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steampunk-christians · 3 months ago

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A Journey Through God’s Ways #02: My Testimony

💖 Hello! My name is Bernardo, I am a 29 year old man, and 13 years ago, on this very same day, I placed my faith on Jesus Christ as my savior (...wow, that sounds generic and unspecific, maybe I could add some...details ❓❔ ❓ ❔❓❔ ❓❔ ❓❔ ❓❔ ❓).

💖 FIRST OFF, I need to clarify that I don’t think a testimony should work as some sort of meta self-celebratory biography, as the idea is to glorify God and His grace. However, there are a lot of things that happened before and after my conversion which I believe add to the mystifying, wondrous experience of providence. So, if I begin the Big Story by sharing other Little Stories from both childhood and adolescence, please believe I do it only because it makes sense in the context of puzzle pieces in God’s providence. Okay? Let's go:

💛 When I was five months old, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and since she also suffers from schizophrenia, it’s not hard to imagine how challenging it was for my parents. They were so overwhelmed with problems that they had no time to raise me or even nurture me in a way that felt appropiate, so they decided I should spend more time in a different environment. Enter my mom’s friend’s home: the lovely home of a lovely woman just three blocks away from our place. Eventually, when I turned 4, my mom recovered, but since I had grown so accustomed to living in this other home (to the point where I would refer to the woman and the man there as 'mom' and 'dad'), my biological parents allowed me to keep going.

💖 Now that this is clear, my mom’s friend had a husband whom I will call 'Old Man.' And well, I don’t mean to be funny about it, but this man was a stereotypical Fyodor Dostoyevsky character: a self-proclaimed Christian miracle worker by day, and a drunken, sorrowful fool by night. And sadly, he was no saint: he was physically abusive to his four sons, and he was also emotionally/sexually abusive to his wife. However, as is often the case with abusive men or women, he didn’t behave this way all the time, so there were relatively long periods of "peace" that allowed the whole family to somehow simulate an idea of "normalcy" in front of my parents, and as none of them seemed willing to reveal the full extent of his shortcomings, that's the story of how I left a rather dysfunctional environment to end up in an even more dysfunctional environment 😂

🌙 However, this is the plot twist: for some reason I will never fully understand (but I can only guess...), 'Old Man' grew really, really fond of me. In fact, his wife would later claim he loved me more than his biological sons, so each time I'd go to the house, I would always RUN to him so I could do what I loved the most: 01) to listen to him talk about God, 02) making him questions about God. Like, seriously, I was really annoying: does God like children? does God like me? what does God think of me? who created God? did God eat the tree of life and gain immortality and became God? is God watching us right now? does God like me when I play video games? I remember he had a rather literal of the "faith as a mustard seed" verse, so he would always try to move a glass of water with his mind, and I remember being 7 or 8 and holding my breath out of pure exciment over the possibility I might actually see telekinesis (it didn't happen lol). I also remember being 10 and being very, very worried about the idea of angering God, to the point I spent plenty of days 'resisting' the temptation of playing Age of Empires 2 until I couldn't take it anymore, and that day started raining and I panicked because I thought I was making God cry 💀

🌕 No one in his family likes that I was so obsessed with him, so I remember always trying to find ways to sneak out so I could keep talking. Seriously, he had the greatest grip on me. If he told me I couldn't eat certain foods because of the Leviticus rules (he had the most random interpretations ever lol), and then my parents would serve the supposedly forbidden, then i'd put it in my month, act like I suddenly had to pee, and spit them in the toilet. However, when I was 11 or 12...my idea of God started to become more somber because I became more aware of the idea of hell, and suddenly God wasn't as cheerful and exciting anymore. He told me that God loved when His kids would worship him, and I remember panicking because I didn't know how to sing or play instruments, so we both decided that I could start writing song lyrics, and that he would then add the music since he know how to play guitar, and even though no music was born out of the deal, I would force myself to write at least one 'song lyric' per day, to the point I must have filled at least 20 notebooks, and even though this is what sparkled my love for writing, I must admit it was quite terrifying because I had this idea that if I somehow failed to write a poem, then I could die and go to hell.

