There was an emptiness in my heart that could not be filled.

I grew up knowing God but had no real connection to Him. Growing up was different for me than most other children because I never knew my earthly father. My family always did the very best they could for me, but they could never fill the emptiness I felt in my heart.

I led a good life and strived for perfection in everything. I thought by trying to do everything perfectly, there would never be a reason for anyone to pass unfavorable judgment on me. On the outside it looked like I had everything, but on the inside I was bitter and empty.

When I met my father for the first time it filled the void in my heart but it also created a new longing.

In 1997, God gave me the one thing I had always desired: I met my dad for the first time. Meeting him not only filled the void I felt in my heart, but it also caused me to seek a personal relationship with Jesus. I had never really paid a lot of attention to God before other than to get down on my knees with a wish list.

Through an advertisement in the newspaper, I learned about and started attending a ladies’ church group. One day while reading my Bible, I recognized I owed everything to God and prayed to receive Jesus into my life. After this I didn’t immediately feel like a changed person, so I thought I had done something wrong.

A banner advertising a website caught my attention and began a surprising series of events.

In January 2001, I noticed the “Power to Change” banners on some of the churches around our neighborhood and I connected with Power to Change online.

When I logged on to their Christian chat line, the chat hostess engaged me in a conversation. We talked about my spiritual life and I told her I wasn’t sure that I was even a Christian because I hadn’t been going to church. The hostess responded by walking me through the process of how to receive Christ, which I indicated I had already done.

So she began sharing with me how to be filled with the Holy Spirit. That’s when I came to realize that even though I had accepted Jesus into my life, I was still living the life of a defeated Christian. I prayed to give control of my life to God. I believe the Lord made a divine appointment that night on the chat session and the very goodness of God is what led me there.

The next week, I returned to the chat room. Amazingly, I learned that the hostess and I lived in the same town! She referred me to a local church where I got involved in the ALPHA discipleship program.

Since then my life has been completely transformed. I am now truly at peace with God.

That is not to say nothing ever goes wrong, but now I draw on the power of the Holy Spirit. There is now purpose in everything I do. God has been so good and I am thankful for the incredible work He has done in my heart.

Now, today, I’m back in the Christian Women Today chat room, but this time, I’m serving as a volunteer hostess. I get to encourage women like I once was—searching the Internet for spiritual answers.

A verse that is particularly meaningful for me is: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1).

Is this the life for me?

Take a look at your life. How would you describe it? Contented? Rushed? Exciting? Stressful? Moving forward? Holding back? For many of us it’s all of the above at times. There are things we dream of doing one day, there are things we wish we could forget. In the Bible, it says that Jesus came to make all things new. What would your life look like if you could start over with a clean slate?

Living with hope

If you are looking for peace, there is a way to balance your life. No one can be perfect, or have a perfect life. But every one of us has the opportunity to experience perfect grace through a personal relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ.

You can receive Christ right now by faith through prayer. Praying is simply talking to God. God knows your heart and is not so concerned with your words as He is with the attitude of your heart. Here’s a suggested prayer:

Lord Jesus, I want to know you personally. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life to you and ask you to come in as my Savior and Lord. Take control of my life. Thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Make me the kind of person you want me to be.

Does this prayer express the desire of your heart? You can pray it right now, and Jesus Christ will come into your life, just as He promised. Is this the life for you?

If you invited Christ into your life, thank God often that He is in your life, that He will never leave you and that you have eternal life. As you learn more about your relationship with God, and how much He loves you, you’ll experience life to the fullest.

Would you tell me your job title or refer to your relationships – husband, wife, son, daughter, friend? Would you talk about your successes, or failures, your dreams or your past? These are parts of who you are, but you are more than what you do or where you live.

You are a human being who is loved by God. You are intelligent, beautiful, loved, and not alone.

Take a minute to think about that – God loves you, and not because of what you do. He loves you for who you are and will never leave you because of anything you’ve done. Isn’t that just the kind of love you’ve always dreamed about?

You might not think of yourself as exceptional, but you are. You are a hand-crafted original. God made you on purpose, no accidents of fate or chance. The Bible says that when God created man and woman He “saw everything that He had made, indeed it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) God created you and He is interested in the details of your life. The Bible tells us that Gods knows each of us better than we know ourselves – he even knows how many hairs are on your head! (Matthew 10:30)

It’s pretty incredible to think about. The same God who created the stars and turns the colors of the leaves in Fall, created you. You are His masterpiece and He loves you. God created you to have a relationship with Him.

