Melissa's Story

Melissa gave permission to post her story on my blog...

"I wanted to share a little bit of my story with you today. I started attending Connections a while back not because I truly wanted to but because I wanted to make my in-laws happy and I also wanted my children to learn about God to help instill the values in them that will help them be good people in the world we live in.

I felt out of place at first, like I didn't belong - I had built up a wall around my heart that seemed would not or could not come down. There are probably many reasons for that - we all have our hurts and experiences of the past. But then something started to happen, I started to re-examine my life and realized that as good as my marriage was and as wonderful as our family is...something was missing.

There was a baptism service several weeks ago where George had invited people to come forward and be baptized if they felt the desire to do so. At that moment I wanted to come forward so bad but I was afraid and I was ashamed because I felt I was not worthy somehow. I wept that entire service for reasons I could not understand or explain, I didn't know what was happening to me. That night I didn't sleep, I couldn't turn off the questions and excitement that filled my head as the Lord's spirit was entering my life.

By the morning it was like a wave had crashed over me and all I could do was surrender my life to God and know that my heart, my marriage, my family, my entire live would be forever changed and it was such a wonderful feeling. I had heard of this spiritual awakening happening to other people but I honestly never believed it to be true until it happened to me.

So now I stand here ready to give my life fully to God, to ask for forgiveness and be washed clean and continue to live a new life reborn in faith and to celebrate knowing without a shadow of a doubt that no matter what happens in my life, I will never be alone. I am also truly blessed to experience this with Lukas and Owen as well. We were not in the spiritual place we are today when our boys were born. Through the grace of God their lives will be forever changed as well.

To quote my son Lukas, "The water will wash away all the bad things we have done (like hitting my brother) and we get a new heart that believes in and loves Jesus."


Melissa loves this song that her husband Fred shared with her. So we threw it into the service as well..