How I came to know Jesus

benotashamed
By: Ron M. of Aurora, CO, USA

I was not married at the time my oldest daughter was born.

My girlfriend and I broke up, and I missed my daughter very much.

I would go into the bathroom and pray that God would return them back to me, and He would remind me of how I would cry and pray. Then He allowed me to remember the pain I suffered when I lost them.

He then asked me, “Do you want to go through that again?”

And, I said “No.”

“Then you need me!”

I ignored that conversation and went on with my life.

One day, a friend of my wife’s came over to update her life insurance policy, because she wanted to put me on it.

I offered him a beer and he said, “I can face reality!”

My thought was ‘what are you trying to say, that I can’t?’

The more I talked to him, the more I didn’t want him in our house.

He told me, “Without the Love of Jesus, you won’t go very far.”

I told him that I had work to do and then he invited me to go to his Church to see a play. I told Him I would go.

I went outside to do the work I had to do.

Just then, the Holy Spirit reminded me of how I used to cry to him and ask him to return my family to me.

I will never forget the last time that I asked God to return my family to me and He didn’t, so I asked Him to either return them to me or send somebody that will love me just for who I am.

To top it off, that day I met my wife! We have now been married 38 years now.

The day came for the play, and I went. They gave an altar call to come and receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior and I didn’t go. I told the Pastor after the service that I wanted to go down there, but he didn’t ask me If I wanted to accept Jesus as my personal Savior.

We left the church and went home.

A few months had gone by, and my wife invited me to go to her Church. I told her that I would go on Easter Sunday morning.

I was impressed by the church; it was very nice inside. I didn’t see any saints along the walls. I was a Catholic, so it was definitely different than the inside of their churches.

When the Pastor of the Church started preaching, he said, “What if Jesus would ask, ‘What are you here for? To show off your new clothes? If you are, get out of here, and don’t come back until you are ready to serve me for the rest of your life!’”

After the service was over, my wife asked, “What did you think?”

I said, “I won’t go back there again.”

The following year was one of the most difficult times I had gone through in my whole life. I quit my job and tried working for myself, but God saw to it that I couldn’t get any work. I could not even get a job, and I had very good working skills.

My wife told me to go apply for food stamps, and I said, “No!”

She said that I needed to swallow my pride and go apply the next day. We went, and we were rejected for any public aid.

What a shame that was to me!

As time went on, I was driving down the road and I got a very sharp pain in my blind eye, so I pulled over, got out of the car and laid on the grass.

I went to an eye doctor shortly after that and he said that I would have to have my eye taken out because it would cause more problems down the road for my other eye.

I left there in tears just thinking of losing my eye.

I called my wife and tried to tell her what was going on, but I couldn’t speak, because I just started to cry.

She said, “Don’t worry, God will take care of you.”

That night I went to bed and I fell apart inside and started to remind God of all of the things I had gone through. I said, “Why did you even create me? First, I lit myself on fire, then I had a dart stuck in my eye and went blind in that eye. I couldn’t look at anybody without being put down. I couldn’t even take off my shirt without somebody saying how gross I was, because of my burns.”

I told God to just take my life, because, “I don’t want to live anymore, but,” I said, ”I am sorry for everything I said, I am sorry and that I tried to live life my own way and I need a new life. I want Jesus to take over my life, now.”

Praise God, He gave me a new life!

The next day, my wife called told me to call this other doctor so I did. I explained to him what had happened and he said to come in to his office.

He examined me and said, “Let me relieve you of your heartache. I can save your eye but it will require surgery.”

I had the surgery done and had to spend the night in the hospital. The doctor came to visit me that night to tell me that it appeared to be okay. The next day I was taken down to get the bandages removed.

He said, “Let’s see if you can see.”

After he removed the bandages, I told him that I could see, and it was like the Lord was hugging me, and He and I were watching the doctor working on me. The doctor removed the bandages and I was able to see for the very first time in 25 years!

I am reminded now about how the blind man, in Mark 8:22-26, came to Bethsaida, and the disciples brought a blind man to Jesus and asked Him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Can you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes, and his eyes were opened! His sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

That is what I am looking forward to, the day I can see Jesus with both eyes!

Praise THE LORD for the blessings he has given me.

©2018 Mark Davis

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How Can Adversity Be Good?

I know that we all have our own stories of how bad life has treated us, but, for now, we are going to expound on why I am a prime example of adversity.

