By April Terry (personal blog http://faithwarming.blogspot.com)

I was ready for Jesus in the spring of 1992, but if you had asked me before that time, I would have told you that I was a Christian. I would have been offended if you had tried to tell me that I was anything other than Christian. There was a guy who visited the doughnut shop where I worked at the age of eighteen one day and he tried to tell me more, but I couldn’t hear it. He said it plainly enough. He made it clear, but it threatened me. I heard it again in a bookstore two aisles down, after eavesdropping on a conversation I wasn’t intending to hear. It puzzled me then, but didn’t change anything.

Still, God won me over after a period of trial in my life and my heart became grateful afterward for His wonderful Grace. My own walk through faith took many detours, alleyways, and side travels, and I don’t think that is all that unusual. In fact, the journey to Christ often takes a long time to come to a full understanding. God often prepares our hearts for the right time. Sometimes, it’s gradual. Sometimes, it’s dramatic.

It took a broken heart for me to understand people whose hearts are broken. Suddenly, I could no longer watch the difficulties and the despair that others are going through without flinching. To this day, I look at my own broken heart as the greatest gift God could ever have given me. The empathy that came from my own brokenness made me a better human being.

There are some people who are extremely good at sharing the theory of the Christian faith. They can break down the “bridge theory” or whatever methodology is current at the time. But I am not a theory kind of person. I am a feelings person. It’s with that understanding that I am proceeding forward, knowing that I might never tell anyone effectively how or why they should accept Jesus today, but hoping that seeing Him lived out through my life will prepare them for the journey they are making toward Him.

You see, I believe that God seeks us out where ever we are. If we are to believe that He is the creator of the universe and the designer of all that we know then we must also realize that He knows how it is best for April Terry to show someone else her special pathway to faith. In fact, He must know the best way for each of us to share our faith. For me, it means that I can let God be the evangelist. When I try too hard, I put too many words in there. I oversell it. I’m better just trying to live it out in my life and leaving more unsaid. I’m better off holding someone’s hand while they cry.

Some folks don’t believe that is enough. They think that if one person slips through my fingers, I have failed, but God doesn’t fail and I believe that is why I always felt that evangelism was unnatural to me. My faith in Christ means that I am learning I can trust that God won’t fail even if I do. He meets us where we are, after all. He sends us messages that we miss so often along the way. It’s easy to notice later, when in the quiet of the morning after our conversion, we realize that He was pursuing us. It’s only after we give in to Him that we finally realize that He was there all along waiting for us to notice Him. After I had been broken, I remembered all the times He was there calling to me. Nothing anyone ever said made the difference. The difference was between me and God and no one else. He waited for me until I was ready to hear His voice.