Eventually, it all came to and end. When I was 12, his 'bad side' ended up overpowering his good side, and he ended up being forcefubly and rightfully kicked out of the house, and by that time my parents were ready to snatch me back to the more 'normal' environment, so I never saw him again. However, I was about to start high school, and I remember being so in love with the memory of being loved by this wacky man, and still so fearful of hell, that I spontaneously decided that I was going to keep following 'the rules' by myself, despite the fact no one in my family was a Christian (and ergo were not expecting me to act like one). Obviously, as my theology training had been provided by a drunken man, in my mind Jesus Christ was like a very good Christian who got killed for being a very good Christian and God resurrected Him because He loved Him, had absolutely no clue the Holy Spirit even existed, I even remember a brief period when I visited a Catholic church with a Protestant Bible, not even aware I was in a Catholic church or that I had a Protestant Bible, as all churches seemed like the same church to me; and all bibles, the same bible. And clearly, I had no idea what the Gospel was, I simply assumed that if my good deeds outweighed the bad ones, I would enter Heaven. However, this is when things took a turn, because by the time I was 13, I started to become aware of a 'sin' that had no easy way out, a very particular little problem that was lingering in the air of my own suspicions since childhood, and that teenagehood did nothing but to confirm: I was homosexual.

At the beginning, I wasn't that trouble because I gaslighted myself into thinking I would simply grow out of it. It had to be a phase, right? Everyone is a little curious, right? Sooner than later, I would see a beautiful girl and fall in love with her, right? However, as time went by, an increasingly sensation of 'dude, you're in a very big problem right now' started to govern my whole life. If I suddenly became aware of the fact that video games were sinful, I could stop playing them, but how I could stop being homosexual? And the bible was so definitive about it, and as I still had no understanding of concepts such as grace, in my mind being homosexual was the sin that would render me unable to access Heaven, mostly because I was not seeing a way to escape this sin. And the worst part is that I couldn't talk to anyone about this because it would force me to come out of the closet, and it was like an impossible problem because talking about it would make me gay in front of others, but not talking about it implied that I could not find a solution. The only option was the internet, but I remember being so scared at the idea someone could simply tell me I had no way to enter Heaven that I didn't want to. You have to keep in mind that this was 2011 and 2012, and progressism/political correctness weren't mainstraim, so it was extremely easy to run into the most normalized, homophobic retheoric, both from seculars or Christians, and terms like SIDE A, B, X or Y weren't popular back then (or at least I don't remember ever reading them). If anything, going to the internet seemed like an open invitation for mockery, or to someone could tell me: no way, you're going to hell.

This was such a difficult situation for me because at the time I was being relentlessly bullied in high school, and I would feel suicidal every single day, to the point every single day i'd ask God to please help me, and I'd just hope He would answer. Besides, my family life was worsening because by the time I was 15, I was acting way more jaded towards my parents. My dad, hardened by a loveless marriage, was growing increasingly cold, and I was absolutely fed up of my mom's schizophrenia, because at the time I didn't even understand she even had a disease. And every single time I would think about my homosexuality, I'd end up numbing out and keep living life. However, a few months after turning 16, I suddenly decided that I could no longer keep hiding, and that I needed to at least dare to find a solution to the problem, and this is when things got fast paced.

I remember googling 'Christian Forum', making an account in the first one that I found, and simply making the following question: "I want to be Christian, but I think I am gay: what do I do?" To my surprise, I received plenty of kind answers in the following hours: some people told me I should 'pray the gay away', and some others told me that I should not mind what the Bible says, and embrace 'the lifestyle.' In my mind, embracing 'the lifestyle' (I hate that word lol) wasn't an option because the bible was too crystal clear about God's opinion, so I thought I was stuck with 'praying the gay away' until the very next day, I received the answer that completely changed the trajectory of my life: "While homosexuality is indeed a sin, your main problem is that, by your wording and reasoning, I can tell you don't know what the GOSPEL is, which means that 01) you haven't born again 02) if you die right now, you will spend an eternity in hell. DM me now so we can arrange a Skype meeting." From now on, I’ll refer to this person as "Boss."

