My Testimony

Tell the world how much you love our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus!
(Send us a brief testimony or word of encouragement to mytestimony@christianartcontest.com and we will post it below.) 

  To God be the Glory & Honor Forever!)

• Christ Jesus is my Lord & Savior.  I praise Him just for who He is.  He is my joy, my rock, my all.  Everything I need, I find in Him. He died for my sins, forgave me, and saved me. There is truly no greater Love.  I am now alive in Christ Jesus.  I am a child of the Most High, the One & Only True God.  Now I just pray that He uses me to help feed  His sheep!  I am very much looking forward to His return. Dear God, keep me! 

                        ~ In His Love, JoAnn Prayear 

 

 

• Praise God for all His blessing, His love and His kindness. He is a loving and patient Father to me and to all of us. I am so thankful for His Son Jesus who died on the cross for the sins of humanity.  I love the words of this song which express God's love for us so eloquently:
  
           Could we with ink
           The oceans fill
           And were the sky
           Of parchment made -
           Were every stalk
           On earth a quill
           And every man
           A scribe by trade;
           To write the love
           Of God above
           Would drain
           The oceans dry.
           Nor could the scroll
           Contain the whole,
           Though stretched
           From sky to sky.
  
  Frederick M. Lehman is credited with writing the hymn called "The Love Of God" which contains this poem as the third stanza. The poem itself (Called the Haddamut) was written in the 11th century by a Jewish Rabbi and poet who was so inspired by God's love that he penned these words: "Were the sky of parchment made, a quill each reed, each twig and blade, could we with ink the oceans fill, were every man a scribe of skill, the marvelous story, Of God's great glory, would still remain untold; for He, most high the earth and sky created alone of old".  Centuries later the words, slightly changed from the  original, were found penciled on the wall of a man who died in an asylum another man profoundly inspired by God's love for him. In 1892 while at an evangelistic meeting Lehman heard the poem and the story of the man in the asylum and he was so moved by God's love for that man that he wrote the words down. In 1917, now a pastor, his own experience of God's love inspired him and he wrote two stanzas and a chorus and added this poem as the closing verse to his song. And the love of God and this song about His love continue to inspire men and women worldwide today and will for centuries to come.
  
  ~ Heather

           

•  Kenny Lee, the author of this article, once observed and realized that kids coming back from a tourism trip always had endless complain about how that bathroom in the hotel was horrible and how the places were dirty and the trip was so tiring, yet kids coming back from a mission trip always had endless praise about how beautiful the places were, how nice and lovingly the people were, and how much they grew and learned. As a result, Kenny had excitedly decided to attend this evangelism trip to Honduras during the first part of his summer and he ended up falling in love with what he learned and experienced from the trip and being re-baptized at Honduras as an Adventist.

 In the United States, most of the people had big houses, drove huge cars, and just had this sense of getting everything as big as possible, but now in Honduras, the all seventeen of us were all jammed in this small van, and that was how everything worked here and that was also what drawn everyone of us together really closely as we each writing on this amazing page of our lives’ diaries. Just like how they would use the most space out of the small cars they had, the people in Honduras were super friendly. They had this default sense of “we are a family” no matter how different you were. The fact that I only knew a tiny bit of Spanish and that most of the people in my church did not speak English and Chinese just went out of the way when I saw how these people in my church including the pastor, translator, path finders, elders, other people helping in the church, and the audiences showed their passion to life and to this teenage Taiwanese who just stepped into their territory.

            It did not take too long until I realized that every sermon that I was preparing to preach to the congregation was actually heavily preaching to me too. I grew up in Christian churches but they were not Adventist churches. Even though I attended an Adventist high school and then were attending an Adventist university, those concepts such as Sabbath keeping, unclean foods, and prophecies were never clearly explained to me. I got so excited to see the convincing sermon everyday when I prepared for it and they just progressively changed my life. It was easier for me to start real Sabbath keeping, but it created a huge battle within myself to finally decided to done away with the unclean food. As a Taiwanese, eating every kind of food that you could ever imagined including the body parts of a pig, the blood of a pig, octopus, shrimp, and crab were just as normal as those Honduran eating their Baleadas. It was extremely struggling for me to see that the Bible actually stated that lots of the foods I was raised to eat were NOT clean. Just as I was so debating within myself, the story the Abraham just flushed through my mind. I remembered how God asked Abraham to kill his son and how Abraham did not complain about that nor asking God to provide more time for him to think about it. All that Abraham did was took his son out of the house and laid him done and God stopped Abraham’s hand right when the knife was about to hit the body of Abraham’s son. I knew that at that moment, God said to Abraham: “Thank you for trusting me, my beloved son.” I remembered from the previous sermon that we were under the grace not under the law, that meant that the reasons that I would do what God adore was not so that He would love me more and would give me more salvation, because salvation has been automatically applied to every one of us. I would do what He loves because I LOVE him. I gave up unclean food in front of my entire congregation on that health sermon.

            It did not take long for me to realize that God sent me here not only to convert people, but He wanted to convert me too. I had happily decided to get re-baptized here in the Adventist church. My roommate reminded me that I was talking to him about a strange dream that I had about two days before it became clear that I wanted to get re-baptized. In the dream I was getting married in Honduras. I was so happy and not happy because I was still so young and I was about to leave Honduras in one week, and I did not even know who the bride was when my roommate asked me about it. It was just a strange dream and my roommate thought I was falling in love with certain girl here in Honduras while I just could not figure out who that person was. Now that it was just clear, God was giving me a vision just like how He gave Daniel those dreams. I was happy when I realized this and the feeling was indescribable after I arranged my baptism with my pastor, I felt like I just got a girlfriend.

            I kept a journal everyday during this trip, and I found the dramatic change of my journal’s pattern really interesting. If you read my journal from Day 1 to the last day, you will realize that I spend a huge portion talking about my sermon on the first few days, but on the later days I would spend literary four lines on writing about the sermon and the rest of the 95 percents would be about those little things that happened during the day. Indeed, we better realize that this trip was not really about just came and be like a radio machine playing the sermons, got the business done and said goodbye to Honduras, this trip was really about coming here and become part of the people here and part of this big family. Every little thing that happened during the day from preparing the sermons and sharing our daily experience with my roommates and friends to arriving the church and worked and chatted and just blended myself into this loving family were just so precious. We will be leaving soon and for every one of us it was just hard tosay this goodbye to them because we were already part of them now. I was no longer that foreign Taiwanese kid coming and trying to preach to everyone, but this brother of every one of the people I met here. I knew that we would be separated soon physically, but I also knew that on the first Sabbath of our new lives in heaven, we will all meet again, under the tree of life in that beautiful Garden of Eden.

      ~ Yu-Tang “Kenny” Lee

           San Pedro Sula, Honduras

 

 

 

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