Today is Day Three of 31 Days of Encountering God! If you missed the kick-off, you can go HERE and find the Introduction as well as each days post! (I will be adding every day as the month goes on!)
How He peeled back the veil & saved my soul...
Somehow I managed to live my life all the way up to 21 without really knowing much about God. I know to those who were raised in church - this seems impossible. I mean... I am not from the jungle or the bush... I am from small town America.
I'm sure we heard the stories and I know I went to church a few times with the family next door or when the big old blue bus would slowly troll the neighborhood looking for kids on Sunday mornings. I attended Young Life in high school but can't quite clearly recall the Gospel being spelled out. I'm sure it was... but it was seeds planted... the harvest didn't really start to sprout until I was at the end of my 20th year.
I had watched my oldest sister and her husband dive into a religion... pick it apart... find lies and holes and leave... still searching. I waited on the sidelines... trusting their opinion. They were the experts afterall! We had been raised dabbling in New Age ways and tended to revert back to some great higher power full of positive energy but we had no one really to worship. My sister studied with several religions before coming face to face with the God who bled and died for her. They were skeptical and hesitant but when they went all in... they went All. In. Still... I watched from afar and pondered some things in my heart.
God was waking me up at night... He was reminding me of how I had escaped death early on and how it was always said of me that I had been spared for a purpose. I tended to shrug that off... thinking it was just the love of a mother saying how destined I was to be love to those around me. I was living a small life with no real future ahead of me and all of the sudden I could feel a shifting taking place. Hope was arising but for what, I could not tell.
Then, I met my husband a few weeks after visiting a tarot card reader - who had told me I would meet my soulmate so I pretty much decided he was it before he really even knew my name. Me - the one who was so guarded and refusing to fall in love too easily - and he had me quite literally at a G-chord... or whatever it was... he didn't even speak. He played his guitar, sitting on the floor, and his chocolate brown eyes casually looked up and I was a goner. (Don't tell him this... we like to make him think he had to work for it... at least a little bit!)
Being involved in New Age things affected me in such a way that spiritual happenings were not abnormal. I had what they would call psychic tendencies but really, God has gifted me with discernment and a prophetic gifting. Back then, I didn't know that though. While seeing things in the spirit was not an everyday event, it didn't usually surprise or frighten me either. However, one day I had picked up my sister and we were driving to go out to lunch. We were stopped at a familiar corner at a stop sign and I was waiting for my turn to go straight across. There were two cars in a row making right hand turns onto my street - both had their signals on... so I began to head slowly across the road when all of the sudden, one of the cars changed their minds, changed lanes and gunned it to go straight - literally headed right for my drivers side door with full acceleration. There was no logical way we were going to escape impact.
I gasped and braced myself to be hit when I saw a hand - larger than the car, tear open a veil and literally cover our car and it gently pushed us across the street and onto a shoulder to safety. We felt the car being pushed... I looked at my sister and questioned if she just saw that and she described the same thing that I saw. It freaked us out. In the middle of a situation where fear (who was so familiar to me!) should have been taking over... Peace filled our car.
Less than a week later... I got saved. Things just clicked together and it all made sense and how could I have never seen that before? God literally peeled back the veil, and saved my soul... and that was undeniable... I kept seeing it over and over in my mind and I could feel His Peace come in like a flood.
That was a God Encounter that I will never forget! It wasn't long after that encounter that... well, I will continue tomorrow... hoping to share another supernatural encounter that I had early on that changed my life and taught me to give voice to my prayers! (We'll see if I can manage to do it within the word prompt for Five Minute Friday!)
In the comments below, I'd love to hear your testimony: How did you first come to know Jesus?
Linking up with The Nester and 100s of other #31Day Bloggers!
That gave me chills!! I grew up catholic, went to catholic school, but didn't know God. Not until I had kids did I feel a pull to be in a church again. It still took my husband and I 4 years to actually step foot in a church, but it was meant to be. We were both saved that first day when the message was handwritten just for us (at least it seemed like it). A month later we were baptized together and haven't looked back. I don't know how I survived so long without a relationship with Jesus.
ReplyDeleteOh girl, I have chills! What an amazing testimony. I was invited to church at the age of 19 by a gal I went to business college with. I got saved a few years later, and met my husband while we were both serving with youth.
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