Lindi’s Testimony

I wouldn’t say that we were completely atheist or anything (and most people would call this normal), but my parents’ reality has always been based on practical logic. In other words, I was taught that the only faith you’ll ever need to have is in your own works and nothing else. That’s what promoted you. That’s what got you somewhere and made you a somebody.

The only people who were on a different wavelength altogether were people like poor old Grandma, who walked through the icy-cold grip of winter and the glaring heat of summer on a dusty little township dirt road to sit for hours in a church while some delirious preacher cried out about things I’d never seen in my whole twelve years of life. I was perfectly convinced that I would never let anything that silly get to my head. Not unless I knew for sure that it was all real and Grandma’s God proved it to me Himself.

Then when I was in high school, there was a boy I wouldn’t give the time of day for how he spoke of preaching the gospel to the nations and he was supposed to somehow put the fear of God in me. A boy I resented for those silly verses he offered as a solution when I was down. The boy I ridiculed when he told me that I was fearfully and wonderfully made, through the awkward zits and flat-chested phase when nobody seemed to noticed me. The boy who remained a friend when everybody hated who I was becoming, with all the dodgy company I kept and the even dodgier things I did to keep it. In truth, I hated myself for being a stranger to myself.

It took him five years, but by the end of high school, we were planning a wedding and I was so desperate to walk down that aisle that I was willing to fall pregnant just so he would marry me before he lost interest.

But when broken and purposeless united with saved but willing to do anything to fit in, it culminated in the most jaw-dropping backslide on his part and utter despair on mine, because I believed that I was the reason that the little light I once saw in him began to dwindle and disappear into the same darkness that I was in. We were both searching for way more than the other could possibly offer… Wholeness.

As I was walking home from school one day, I noticed that a shady character had been following me for quite some time. I knew that I was in trouble when I found myself running for my life on the lonely stretch of road that pointed towards my home. Then a car suddenly stopped in front of me and a lady that I had never met before offered to take me home. Surprisingly, we lived in the exact same neighborhood and she was on her way from church. She was one of those praying women. She introduced me to a girl named Chloe who lived right next door to her.

Now an apostle’s daughter, whose parents were sent from America to minister here in Africa by God Himself, couldn’t be more different to little old me… But in the desire for a real encounter with God and a real answer to the questions: “Why am I here and why do I feel like something is missing in me”, we were exactly the same. Now that I think about it, the day I met that girl was a Divine Appointment. It took only a few weeks of hanging out with her before I started convincing my boyfriend to re-connect with God again before it’s too late. Little did I know, that it meant we would have to break up before any of us could do that. Little did I know, that I would be sneaking out of bathroom windows to attend church services because my parents had concluded that I was stark raving mad. I let go of everything I knew and practically dared God everyday to take notice.

By April 2009, God answered that prayer and I knew that without a shadow of a doubt, I would never be the same again. Nothing ever would.

It’s not really about what was preached that Sunday that convinced me to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior, but when I first believed, nothing was more real to me at that moment than feeling everything that ever tormented me begin to lift from my shoulders and nothing else remained but the sweetest calm sweeping over me.

It’s been exactly a year now since that day and it’s still happening. If you’re truly willing to diligently seek His face in all honesty, just as you are, it can happen to you too. That’s a promise.