Since we have met just in passing or perhaps this story has come into your hands in some other way, without our meeting, I would ask a few minutes of your time to share a story that is both personal and wonderful. This story has something to do with the claims of Christianity and everything to do with the person that Christians are named for.

I was born in an American hospital in France in the year 1961. My father is an Art teacher and my mother was at home. Until the age of 13 I lived a fairly average American life. My father had me attend Sunday School some and I can remember thinking about and even speaking to God at different times. But we were not very religious nor do I remember hearing anything much about spiritual matters except for the "Christmas story" at Christmas time. My mother had been searching for something for quite a while (I'm not sure even she knew what) and had attended various churches and was even going to a self-help counseling group. At one of their meetings she met a pastor who invited her to a Pentecostal church. She decided to go one evening and to my amazement she came home a changed person. Where there had been sadness and/or gloom there was now joy. What had happened? Well, she had believed on this person--Jesus Christ--and been baptized in His name and been filled with His Spirit. This was a lot for me to ingest but the reality of her changed and now happy life was very apparent. In the following days she started reading the Bible and praying and doing the good things commanded in the scriptures. I had never met someone who took the Bible seriously or who so obviously had something great working in their life for good.

On her invitation, I visited this church with her several times. God's work and what the Bible teaches about a relationship with Him were openly proclaimed. I was deeply impressed by the Truth and reality of this message and of the cost of believing it. To me, however, the cost seemed too great--the Truth, a relationship with God, my maker, in Jesus Christ, and indeed eternal life on one side of the balance, while on the other side loomed a fear of what people would think of me if I became a Christian . Hardly a contest, one would think, but, to my shame, the latter won out. In my heart I knew the claims of Christianity were right but I was unwilling to commit to them.

However here, in my mother, was a person who was living proof of the reality of God and the truth of the good news found in the scriptures. How could I live with her if I was being intellectually dishonest? So I erected walls and arguments and strong defenses against the claims of Christianity in an attempt to reconcile my cowardliness with what I knew to be true. These devices generally worked well for me during the day but almost never at night when I was left alone to contemplate my ways. Nevertheless I began to shun Christians and to openly fight against them. And so began a miserable period in my life of darkness and depression. Since I rebelled against the Truth, it seemed that the Truth rejected me and I could hardly think or understand much about life at all. This went on until I was about 18, though there continued to be much evidence in my life that the Lord was wooing or should I say "pursuing me." One situation sticks out in particular--a highschool friend, who I greatly appreciated and was attracted to, turned out, as I discovered months later, to be a Christian. The attraction lay in his character and his understanding of life as a Christian. This angered me--I thought "God did this. I've been tricked." Perhaps this was so, but I am so thankful for it. He (this friend) recommended an author: C. S. Lewis and I read his book Mere Christianity. How interesting--a thinking man who was a Christian. For five years I had been convincing myself that Christianity was a crutch, that people just gave up on thinking to believe its claims, etc. How wrong I had been. Now at 18 I realized, "This is it. The time has come to face the Truth. I must direct my life to the Truth no matter how costly and stop being dishonest. If there is a God I will follow Him--if there is no God well, what is there to lose?" So I prayed. I acknowledged myself a sinner, a wrong-doer, and I sought to repent and turn to God following the same pattern that some of Jesus's early disciples had followed. And feeble as my prayer was; dim as my understanding was; God heard me and began to work in my life. And yes, I had to humble myself a great deal (a much happier place to be anyway).

I was baptized into the Lord Jesus Christ, just as He commanded His followers to be, in 1979. This was a joyful day that I approached with trembling. At various times God had worked to make me see how I had sinned against Him, my Creator, by rebelling against Him in my heart and by disobeying even the most basic of His commandments for me as a person (e.g. do not bear false witness, do not steal, do not covet, love your neighbor as yourself, and so many more). When I was baptized I was wonderfully cleansed of all sense of guilt from my own wrong doings and I knew that in God's sight my past sins had all been wiped away--I was forgiven. I had never known any greater joy than to find that my life was now right with God, to know that I could now have a relationship with Him and indeed to have it. This is what the Bible calls the beginning of eternal life. . .that we might know Him and His Son Jesus Christ.

Now, why do I share with you a bit of what God has done in my life? Is it so that you might consider joining or even visiting my church? No. God's plan is far bigger than that. I share this with you because it is my great privilege and honor to do so. And because it is the way that God has made for people to come to know His way. And indeed I do pray and ask God that you might become a partaker of the riches of eternal life and the knowledge of Jesus Christ by receiving what He has done as it is recorded in the Bible. It is to my great and everlasting joy that these things have come to pass in my own life and I wish the same for you. What you have read records just a small part of the story of my life and yet in its basic way I know it is the story of many people's lives. I hope that you too, dear reader, would consider God's legitimate claims upon your life while you have time on this earth to do so.

The good news of Jesus Christ is recorded in the New Testament (the 2^nd half of the Bible) in the gospel of John. This portion of the Bible records some of the chief events of Jesus's life on earth as well as many of his actual words including the well-known passage in which he declares: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes on Him should not perish but have everlasting life." From John 3:16 (the 3^rd chapter and 16^th verse of the gospel of John).