My Heart Was Convicted By Truth

Today is Sunday! I love Sundays! I celebrate The Lord every day, but Sunday is His day like each one of us celebrate our Birthdays! It is a day to rest and spend time with family and friends. Relaxation is almost a word in the past but Sundays always bring us back to relaxation!

For most of my life working on farms and taking care of farmwife responsibilities, it was instilled upon me from childhood on that The Lord’s Day was spent not working but observing God. I always prayed to God, we said the rosary, and we prayed.

In my younger days, well, I honestly had no clue as to what I was believing in. Early grade school age I was reaching for something I didn’t understand. Middle and high school age, let’s just say I felt God was my only friend anywhere I turned.

My husband came into the picture during my high school years. I grew up and worked for him for years, but he showed me a humanly friendship and heart that I could not resist! We got married and that was when the biggest pull toward God occurred.

By making that last statement, I am not insinuating that our marriage was rocky, but the opposite! As any marriage, everyone has to adjust and give in more than the other sometimes, but in a marriage, kids arrive for some.

We went to church faithfully and I taught religion classes for more than 10 years. The first couple of years before our daughter arrived, I was teaching and those awesome hearts were asking questions I couldn’t answer sometimes. I started to look for those answers!

I read verses on each topic and found myself reading around those verses. Some did not add up to what my upbringing in that church had taught me. Each time over that ten year period, I ran across different situations and inquiries that I would search for ways to help these kids, age 4th grade to sometimes 10th grade.

I stumbled upon the verse in The Bible where God said parents are to raise their children up in The Lord! At this time, I was pregnant with our daughter. I had a huge responsibility and this hit me front and center! It was like my heart burst into puzzle pieces and I had to put it back together!

I was so confused at one point that I was determined to teach just from the Bible since the material I was given to teach was confusing. I know a couple of parents did not like that, but I was trusting God’s talking to my heart to guide me.

It was not long before she was born and the end of that same year I quit teaching for a while! Babies take a lot of time to care for and at this point, my back issues were causing havoc to my system!

Life got busy and when I returned to teaching, we had two children! Now that both were in the religion classes, I decided to get back to it. I had been so busy with raising the kids and everyday farmwifing that I had neglected my search for more. I prayed everyday and read Bible stories from the Bible and the Alice In Bibleland series, but I knew something was amiss.

I taught several more years, knowing in the back of my mind something wasn’t right! My soul thirsted for more and I myself needed something more! At this same time, someone close to me found her way and left the same religion I was in. I questioned that, yet told my husband that the religion is what you make of it in your heart. It didn’t bother me so much at this time, but God’s plan for me was unveiling!

I saw how others treated her and saw how strong her love was for Christ! This peeked my interest! She was at peace with herself when others were afraid to be around her! If these people loved God so much, why would it bother them so much to be around someone who loved Him so much?

Here began part of an awakening that stirred those broken puzzle pieces of my heart to fit into place! Her love for Jesus was strong! Jesus! Hummm. I always prayed to God and loved the stories of Jesus. I really did not pray to Jesus! Why not?

I began asking her questions and receiving the answers she gave by using scripture. By this time, the kids were a little older and I had a hard time teaching other’s children knowing I was not allowed to just teach from His Word. I even was not allowed to have Bible classes in my own home for the college age students without getting permission and having an “archdiocese coordinator” have the class in my own home! I think I mentioned this before but that is why my title says My Way in it!

I think I also already wrote that at this time, I got up before the kids did for school and dove into the Catholic Bible front to back! I was determined to get my answers and I had a drive so strong I couldn’t put my Bible down. I made it a New Year’s Resolution to read it that year and finished by October. I had a notebook of important verses to me, the contradictories of verses verse what I had always been taught, and I highlighted that Bible front to back!

Jesus stood out more than ever! Now I understood why she prayed to Him. My emphasis was on God and that is great, but here is the verse that stood out: 1 Timothy 2:5 “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ…”

Think about that verse a bit. One God, that’s a given. There is only ONE! ONE mediator means just that! NO one else, dead or alive, can get to God but through Jesus! We were taught to pray to saints and pray those rosaries. Why? The Bible I was recommended to read by a nun says so! I had been deceived to think otherwise and I was angry.

That was just one of the many puzzles that with seeking His Word, I was able to piece together a distorted heart. We all have our own story and each person was created by God to have a heart for Him. We have to be shattered in order for God’s puzzle pieces to fit properly! If we depend on our own thinking, we won’t become whole.