Beth Kent shares her story of God’s miracle of salvation in her life.

I have been asked to recount how I first became a Christian: I can just about remember how at the age of 5 or 6, and at the prompting of my older sister, I asked the Lord Jesus to “come into my heart”. So, did that make me a Christian? I don’t think so; but it may have been the first step on the journey.

Growing up in a Christian family, I was accustomed to going to church twice on a Sunday and to Sunday School; and as well as family prayers every morning. I was encouraged to read my Bible every day, and to pray. I was baptized and joined the church when I was 13, and outwardly appeared to be living the sort of life that would be expected of a young Christian.

However, my heart was not right; and as the years went by and I left the sheltered atmosphere of home and started my first job – training as a Nursery Nurse, where the Matron was very strict, and rules and regulations kept us in line – and then going on to general nursing and midwifery over the next 10 years or so, I gradually drifted away from Christian things, and my main aim in life became to have as much fun as I could possibly pack in.

I got very far away from God, and my occasional efforts at self- reformation always very soon fell flat. Looking back, maybe those efforts, prompted by my guilty conscience, were evidence that God was still working on me –

Reaching a crisis point, where I was contemplating a course of action that would take me even further away, my father said to me, ” It seems to me you’ve never really repented”. That brought me up with a jolt, and caused me to think long and hard about what repentance involved; and then to realise that (a) I didn’t want to repent, and (b) the consequences of not repenting were too awful to contemplate. So then I cried out to God to enable me to repent – a prayer which He graciously answered by showing me, through the help of another Christian friend, how much my sin was grieving Him.

I think that was the point at which I truly became a Christian: where faith – which amazingly I had never lost from those early years – became joined with repentance to complete the miracle of salvation.

Now I can look back over many years of walking with God, and proving over and over again His unchanging grace and faithfulness in all the changing circumstances of my life. To paraphrase the hymn writer:

“I’ll praise Him for all that is past

And trust Him for all that’s to come.”

Beth (June 2017)