“I grew up a poor black child”, Oh sorry, wrong story.

     I guess the first part of this should be Who I was before coming to Christ. Until I was a teen we attended a very tradition based church. I had a knowledge of God and even a love for Him when I was young, but I did not know Him. As I grew older I was a real hard lined bad girl. The only drugs that were out at the time that I hadn’t at least tried were angel dust, heroin, and ecstasy. I smoked pot regularly. I did coke when it was free because even in my sinful state I knew I liked coke waaaaaaaay too much and if I started paying for it I would ruin my life quick. I dropped acid, ate mushrooms, smoked hash under glass. What I did the most though was drink and drinking was a problem. I thought the purpose of drinking was to get drunk. So I did, on a regular basis.

     In 1988 my fourteen-year-old sister was put into drug and alcohol rehab by our mom. It shook me up that I had been such a bad example to my baby sis so I stopped doing anything that was illegal. The drinking continued.

     I was an English major in college and prided myself on how colorfully I could string together expletives in new and interesting ways. I made bikers cringe with how I said curse words. I would drop the f-bomb in public and not care who heard. I was hard.

     It almost goes without saying that I smoked cigarettes too. Yeah, smoking won’t send you to hell; it just makes you smell like you’ve been there.

     Finally I will say that I was promiscuous. The summer I received Christ I was living in sin with my boyfriend, who is now my husband, and I had a “LIVING IN SIN” bumper sticker on my car. I was proud to be a sinner.

     Time for the What. I was a college student living with Keith, waitressing at a bar, and working for my mom at a jewelry cart.

     When, well, that would be the summer of 1989, in my mother’s third husband’s lake house, between my sophomore and junior years of college. I was home alone. Keith was at work. I have always been a voracious reader and a friend from college had given me a copy of This Present Darkness.

     And now the Why, I was about a third of the way through the book when I realized that though it was a fictional novel, the type of warfare I was reading about was real. I stopped right there, alone in our bedroom, got on my knees and committed my life to Christ. My life changed drastically from that moment on. I am a two footed person, what I mean is when I commit to something I don’t just half commit, I commit all the way. I had a working knowledge of God from my childhood and knowledge of how to study the Word. I grew very quickly because of the foundation from my youth. Within a month Keith had dumped me because I had two heads and spit green goo. No really, our relationship was rocky already and my getting saved was the perfect excuse for him to leave me.
     I went on, with my broken heart, to go after God and His will for my life with all that was within me. I started attending a local Assembly of God church as soon as I went back to school. The drinking and most of the swearing were gone in months.  The smoking within two years.  The promiscuity--within one month of getting saved.  There is so much more and maybe someday I will add to this, but this answers the basic questions of who, what, when, and why I came to Christ.