My Fourth Day Talk

My Fourth Day

My name is Alisha Brown I attended Pennyrile Emmaeus Walk number 53. I sat at the table of Ruth. This is my testimony.

As a young girl around the age of ten I attended Vacation Bible school at Lamasco Baptist Church in Lamasco Ky. I remember doing Bible drills in one of the classrooms in the basement of the church and I enjoyed all the activities, crafts and singings that took place during that week. What I enjoyed the most about VBS that year in the summer of 93 was a tall blond haired boy named Jason coincidentally, who I was infatuated with. At Vacation Bible School we learned about the life and death of Jesus, and how he died for all of our sins. He Died for me? I understood that I should be grateful and I was sad that Jesus died for my sins because at that time my experience with death was a very scary thing that involved funeral homes and people crying as they passed by the casket of the dearly beloved that had passed on.
At VBS they talked a lot about being saved, and everybody was very excited when it happened. How I really understood it, was that once someone was saved they were allowed to attend "The Last Supper" something I understood to be some kind of potluck party that all the saved people got to go to, and also that if you weren't saved you weren't allowed to go. It didn't make any never mind to me at the time, cause of course then I didn't have the love affair with food that I currently do. So "being saved" was something that I didn't really need to be, that is until the object of my affection : Jason, got saved. Suddenly I wanted to be saved too. After confessing this in class the VBS teacher hugged me tightly and might have even cried a little as she sent me to go talk to the Pastor.
He sat me down on the first pew in the sanctuary and handed me a piece of paper, a tract I think it was with the sinner's prayer on it. He left me to read the story of Jesus' crucifixion and then the prayer, and when he returned he asked me if I understood it. I didn't, and I told him so. He asked me to read it again and to pray about it. I did and when he asked a second time if I understood what it meant I said that I did, because I thought that is what I was supposed to say, as if I didn't that he might tell me that i couldn't be saved. He then proceeded to ask me a few questions and apparently i answered them all correctly because I was baptized a few days later.
I went to Church every other weekend when I went to my Dad's. Every night before bed I said the Lord's Prayer which I was so proud for memorizing. From the adults in my life I learned many things that you weren't supposed to do, and from everybody else things that the Bible says you are not supposed to do. My childhood friend's would say, " The Bible says, You are not supposed to lie. The Bible says that you are not suppose to steal, the bible says this and the bible says that. Most of things I knew of the Bible is what I heard, not anything I actually read. Every time I decided that I was going to read the Bible I started in genesis, because what I knew about books and about reading is that you are supposed to start from the beginning. I barely made it passed the story of Noah and the Ark. I believed in God. I understood that Jesus was God's son (sort of). During much of this time my family was studying with the Jehovah's witnesses and so I learned a lot about religion, which of course doesn't have very much to do with Jesus. We weren't supposed to celebrate Christmas or Birthdays, or easter or Halloween and was not supposed to say the pledge of Allegiance. As a child this was a very hard concept for me to understand and so Religion looked like this huge list of things you weren't supposed to do.
As I entered my teenage years we moved to trigg county and subsequently away from this source of influence. My mom was in and out of the whole religion thing and it wasn't something we talked about much. My best friend in high school invited me to go with her to Acquire the Fire a teen retreat in Nashville. There were several other Christian teenagers on this trip, ones that were really on fire about God and they spoke about the Bible knowledgeably and I was wonderfully impressed and at the same time terribly intimidated.
Acquire the fire was a great experience. A group of young people there to learn about God in a fresh and fun way. Every talk was interesting and powerful, but my favorite part of the experience was the worship. The music was incredible. People sang to God with their heads back and arms lifted toward the heavens, which was different than anything I had ever seen in a Baptist Church or at the Kingdom Hall during an altar call on my second night there, I found myself moving toward the stage, I was halfway there before i had even realized i made one step. My best friend was with me and other teenagers that we had come with. I fell on my knees and cried. I begged God to forgive me, to help me, to save me. I got up from there relieved and I felt better, I felt peace.
i returned home a new person. I was excited about God, and about how to live for him. I wanted to do mission work, I wanted to be a part of Acquire the Fire something that meant so much to me. I joined a teen bible study group, but I didn't attend church: not regularly anyway. I met with other teens in the lobby of the school theater most mornings to pray. I read my Bible more, and I actually started to understand it. I listened to Christian music in lieu of the other genres that were popular at that time. i was happy, I had friends, I had drive and direction that is until I had my first boyfriend. He was older and had a much more lax view of what Christianity meant. I was young and impressionable. I believed in fairy tales, I believed that we would be together forever and so I made myself align my views with his, because after all people that are in love forever have everything in common, Right? It starts with one compromise of your beliefs, just one. My innocence was the first, the first of many more that were to follow.. I believed that if I loved him enough I could make it work, make it last. I was wrong, because my priorities were wrong, I put him above everything.
