Testimonies

Alison Mackay

As a deer pants for water, so my soul longs after God...

I cannot remember a time when I did not sense a longing to know God. Even as a young child I recall the ongoing thoughts that would run through my mind, like ‘Surely there must be someone bigger than us, a God who made us for some good purpose?' Sometimes it ran like this, ‘If there is no God, then this life seems pretty meaningless and unpredictable.' I should have been perfectly happy, growing up in a large, secure family, with lots of friends and activities and no problems at school. Yet I couldn't escape this deep awareness that without a real relationship with God there was something seriously wrong.

Then a pivotal event changed my life forever, and set me on a pathway to finding answers to my questions. One night, when I was only thirteen, my dad just suddenly took ill and died, all within ten minutes. Our lives were devastated. The security of our family situation was shattered, as we each in our own way tried to deal with this calamity. I grew up before my time, trying to help hold things together. One of my older brothers and I started going to a local church, looking for answers. Sadly, I continued to feel empty, and had no idea of how to bridge this gap that seemed to exist between me and God.

‘How would you like to come over and spend time with us?' my sister wrote in a letter to me, about three years after my dad's death. She had moved to the United States many years before and we had been writing to each other for some time about God and Christianity. She had told me that she and her husband had become committed Christians, and how their lives had been utterly changed. At sixteen, I boarded a plane for California to join my sister, still searching for this God who seemed so elusive. It was sad leaving family and friends, but the pull to follow through on this search never let up, and off I went.

‘Did you know that you can be sure of eternal life, and of God' s love and forgiveness right now, today?' asked the speaker, on the first Sunday of my stay with my sister. I sat in the congregation with my family there in California, and it seemed God was speaking right into my soul with these words, ‘These things are written (in the Bible) that you might KNOW that you have eternal life'. The word of God had suddenly come alive to me. It wasn't a case, then, of simply hoping God existed, and trying my best to somehow live for him in a vague, uncertain way. That brought no peace or understanding. So, when the speaker asked those who wanted to offer their lives to God to stay behind and come to talk, I was first out of my seat! The man teaching the Bible that day was a converted gang member from an infamous street gang from New York. His whole life had been turned around by his conversion to Christ.

Only that day did I begin to realise that God had seemed distant to me because my sin kept me from being close to him. I needed to pray and thank God's Son for dying on the Cross for my sin, and making me pure and clean in his eyes.

The death of Christ had brought me into a right relationship to God. People come to Christ in many different ways, but he is the only way to the Father.

Once I knew that I was forgiven, loved, called by God to love and serve Him, there was no turning back. The deep happiness, sense of purpose and excitement I began to know were truly amazing.

Many years later, I look back on a Christian life that has included Bible College, missionary work and local church work, and feel humbled at the way God can love us, with all our faults and the disappointments we must bring him at times. There have been many challenges and difficulties along the way. That's how a Christian grows and learns more about the ways of God. There has also been so much blessing. Many of my family have since come to know Christ and are active members of their respective churches. The brother I mentioned earlier passed away only a short time ago. Praise God he faced death with the assurance that ‘to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.' My mum died only five years ago. She too had come to faith in Christ, and had spent her last twenty years in fellowship with God and his people, a real testimony to all.

Life is short. The Bible says that our life is like a vapour that appears for a little while then vanishes away. We won't always have the opportunity to trust Christ. I am so thankful that he led me to know him while still in my teens. I pray that you too, reading this story, will draw near to God.

Alison Mackay.