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Print I want to share my personal testimony with you—and it is hard to share in whole with people. I didn’t grow up in church. I knew there was a God. My grandma and mom were Lutheran, and I went to Sunday school a lot with my grandma. Then I started going to a Brethren church with my neighbor for a few years. I knew there was a God, and I knew a lot of the Bible stories. But I didn’t think that God was there for me.
Lessons from Dad When my dad wasn’t working, a lot of the nights he came home drunk. My dad taught me things that a normal child shouldn’t know how to do. By the time I was in elementary school, I knew how to roll a joint. I knew how to grow marijuana. I knew how to make mixed drinks. I could name the makes and models of all of my dad’s guns, and I knew how to shoot them. I knew how to cheat. I knew how to lie without being caught. I knew how to find the hidden picture on the cover of a pornographic magazine. I knew how to stack the deck in a poker game. I was loaded with all of this information, but I chose not to use the information. When I was in the sixth grade, I thought about suicide. I was only 12 years old and I was thinking about suicide. I even wrote a note. But I couldn’t go through with it. For the next few years, my dad continued to get worse. He started using and abusing drugs. Prescription drugs at first, but then he branched out into some others (cocaine, meth, etc.). During all this, my mom and I didn’t know he was doing hard drugs. We knew about the marijuana and the alcohol and the cigarettes, but not the hard drugs.
Introduction to Apostolics Since he was living at home, he couldn’t date anyone who wasn’t in church, so I started going to church with him. At first, I didn’t want anything to do with church or God. I thought that God had turned His back on me many times. I felt God at that church and I was afraid, because I had never felt God like that before. I was scared!
Holy Ghost Baptism After three years of mental anguish I had had enough. I decided to give all of me to God. I talked with the guy about it, and he said I had to choose either him or God. I chose God and we broke up. He didn’t want to live for God. He made the choice to stay in his sin. I changed churches and jobs, mostly because my parents moved. I had made plans to live with my grandma for a while, but I decided to move with my parents to get away from the memories and the pain. I dealt with my shame and the grief and the mental games for a long time.
Meeting My Husband Meeting Brian is actually a funny story and most of the girls in my high school Sunday school class know it. There was a weeklong conference at Brian’s church in South Bend, IN that I was attending. And as anyone who knows me knows, I am horrible with directions. Anyway, it normally takes about two hours from my previous home to get to South Bend. Well, it took me five hours. I knew no one at this conference. I went by myself (and that is something that I just normally wouldn’t do). But I was going for God, not to meet people. Now a few weeks before this conference, Brian’s brother Mike prophesied to him that he would be meeting his wife and she would be wearing red. When I finally arrived at the conference, guess what I was wearing—a red shirt! Everyone had gone out to eat, except for Brian’s brother and sister-in-law. So they introduced themselves to me and invited me to dinner. All through dinner Mike kept telling me, “I have a brother you should meet.” I kept trying to tell him that I wasn’t there to meet guys. So we got back to the conference and I unpacked my stuff in my room. I opened my suitcase and realized all I had packed to wear that week was red. Anyway, Mike set up the meeting and I met Brian. We were engaged on our third date and married six months after that. We will have been married for three years in August, 2004.
Standing Strong for God For instance, last year in February, my great aunt died. (I was close to my great aunts.) Then a few weeks later I found out my grandma had cancer. About a week later she had surgery to remove the mass, but when the doctors went in, she was already eaten by the cancer and there was nothing that could be done. A week later, she died. I was there by her side when she died. I held her hand as she took her last breath. Then, a month after that, my dad was arrested for dealing drugs and having an illegal methamphetamine lab. My mom bailed him out of jail and there still hasn’t been a trial. So even though, my life might look good on the surface, that doesn’t show the kind of choices I have had to make. There were times when I didn’t want to go on. There were times when I wanted to have it out with God and ask Him who He thought He was for letting these things happen. Yet I held on to the choice that I made over seven years ago—to live for Him. And I will never regret that choice.
ninetyandnine.com © 2004, Denial Nichols ---------- Denial (pronounced Danielle) Renae Nichols, a cat owner, a loving wife, works in insurance, loves God, and is involved heavily in her local church. Her husband thinks she loves the cat more than she loves him. |
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