This is somewhat embarrassing to share because it is personal but if it helps even one person it's worth ditching my pride. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life but one of the greatest mistakes was overlooking something that was so precious to me, my wife, Hollie. She has stood by my side from day one and has loved me unconditionally with all that she has....something I never could have endured. She is still the most patient, selfless and loving person I’ve ever known. I pushed her away so many times because of my own selfish ways and desires. I will never forget the many times that she would sit and listen to me whine and moan about some insignificant drama I was going through. I specifically remember this one time, while Hollie and I were "broken up" in our dating years, when I drove to her house and fell apart about a broken relationship I had with another girl. This had to be killing her but she listened to me and was kind and gentle in dealing with it. Even after I had broken up with her for the millionth time, she would still treat me like I was of some value to her. It was if she knew my true heart and that she understood that I had to “experience” life without her before I could truly appreciate her. She exemplified unconditional love. She didn’t just talk about it. She showed me with her life. Hollie is a rock….very consistent…very grounded…unbelievably understanding and I thank God every day for her and the blessing she has been in my life. Looking back, I wish that I would have had the backbone to be a better example for any of you who knew me in school and may find this blog. By the time I was 12 or so, I was a committed Christian. By this I mean that I had asked Jesus into my heart and my desire was to live a life that was pleasing to Him. This was always my desire. From birth I was submerged in my local church. My parents made sure that my knowledge of Jesus Christ and my role as a Christian was learned through the study of God's word and through the fellowship and guidance of other believers. My parents led by example. By the time I was 14 years old I had tons of scriptures memorized and could rattle off any chapter or verse off the top of my head. I enjoyed learning...I loved God and my personal relationship with Him was sweet and nurturing. Up until this point I had been sheltered, educated and well protected from the world outside of church and family. Later, I would find that stepping outside of this shelter is where the boys are separated from the men. This is where your faith is tested and you'll find out where your heart is when you have to apply what you know and have learned through practicing discipline and truly walking the walk that you say you believe in. This is where my story gets ugly. The teenage years came and so did the hormones and the "me,me,me attitude...then college and a lot of highway between where I grew up and the school I attended. To make an extremely long story short, I, along with my heart, left God in Thomasville and began a slow fade towards a life full of self pleasing without a purpose. I cracked. I gave into temptation. I blew it. My desire for a close relationship with God was replaced with a desire to please myself and I gave into every temptation placed in front of me including girls, girls, girls, alcohol, nightlife, etc. I immediately became the average college student...if even that. It was as if my priorities flipped 180 degrees. You couldn't tell the difference between me and a nonbeliever. My light was very, very dim and at any moment God could have snuffed it out. Despite my internal compass tugging at me and pulling me towards my personal commitment to Jesus and my involvement in a church community, I continued down a broken road of unhealthy relationships and habits. I began to have some basic doubts about myself and God. I was haunted by questions like, Am I really saved? Does God really love me? Is there really a God, and did Jesus really die for me, or did somebody make all this up? Why would I be living this lifestyle if I really loved God? What has happened to me? I asked Jesus into my heart over and over, just in case I wasn't sincere enough the previous time. I kept hoping that the next Bible study, the next inspirational book, the next Sunday sermon would set me free from my doubts and my selfishness. I was truly in turmoil. I felt just like Paul did in the Bible in Romans 7:15 when he said, " And I do not understand what I am doing, for that which I have a mind to do, I do not, but what I have hate for, that I do." I literally began having anxiety about where I was headed. I was under great conviction about where my life choices might lead me. God was trying to get my attention. Would I listen? I didn't think that doubt and insecurity was an acceptable part of being a Christian so I never shared my doubts with anyone. As much as I wanted to trust God, my weaknesses to temptations crippled me. For this reason my doubts remained. I needed God to show me something. I needed Him to reveal himself to me and make it obvious. Was I saved? Did He really come into my heart and save me when I asked and believed at 12 years old? That was many years ago, and although I still have times when I get in the way of completely trusting God, I'm no longer haunted by doubts. What made them go away? Well, it didn't happen all at once. In fact, for me, it took years; A few of those years were unbearable due to circumstances in my life including severe anxiety, panic attacks and depression that forced me to make a decision between choosing myself and the limited strength I had or choosing God and his divine plan for my life. Did I really, truly believe God’s Word and was I willing to put it to the test in my life on a personal level? This was the beautiful work of God letting me know that he does reveal himself in many ways. I was in my mid to late twenties when I realized that I was most definitely saved at the moment of my first sincerely asking God into my heart. Doubting didn’t steal all of that away. I began to experience the vastness of God's grace, power and mercy. For me, it took those few years of unbearable circumstances to allow all of the wonderful things I had been taught as a child to become substance in my life. God had used divine discipline to get my attention. His truths and purposes were slowly being revealed to me on a very personal level. And contrary to what I'd been searching for, the solution was not in a compelling, intellectual argument, book or presentation. It was not in finding the answers to my questions. What helped me the most was experiencing God's real presence. During those years of doubting, I experienced God being with me in many ways. I remember the dark nights of crying out to God when I was lonely or afraid, and the warmth of God's presence that often came to me within minutes. I remember sensing that God was leading me as I decided to move through my fears and anxieties of past mistakes and possible future ones. I remember God beginning to heal my emotional wounds; freeing me from some codependent patterns and helping