SALVATION · CARMEN'S STORY
His Grace was always there.
How I came to understand the grace of Jesus Christ.
I grew up knowing the importance of going to church and hearing about the goodness of God. But as a child, you can hear these things without completely understanding what they mean. At least, that was my experience.
It wasn't until I became an adult that I began to understand how God had always been there for me.
I felt His presence in ways that were difficult for me to explain, although at the time I did not understand what it meant.
When I was young, I nearly drowned at the beach. I became trapped underwater in a whirlpool and could not make it back to the surface. The water was dark, and I still don't know how anyone could have seen me, but a woman reached me and pulled me out by my hair. To this day, I believe God guided her to me and preserved my life.
As the years passed, however, I moved farther away from God and from the church. I went through many ups and downs. I was rebellious, did not listen to my family or to the teachings I had received in church, made mistakes, and made choices that led me down paths that did not honor God. There were seasons of anger, loneliness, and isolation, and at 17 I became a mother while I was still trying to find my own way. I had a family and children whom I loved, yet deep within my heart I still felt an emptiness. Something was missing in my life, although at the time I did not fully understand what it was.
During that period of my life, I began having nightmares in which I felt as though I were being chased by darkness. Yet even in the midst of those frightening dreams, something else remained with me: the memories of my grandmother and my aunt telling me to return to church and to believe in Jesus. Their words stayed in my heart.
Eventually, that emptiness led me back to church. One day in 2001, while I was there, I felt a warmth in my heart that I could not explain. In that moment, I knew in my heart that Jesus was calling me. That was the day I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.
Now, when I look back, I can see what I could not understand then. God had preserved my physical life when I nearly died, but I still needed to be rescued spiritually. Even while I was walking away and living in sin, His Grace continued to reach me. I had tried to fill my life in other ways, but the emptiness in my heart remained. I needed Jesus. The God I had heard about as a child, whose presence I had experienced without fully understanding it, was drawing me back to Him. I began to understand that the greatest rescue I needed was not only from physical death, but from the sin that separated me from God. Jesus Christ did for me what I could never have done for myself.
From that point forward, I began to understand something that has stayed with me ever since: I wanted to know Him for myself.
Studying the Bible and seeking to understand Scripture brought me closer to God in a way I could never have imagined. I didn't want only to hear what someone else said about Him. I wanted to open His Word, read it, understand it in context, and know more about the grace I had received through Jesus Christ.
And as I look back over my life, I realize something that I couldn't fully see when I was younger:
His Grace was always there.