The start of my college education was the beginning of the end for my first love. I learned a lot at college none of which helped me grow spiritually. Each an everyday I fell more in love with the world a little by little my spirit died. I was smart and the devil used my "intelligence" as a way to lie to me. He used so called logic to convince me that the Bible wasn't completely true, after all it was written by men thousands of years ago. A book that was written so long ago couldn't possibly be relevant to me today.
I loved the world. I thought of myself as a hip young intelligent woman. In America women that are hip and young aren't in churches, they are in episodes of Sex in the City or so I thought. I was really living in the world now, but for me I believed that I was doing alright because I was doing a lot better than some people. I drank but I only got drunk ever once in a while. I wasn't promiscuous by today's standards but i wasn't pure or chaste by any stretch of the imagination. My friends and I had the idea that if you cared about somebody it was okay. I smoked marijuana on occasion but I never did anything worse like x, or coke like some of the people I hung out with had done. This is what I believed! I wasn't the worst so I was still okay. I partied a lot, and I'm not a morning person on a stone sober day so i missed a lot of my classes. I went on Academic Probation after my second semester because of my attendance. I moved back home with my mom and was commuting back in forth to Murray for the fall semester of 2001. After 9/11 I stopped going.
I started serving at cracker barrel and my partying college life continued locally without the academics. Now mind you I still considered myself a Christian! I said my nightly prayers, asking God to forgive me where I had failed him, and feeling a little guilty for my transgressions, although not enough to really repeat from them. I didn't talk like a Christian, I didn't act like one but in my mind I was one because I wasn't a hypocrite. I didn't go to church, because I said, "I can worship God anywhere." Although I very rarely did.
My life was not going as well as I thought it should. I had my own apartment that I struggled to pay the bills on. I wanted more than anything to be in love. Being a romantic is really hereditary in my family and I wanted someone to love. I prayed that God would give me someone to love. I picked out men to love, but no one that every loved me back. I was the perpetual Queen of unrequited love. There is nothing like a broken heart to make you feel like you are at the bottom of the barrel. And so with my heart broken I called out to God to save my soul, to really save my soul, make me clean, to make me new. You all know that when you are first saved that the feeling is incredible. People describe it as better than any high, Like feeling like a weight is lifted. I had gotten so far away from this that I guess I didn't feel saved. When I got saved as a teenager at Acquire the Fire I felt clean, but since that time I had bathed in so much sin that my heart, my soul felt dirty, and so I asked for God to cleanse me with His blood. After crying out to God and pouring out all the weariness that was in my soul I was once again on God's team and feeling like a Christian. My mom got saved in March of 2002 and a year later I was back on track. I was on fire yet again. I wanted to work for the Lord, go out and minister to people. I wanted God to use me.
There was a possibility for a promotion at Cracker Barrel, to travel all over the country opening up their new stores. I wanted it and looked at is a way to travel and minister all while making a pretty good living. I begged God for it, telling Him of the wonderful opportunity I would have to witness to others. I asked God to help me in the interview, so that I would get the job. He did, I did, and it was a wonderful opportunity to witness, if I had only taken that opportunity. I found out very soon that God was the last thing people wanted to talk about. In fact it was politically incorrect to talk about God and might even be grounds for my dismissal or even a lawsuit if I offended someone. I didn't want to lose my job so I just decided that I wouldn't talk about God unless someone else brought Him up. People very rarely did. Everybody was nice and I was doing well.
I excelled professionally in this environment and stood out from my colleagues, so much so that when in a year and a half after I started I was recommended for a promotion. I applied, interviewed and got that too. I would go through phases where I would be a good little Christian girl and do my best to do a good job. Then there would be times when I kind of gave up when I realized it was hard, most of these phases revolved around my love life. I prayed fairly regularly and felt genuine remorse when I backslid, all coupled with a new determination to do better.
Through all of this you may recognize one constant, one certainty. The reason I could not succeed in my Christian walk is because I had nothing to sustain it. I didn't attend church and therefor I had no support system of other members of the body of Christ to strengthen and encourage me. I now understand how important it is for new Christians to be involved in a Church family, the Bible tells us that after Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus he went and stayed with the Disciples for a few days. This is the type strengthening that we all need.
I also wasn't committed to the study of God's word, and so I received no nourishment, or only just enough to keep me from completely starving to death spiritually. I thought, I really thought that it was enough just to believe in God. Its NOT. We need to be fed so we don't wither away and die.
I started to grow tired of traveling all the time and yearned to be home. I missed my family and friends at home. I wanted a close relationship with God, wanted to attend church and I desperately wanted a romantic relationship which I had determined was impossible to sustain when you traveled all over the country for 9 - 10 months out of the year. But truly above all I wanted to grow closer to God and was sure that I needed out of my current environment to do so, And so I put in a 6 month notice of my decision to leave cracker barrel.
