March 19, 2010 10:16am
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Daily: How much have you changed in the past 2 years? Click here to answer
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Transformation from Satanist to ChristianRelated ArticlesI was approximately seventeen years old when my parents, brother, and I began attending the Seventhday Adventist church in Lamar, Mo. To say that I was less than thrilled when we started attending on a regular basis is quite an understatement. I thought my parents had picked one of the weirdest religions known to mankind. I mean, who ever heard of church on Saturday and not being able to do activities I had become accustomed to doing on Saturdays?
I came to my own conclusions; these people must be some form of a strange cult. No matter what nice gestures were shown toward me by the church members, I continued to be downright rude to them. I remember we had a potluck dinner at the church soon after my family and I began attending and my brother and I refused to go in and intermingle with the members. Even with this rudeness they still tried their best to break through the wall I had built around myself. We had been attending for at least six months before I would even greet the other members and actually carry on a conversation with them. The first time I can really remember saying anything nice to any of the members was at a Christmas program our church was having. One of the members had brought his guitar and sang a few songs. I was blown away by the amount of talent he possessed and made sure to tell him afterwards. The look on his face can only be described as one of pure shock. After that night I began to take more of an interest in the people and activities at the church and actually enjoyed it. I know that all of you probably think that nothing negative could possibly happen after this, right? Wrong. When I began to question my parents on their beliefs and different Bible truths, they couldn't answer alot of my questions so I began to think if the Bible is what we are supposed to follow and Christ is who we should worship then He should give the answers to my parents so I wouldn't doubt his existence so much. It was a short time later that I began to slip away from the church, not to say I wasn't still polite to the members, because I was. I just figured if God wanted these answers known he would have supplied my parents or someone else with them. This is around the time I began to think to myself, "There seems to be alot more bad in the world than good, so Satan must exist. And since it appears that there is no good in the world, then God must be the world's biggest hoax. I'm not proud to say it, but I was a satanist for quite a few months, maybe even a year. This way of thinking even started to work my way, I figured since I had no belief in God I could do anything I wanted to and not feel guilty, since I thought there was no God to punish me. But like many atheists and satanists when a problem arised I went to the God I had told myself didn't even exist. To give you a better idea of what I am speaking of, I'd like to take you back about 4 years ago. When I was a Junior in high school I attempted suicide for the second time in my life by swallowing large amounts of aspirin and, obviously, I failed. The second time messed me up alot worse than the first time and I was scared to death that I might have ruined my internal organs. Fortunate for me this wasn't the case; I just threw up a lot and had panic attacks for many months. The ironic thing was that I didn't have these panic attacks when I was at church, which got me to wondering what was going on. As soon as I was in the church I felt instant peace and as soon as I left, the peace seemed to go away. It would seem that I would have changed my way of thinking soon after that wouldn't it? Nope. Sure, I prayed to God for awhile to take away my panic attacks and when it finally happened, I decided that I didn't need Him anymore in my life and I went back to my old ways. I stayed this way for almost three years and was happy to live this way. I know everytime my parents had a silent prayer, they were probably asking God to help me see the truth before it was to late. But I wanted nothing to do with this stuff called religion and I thought that I never would be interested in it. Well needless to say, sometimes God sends just the right person or maybe I should say people to help you see the truth. This came in the form of our new pastor Dennis Mix and his wife Janice. They were just the kind of people you knew that you would like the first time you met them. She was the sweet, quiet motherly type and he was the outgoing, humorous type. Before I met him I had no idea that pastors could have a sense of humor and still teach the Bible. I began to talk to him quite frequently and a short time later my mother asked if I had mentioned to him that I had no belief in God. I told her that I had never mentioned this to him because I didn't think it was his business to know. The truth was I was afraid he would lecture me about religion and God. At my mothers request I told him how I felt that God was a lie and there was no way to prove he exists. Do you think that the pastor lectured me about it as I feared? No. He just asked me one simple question that got me to thinking. Do you have any idea what that question was? The question he asked me was "Can you think of anything that doesn't have a creator?" I pondered this for a few minutes and couldn't come up with an answer. Weird how one small question can trigger you to begin questioning your reasoning isn't it? I won't say that I instantly began believing in God, but I did start to listen to what my parents and the church had to say about religion. And with a few late night chats with the pastor through computers I began to slowly ask more questions and get answers that made sense to me. I also began to take part in activities at church. For example, I helped teach a class at our Vacation Bible School last summer. Now I'm in charge of doing the weekly bulletins for our church, and when we honored our pastor and his wife during Pastor Appreciation Month I wrote some poems expressing my appreciation for them. I have tried to give credit to the pastor and his wife for the changes in my life, but do they accept the credit? No, they simply say they're just messengers of God who are doing what they enjoy doing. Whether they choose to accept the credit doesn't matter to me, what matters is that God found it fit to bless our church with these two wonderful people. If you are all wondering if I have stayed with my new and improved life. I'm planning on being baptized this Spring or Summer into the Adventist church. And to think, my new life all began with one man who played the guitar so beautifully. |
