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“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
— Proverbs 14:12
Prior to July 4, 1999, I lived my life in a way that seemed right to me. Little did I know I was a woman on the verge of dying — not a physical death, but a spiritual one.
I did everything I thought I was big and bad enough to do. It was the same ol’ story: smoking, drinking, drugging, clubbing, in and out of emotionally draining homosexual and heterosexual relationships, all as a form of supposed self-expression.
Being Free, they call it!
Well, after 14 years of aimless, reckless, nomadic and loathful living, I now admit that I was far from being free.
I spent all that time going from vice to vice. I partied in and out of town, spent above my means, jumped on every cultural bandwagon and used poppers to stay on the dance floor at 1470’s, Shirley’s and The Dock after the weed and beer wore off.
The cost? The suppression of my emotions and pain.
Even though I continued, I remotely felt that there was more to life than what I chose. I was burned out on the bars, faces became more distorted after a night of drinking and I grew tired of hiding my sexual identity.
I didn’t want to hear the warnings of the church folks, and I didn’t know where to go. Finally, I came to my wit’s end as a result of my tormented soul and opted to fulfill a prophecy spoken by a friend years prior by becoming like Howard Hughes. I was short of a recluse.
While in the confines of my home, I learned to manage my own demons. The world outside was too painful for me and I wanted so much to leave it — not physically, but mentally and psychologically. I didn’t know the process of separation. I wanted to be cut off from the world around me, but the only one who could offer that process of separation was God.
Embarrassingly enough, I made him my last resort.
I didn’t know where to begin to look for God, because I had removed him so far from most of my adult experiences. I found temporary solace in the fact that I’d accepted God as a child, but as an adult I had to really get to know Him again for myself.
Little did I know at the time, but getting to know God again would eventually separate me from the world’s way of thinking and doing things.
I first tried to get to know God through books I found at the library. After a few days, I found the books just stared back, so I returned them.
What was ironic was that I was trying to understand God through books and not the book, the Bible. Although this initial attempt was genuine, I still missed the mark because I wasn’t getting the effect I sought in all of the watered down interpretations in those books about Jesus Christ.
On the way home, I began wondering who was this man, Jesus, whom my grandmother sang to as she washed the dishes? Other questions flew about. Why did people in the church revere him the way they did? How was it that the older men and women with little or no education could read about him in the Bible and receive an immediate “touch” from him?
Then I wondered how I allowed people to sucker me into believing that Jesus was “just another prophet who walked the earth.”
“Besides,” they’d say, “you don’t need Jesus to know God.”
I should’ve known better. But I didn’t know then what I know now — that we’re reconciled with the father through Jesus Christ. John 14:6 states, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”
I then had to contend with naysayers, people who couldn’t see how someone like myself could worship a blonde, blue-eyed white man. I comforted myself with the words of the Bible, which says that we’re “to worship Him in spirit and truth.”
As far as I was concerned, his spirit had no color or physical description. The thoughts ran through my head like a freight train until I acknowledged my ambivalence toward Jesus Christ.
It was at that moment that I set out to get to know Jesus Christ.
I wasn’t hearing what the church had to say, and after turning down many invitations to go to church pride set in. I continued to wallow in my pool of self-pity.
Time passed until one day I found myself crying out to God, while in the shower, to send a person I could trust. I was ready to share some very personal and intimate things with someone disengaged from my former life, since my old friends were quietly being ushered aside.
I couldn’t quite understand it at the time, but God was creating a new environment as he brought new people into my life. I became reacquainted with a high-school friend who was also seeking God for healing in her life. She and I developed a friendship and began to work through my junk and her junk during the course of the following year.
In May 1998, she gave me the best gift a friend could give another — a copy of the New Believer’s Bible. It’s written in Standard English, a form void of the “Thou shalts” and “Whither goest thous,” and I was beginning to like what I was reading.
The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I was amazed to find people in the Bible who weren’t perfect. They had faults, shortcomings and sin in their lives. There was even Thomas, who doubted Jesus just like I did.
But God still used them. I found refuge in reading about Rahab the harlot, the Woman at the Well, David the murderer and adulterer, Mary Magdalene the groupie, Jacob the deceiver, Simeon the wannabe marksman and so many others. I had no idea there were people in the Bible who had such chaotic lives but who still had heart and willingness to obey God.
I began to see God in a different light. He wasn’t who I thought He was.
I thought He was harsh, strict and quick to punish, but later I found He was the total opposite. He was patient, faithful, gentle, generous, merciful and gracious — not just to those who seek him but also to those who don’t.
I became a geeker for the word of God. I awoke wanting to read the word before, during and after work. In retrospect, I believe that God placed every scripture he wanted me to read right before my eyes. Slowly but surely God was reeling me in.
After reading the Bible in my home, I found a church home and accepted Jesus Christ into my life as my Lord and Savior on Independence Day 1999.
The day I received my freedom was bittersweet, because I still had some apprehensions as to what I’d done in my past life. Then Hebrew 10:25 made things more clear.
What I learned was that, as children of God, we were to exhort, encourage, edify and build each other up. Other believers assembled together in the same place were my support on my good and bad days.
After I allowed the Holy Spirit to break me from thinking that I didn’t need anyone, I slowly began to admit that I needed others in church just like they needed me.
It was through their testimonies that I was beginning to see Christians weren’t exempt from the trials and temptations of life just because they were born again. So it is that Christians, too, have bad days, disappointments, failures and troubles. And we’re probably more susceptible to trouble as we go through the process of sanctification, or separation.
Prior to me rededicating my life to Christ, I thought I would first have to change things in my life before asking Him into my life. I learned quickly that it was impossible for me to change or clean myself up.
Jesus delighted in taking me as I was, because he knew I didn’t have what it took to change the person I’d become without him.
Chapter 18 of the book of Jeremiah illustrates how the Lord would reshape, mold and make me over in his image. Just as a potter shapes, reshapes, takes away, adds and replaces, likewise does the Lord through the process of sanctification.
To accept Christ in my life happened instantaneously, but the process of changing my thought patterns and satisfying my sinful nature are all handled by allowing the potter (Christ) to renew my mind with his word (the Bible).
Yes, I believed in God. I considered myself to be a law-abiding citizen. I didn’t bother anybody. I was an altruist at heart. Regardless, I was still dying.
It wasn’t until the day I recited and believed in my heart that, as Romans 10:9 states, “If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, you will be saved,” that I could live.
Prior to Independence Day 1999, I was living on my own strength, intellect and will. But those things are meaningless in the sight of God. It’s not by my power or might, but in the Lord that I live.
Now being on the verge means living eternally with Christ. John 3:16 says it best: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
And now I do. ©
This article appears in May 9-15, 2001.