Reason To Be

Never been a sinner I never sinned

I got a friend in Jesus

So you know that when I die

He's gonna set me up with

The spirit in the sky

Spirit in the Sky -Norman Greenbaum

(I thought this might happen. When I starting writing all this out I was alternating back and forth from one time line -childhood through to exiting the Catholic church - and another- going back to church up to the present. The former timeline has more that needs added, so I'll stick with it for the next few posts.)

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After my salvation experience, I was super hungry for anything that was or seemed to be of God. I watched tons of TBN, read my Bible at work when I got breaks talked with other believers, and prayed and thought about all these things. My husband believed, too, but we may have been on very different pages for awhile. He was raised Catholic, so his idea of God was different than mine, I'm sure. I don't really remember any of the early conversations we had about it, but we started to think of ourselves as believers. Going to church at this time was not something we could do as we were both in the restaurant industry and always had to work Sundays.


The first Christmas time after I believed was very special. I played a Handel's Messiah cassette that I had in my car stereo and it was finally so meaningful. I still didn't understand the core doctrines of the Faith, I just knew the feelings that I had were wonderful.


I found that believing in God took away my depression. I finally had a reason to be and I would go to Heaven someday.  One day while I getting ready for work at our apartment, I got a sense that I didn't need my antidepressants anymore, so I just stopped taking them. I remember once at work a dishwasher asked me why I seemed so happy. It showed!


I was fascinated about the End Times and since my husband's manager, Kyle, was into it, he talked to him about it at work and I discovered Jack Van Impe Presents on Christian Television. It seemed to him (Van Impe) that we were going to see Jesus at any moment. He went through all the day's headlines and quoted scripture that seemed like prophecy was literally being fulfilled before our eyes. I was so excited to have started believing when I did. It was very likely that I would never die at all since the Rapture was so close at hand. I was quite vocal at work about all this and I found that most people plain didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want Jesus to come back yet, stating reasons for not being done here on Earth. All I could see was this amazing new world to come.


This was a time when I truly felt as if I had a personal relationship with God. I talked to him all the time, had prayers answered, felt His presence constantly. If I could go back and not investigate the faith further, I may have stayed this way until now.


Reading the Bible, I found troubling things then, too, but figured I had so much to learn. Van Impe was using Ezekiel and Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets quite a bit to point out things happening in the news and when I went back to those books to read them, I wasn't understanding one bit of it. When the people on Christian TV and radio quoted scripture, they seemed so sure as to what they were talking about. I wanted to be that sure, too. I wanted to know what was in the Bible, be sure about it myself.  If this was God's book, then I needed to know all about it.


Around this time my husband's grandfather became too ill to take care of himself and needed to go into a nursing home. His mom asked us if we wanted to move into his house to keep an eye on it. Since his grandmother had passed a few years prior, it would be empty and she didn't know just what they were going to do with it yet.  We agreed and moved out of our apartment to the house. A new chapter was beginning in our lives and I saw the hand of God in all of it.



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