God's Love For Us, Our Christian Foundation

Laying in the cool, dark upstairs bedroom of the old farmhouse, I turned and faced the wall. My life had been careening out of control in a crazy downward spiral until I now found myself at the bottom of a horrible pit. My mother's words spoken to me earlier, as we sat in our country kitchen, still rang in my ears, "Jeanie, you just need Jesus." Hadn't I been there and done that? Wasn't I raised as a Christian, attending church every Sunday and Wednesday? Wasn't I a recipient of the Queen With Scepter award in GA's, and didn't I possess a stack of Vacation Bible School Certificates? Hadn't I made my profession of faith and been baptized? Yes, I'd been there. I'd done that. And yet my heart was breaking with years of disappointments, abuses and condemnation. I had even spent years exploring and implementin Eastern religious practices into my New Age concept of life. I had decided to believe in Reincarnation, and I was a strict adherent to the Macrobiotic way of eating and its accompanying philosophy. I had explored and tried to leave no stone unturned in my search to reach God, or as I callled Him, the universal power. Now at thirty-one years of age, I lay broken, hurting and confused in this dark bedroom facing the wall. "Jesus, if You are God's Son, and if You really do love me, I need You to show me," I prayed the first prayer I'd prayed in unremembered years. It was the most serious and desperate plea I had ever made in my life. Several weeks later, I sat cross-legged on the soft green grass in my backyard. It was an unusually warm and sunny day in march. I was practicing Transcendental Meditation in which I had been professionally trained. My fingers were in position, hands resting on my knees, and I was repeating my mantra over and over. By practicing this I was trying to sink down into the only kind of peace I had known in recent years. Suddenly, as I sat there chanting my mantra, (which I later found out was the name of a Hindu god), I saw in a vision Jesus. He was walking toward me, and in so doing proving that He truly is God and preempting any other so-called god that one could call upon. He was smiling at me beautifully. More than noticing His features, I was overwhelmed with His love that flowed over me in waves. Love that flowed from his heart and through His eyes to me! My first words were, "Oh my God, You are really real!"; for before this moment, I did not truly know that Jesus was alive and real. He was always something of a fictional character to me. From that moment I was forever His! I was forever chnged - changed by love. My life made a 180 degree turn, and I began walking a new path with Jesus. His love had lifted me out of my horrible pit, set my feet upon a rock and given me a brand new life! But that is not the end of a beautiful story where I lived happily ever after. And it is "the rest of the story" that compels me to write this book. For what happened to me in "the rest of the story" is what happens to multitudes of Christians following the glorious freedom of the Father's love given to us in the New Birth through our faith in Christ.