Sarah's Story

My testimony is about getting to know God rather than coming to believe in God.

From my earliest memories until the age of about five, my family regularly attended church and I participated in Sunday school. After we discontinued going I never stopped believing that God existed, but I didn’t know anything about Him. To me, God was a distant presence that I didn’t really understand; a nice idea. Understanding the nature of God was never a priority or a goal of mine until I was sixteen.

I was attending Newmarket High School and was aware that some of my friends went to the Northridge church down the street. One of them was experiencing the loss of a loved one and asked me to come to the church with her while she spoke with one of the pastors.

Within five minutes of our entering the building my friend was surrounded by three or four people offering her words of support and encouragement. My impression was that these people seemed to genuinely care about how she was coping. Soon I was introduced to the church pastors, Brian and Glenda, and I distinctly remember my friend saying to me, “That’s Brian and Glenda Bishop. They won’t forget your name”. At the time I thought nothing of her comment.

A few weeks after my visit to Northridge, I was at Tim Horton’s and someone in the drive-through line rolled down their window to say hello. It was Brian and Glenda, and although I had barely spoken to them when I visited the church, they remembered my name. Soon after, my friend invited me to come for a Sunday morning service and out of curiosity I decided to go and check it out.

The sermon that week was called “Winning at Life” and was about Christ’s radical love for humanity. Never before had I heard that God loved me unconditionally and wanted to be my support through life; I guess I had thought of God as being angry and fearsome. It really resonated with me that the reason why the people at the church cared so much about my friend, and enough about me to remember my name after a single meeting, was because they want to love people like God loves them. What I heard in that sermon provoked my curiosity about God enough to make me come back to Northridge week after week until my attendance at church became a regular thing.

Every week I was impressed by what I heard about God; sermons about love, mercy and grace; until I started to hear about God having a plan for my life. I remember hearing that God had a perfect plan for me and that all that I had to do was accept it and follow Him. Instantly my reaction was, “no way!” and I found the idea very offensive.

By this time I was in my final year of high school making plans for university and I was happy to be experiencing independence and control over my future. This became my mentality; I will believe in God, but I will not devote myself to living His plan for me.

Then things started to go downhill in my life. I was miserable during my first year of school, recognizing that I had made the wrong choice in both the school I was attending and my program of study. Upon returning home from my awful first year I was told by my parents that they had decided to separate. Other problems arose, and suddenly I found that several aspects of my life had spiraled completely out of my control. I had no idea how to handle the situation.

Shortly after I found out about my parents, Northridge's Youth Pastor asked me to meet with him. I confessed that I was at a loss to understand why all of these things were happening to me at once. After listening to me rant for a while, he asked me if I had heard the analogy that Jesus was the Good Shepherd. He told me that while attending their flocks, shepherds would sometimes take action if they noticed that a sheep was consistently straying from the herd. To avoid the sheep being attacked by predators while astray, the shepherd would break the sheep’s leg and carry it over his shoulders until it was strong enough to walk with the flock again.

This sounded kind of barbaric to me, but he explained that the shepherd did this out of concern for the wellbeing of the sheep and in turn supported it until it could stand on its own feet again. He suggested that I look at my relationship with God this way.

I was still extremely reluctant to rely on God to that degree. It took a long time for me to start going to God with my problems, but when circumstances forced me to, the comfort and stability I found is beyond explanation. Many difficult times have followed since my first year of university and every time that I have gone to God for help in one of these situations, I have been met with an overwhelming sense of His presence, comfort and love. Recognizing that my attempt to forge my own path had been a dismal failure, I eventually conceded and began to have a more open mind about God’s plan for my life, and it is awesome.

Now entering fourth year of university, I feel like I am living for a purpose. Though life is far from perfect and situations are not always happy, I am able to find joy in my circumstances in the knowledge that God loves me and is looking out for me.