A Life Transformed

She was exquisitely beautiful, gregariously charismatic, and very popular, in addition, she was my big sister. I would have followed her anywhere, to the ends of the earth, or even off a bridge. Where I followed her was quite unusual and a tad jolting: the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Bible study at Mayport Middle School. It was not an easy sell.

I thought she had lost her mind when one Tuesday evening, with Bible in hand she began quoting scripture to me while I traversed the living room. I reacted sharply, “Listen, I love God and I love church, and I especially loved going to vacation Bible school every summer when we were just kids. I did! But today is Tuesday, and Sunday is so very far away. Why are you reading me scripture? Ugh!” I was frustrated, a bit peeved and even embarrassed when she did the same thing when a friend was over spending the night. Despite my best defenses, I found myself in an upstairs classroom, listening about, and reading for the first time, a Bible. I was completely blown away. That night in bed, my heart palpitated to have encountered such wisdom. My mind and spirit were soaring at the words and the discussion as I immersed in God’s Word, “New wine will not fit into old wineskins….The wineskin will burst.”

You could sense a shift as the following summer we packed a van with several teenage girls on our way to Black Mountain, North Carolina to attend the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Camp. The breathtaking majesty of the Blue Ridge Mountains pierced my senses as we traveled the riveting splendor of distant peaks, the winding inclines that you wondered if our vehicle could climb, the rushing rivers and lush ravines with endless summer foliage. This overflowing, continual beauty overloaded my logical process, my heart was bursting trying to capture these newly discovered visages for future reference.

We arrived at at the YMCA camp with 700 athletes from all over the country. We were there to learn and grow and saturate in Him. The auditorium seated at least a thousand and was outfitted in the simplest of materials: wooden seats complete with arm rests and large windows that seemed to reach all the way to the sky. The podium was plain. It had a distinctive, high-schoolish feel. And yet, when the 700 young female voices sang acapella “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. Hallelu, Hallelujah” It was temporarily converted to a chorus of angels proclaiming on His streets of gold. The speakers, teaching and worship were in themselves life altering.

Then, the night of the keynote speaker arrived. She must have been 6 foot 2 inches tall, and all around enormous; weighing close to 300 lbs. However, her story was more compelling than her physique. She had been a prostitute, a madam. She had done many wild things in her former life even mentoring others to follow her lead, but she spoke of our Savior with such gentleness that was entirely disarming. This Son of God, bruised, broken, tortured and murdered, loved her so thoroughly. She allowed Him to love her like that. In my imagination, I saw that she had been given a small box, intricately wrapped, as a eternal Christmas gift. She had opened it! The treasure within was Christ Himself, in exchange for her life, lived in such complicated fleshly bondage. Then, she extended this same gift to us. The promise of eternal, purposeful life in exchange for all our sin, all our self centered teenage whimsical wishes. An altar call was given. I froze like a deer in the headlights. How could I, who lived my whole life trying to be a good person, take that step down the aisle in humility in front of everyone? How could I, raised Catholic, take that step out and up? I wrestled with myself. Stubbornly, I anchored myself, harboring safety in my established pride. I would not budge for the reckless, public involvement at that altar, up front where the girls were weeping, exchanging their sin for freedom. Nevertheless, His Word, through the speaker, had penetrated deeply. What happened in the anonymity of my wooden chair was nothing short of a life transformed. What had been a routine of waking up and trying to decide what I wanted, would henceforth become a lifestyle of arising and consulting, “What do You want, Father?”

Even the air seemed lighter as we left the meeting place and moved outside into the chilled mountain air. What seemed like thousand of tear drops exited my eye lids and found their way pulled by gravity, down, down, down. God was forgiving and washing my soul clean. He was holding my transgressions just long enough to pry them from my hands and hurl them into His sea of forgetfulness. Every white lie, every selfish act, every disrespectful, or rebellious act or attitude; every time I had exalted myself above my beautiful Savior. He took all of it and remembered them no more. He removed that heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh; one that was capable of worshipping Him, one that was capable of considering others over myself.

This life transformed is available to anyone, anywhere. It is free for the asking. This freedom to be loved by our Creator is without barriers or stipulation. There is no sin that can not be forgiven. There is no arrogance that can not be tempered. There is no wrong doing that can not be thrown as far as the east is from the west. “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white like snow.” Nothing and no one can stop you from reestablishing your born identity as a strong, wild son or a beautiful, captivating daughter of The King. Your heart is built to worship. It will try to worship many things apart from God: money, sex, position, altered states of consciousness, power, entertainment. You name it. Our hearts are actually idol factories, but a peace that transcends circumstances is only found in finding your way back to Father’s heart. “Today if you hear His voice, harden not your heart,” For Jesus “came to bring you life, and that to the full.”

_{From that time on, Jesus began to proclaim His message with these words,}

_{“Keep turning away from your sins and come back to God, for Heaven’s Kingdom realm is now accessible.”}

_{Matthew 4:17}