💖 First off, I don’t think I can explain the frenzy of emotions I felt reading his message: it was the most panicked and despondent sense of dread I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. However, there’s something else I need to make clear: his message was actually quite long and filled with Bible verses to support his point, but the tone was so severe and harsh that I became fearful in two distinct ways: spiritually, because I feared he might be right and that I was doomed; and secularly, because I feared he might be some sort of psychopath trying to take advantage of me. My head was spinning so much that I considered not responding out of sheer panic. Nonetheless, he came across as someone so…knowledgeable? I mean, up until that point in my life, I had never, ever heard anyone use biblical language like that. The closest comparison I can make of what I was feeling is in the following verse: 'For he taught with real authority—quite unlike their teachers of religious law' (obviously, I’m not literally comparing him to Jesus, what I’m trying to convey is that there was something radically different about the way he spoke about matters of faith—not only in comparison to what others were saying in the same forum, but to anything I had ever heard from Old Man or anyone else). The way he focused on THE GOSPEL as a concept that could save souls was difficult to grasp because, due to the polysemc nature of the word, I remember thinking he was implying that I should memorize Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which at the time felt extremely random for it to be truth. However, I figured I could at least talk to him once and then nope myself out if I noticed anything off, since there was no way I could move on with my life and pretend such a message hadn't happened.

💖 Before anything else, we talked through Messenger. He introduced himself and told me he was some sort of online missionary (obviously, those weren’t his exact words lol), traveling from one Christian Forum to another to preach the gospel to us, the online sinners (again, not his words, but you can guess the sentiment). Basically, he told me that he found the Christian Forum I had logged into by accident the day after I posted my question; and that that alone had surprised him because he was under the impression that he already knew all the Spanish Speaking Christian forums on the web, but didn’t know this one. He also said that when he found the forum, he felt a very strong urge to create an account and explore it further—that’s how he came across my post. At first, I was suspicious, since I believed he might be faking providence to make himself more trustworthy, but I didn't argue. And then he asked me to talk through the camera so he could preach the gospel face-to-face. (I think I asked him why it wasn’t possible through text, and he said he needed to observe my body language and facial expressions to make sure I wasn’t being deceitful, though I might be misremembering that). However, I had a problem: since I didn’t have my own computer, I could only talk to him on my dad’s computer when he wasn’t around in the office, which only happened two or three hours per Sunday. This meant I wouldn’t be able to receive the entirety of the Gospel in one go; it would have to be spread out over weeks, which meant that I would end up with the most ridiculoys slow paced preaching of the Gospel in what at the time felt like the fastest progression of events in my entire life.

💖 When the first day arrived, we only got to talk about what he (and many others) would call the 'BAD NEWS.' He confronted me about my sin—not just homosexuality, but all of them—even those I had previously deemed small and unimportant. According to this logic, there was no such thing as a 'small sin' in the eyes of a God who is, by definition, good and perfect. If God is truly perfect, He cannot tolerate even the smallest transgression, because He would cease to be perfect—just as a perfectly clean glass of water would no longer be pure if you added a single drop of dirt. However, there was another problem: because God is holy and because God is perfect and because God is just, He was also righteously ANGRY at me for both my sin and my sinful nature. I deserved to be eternally separated from Him. Even though I feared hell, I deserved it, because there was no way a just God could allow an unjust person into His presence. And then Boss told me: "This is the greatest theological problem in all existence: how does a just God allow unjust people into His presence without ceasing to be just? Do you know the answer?" And I was so bewildered and perplexed by what I perceived as a surreal situation and an impossible problem that I simply said, ‘No, I do not know the answer." This was the end of the FIRST DAY.