So, why does it sometimes feel like you and God aren’t on speaking terms?

You know what it’s like when you have an argument with a friend and there’s distance between you? It’s like that with God and us. God could have created us as robots that just did whatever we were told, but he didn’t. He gave us free will, the ability to choose. It’s because of his love for us. Love without choice isn’t love, it’s coercion. You can’t have any real relationship without choice.

So, as humans we get to choose, and in the very beginning we chose to go our own way. Sin entered the world and with it came a separation from God, a distance in our relationship with him. I know what you’re thinking, “Sin? But I’m a good person” Being a good person isn’t enough.

The word sin in the Greek comes from a word that means simply “missing the mark”. We can try really, really hard to be good people, but to be able to be in relationship with God we’d need to be perfect in our thoughts, attitudes and actions. We all know that’s not possible. The Bible tells us that the punishment for sin is death – eternal separation from God. We are all sinners but that is not where the story ends.

If God loves us, why would we perish? That’s a good question. God cannot just ignore our sin. God is just – he is concerned with right and wrong. The price of our sin is death – eternal separation from God – someone had to pay that price. God couldn’t take away the punishment. If he did that it would be like saying that sin isn’t really a problem. It would mean pretending that everything is okay between us instead of actually repairing the relationship.

Since God loves us, he does not want us to perish. So He sent His son Jesus to die in our place. Jesus, Himself divine; God in human form; God’s only son, lived a perfect life and was put to death on a cross. He died a death He didn’t deserve so we could live a life we couldn’t earn. God made an unthinkable sacrifice. There was a card years ago that said something like this:

“How much do you love me?” I asked Jesus.
And he stretched out his arms on a cross and said “this much.”

It says in the Bible that “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). God loves us so much that he didn’t wait for us to come to him with our need, he took care of it before we even realized we needed him.

It doesn’t end there though. Jesus died, and three days later He rose from the dead. Sounds impossible right? Jesus is the Son of God, not just a good man, a teacher or a prophet. Jesus proved who He was by raising up from the dead. Through Him we can know God because Jesus paid for the sin that separated us from God.

The First Step

Knowing about Jesus isn’t enough. Each of us has to accept what Jesus did for us. Imagine you were dying of some horrible disease and the doctor came into your hospital room and told you that he had the cure. Knowing about the medicine would not cure you. You’d have to take it for it to affect your condition. It’s the same thing with God’s love and Jesus’ sacrifice, unless we own it, it cannot save us.

Owning what Jesus did is agreeing with God that you are a sinner. It’s not an easy thing to say. But as any recovery program will tell you, you have to own the problem before you can start to fix it. If you were back in that hospital room and told the doctor “I don’t need your medicine, I’m not sick” he wouldn’t be able to do much for you. You need to agree with God that you need Him in your life and that there is nothing you can do in your own strength to make up for your sin. That’s the first step.

The Second Step

The Bible tells us that if we accept what Jesus did for us, our sins are forgiven. Psalm 103 verse 12 tells us “as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” “Transgressions” is just another word for “sins”. Think about that, ‘as far as the east is from the west’. That’s pretty far.

What Next?

Accepting Christ does not transform you into a perfect person. But it does take you from being a condemned person and sets you free. You and I will keep sinning, but because our relationship with God has been restored we can go to him and ask for forgiveness and strength to make better choices. We can be assured that when we do sin and honestly seek forgiveness we will be forgiven.

You may have heard of a version of the Bible called The Message. The Message tries to put the truth of the Bible into more modern English. The Message explains sin and forgiveness this way:

But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.

With the barrier of sin gone, we can have the relationship with God that He wants for us. This relationship promises strength for today and eternal life, being with Him forever, after death. All you have to do is accept this gift in faith by and act of the will. The doctor is there with the cure, you just have to take it.

How do I accept Jesus?

The final step is a prayer asking God to come into your life and make you the person He wants you to be. Prayer is just talking to God. There is no right or wrong way to do it. God is not concerned about the words that you choose, he cares about the state of your heart. He hears you. You can pray a prayer something like this:

Jesus, I want to know you personally. I know that I am a sinner and that nothing I could do can make up for that. Thank you for dying in my place and paying the price for my sin. I know that my sin doesn’t separate me from God anymore. Thank you for forgiving me. I know that you love me and that I will spend eternity with you. I want you to be my Savior. Come into my life and take control, make me the person you want me to be.

