Omer 1: The onset of my testimony in Christ

by Melanie Irizarry on Friday, March 27, 2009 at 11:12pm

It was Easter Sunday of my 9th grade year in high school. I was in the backroom at my house and my mom and step dad were fighting as always. I stood there in the room contemplating life and what it was worth. I was never a particularly depressed individual but things were just so overwhelming that if there was no "reason" or a hand I could believe in from God somehow intimately intertwined in my life I didn't know how much farther I wanted this to let things go. The night before I had even run away;however, I found myself dragged back in the middle of the night not by hands but by the sound of my step dad yelling at my mom as she frantically looked for me in the middle of the street. I came out of the abandoned house I had found a few hours of sleep in to save my mom from anymore pain. Running away was no longer an option. So in the back room I prayed "God if you are there I NEED TO KNOW NOW" . I was about to say "so I know life is worth living" as I eyed the knife I had in the back room but before I could even take it so far my mom opened the back door. My mom and stepdad stopped fighting long enough to answer the phone and toss it in the room with me. My friend Esther was on the other end of the phone. She has been at church that day and experienced the power of God like never before. She and I both "believed" at that time in a God somewhere there... but it was more of the far off God. The person on the other end of the phone that I KNEW was somehow different. She kept going on and on and on about how SHE KNEW she was not alone anymore. SHE KNEW God was right there with her. SHE FELT his hands in her heart... SHE FELT GOD in the deepest part of her soul where it's just you .. in that place she found God with her, and it was like SHE KNEW for the first time ever SHE WAS NOT ALONE. After listening to her story of what God did that day in church I concluded for myself that there was no other explanation for this timely even then God himself answering my heart. I didn't fall out in the Holy Spirit in that moment or have some major life altering experience I could convey but the faith that was birthed then sealed the rest of my years. I believed in on just any God in that moment but the God of the bible and all that came with that, and I KNEW I was not alone even if i didn't understand anything around me I knew that now.