💖 The following week was one of the harshests of my entire life, as I battled a level of spiritual agony and mental confusion I had never experienced before. In addition to the panic that I could die and go to hell, there was another problem: at the time, due to my lack of understanding of the concept of grace, I was completely sure

I became overly fixated on the idea that he would try to 'cure' my homosexuality first, which made me terrified of being forced to do something outrageous in order to be saved. I mean, this was the generalized anxiety speaking, even though I now recognize it was also the Sin Within channeling it to prevent me from engaging further in the conversation: "Don't answer, Boss is going to ask you to be circumcised" // "Just ghost him, Boss is going to ask you to leave your home to live with him and do who knows what" // "Don't you realize it? Boss will put you through some sort of traumatic conversion therapy" // The scariest, most deranged delusions bombarded my heart and soul, to the point I started feeling detached from my body. At night, I would dream of being on literal fire. I vividly recall reading, 'And do not call anyone on earth "father," for you have one Father, and He is in heaven,' and believing I could no longer call my biological dad 'Dad,' as if the sin within was telling me the Christian life was going to be miserable. It felt like I could only analyze the Bible through this nonsensical, hyper-literal lens of interpretation, which made it the strangest and scariest book I’ve ever read: my mind, heart, and soul were malfunctioning; I could no longer make sense of sense. I even had a small death scare when a car randomly moved forward while I was crossing the street, bumping me lightly (though I think this happened before the First Day). However, I was determined not to miss the Second Day, and I soon realized that all my fears had been completely unfounded.

💖 I don't even remember Boss singling out homosexuality as some sort of special sin that required prior handling; he simply started sharing the GOOD NEWS right away: that the wrath I deserved for sinning against a holy, perfect God—the righteous ire building up against me for ALL my sinful transgressions and nature—was placed upon the only human being who had ever been sinless and innocent: Jesus Christ. No, I couldn't to work my way to salvation. No, I didn’t have to be 'good enough' for salvation. No, I couldn’t save myself: so Jesus Himself chose to endure the Wrath for the sins I had personally committed. However, don’t assume I understood it instantly. I remember asking Boss, 'How can God be just if He punished His innocent Son?' because I wasn’t yet grasping that it was a mutual agreement. I didn’t realize that the Son was also God, and that this was God the Father sacrificing God the Son to save ME: an evil sinner. It was the plan of the Trinity all along: for the Father to sacrifice the Son in order to save humanity. However, since the punishment for sin is death and the Son was sinless, He resurrected. Now, all those who believe and repent can be 'born again' through His grace and love. Boss then asked me to find some alone time to reflect on this, and we would meet again after I had spoken to God.

💖 I didn’t find a real, authentic moment of solitude until the next day, February 9th, 2012. I knelt down and began praying, trying to let all this new information settle within me, unsure of what to expect. Was I going to feel something? Was I going to see some sort of light? Would I somehow guess that I was saved? I remember feeling moved—if not somewhat amused—by the thought that the angels might be watching in anticipation of a sinner about to repent. I was also struck by the idea that the demons would be furious at the thought of a sinner escaping the wrath they themselves will have to endure. But most importantly, I began to think of Jesus Christ. I started to think about the sacrifice He had to endure—the fact that it wasn’t the nails or the cross or the whiplashes the reason behind His anguish in Gethsemane, but the fact He was going to be hurt and punished by His own Father: He was about to endure the wrath that was reserved for me: a rebel. And that’s when it clicked. A very subtle '…oh' feeling. I suddenly understood: I had it all wrong. Old Man had it all wrong. My parents had it all wrong. And Jesus had been so...kind? So...merciful? It clicked. And then the craziest thing happened.