me develop healthy boundaries. And I remember many of God's personal, daily gifts to me--a hummingbird in flight, staring into my face from two feet away, or an encouraging conversation with someone I trusted, or a glimpse of something good that God was doing in a situation that had tied my stomach into knots. I remember one Christian friend, my best friend, in school who had a lifelong impact on me. He knew lots of Scripture but never used it to try to fix me or "assure" me. Instead, He lived Scripture. He listened to me. He responded with compassion. He affirmed me. I know Jesus was in him, using him to draw me closer to Him and to trust my experience of Him. I felt loved, accepted, respected, valued, comforted, nurtured, and strengthened. Later I met other supportive friends, communities of believers, who taught me how much we all need each other to survive. I also remember how God made many Bible passages come alive for me in the midst of my doubts. For example, I identified with the man who told Jesus, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). That story told me that Jesus wanted me to be honest about my doubts and that I could ask him to help me with them. Despite my doubts, God met me in all those ways, and more. Over and over, I was invited to experience God. I experienced God's presence, God's guidance, God's compassion, God's comfort, God's nurturing, God's strength, God's love and many more aspects of God's character. I experienced God through nature, through other people, through circumstances, through words and pictures and impressions, and increasingly often through the Bible. God used those experiences to gradually vanquish my doubts. My unhealed wounds from the past had caused me to doubt God, while my conscious mind wanted to trust God. And because my doubts were on a feeling level, not on a thinking level, God addressed them emotionally, not intellectually. Hearing, reading, and thinking about God's love for me, and all that Jesus had done to demonstrate God's love, did not diminish the doubts. I needed to experience God's love for me before the doubts would subside. And as I began to experience God's love, my heart began to open to the living truths of the Bible. My experiences of God during those years of doubting taught me a few things about God. The Bible clearly communicates all these truths, but they're meant for us to experience as well as to think about. "Taste and see that the LORD is good" (Psalm 34:8) is one of the ways that David talks about experiencing God. Tasting is not primarily an intellectual exercise; it's an experience. Here are some things we can discover when we taste, or experience, God: God is kind. I was taught this at church, as many of us were, and my conscious mind believed it. So then why was I often surprised when God did kind things for me or spoke gentle, respectful words to my soul? Those of you who grew up with critical authority figures tend to brace yourselves for shame, put-downs, guilt, mistrust, impossible demands, performance reviews, and other harsh treatment from God. But that is not God's way. God surprises us with kindness. God's love has no strings attached. God's love has no "if" clause ("I will love you if you please me" or "I will love you if I feel like it"). God's love is not a smothering love ("I love you because you make me feel good"). And God's love is not a controlling love ("I love you because you are my property"). God simply loves us--unconditionally, eternally. God wants us even more than we want God. In the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), Jesus compares God to the father who unashamedly hitches up his garment and runs to meet the lost son. Jesus says that while the son was still a long way off, "his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him" (v. 20). We may find this illustration of God's affection too intimate, too threatening. But God invites us to come a little closer and to experience God's compassion. God is more gracious to us than we are toward ourselves. I'm a perfectionist. I have high expectations of myself, and those like me tend to judge ourselves harshly. We fear failure, we reprimand ourselves when we fail, and we might even punish ourselves for failing. But God knows our limits even better than we do. And when we fail, God does not scold us or shame us. God always has grace for us, no matter how many times we fail. God is trustworthy. God never gives up on us, never rejects us, and never leaves us. These things are especially difficult for us to believe if we didn't grow up in an environment of trust. But God understands our mistrust and invites us to discover, through experience, how trustworthy God is. God delights in giving to us. It's God's nature to give. Unfortunately, most of us aren't very good at receiving. We find it hard even to receive from God, unless it's mainly for the purpose of serving someone else. But when we slow down, pay attention to what God might be doing in us and around us, and receive the good gifts God is offering us--especially God's love for us--we become healthier human beings. We become human beings who know we're loved. And then we're prepared to serve others out of love. We can tell God exactly how we feel. God can handle our doubts, our fears, our anger, our disappointment, our anxiety, our sadness. Unlike some people we may have known and trusted, God doesn't turn away from us or tell us to go away until we get a better attitude. Instead, God invites us to share all our feelings with him, including the unpleasant ones. If we find this hard to do, we can browse the Psalms for helpful scripts. Psalms 13, 31, and 69 are good examples, and there are many more. God wants to heal our wounds. It took me quite a few years to let this truth sink in, but God is always patient. While we may want our emotional wounds to be healed, we may avoid the healing process. We fear the pain we'll experience as we expose wounds that we buried long ago, or we fear God's responses to those wounds. However, God understands all our fears. And as we take them to God, one fear at a time, God slowly and thoroughly drives out our fears while healing our wounds. The Bible is full of stories about how people have experienced a loving God. And the Bible is full of invitations for us to experience this God. Fortunately for us, God does most of the work. Our part is to ask God to make us willing to have our wounds and fears revealed to us so that God can heal us. Our part is to ask for eyes to see and a heart to receive God's loving gifts to us each day so that we can experience and truly know this One who loves each of us beyond the telling.Where will you spend eternity?Jesus says, “He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24). “But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name” (John 1:12).Make sure of your future today. Commit your life to Christ with the following prayer:Being convinced that I am a sinner, and believing that You died and rose to life again for me, I now receive You as my personal Savior. I turn now from my sins and commit my life to You.