“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King Jr
I grew up in South Africa in a family where religion was neither discussed nor debated. I had RI – Religious Instruction – as a subject at school, but my RI teacher was always more interested in talking about the men in her life rather than God.
Guided by my overprotective Greek father, I achieved good grades, got along well with my two sisters and brother, and socialised with a close set of friends. But in spite of all that, I was a lonely child. There seemed to be this hole in my life, this sense of emptiness that stayed with me no matter who I was with.
The feeling worsened after I left school. I withdrew from everyone for a year, spending most of my time cooped up in my room, writing a book and trying to find a sense of purpose to life. Why was I here? I was hungry for something and I looked in all the wrong places to fill myself.
I went to university and studied journalism and philosophy. In philosophy, I studied various theories of existence. The one that appealed to me most was atheism – I’d read Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged and it had a huge impact on me – and so I became an atheist for two years, rejecting all notion of a God.
But you know what? I wasn’t a happy atheist.
I then turned to relationships. I thought that loving someone and being loved by them would finally give me that sense of fulfilment and belonging I craved so desperately. How naive I was. As if I could compare the flawed love between two people of the world to the unfailing, perfect love God has for us. At the time, though, I had no idea of the kind of love that awaited me.
During my relationship phase, my search for personal meaning began to take on a broader perspective. I became, to put it mildly, obsessed with suffering. I wanted to know why people did awful things to one another. I collected scenes of genocide, pictures of all different kinds of suffering, and plastered them on my bedroom wall. My little brother was banned from coming into my room. My parents begged me to take the pictures down, but I couldn’t. These pictures confronted me with questions and I had no answers.
What I did have was a string of unsuccessful relationships and a broken, disillusioned heart. And then I met Craig, the man who would become my husband. And yes, the man who would also break my heart.
When we first started dating Craig was – and still is – a Christian. It was my first real exposure to Christianity. Here was this man telling me that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins – my sin – and then came back to life, and that I can receive God’s love and forgiveness through faith in Christ.
I had never heard this before. And I didn’t believe it either.
So after three months we broke up – there was my seriously broken heart. Although we’d only dated for three months, I had really fallen hard for him. Why did we break up? Craig had become convicted that dating me was wrong. He was a believer and I wasn’t.
And boy, besides being upset, I was angry. Angry at Jesus for getting between us. Angry at Craig for loving Jesus more than me.
But God hadn’t let me go. Craig and I remained good friends for two years. During that time, he persevered in sharing his faith with me. And I persevered in rejecting what he was telling me.
But since I’m a journalist, I’ve been taught to ask tough questions, and I had to ask myself two really difficult questions: Why were other religions and philosophies still so attractive to me, but not Christianity? Was I so hostile toward Christianity because there was truth in it?
That was a turning point for me.
The night of my conversion, I remember looking back on my life … looking at what I’d believed in and how it hadn’t made me happy … looking at my failed relationships, at the men who had hurt me and who I had hurt in turn. The realisation hit me I could now have a personal relationship with a saviour who would never leave me nor forsake me, who would never hurt me.
So I became a Christian. I was twenty-five years old.
A couple of months after that, I took down the pictures on my wall. I realised people did awful things to one another because we live in a broken world, but I also know God is in control, and I had peace with that.
I’ve been a Christian for many, many years, and I can honestly say I no longer carry with me that sense of emptiness. And it’s not my wonderful husband or my two beautiful children who have filled that hole in my life and given me peace at last.
It is the love of God, who has promised in His word, the Bible, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.”
Lara Martin 