be from another dimension. They prayed all the time in many different places. They sang like a bunch of drunken sailors at the top of their lungs, repeating verses over and over. They sang at home, walking to the store, in their fellowship meetings at every lunch and dinner. I felt like I was living in a musical. When they met there were blacks, whites, yellows, Hispanics speaking languages I had never heard of. There were straight people, hippy people, military people, old people and young people. You had to get to the meeting early in order to get a good seat. A good seat in a Christian meeting that was a foreign concept to me.

One night while visiting a ice cream shop, I told my brothers' friends that I thought that what they had was very special. They said that it was Jesus. I told them that I was happy for them, but that I did not believe in Jesus, God or anything else that I considered religious. It was there that my brother pointed out to me that Jesus had resurrected from the dead a while ago, that He was alive presently and that I could meet Him if I wanted to. Again, I repeated that I did not believe in Jesus. My brother told me that telling them that I didn't believe wouldn't help. He suggested that I tell Jesus that I did not believe in Him and that I did not believe that He was real and that I should challenge Him to make Himself real to me.

As five of us sat eating our ice cream I did exactly as my brother suggested. After finishing my challenge I asked my brother when did he think I would meet this Jesus? He said that he didn't know and that it really wasn't up to him as to the place and time but he was sure that this would happen.

Since that day I will just quote a verse from a hymn that I now enjoy: "Could I with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every one a scribe by trade; to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky." This is one of my many testimonies.