I first visited trigg county Baptist Church in Feb of 2007 when I was home between stores. It was awakening experience and so perfectly timed it is scary. It was then that I wanted more. More of everything, I thirsted for the Word, and the more I got into it the more God would reveal the truth about the lies that I had let the devil convince me of. I began to trust God to take care of me and wanted God's perfect plan for my life, not my fly by the seat of my pants style of living that i was so accustomed to. I knew that God had better for me that I could ever imagine, I knew this because i read it in his Word.
I continued to work out my six months notice with Cracker barrel and attended church when I was home. When I was away from home I kept in the word and day by day, very little by little I changed. It was a two steps forwards, one step back deal.
I started seeing a wonderful man who lived in Nashville. He, a good Christian man was respectful and engaging, but for the first time in my entire hopeless romantic life I did not lose sight of my priorities. A month or so into it I earnestly asked God to be involved, I surrendered my courtship with Jeff to God, told Him he was in control, if this was the man he wanted for me then okay, and if it wasn't okay. And I thought I meant it, but when God did end it only a few days later I was upset, at first.
I prayed about it and eventually understood that even though this guy was good Christian man, he was a man that i picked, not a man that God had chosen for me. In the depths of my despair of the ended relationship I cried out to God asking why I was the only one to love. I sobbed and asked why every relationship I was in, I wasn't loved back. I told God "all I want is for a man to love me as much as I love him, thats it, thats all." I just wanted SOMEONE to love me as much as i loved them: And then I heard it, that still quiet voice. "I will love you more than anybody ever can." and there it was.
Jesus was the man I had been looking for all my life. The one that loved me before I met him, the one that wooed me and pursued me through all of my ugliness, through all my sin and when I was the most unlovable. It was then that I thanked God for closing a door that I wasn't supposed to go through. I was overwhelmed, He loved me so much, he didn't want me hurt, he didn't want me unhappy and HE the MAKER of the of the Heavens and Earth cared SO MUCH about me that He would keep me out off something I didn't need to be in. I GOT it, I really did, and I resolved to turn every aspect of my life over to GOD, including my love life. I told God that I was going to wait until He hand picked me a man. A man that wasn't just going to be good for me, but that was the BEST that he had for me.
Many of you know that I am now engaged to be married to that man who God picked for me. Just as Eve was Made for Adam. It's is a wonderful story, perhaps for another time.
Soon after leaving the training team in July I joined trigg County baptist Church and was invited to attend the emmaeus walk in October. I was excited to go and had heard many great things and wanted another experience to grow closer God.
Before I attended Emmaeus I went to church regularly, I studied my Bible and read my devotional almost everyday. I prayed and not just at night but all throughout the day. Before Emaeus I was often late for church, cursed sometimes still when I was angry or frustrated, but I was growing in Christ. Day by day he revealed truth to me, through his word, through Christian fellowship, through sermon, and song.
I attended Emmaeus at a key point in development. When I went to Emmaeus I was asking God what it was the I was supposed to do. what is my Purpose I kept asking, but I hadn't really heard a definite response. I went to Emmaeus with that question. During my walk I learned a lot. I learned about God's love. I came away from emmaues understanding a simple truth, that the Jesus that is within me is the only Jesus that some people will ever see. I learned the importance of the body of believers and how much I can learn from another persons trials. I learned through the talks that you can not know what a person has been through just by looking at them. I learned how to study, how to witness and different ways of worship and prayer. I came away revived and with a new determination to pursue God. I learned that as the body of Christ we are the hands, feet, mouths, arms hearts and minds of God.
After Emaeus I am in my fourth day. As great as those 3 days basking and learning in God's love was, my fourth day is better. After Emaeus I still worship and serve at Trigg County baptist church. I still study my Bible and and read my devotional nearly everyday. I still pray throughout my days, each day an attempt to pray without ceasing. I am still late for church and I still struggle with taming my tongue when I am angry or frustrated, and day by day truth is revealed to me through the Word, through fellowship, song and sermon. I am different in the way I approach each day. I understand through lots of my own experience how I can get off track. I understand the importance of renewing myself through my church and study. Most days I ask God in prayer to forgive and save me because I figure what can it hurt, to rededicate yourself to God everyday.
I said before that I went to Emaeus to discover my purpose. What I discovered is how to listen to God, or better yet how to hear Him. I learned to trust in Him and to learn follow His direction. Through listening to God I have found that it doesn't always or even often go the way I expect it to, but He always has a blessing for me when I am obedient. For he that is faithful in little is also faithful in much. I know that as I learn and grow God will provide more opportunities to serve Him, which is as I have found out, is my purpose.

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