Although it was many years ago, the memory of the moment I was brought to realize my need of the Savior is still vivid in my mind. I sat with my family in an old-fashioned tent meeting. The sermon had been preached, and a quartet was singing, “I was lost and undone, without God or His Son, when He reached down His hand for me.” I was nine years old, and those words sank into my heart. I leaned forward with my face in my hands, crying. I wanted to go forward with the others, but a glance at my mother’s face told me I shouldn’t. I stayed in my seat quietly praying my childish prayers and knew that I had been forgiven by God. I cherish that moment, and tears flood my eyes even now as I remember.

I was a compliant child toward my parents, wanting to please them. I wanted to please God too. Raised in a strongly Armenian household, I was well aware of my failure to measure up in regard to my parents and to God. Trouble was, I thought it was up to me to pull it off. Using sheer willpower, tried harder and harder, never reaching a sense of achievement. Each time there was an altar call and the preacher said “there’s somebody here who’s a sinner and needs to get right with God, and if you leave without getting right, you might be killed on the way home and go into eternity without God,” it scared me to death. I’d sit tight in my seat holding out, waiting for that person to be somebody else, but it rarely was. I knew I was guilty, and I couldn’t stand it, so I’d get up and go down to the altar to get right with God again. I was in my teens before I figured out that what I was hearing was not necessarily God speaking to me, and I wondered why no one ever talked to me about my ‘getting saved’ repeatedly. Perhaps it was by being the perpetual sinner of the church I was conveniently letting everybody else off the hook!

After high school I worked for a year then went to Bible College. I wanted my life to count for God. I didn’t know how, but in my small world, that was how one went about serving God if you were serious about it. It was there that I began to think and sift through what I had been taught, Bible in hand. My relationship with God became my own; not my parents.’ It was also where, after a couple of years, Harry and I met. The thing that I first admired about him was his zeal for God. Unlike most other guys on campus, he had a no-nonsense attitude about living a life of devotion and service for God. I respected that, and he influenced my spiritual growth and love for God. We shared books: biographies of Hudson Taylor, George Mueller of Bristol, Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, C.T. Studd, John and Betty Stam, and others. We were on a college evangelism team that traveled to secular colleges to share our faith, then to churches to preach and sing. Harry preached, I sang. From the very beginning, God graciously arranged our relationship to be focused around service to Him. It was a training ground for what was to follow. When Harry asked me to marry him, he very seriously prefaced the proposal with telling me that he fully expected to die on a mission field, and would I be willing to die with him or be widowed if that were the case. Without batting an eye, I said ‘yes.’ Either way. As we look back at that time now, we laugh at our naiveté, but we know for certain that the hand of God was on our heads.

When we married, our invitations invited our guests to witness ‘as we are united as one, with Christ, for service.’ That was almost thirty-eight years ago. It is not a light thing to vow before God to serve him wherever or however. I can tell you it has been a most challenging, wonderful journey, and God has been abundantly, graciously faithful to provide all we need to fulfill his call to us during every moment of it.

Harry’s first job after we were married was director of college ministry in New York and New Jersey for our denomination. He also began work on a master’s degree at New York University. We were very impacted by the writings of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, and made plans to study at L’Abri in Switzerland. God had different plans for us, and ordained circumstances that led us to Kabul, Afghanistan to work in a house ministry much like L’Abri to hippies from America and Europe who had traveled overland in search of drugs and Eastern religions. After being in Kabul for 6 months, we traveled overland through the notorious Khyber Pass, then on to New Delhi, and then flew in a very rickety Afghan Airlines plane to Kathmandu, Nepal, to begin a house ministry at the end of the hippie trail. It was a tremendous time of learning to trust God, literally, for our daily bread, and to help us to clearly present the Gospel to young people of so many different nationalities. When embassies didn’t know what to do with stranded or sick hippies, they called us and we took them in. It was absolutely thrilling when they responded to the gospel and became believers. They would remain with us as long as they could so they could learn the scriptures and be discipled.

While in Nepal, we were made aware of a baby that was to be born whose parents were a Nepalese mother and an Italian hippie father. Such children are outcasts, and since the father had long disappeared the mother wanted to give the baby up for adoption. We had been unable to have children and when we heard about the baby from our social worker friend, we went through the legalities to prepare for adoption. We were excited about having the child, and my family sent a trunk load of clothes and supplies so we’d be ready when the baby arrived. Time passed beyond the expected time of birth. The social worker had heard nothing from the mother, so Harry rode a motorcycle out to her village. He found her, with the baby girl, in her filthy mud home. She had changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby for a while before giving her to us. We were devastated, our unrenewable visa ran out, and we left the country with empty arms.

Our desire to have a child didn’t diminish. I wrote in my journal:

Lord, like Hannah I come
With a prayer on my lips
With an anguished heart
With empty arms, Lord.
Favor me.
Give me a child, fruit of my womb,
And I will return him to You.

I meant it, and I had no idea what I was praying. We were thrilled beyond measure when we learned that we were going to have a baby. Our long-prayed-for son was born with a problem that will challenge him and us until heaven. When he was six months old, we went to Holland to rejoin the ministry we had left in Nepal. Harry’s main responsibility was to counsel the young people who lived there and came through during their travels. We were there for two years, then returned to the States. I was pregnant with our second child.