💖 I remember walking through my home with a newfound sense of inner calmness, nothing extraordinary or out of the blue, but with the security that—at least—the spiritual battle was over. I even remember doing dishes and watching television, slightly unsure of what to do next: everything felt the same, yet different somehow. And that’s when I suddenly felt the urge to read the Bible, and this is the moment I will never, ever forget:

💖 I started reading the New Testament, and I realized that my understanding of it had been shifted. Keep in mind, though, that February 9th wasn’t the first time I had ever read the Bible. For almost four years, influenced by Old Man, I had been trying to read it on a daily basis. But until three or four days before my conversion, it had been nothing but an utterly nonsensical and perplexing book. Yet there I was, reading Matthew, then Mark, then Luke, then John, then Acts, then Romans, then 1 and 2 Corinthians, until eventually I reached Revelation. And long story short: I finished reading the entire New Testament in three or four days—after years of struggling to finish even Matthew—and I was in absolute awe. Please, I am not being hyperbolic: I had no app to help me read it; no summary, article, or insight to guide me through it, and Boss didn't even know I was reading the whole New Testament since I was still unable to get on the computer and tell him the news. I was simply reading it and somehow understanding it—not out of intellectual prowess, but because I was being guided by a stronger force in my own understanding, more like a father reading his smallest son a short story than a person suddenly becoming smarter.

💖 And you know? The most beautiful part is that I wasn’t being guided just for the sake of it. It felt as though there was a specific insight God wanted me to fully comprehend before embarking on this wild, beautiful, and painful journey—a message I had to receive because He knew how much I would need it: that we can’t lose our salvation. The realization started to hit me while reading Romans, I remember, and then every single epistle confirmed it: my entire reading seemed spiritually guided toward that particular conclusion. And please know this: neither Boss nor Old Man had ever spoken to me about eternal security. I had no knowledge that such a concept existed, no awareness of the theological debates surrounding it or the endless discussions among denominations—respectable, despite their discrepancies. I never once, in my 16 years, got even the tiniest clue that something as beautiful as 'once saved, always saved' was a possibility. Because, as strange as it might sound, even though I now consider myself 100% Protestant, my conversion didn’t give me an instant understanding of concepts like Catholicism or Protestantism—I still didn’t know them. My reading wasn’t telling me: 'You’re a Protestant,' (even though I was). It wasn’t telling me the type of church I should go to, what the thorn in the flesh was, what the four horsemen symbolize, or how wretched I was and how bad I should feel. It was simply God telling me: 'You’re mine now. You will always be mine. I will love you forever and ever.' And even though I am aware of the rationalistic approach and understand that self-suggestion can make us feel and do wild things, there’s nothing about this experience that I can associate with suggestion, because it wasn’t a feeling—it was an event. I saw order in the words.

💖 The following weeks were some of the happiest of my entire life. As if my reading experience wasn’t miraculous enough, another absolutely BEAUTIFUL thing happened: remember I briefly mentioned that my mom has schizophrenia? Well, in that exact month (February of 2012), she started a new treatment that did wonders for her mental health. Essentially, she regained a sense of inner peace and practical independence so powerful she basically turned into a happier version of herself after 30 years trapped in what she would call the darkest darkness. Her mental state had been so low that she once attempted suicide by jumping off a cliff when I was a kid, and our relationship was so broken that I remember wishing I were an orphan. And please consider this: my mom had no idea I was going through such experiences. She didn’t know who Boss was or that I was in the process of becoming a Christian: at the time it was all a secret. And while I understand that from a secular perspective, this could be seen as a mere coincidence, we both experienced such a radical shift in our worldview in the same month that our relationship improved in almost an instantaneous manner: our wounds began to heal, I got to know and love my own mother.

💖 The following Sunday, I talked to Boss about my experiences with the New Testament, and since he believes in eternal security as well, my experience was quite the surprise for both of us. He then told me that I should seek a church in my city, but I couldn’t find a church that was biblically sound, as Latin America is too troubled with prosperity gospel churches. So, a rather funny thing happened: he became my "personal pastor" for two years. Every Sunday, we would talk through Skype and he helped me grow spiritually with accountability, theological discussions, and assigned readings. And while it isn’t ideal to be without a church, the fact that I had a "personal pastor" was indeed a huge privilege. On the other hand, I was no longer depressed, and I got to experience a classroom swap in school that allowed me to meet people who were kind to me and became my first friends in adolescence, which made the effects of bullying less painful. And even though I don't think the Christian life is easy or should be understood as a journey towards an increasingly easier life, I felt absolutely and carefully watched over by a loving Father after years of hollow, meaningless pain.

