The Bible says that God is longsuffering. He patiently presents His truth to us throughout our lives in a variety of ways. He is the Supreme Teacher, and He provides individualized instruction to each of us. Sometimes we “get it” and sometimes we don’t. Still, He persists in His patient pursuit. On December 29, 1974, I finally “got it”.<\/p>\n
My testimony part 3:<\/strong><\/p>\n Be merciful to me, O God,<\/em> because of your constant love.<\/em> Because of your great mercy <\/em>wipe away my sins!<\/em> Wash away all my evil\u00a0and make me clean from my sin! <\/em>Psalm 51:1-2, Good News Translation<\/p>\n Repentance is a funny thing. It demands that you recognize your own sin; but it is also accompanied, very often, by an abhorrence of what you have allowed, done, or become; and true repentance will birth a change of heart and behavior in you as well.<\/p>\n When I was in high school and quit drugging and drinking due to the heavenly \u201cvision\u201d, some may have considered this to be an act of repentance, but it wasn\u2019t. Yes, I changed my behaviors; yet I, myself, remained unchanged.<\/p>\n Later, in college when I recognized that I had become an alcoholic, I grieved terribly about the control I had allowed drinking to gain over my life and told God how sorry I was, but even that was not full repentance. I sorrowed, but my behaviors remained stuck, unchanged.<\/p>\n After crying out to God in November, 1974, I continued drinking but didn’t enjoy it; I felt enchained by it and couldn’t get free. In fact, a couple of days after Christmas, once again, I was getting drunk in a bar while my friends partied away with glee. As I sat alone, absentmindedly watching the band play song after song, I noticed that many of the folks on the dance floor\u00a0were swaying\u00a0with their arms lifted up to the sky. Just then I heard a voice in my ear: Lifted hands are a sign of worship.<\/em><\/p>\n I dropped my head and said, “I’m in hell.” I had acknowledged my sin but had no idea where to go from there.<\/p>\n But God had a plan, and He came through for me in the most unexpected way.<\/p>\n Two evenings later, on December 29, I received a phone call. I took it in my parents\u2019 bedroom on their princess telephone while standing next to their full-length mirror. (For those of you much younger than me, princess phones were quite the thing back then.)\u00a0My friend on the other\u00a0end\u00a0wanted to know if I was planning to get drunk on New Year\u2019s Eve. Now remember, I had gotten smashed just two nights earlier and desperately wanted to quit but felt utterly unable to do so.<\/p>\n Out of nowhere, I heard my mouth saying, \u201cHaven\u2019t you heard? I quit drinking.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou WHAT?!\u201d she bellowed. I WHAT?!<\/i> my mind echoed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d she persisted.<\/p>\n I looked at my reflection in the mirror and gave myself a puzzled look. I also noticed a small smile tugging at the corner of my mouth.<\/p>\n \u201cDrinking is so un-ecological! Think of it! You drink and drink and drink, and all those resources are just wasted! Trashed! It\u2019s just not good for the environment!\u201d I could feel my mind scrambling for some sort of excuse to cover for what my mouth had just announced.<\/p>\n \u201cOh man, are you ever messed up!\u201d and with that our conversation abruptly ended.<\/p>\n There I was, standing before my parents\u2019 full-length mirror, and two things happened. First, I felt something literally leave my body, making me feel about two thousand pounds lighter. Second, as I looked into that mirror, my face was glowing. I\u2019d never seen anything like it in my life. Something very profound had just happened to me, that\u2019s for sure, and I had a feeling that Jesus was\u00a0in the\u00a0middle of it.<\/p>\n I went to my bedroom and found a daily devotional I had just bought sometime in November to make sense of my spiritual condition. Instead of opening it to December 29, I opened it to my birthday page. And there, in bold Living Bible terminology was Hebrews 10:19-20. It said, \u201cAnd so, dear brothers, now we may walk right into the very Holy of Holies, where God is, because of the blood of Jesus. <\/i>This is the fresh, new, life-giving way that Christ has opened up for us by tearing the curtain\u2014his human body\u2014to let us into the holy presence of God.<\/b><\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n And then I saw Him. There in my bedroom, all alone, I saw Jesus opening His chest with His two hands and beckoning me to enter through Him into the presence of the Father. And as I wept in gratefulness to Him, I said, \u201cI must be a Christian now!\u201d<\/p>\n And thus my journey ended; and so my journey began.<\/p>\n Dorothy<\/p>\n “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you,\u2019 declares the Lord…<\/em>” Jeremiah 29:13-14a<\/p>\n “…if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation…for whoever<\/strong> will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.<\/em>” Romans 10:9-10, 13<\/p>\n \u00a9 2015, Dorothy Frick, and updated 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Bible says that God is longsuffering. He patiently presents His truth to us throughout our lives in a variety of ways. He is the Supreme Teacher, and He provides individualized instruction to each of us. Sometimes we “get it” and sometimes we don’t. Still, He persists in His patient pursuit. On December 29, 1974, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-testimony"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8137"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8142,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8137\/revisions\/8142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firstofallpray.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}