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Today, sometime between 10:30 and 11:00am, I will have been a Christian for 16 years – pretty much half my life now… (that just floors me.) In some ways it feels like it’s been forever, and in other ways it still feels like yesterday.
It was March 2, 1991. Killingworth Congregational Church, in Killlingworth, Connecticut, toward the back on the left hand side as you face the altar. A typical old-fashioned New England church.
I’d been going to summer music camp with Musicon Ministries, Inc. since the summer between 7th and 8th grade. I loved it. Every summer we would spend a week learning a musical, and then we’d take it on the road to churches around New England – and the 2-3 weekend retreats when we would re-unite and sing at churches closer to home were highlights of my year.
The spring retreat of 1991 was right in the middle of the Gulf War, and one of our staff members felt really burdened that regardless of what we thought about the war, it was still our responsibility to pray for our enemies, and so she had designed a prayer workshop to teach us how to do that. She gave us all a piece of paper that outlined what we should pray and sent us off for half an hour or so to pray. (I still have it in a box somewhere.) So there I was, sitting in one of the back pews of Killingworth Congregational Church, praying for Saddam Hussein – when suddenly it hit me that all the stuff I was praying for this guy was stuff I needed to be praying for myself. I needed to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus really loved me, and really would save me. I needed a humble heart, and I needed to know that all the stuff I’d done that I so regretted could really be forgiven. So I asked – and He saved me. It was one of the sweetest moments of my life. And in case I needed the extra confirmation, on my way back to the dining hall, I passed our music director’s wife in the hallway; she took one look at me and gave me a huge hug. She could tell something had changed, just in that instant.
And it had. I still don’t do it perfectly, but I am learning to live surrendered – to be okay with not being in control of my life, eternal or temporal – to accept the grace I so desperately need, and to follow His directions – and to rest in His unchanging love for me.
“Praise the Lord, O my soul, all my inmost being, praise His holy Name.
Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits –
who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion,
who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
I’m so grateful for the gift I was given 16 years ago. I wonder sometimes if anyone ever told Saddam Hussein it was available to him too… Maybe things could have been different – or maybe, free will and all that, they wouldn’t have been. But I think maybe this missions impulse I feel now is partly rooted in the fact that I once prayed for someone who went to his grave this year cursing – but God used that experience to save me. Isn’t that just like Him?