A few months later, our precious daughter was born with Trisomy 13, a devastating chromosome abnormality that wreaked havoc on her tiny body. Usually babies with this abnormality do not survive to be born full term, but she did, giving us no clue that anything would be wrong. She lived an angonizing, indescribable two days. We had never even held her.

At the time, we would not have said that we expected any kind of ‘payback’ for serving God. We would have scoffed at the idea; said it was wrong. But in reality, I did. In my heart I said, “We sold our wedding gifts for You and went overseas; we lived without a refrigerator for You; we said we’d DIE for You; none of our friends did what we did and THEY have healthy babies. Why are You doing this to us!” To say I was furious would be an understatement.

We consulted with doctors who told us that the physical issues with our two children were not related. It was a fluke. We should not be afraid to have another child if I were to become pregnant again. So it was with great delight we expected our third child. This time we were going to do it right! After all, the doctors had all but promised, so we doused our fears with the doctors’ hope. Our beloved son was born with medical issues that meant chronic illness and over twenty hospitalizations and surgeries to date. More testing was done that proved the doctors were somewhat right; the issues between our children were not connected. But we were to come to understand that they were absolutely not a fluke. We have no answer beyond the truth that God does all things for our good and his glory. That is enough for us now, but that was not always the case.

It was beginning to dawn on us that God has different methods of taking one’s life. The way we were willing to die was not the same as how he was calling us to die. We did not approve.

During the years when this was going on, Harry was working on a second master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin. We were angry, hurt, and wanted nothing to do with ministry. He wanted a secular career and worked on a degree toward that goal. At one point his advisor (not a believer) suggested that he take an independent study course on the subject of child abuse. Although Harry had no interest in that subject, the course fit his work schedule so he took it. That course was the specific thing that landed him a job as a social worker with the county in which we lived. He ultimately became the county ‘expert’ on sexual abuse cases and was called in to deal with not only the children, but the perpetrator as well. We didn’t realize it at the time, but God was still sovereign over our lives and was working for his purposes in spite of our avoidance of him. When we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

We could not disregard God forever. We wanted to know whether he was real or whether everything we had known about him was a farce. It was something both of us had to deal with personally, independently. Harry certainly did, and sooner than I. My long-standing desire to ‘measure up’ had hit an impenetrable wall. I had done my absolute best, and could still not please God. I felt insulted. I had always been compliant, trying to be a God-and-people-pleaser, and I felt pretty good about the job I had done. That is exactly what God was trying to get at and out of my heart. It’s called pride; ugly, ugly, pride. In other words, rebellion against God. We experience the means God uses to remove pride and the other resulting sin from our lives as unadulterated pain. As much as I despised the pain that my children experienced and that we had to bear as their parents, I was loathe to hand it over to God and stop complaining about it. The anger I carried–savored–about our daughter’s death was all that I had left of her. It turned to bitterness and filled and satisfied me in a terrible way. Publicly I looked okay, but privately was a different story. I didn’t delve into overt sin; it was a matter of my stubborn, deceitful heart. As I write now, it fills me with shame and sorrow as to how my anger, my actions, my words did not honor God during that time. How merciful he is to have brought me to the place where I can “taste and see that he is good!”

When I read C.S Lewis’ description of God as “vivisectionist” I knew exactly what he was talking about, and thought he hit it exactly: surgery without the benefit of anesthesia. Sometimes it felt like God was picking around in my heart with tweezers; sometimes it felt like he was ripping my chest open with a chainsaw. It wasn’t until I more deeply understood my depravity in a way that was way beyond anything I had previously understood that my anger against God finally turned into a cherishing of the grace that he had lavished upon me through the Cross. I no longer felt mistreated or taken advantage of. Like Christian of Pilgrim’s Progress, when I truly saw the Cross, the burden on my back dropped off, rolled down the hill, fell into the sepulcher and disappeared.

God’s work in us is ongoing and faithful. As we are obedient, he leads us further into the path of his purpose. The position Harry took for the county eventually led him into the ministry of counseling people who struggle with issues of sexual sin and to the writing of a book that has proved helpful to many. God used the suggestion of an advisor who didn’t even believe in him to lead my husband (and therefore me) into the purpose God had for our lives and for the lives of those to whom we minister. Ministry in New York City, a doctoral degree for Harry, further experience in counseling, then finally to our present ministry in Colorado—to quote that old song, “Jesus led us all the way.” When we talk together about our lives, the overwhelming mercy, grace and faithfulness of God cannot help but be the theme of our conversation. We are astonished at his goodness to us, and we are certain of his good sovereignty over the years that remain. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

*Update: It was more inferred than absolutely clear in what I wrote, so let me plainly say that there is no way we can ever ‘measure up’ to merit or earn anything from God even if we tried for an eternity. To even think we can do that is rebellion against him. Christ, and Christ alone, is the one who perfectly ‘measured up’ for all. That is what I learned. Nor does obedience merit anything. It is an outflow of the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts who causes us to love and obey God, and for that we take no credit.

Read other Tuesday Testimonies at Challies Dot Com. Thanks, Tim.