Ken's Testimony

When I grew up my parents didn't raise me with any faith in particular. By the time I was 17 I had been to church only a handful of times. I was lost. There were times when I wondered what was going to happen to me when I died. I always wondered, "who knows the truth about death?" No one ever comes back to tell you what happens after death. Do you just cease to exist? Is there a judgement, a heaven or a hell? If so, what determines which you go to? I had finally settled on the idea that when you died you just ceased to exist. This idea used to keep me up at night. I wondered what the use was to getting out of bed if someday everyone who ever knew you existed was going to be dead and you would eventually be forgotten.

In my senior year of high school I met Amy. We both liked each other and we went out. At one point Amy told me she was a Christian and I reacted negatively. I had a low opinion of Christians. I believed them to all be fanatical hypocrites. Still, I thought Amy was cool. I decided that she was the one Christian on earth who wasn't a fanatical hypocrite so we continued going out. However, I upset her parents because they wanted Amy to date someone who was a Christian and I was not. To satisfy her parents, Amy brought me to church.

It was in church that I first heard the Gospel message. I heard that all people had sin in their lives. I learned that sin was straying from God's perfect will for our lives and doing things our own way. Because of this, all of us are headed to hell unless we are forgiven. I learned that Jesus was God's own son who died and paid the penalty for our own sins so that we didn't have to and that the way to accept that forgiveness was to believe and trust Jesus to save us and make Him Lord of our lives. If we did this, we would know it was true because we were changed inwardly. Life would never be the same after accepting Jesus. I thought that was an interesting story. I thought it was totally ridiculous but I thought it was an interesting story. I chose not to believe.

After summer ended, I went to college at UC Santa Barbara. In my hall there lived a student who never smiled. I would say that he was not a happy guy. In fact, he looked like death all the time. In my mind I figured there was a fair chance this guy would kill himself during the year. Because we were on the quarter system, winter break was only 2 weeks long. After winter break, I was in my dorm hallway when I spotted this student down the hall. He laughed, joked, even smiled. Several of us gathered in his room and we asked him why he was so happy. He said he went to church and accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior and it changed his life. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. The change in this guy was undeniable, his basic character changed. The innevitable question hit my mind, "What if Christianity was real?"

Late one night I thought long and hard about what I saw. If the claims of Christ were true then why didn't I believe? How would I know for sure if they were true? I realized that there was only one way to prove Jesus' claim as either true or false. If I believed on Him and trusted Him for my salvation, then I should change in a fundamental way. If it was false then I wouldn't change at all. Believing was the only way to know for sure. That night I believed and I entrusted my eternal life and my heart to Jesus. It changed my life completely. This decision to trust in Christ touched every area of my life.

I no longer wondered what the point was of living. I had a purpose. My life wasn't just a series of random events anymore but it had a plan, a purpose, a destiny. My reasons for doing what I did changed as I grew in my Christianity. I did things less out of a sense of selfish ambition and more because I cared about other people and I cared about the Lord. Finally, that is why I became a missionary, because there is no better use of my time than to spend it serving the Lord, helping Him bring people to Himself, one soul at a time.