CAROL'S STORY

"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart" Jer 29:13

I can't really remember NOT being a Christian - raised in the Catholic community of St. Paul where everything seemed to center around the beautiful historic church that sits magestically in that small town as a centerpiece on a beautiful table. I was raised in a culture that believed in Jesus Christ and celebrated that daily with mass and confession, fear of mortal and veneal sins, beautiful Christmas Eve services and all this was woven into the fabric of daily life as people used the church and its dictates to structure their lives.

My mother, not being Catholic, but married to one, hiked us off to the Presbyterian Church in Woodburn eight miles away. She began going to that church as a small girl. It was 1 1/2 blocks from her home. She went faithfully even though her parents did not attend church. She still attended the same church at 91 years of age.

She was my Sunday School teacher. I remember as a young child, 11 or 12, vivid dreams about the world ending and me being left behing. It scared me and I knew I was not ready to go.

One day a young man and young lady knocked on our door and invited us to attend a Sunday School class they were starting at the public school. I know now that they were students at George Fox College who had been led to do this. It became an important event for me because it was at these very small meetings, just three to five of us Protestent children that I made my committment to Christ. (Never underestimate small works!) They can be very fruitful.

This was a turning point in my life, an official decision on my part to accept Jesus into my heart and follow Him.

I grew up with my belief system in place and when I attended church, many times that excitement of the presence of the Holy Spirit was there.

When I was a young adult, I never abandoned my faith, but what took over were the unmet personal needs of my life. The deficits of one's soul and I pretty much walked in my own ways - selffullfilling, sinful, and selfish and as a result caused a lot of pain for myself and others.

I was sitting in the debrie of that in 1972 when I read an article about an event that had just taken place in the colliseum in the spring of '72.

The "Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts" and my Spirit leaped within me and said "GO!!" It was coming back in the fall on Oct. 1972.

I went, and was overwhelmed with God and recommitted my life to Christ, this time out of despair with my own condition.

When was I born again? I say Oct. '72. What about before? I believed.

Then supernaturally I was invited to Banks Methodist Church under Chaplin and Willa Hayes and the Charismatic Renewal was sweeping through the nation.

I attended almost daily Bible studies, prayer meetings, awesome gatherings where the presence of God was so strong it could flatten you. My husband became a born again Spirit filled Christian. We ate, drank and lived in the presence of the Holy Spirit for about 10 years. It was a magical time. It was beyond description, wherever you went the Holy Spirit was around us.

Then it moved on, and the presence was no longer so external and we now were left with seeking Him on our own and bringing our own thoughts into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

It was like a marriage. The flush of romance when you can leap tall buildings with a single bound, and then you are left with your marriage partner and need to learn to put them first, yield, not go with your own emotions.

So now these many years after 1972 when I fully surrendered to Christ, this is my life. Daily I seek Him, I find Him when I seek Him with all my heart or I can walk in the flesh and reap that.

I believe for me, Revival is as close as yeilding. Sometimes it is helpful to go somewhere, but mostly not, because if my heart is not fully yielded, when I get there, I still find me.

Carol's life was not all roses, even after her surrender, she lost her husband to cancer, but then married her pastor who had lost his wife to an aneurysm the year before. She and her husband pastor a small church in their hometown.