Saved out of a Lonesome Life

Annegret - Darmstadt, Germany

I would like to tell you how I was saved. Before I became a Christian, I was very shy and withdrawn. When I was a child, bullies crushed all my self confidence and sense of worth. Because of that, I found it very hard to make friends. I tried to change this in my own strength, but it didn't work. I had a very lonely life, because I was so shy and and found it nearly impossible to get into a conversation or to show people that I liked them.

So, I began to have two ideas in my mind about what I would do with my life. One idea was that one day I would go to Australia, and there I would be able to change and find many friends. The other idea was that I would be living in some lonely place in Iceland and have nothing do to with people anymore. Sometimes I preferred one idea, sometimes the other.

One day my English teacher showed us an advertisement from a student exchange organisation. It advertised staying in another country, living with a local family and going to school there to improve one's English. One of these countries was Australia. This was my chance! I hadn't expected it to come so soon. My only friend and I applied for a 7-month student exchange in Australia. Our teacher was quite surprised when he heard that both of us had qualified for it, because they met the students to ensure that they can handle living far away from family and friends for such a long time. It was, I believe, a miracle in itself that I had qualified. I was the last person people would think would qualify! I was never afraid to go though. I had nothing to lose.... I had actually made a plan that I would commit suicide in the unlikely case that my plans of changing did not work out there. My friend didn't know anything about this, or the real reason I was going to Australia.

I had always believed that there was a God, but every time I tried to get closer to Him by going to church, I was soon bored and gave up. I was lucky because in school we had Lutheran pastors as religion teachers and they taught us about the Bible, encouraging us to read it. So I knew many things about the Bible, but as I would discover, nowhere near all of it. One day when I was reading the Bible at home I came across 1 CORINTHIANS 14. It talks about ‘speaking in tongues', and it didn't make sense to me at all. I didn't know what the term meant, and I didn't get a proper answer about it: neither from my mum, nor from the Lutheran pastors. This became one of several reasons why I sometimes doubted the Bible.

When I went to Australia at the age of 16, I had a friendly, Christian host family who attended a spirit-filled (Pentecostal) church and invited me to their meetings. At first I didn't understand much of what was said because my English lacked the vocabulary for spiritual things. I heard them speaking in tongues during the ‘spiritual gifts' after communion, but thought it was the language of the Aborigines. I was looking around to see the Aborigines, but when after several meetings I didn't see them, I got up the courage to ask my host family why they were speaking in another language. They told me it was speaking in tongues, that it was in the Bible and that through the ‘gifts', God was speaking directly to the church. I was very happy about that, because now 1 CORINTHIANS 14 made sense. You could actually hear something from God! However I wasn't sure yet if this was for me.

I then went on a bus trip through the outback with many exchange students from different countries. A Finnish girl sat down next to me on the bus on the first day. She had already received the Holy Spirit in Australia shortly before this trip, because her host family was in another spirit-filled church. Immediately she started witnessing to the girl sitting behind us. Throughout the trip, people were discussing Christianity, the Bible and so on. That a Finnish girl in another church had had the same experience as me was a confirmation for me that it was the truth.

Twice on the trip, our bus met another bus that my friend was on. For some reason, we had an argument in which she told me I hadn't changed at all. This was it, now my hopes collapsed. I already had some friends in my Australian school and thought I had already changed to some degree, but obviously it wasn't true. Now I was seriously considering carrying out my plan of suicide... but another voice in my mind held me back from doing it, encouraging me to make the best out of my life and keep working on it.

During a discussion with my host's sister upon returning from the trip, I realised that I was not a "good" person and that I was just making excuses about every bad thing I had done. I realised that these people had something I needed to have in order to change. If it was the Holy Spirit then I prayed to have it, and if I had to speak in tongues for that then I wanted that too.

During the next meeting, it became clear to me that I also needed to be baptised, because you have to do it the way the Bible says. So to the surprise of my host family, I went and got baptised and received the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.

It was a great change. A big burden fell from my soul and I started to find it fun to speak to people; even others, not knowing that I had been saved, remarked that I had changed and had learned to smile in Australia. The Bible says in ACTS 1:8, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you”. When you receive this power it will enable you to change, where you were not able to change before. This proves that the Holy Spirit really is a ‘comforter' as the Bible says, because it is by the gift of the Holy Spirit that God “heals the brokenhearted and sets the captives at liberty” (LUKE 4:18; ISAIAH 61:1). Over the years, I've seen this power at work not only in my own life – and it's an ongoing process – but also in the lives of many others. Where the power of the Holy Spirit is, the Gospel is alive; I've seen it. I was raised a Christian believer and I always believed in God, and the preaching I heard at the Lutheran church and at school did prepare my soul for salvation; but the power that I needed to break through the wall that was around me only came after God led me to another country to receive the power of the Holy Spirit. Praise the Lord!

Love in Christ,

Annegret.