Loni

Sometymes I hear or read stories about people that had a life changing experience that prompted them to seek out the Lord and accept Him as their Savior. The stories are usually very inspiring and often border on the line of unbelievable, but I know God does miraculous things and that the only way the story could be true is if He was involved. I have to admit, I tend to be envious of those stories from tyme to tyme because I don’t have a story such as that. The truth is, I don’t remember becoming a Christian, at least not the first tyme anyway. Now, before you go getting all up in arms, I know full well that you can only become a Christian once because you cannot lose your salvation, however, you can lose memories, especially memories from when you’re five years old and that is when my mom told me I became a Christian.

She told me that on a trip to Virginia, we were living in Pennsylvania at the tyme, to visit my aunts that I accepted Jesus as my Savior, but she could have told that it happened on top of Mount Rushmore in a blizzard and I have to believe her, because I simply cannot remember anything about it. The truth is, I don’t remember much from my childhood, so the general lack of memory didn’t concern me really, but as I got older, the lack of my salvation memory started to trouble me.

I don’t think anyone realized it, but all through my teenage years and into my twenties I was afraid that I wasn’t saved. I remember several tymes when I prayed the salvation prayer because I feared I did it wrong in the past or because I thought that maybe I just imagined or dreamed that I did. I even thought that maybe my mom heard wrong when I was five. I lived with that fear for a long tyme. Whenever I did something wrong or messed up I thought it was because I wasn’t saved, because a truly saved person didn’t mess up, right? Wrong!

When I moved to Virginia in 2004, I started to actually listen to my pastor (what a concept) and I realized that being saved doesn’t make a person perfect, it simply makes them forgiven. It was like a revelation to me. My whole life up until that moment, at least the years I could remember, I was looking at Christianity all wrong. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I was saved, it was that I never stopped to ask myself if I believed what Christianity taught; I simply went by what I was told. My mom, my pastor, my Sunday school teachers, my aunts and uncles all told me that Jesus died for my sins so it was obviously true, but there’s the catch. They told me, but I never stopped to think about it. Who was Jesus? Was He really the Son of God? Did He really die for me or was the Bible just a bunch of stories?

I was twenty-seven when I had this moment of clarity and right then and there I asked myself, “Do you believe that Jesus died on the cross and rose again to save you from your sins?” The truth was, and is, that yes, I did, and do, believe that Jesus is my Savior and that His death was a sacrifice for me and His resurrection was to secure my eternal life in Heaven. It wasn’t long after I made this confirmation to myself that I asked my pastor to baptize me so I could let my beliefs be known to the world around me.

Today I will admit to you that my head doesn’t understand everything that the Bible says, but my heart believes it all. When I think back to all my tymes of fear and uncertainty I realize that my salvation story is kind of remarkable. At a very young age Jesus found me, saved me and took up a permanent residence in my heart because He knew that there were going to be tough tymes in my life that I wouldn’t be able to handle if He wasn’t there. All the tymes kids picked on me in school, all the tymes that my home life was unbearable, all the tymes that I had difficult decisions to make or had to stand up for what was right,. Jesus was there to direct my paths. Could I have done any of it, gotten through any of it if He hadn’t found me on that car ride to Virginia when I was five? Indeed not!

Loni Kirklin:

Saved at 5 yrs.

Baptized at 27 yrs.

Loved by God always and forever!

Miriam

I was born the tenth out of twelve children in an Old Order Mennonite family. Though being devoutly religious, the Old Order sect puts their focus on adhering to the church's strict rules and traditions. As a child I was taught that only God knows your eternal destiny and my part was to follow the church's ways. The plainer and more strictly you lived the more righteous your standing before God. Bible reading was considered as a beneficial exercise, but studying the Bible was pretty much a foreign concept.

I was always an inquisitive child and as an adolescent I began to question the reasons for the church's traditions. My questions were either dismissed or deemed as rebellion against authority. My insatiable desire for learning and education caused me to read, observe and evaluate everything. I tried to repress my questions but was not very successful.

My mother, who was the family disciplinarian, died when I was twelve years old. After her death I seriously began to question the ideas and inconsistencies I had been taught. Teachings such as you can't know if you are going to heaven, yet so many people said that was where my mother was, how did they know? And it is wrong to own and operate a car but ok to pay some one to drive you somewhere. These things continued to plague my mind for several years.

At age sixteen my older brother, who had left "the church" invited me and my sisters to go to a revival meeting at the church he was attending. The gospel of salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ by His death & resurrection was clearly presented by the speaker and I accepted Christ's payment for my sin. That night I became a redeemed child of God.

I struggled through my teenage years as I left the "Old Order" ways and struck out on a new path. I had little guidance and the absence of the strict rules I was accustomed to caused me to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, but God was watching over me and gently guiding me to a close relationship with Him.

In my early twenties, God led me to a group of believers who taught me to study God's word and set me on a path of following Him. It was through this time I met my husband and the rest they say is history. We have endeavored to show our devotion and love for Christ through service to Him wherever He leads us. We stumble and fail but God is gracious and loves us in spite of our failures.

My prayer is that our devotion to Christ will be an example for our four sons to follow and pass on to their children.

My life verse is II Timothy 1:12.