God invites you into relationship with him. He is ready to welcome you home.

We heard shrill shouts and the dull thud of coconuts hitting the wall.

Outside, thick snowflakes floated in the silent Christmas sky. “Peace on earth,” the angels had sung 2,000 years ago. But I didn’t believe them, lying there terrified, my head buried in a pillow.

Earlier that night, we had gone to church. My family knelt in silence, as if peace were almost possible. From the life-size manger scene, a porcelain baby Jesus beamed a serene, painted smile. But my mother’s breath told me liquor already coursed through her veins. Baby Jesus’ saintly smile wouldn’t have stopped any of what took place that night. He was just a lifeless doll in his wooden manger.

And so it went, one dreadful Christmas after another. We had all the trappings in place: the toys, the turkey, the tree. But without fail, a few drinks too many fuelled the family feuds and ruined our Christmas.
Eventually, I moved far away from home, got married and had a daughter. Every year, I vowed we would have a simple celebration, the perfect holiday I never had as a child.

But even though liquor and violence no longer marred my Christmases, the seasonal bustle still disturbed the peace. On December 24, I found myself running from mall to mall, buying gifts people did not need, my frenzy hardly lulled by the Christmas carols seeping from the PA system. In January, I would still be scribbling greeting cards – purchased at a post-holiday sale – for those dear, distant friends and relatives.

“Oh, Not again!” I moaned whenever Christmas rolled around. So last year, I was delighted to discover I was going to have a baby in December. Here was the excuse to skip Christmas and dispense with the gifts, cards, and other seasonal exertions.

According to plan, my son Gabriel was born on December 13. But instead of warding off Christmas, as I had hoped, my little boy took me to the very heart of it.

It happened on Christmas Eve, when my family went to see the children’s musical put on by our church.
In the darkness, Gabriel on my lap, I watched the familiar story unfold. “No room,” the Bethlehem innkeeper told Mary and Joseph. The weary travellers found refuge in a stable, just in time for Mary to give birth to a boy – the Son of God.

Singing with exuberance, the children on stage bopped around Mary, who was cuddling a swaddled plastic doll. “I should have let her borrow my baby,” I thought idly. And then, it dawned on me. Mary’s son Jesus had been a baby boy just like the little guy in my arms.

Suddenly, baby Jesus came to life for me. Gone was the plastic doll. Gone were the porcelain Jesuses of my childhood. He was no longer a well-painted figure with a shining halo, a peach complexion and a maddening smile, but a real baby – soft, tiny, with a hazy gaze and wrinkled skin. A baby who needed to be nursed, diapered, rocked and kissed.

What an amazing thing! God had become human. He left the magnificence of heaven for a makeshift bed in a stable full of hay and manure. He made himself vulnerable so that all people would know God was not too great or too remote to be touched by human love.

As the play ended, I understood Christmas as an invitation from the baby Jesus to love Him from the depth of my flawed human heart, just like I loved my Gabriel.

The audience applauded and the lights came back on. People slowly left, but before I joined them, I gave Gabriel a happy hug.

My little guy with the angel’s name. He helped me grasp the essence of Christmas and understand that the baby in the manger was real. That night, the peace I had always longed for filled my heart.

Take a look at your life.  How would you describe it? Contented? Rushed? Exciting? Stressful? Moving forward? Holding back? For many of us it’s all of the above at times.  There are things we dream of doing one day, there are things we wish we could forget.  In the Bible, it says that Jesus came to make all things new.  What would your life look like if you could start over with a clean slate?

Living with hope

If you are looking for peace, there is a way to balance your life. No one can be perfect, or have a perfect life. But every one of us has the opportunity to experience perfect grace through a personal relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ.

You can receive Christ right now by faith through prayer. Praying is simply talking to God. God knows your heart and is not so concerned with your words as He is with the attitude of your heart. Here’s a suggested prayer:

Lord Jesus, I want to know you personally. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life to you and ask you to come in as my Savior and Lord. Take control of my life. Thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Make me the kind of person you want me to be.

Does this prayer express the desire of your heart? You can pray it right now, and Jesus Christ will come into your life, just as He promised.

Is this the life for you?