I’ve lived a normal life up until age 35 and then I was diagnosed with a 7″ spinal cord tumor between C-3 and T-5.  After the tumor was removed, I was left paralyzed from mid-chest down.  Where, since, I have regained some ability to move and even walk, I have little ability to feel in those areas – except for pain.  Severe peripheral neuropathy in my right leg and left arm and both hips.  Minor peripheral neuropathy is in my left leg and right arm.

Also, in the site of the tumor resection, there had developed some bad arthritis (is there a good kind), a bone spur and a pocket of spinal fluid building up that was starting to choke off the nerves as well as one vertebrae that never healed from the original surgery, so the bone never healed back together and was then considered fractured.  That all being said, I ended up having to have the vertebrae in that area fused together 10 years later.  All 5 of them (four joints).

To top it all off, 5 1/2 years ago I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Carcinoid Cancer.  This is a very slow growing cancer and that is why I haven’t died yet.  It was found only after it had spread to my liver and now my liver is infested with it.  There are a multitude of “primary” tumors in my “gut” and, since it has spread, it is considered to be inoperable unless something life-threatening comes of it.  It is under “treatment”; meaning, there is no cure, there is no treatment to get rid of the tumors or even shrink the tumors, the only thing they can do is give me a drug every 4 weeks that helps control the symptoms.  I would be dead now if it weren’t for that drug.  The symptoms alone were enough to kill me eventually.

Both of these things that I document here, are very rare and almost unheard of finding them.  I mean, the spinal cord tumor was found when I was 35 – it is normally found in 12 year olds, according to my pediatric neuro-surgeon that removed it (I was his oldest patient).  The cancer is so rare that they only find it in maybe 1:300,000 people.  It is one of the most rare types of cancer in the oncology world and one of the most misdiagnosed diseases in the world… in fact, most cases aren’t even found until the patient is already dead.  I am fortunate and divinely cared for in both of these situations.

But, why do you think that these things happen to us?  Is it to punish me/us for some sin that we have committed?  Not likely. Then Why?

Side note: At the time that both of these situations happening to me, I was NOT walking closely to God… I was a Christian, I was just seriously backslidden in my Christian life.

There is a serious chance that God was trying to get my attention and make me realize that He really was in control, so if I continue to walk in the path that I was in, I would only be having more bad things happen to me.

Since we have gotten to this point, I have since given my heart and life back to God and given Him control of my life and now my life has purpose. No, I was NOT miraculously healed and the cancer taken away from me and my nerve problems solved.  God has used my infirmity to put me in the paths of people that I otherwise wouldn’t have ever come across that I might be able to witness to them and encourage them; and in return, He has shown me the plans that He has for me and has placed a wonderful wife and 2 kids in my life to help me along and, hopefully, I can help them along as well.

Ever since I was a kid, I had heard of Joni Eareckson-Tada.  She was in an unfortunate deep-water diving accident in shallow water resulting in a broken neck and becoming a quadriplegic ever since.  Since then, she has become quite an amazing person (I didn’t know her before the accident) having become an artist – yes, artist; she paints with her mouth – and an author and inspirational speaker in the evangelical Christian world.

I came across a video clip that is only a little over 5 minutes long that you might enjoy watching:

I hope you enjoyed hearing what Joni had to say.

Suffering is only one side of the coin in God’s eyes.  He really wants to see how you deal with it and which way you turn.  Because, you have a choice of what you are going to do with it.  You can take the devil’s route and get depressed and think “woe is me” and get down and even contemplate suicide, or you can turn your eyes upon God, get in His word and see what He has to say about it and be encouraged by it and in turn try to encourage others to turn to Christ as well.  It’s your choice.

References for Bible verses on comfort during hardships and to see what God has to say about it are available upon request.   I really want to find out how many of you are out there that are interested in this sort of thing and those of you who actually read this and care.  Comment at the bottom and let me know what you think.

©2013 Mark Davis

If you feel that you have a story that might encourage someone or that just points out the awesomeness of our God, please email it to me at mdnoidlife@gmail.com.  I am compiling some of these stories to be put into a new section of my blog for Testimonies.  I will even give you all the credits and will even link to your web site if you have one.

I Corinthians 6:19-20 – A Christian’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit – Take care of it!

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

19 “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

20 “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s”.

God the Holy Spirit, as a Christian, lives within our body.  God gave us all that we own, including our bodies.  We don’t  really own them – they are God’s.  We are to be good stewards of what God has endowed us with or it can easily be taken away from us.  If we don’t think that God would be happy having something go in or on our bodies, then we shouldn’t be putting them in/on them.

©2012  Mark Davis

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