💖 However, in case someone got to this part, I feel like I need to make a HUGE disclaimer: not every conversion is the same. My story has some out-of-the-blue elements, but not everyone feels a sudden or drastic change in perspective, in the same way not everyone goes through what can be sensorially understood as a miracle. Plenty of better Christians than me don’t even remember the day they were saved because they were born into a Christian family. What matters most in every conversion is THE GOSPEL, which is already miraculous, wonderful, and spectacular enough. And even though I can't speculate on divine matters, at the end of the day, I think my conversion happened this way because God knew I would need a strong sense of assurance from the get-go.

💖 In 2014, two years after my conversion, my communication with Boss became strained to the point where I carelessly stopped engaging with him, so what joyfully started as Sunday Meetings became vague and evasive yearly emails. However, as I was still churchless, I suddenly had no one who could hold me accountable for habitual sins, no one I could ask questions about complicated theological topics, and no one who would encourage me to focus on the things that matter, so I ended up becoming virtually indistinguishable from a non-believer. To make a long story short: I left my Father's home and I ran to the world, and the world broke me: a 10-year-long spiritual drought began. However, it was the memory of that magical week reading the New Testament, the borrowed assurance from those wonderful early experiences, that kept me from losing sight of the fact that sooner or later, I had to come back. I never doubted the Gospel, and I didn’t become an unbeliever, but I allowed lukewarmness of mind and heart to turn me into a fearful, stained, hurt, angry, and confused version of myself. And yet, it always seemed easier to stay in the dirt, even though I loathed it. However, 2023 and 2024 became unbearable, and you know what I ended up finding out? “If we are unfaithful, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny who He is.” God never stopped watching over me, and not even the most heartbreaking experiences can give me an ounce of regret over what was the most beautiful experience: to be born again.

💖 And while I understand that adding this last bit might seem like unnecessary negativity in what is otherwise a story meant to praise Jesus Christ, I not only hope an unbeliever might read this and consider joining this spiritual family, but I also hope that any Christian who might feel lost in their own way realizes that your Father does not resent you. He is looking out through the window day after day, painfully awaiting for your return because He chose to love you when He had a reason to hate you, and He continues to love you even if you continue to fail Him. So, praise the Lord! Praise Jesus Christ, who died on the cross so we could call Him brother.

💖 And I don’t know what else to say— If you're an unbeliever, let me tell you this: I know it is difficult, I know it can be scary, but please, please, dare to search for Him. Don’t mind your family, don’t mind your friends, don’t mind the circumstances, don’t mind the world or the entire universe. Jesus is the star you keep wishing upon, Jesus is the horizon you keep running toward. He’s the mind behind all galaxies and stars, yet He’s also right here, right now, so please, take the opportunity— it wasn’t painless for Him, it wasn’t painless for the Trinity, but it’s the greatest gift you will ever receive. You don’t have to do anything except believe and repent. And no, you don't deserve it, that's what makes it so beautiful. So please, don’t hesitate.

💖 Finally, I hope this testimony can offer reassurance to anyone about the beauty of our Father, especially in these trying times, and remind us that we can’t fight the good fight alone. That’s the lesson I had to learn the hard way: we’re not just a kingdom; we’re a family.

💖 "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)

#christian faith #christian living #christian blog #a journey through god's ways #it has been so long...#yet the feelings remain so familiar #despite despite despite #thank you lord #thank you so much #but basically...it's my christ-day :)#i remember when i legit told boss i thought he'd ask me to get circumcised and he was like what?????????????#the gospel #my testimony

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