If you invited Christ into your life, thank God often that He is in your life, that He will never leave you and that you have eternal life. As you learn more about your relationship with God, and how much He loves you, you’ll experience life to the fullest.

Story from A Christmas Digest, © 1998, reprinted with permission

I lost my dad to suicide at the age of five.

No matter how much I tried to get better, I kept falling flat on my face. The unbearable anxiety and suicidal thoughts occupied my soul. The ugly reflection from my mirror flooded my mind with atrocious lies. You are never going to get well! You will remain living with this hell! You will never escape and be free! I picked up drinking again, hoping to find relief. Escaping from the monster in the mirror forced me to run towards things even more gruesome.

I needed a way out

Then one night my turbulent way of living caught up with me. I couldn’t handle my extreme highs, lows, and the stack of baffling conditions I juggled. I didn’t want to continue on the wild roller coaster ride any longer. I couldn’t handle the disabling hours in the bathroom, nor tolerate the self-destructive behavior in the bars. I felt ashamed of my life and needed the madness to end. Out of dire desperation, I prayed to God.

“God, I don’t want to wake up to see another day. I’d rather be dead! If you must keep me alive, then you have to help me get better. Please rescue me from this misery! God, let me die!”

To my surprise, when I awoke the following morning, I prayed to God to guide me into a church. It was Sunday morning and for some odd reason I longed to be in his presence. I fought a dreadful conflict in the bathroom as I prepared myself to get ready. The tormenting obsessions nearly destroyed me but I survived the onslaught, the hideous grooming ritual.

As I got into my car, a strange feeling encompassed me. I had no idea which church I was heading to. As I drove down the street, it felt as though a gentle hand was chauffeuring me. I pulled up along the side of an unfamiliar church. I hesitated for a moment, deciding whether to park my car or not. Is this the one? Look at all the people. Will they stare at me because I’m ugly? Should I go in or not? Within a few seconds, an incredible sensation empowered me, urging me inside.

Finding relief in a church

As I walked towards the entrance, several parishioners greeted me with open arms. This made me feel welcomed, so relieved. I found a seat and immediately participated in the singing taking place. I’d never done this before, but my heart longed to connect. The songs were uplifting and joyous.  I cried as I joined in. I don’t recall the exact message spoken, but it infiltrated my heart. As service was about to end, the pastor asked everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads for prayer. After a minute or two of prayer, he announced an altar call, something unfamiliar to me.

He asked, “Is there anyone who would like to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? Please raise your hand.”

Without hesitation, I raised my hand.  I knew in my heart, right there and then, that I needed Jesus Christ in my life. I had no idea the pastor was going to ask all of us, who raised their hands, to go up for additional prayer. Right away, I walked up to the front. The pastor had me recite a special prayer, accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord.

Shortly after, elders of the church prayed over me. Tears poured down my face as we prayed together. Later, as I walked towards my car, I felt different. I didn’t feel dirty and ugly. I wasn’t troubled! I feel like I was finally alive!

Everything changed

Something inside me vanished. I felt all cleaned up inside. The obsessions and anxiety disappeared. For the first time in years, I felt good about myself in a healthy way, not in a self-destructive manner. I attended church on a weekly basis. I began to break out of the shell I was locked up in. The greatest feeling anyone could ever experience—imagine a prisoner, set free after being wrongfully locked up for over thirty years.

If you feel lost there is hope for you. There is hope for the aching heart that can not love. There is hope to the one that might be thinking about taking their life. Cry out to God and He will send you help.

For God says, “At just the right time, I heard you. On the day of salvation, I helped you.” (2 Corinthians 6:2)

God is ready to help you right now. Today is the day of salvation.

Do you want to accept Jesus just as Barbara did? All you need to do is pray. Prayer is just talking to God. There is no right or wrong way to do it. God is not concerned about the words that you choose, he cares about the state of your heart. He hears you, the words aren’t that important. You can pray a prayer something like this:

Jesus, I want to know you personally. I know that I am a sinner and that nothing I could do can make up for that. Thank you for dying in my place and paying the price for my sin. I know that my sin doesn’t separate me from God anymore. Thank you for forgiving me. I know that you love me and that I will spend eternity with you. I want you to be my Savior. Come into my life and take control, make me the person you want me to be.

God invites us into relationship with him. He’s not here to condemn, although our sin makes us guilty. God is inviting us back, ready to welcome us home.

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