My Testimony

I should be dead right now. When I was ten years old, I discovered there was something wrong with me. This discovery came to me in the form of bloody diarrhea. Because I was ten, and all children have brain damage, I didn’t even consider it was blood; I thought it was the strawberry applesauce I had eaten that day. Like I said, all children have brain damage. Anyway, once we discovered that it was indeed blood and not strawberry applesauce, the next move was to take me to the doctor. The doctor told me to go to MCV in Richmond that same day.
Once I was there, it was discovered I had a condition called Meckel’s Diverticulum. This condition is present in only 2% of the world. Wasn’t I lucky? It was a bulge in my intestines, secreting acid and causing internal bleeding, thus slowly killing me. This requires surgery to repair; and due to the rarity of the condition, there are very few doctors who have performed this surgery. In fact, there is only one such doctor on the entire east coast; my doctor. Now what are the chances of that?
The surgery went without incident, and I made a full recovery, as you can tell. This near-death and full healing were all part of a plan God had laid out to get my attention. And it happened to fly roughly twenty feet over my head. In fact, over the next 6 years, God threw several such attempts at me, and I was oblivious to all of them. All, that is, except the one he threw me in my eleventh grade year.
In the September of that year, I developed a huge crush on a girl I knew. Eventually, she invited me to attend a Bible study at her church one Wednesday night. For desires that had nothing to do with God, and everything to do with impressing and spending time with this girl, I went with her and her family one night. It turned out that I knew a lot of the people there, and had a pretty good time. This was the beginning of my Olive Branch Baptist Church experience.
After that night, it became a regular thing for me to attend the Bible studies. For the next two months, I went every week and became friends with several others of the people there. The youth pastor, Anthony Wall, and I grew to be friends as well and started talking more often.
However, after those two months, some issues arose, and I was unable to attend until the following May.
Now during that year, and the two preceding it, my life had fallen into a very dark, evil place. My language was horrible, my mind and my heart were totally impure. I even had an addiction to pornography. And even worse than all of these, I had actually denied the existence of God; without a doubt, Satan had his claws me in deep!
Eventually, I managed to start attending OBBC again. During the months I was unable to attend, God began to work a change in me. My mind became more objectionable to the filth I had once coveted, and my language became cleaner as well. God did this in two ways: directly changing the inner me, and using the people around me to show me His existence.
Through these two devices, I started to realize just what was happening to me. And through the teachings of the Bible revealed to me anew through Anthony, I started to realize just how large of a gift I had wasted: the salvation offered to me by the death and resurrection of Christ. I finally realized that I was a sinner and that if something didn’t change, I wasn’t going to end up in “a better place.”
One night, after the actual lesson, when we were just hanging out and talking, I took Anthony Wall aside and told him I wanted to accept Jesus into my heart and become saved. He immediately took me outside the building we were in and prayed with me. In that moment, I felt something enter into me and take up residence in my heart.
My life hasn’t been wonderful since then, but it has been far from terrible. So many things have changed both in me and for me. One such thing is something I mentioned before: my beautiful and amazing girlfriend, Rachael Kidd. And I owe it all to my Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ of Nazareth.