~In Loving Memory of Rev. David Wilkerson (1931-2011)~

Day before yesterday I was listening to one of Rev David Wilkerson’s sermons from a couple of years ago, where he joked about how his children are all fighting over who gets to keep his bible when he dies. Yesterday, I laughingly mentioned this to my sister. Yesterday, Revered David Wilkerson left us to be with Jesus.

When I was read the news this morning on the World Challenge website, my first instinct was to stare at my laptop screen and then kneel down in prayer and burst into tears. Thing is, I’ve never met this man, this magnificent solider of God. I only listened to him, listened to his sermons every night, awed by the moving power of the Holy Spirit that literally flowed out of his voice. God spoke through him when I was weak and alone and renewed my faith and gave strength and solace.

I usually can write on and on but I have no idea what to say right now. Words are failing me, as clichéd as it sounds, I just can’t find words that are proper enough to describe what a wonderful gem of God was David Wilkerson. A man who devoted his life to serving Jesus, to the point of leaving his pregnant wife behind while he went to “walk where angels fear to tread” just to do what God asked him to do. He was a man of formidable faith, never too proud to admit his own shortcomings, never too weak to help others. Sickness constantly plagued his family, yet Wilkerson’s faith only grew with each passing day.

Like I said before, I doubt whether anybody even reads this. But in case someone’s reading this, I urge you to pray for his family, especially his wife and the other driver who was involved in the accident; both of them are in critical situation.

David Wilkerson will never know how God sent him my way to help me out of the darkest pits of hell, out of the most dangerous pits of despair and help me strengthen my faith….the pain I felt at his passing amazed even me: I was always fond of him, but I never expected to feel that way after he died. However, after crying and praying, I felt a wave of peace and comfort descend upon me….Reverend David Wilkerson is exactly where he wanted to be. He’s happy.

He’s Home at last.

“Those who die in the Lord are the winners; we who remain are the losers. Death is not the ultimate healing: resurrection is! Death is the passage, and sometimes that passage can be painful. No matter how much pain and suffering wreak havoc on these bodies, it is not even worthy to be compared with the unspeakable glory that awaits those who endure the passage.” ~ Revered David Wilkerson, February 2, 2011

~Love~

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres...

Corinthians 13:4-7

~God's looking out for me~

There is something I have to admit....a couple days ago, I posted a rather lengthy rant (which i subsequently deleted) about how tough it is not to feel accepted by my loved ones. I have very few friends and when they turn against me for being a christian, this wounds me to the very core. My family are against Christianity as well and for years I've had to constantly have to live with the notion that my own family rejects me for who I am. They love me when I keep a lid over my faith, when I pretend to be something that I'm not. Which I don't want to do.

Anyway, day before yesterday, I was miserable and cried and prayed to God. I literally placed my burdens at his feet, begged him for strength to move on in the midst of persecutions and forgot about it. Having prayed and been conforted by him, I was okay again. God took care of me like he always does....but I'd forgotten the magnitude of his love for me. Aparently, just conforting me wasn't enough- he sent someone my way yesterday to make me know that I do have somebody, a non-christian, who accepts me just as I am. And that made me realize how useless it is to want to be accepted by the world. Jesus did say that we're going to be persecuted like he was.

My dearest friend, my soulmate and sister created a website for me, with biblical quotes, sermons from Reverend David Wilkerson, quotes about Nicky Cruz's conversion, and an absolutely magnificient Hillsong song which I heard long, long ago without even knowing the title. When I opened the site and saw how she was able to capture everything that I am, everything that I love in her site, I did two things: I burst into tears, and said a quick prayer to thank God for placing her in my life.

Her website is, according to me, God's way of reminding me that even if the whole world shuns me, He's looking out for me from up above. In fact, the background to my website was this absolutely touching quote from Isaiah:

"See, I will not forget you...I have carved you in the palm of my hand."

I don't think there's anyone out there reading my blog...but just in case there is someone who's being persecuted for being a Christian, hold on. God's looking out for you, it won't be long before He'll show you that the struggle is worth it. And you know what? I usually can't sleep at night cos I've got all these thoughts bouncing around in my head. Yesterday I was up till 5am cos I felt too happy, too estatic, too lucky for the life God's given me. And for the amazing friends he placed in my life.

I felt discouraged, but God very gently reminded me that I was bought at an extremely, extrememly great price and that I'm just too precious to become slaves of men.

Sparkles&Smiles

Why I accepted Jesus and nothing else into my life? (1)

Not that I have to justify myself to anyone but God has placed me right in the midst of unbelievers (of course he has his own reasons!) but sometimes things get overwhelming....I find that I constantly have to justify- Why Jesus? Why is it than five to six years ago I decided to follow Jesus and nothing else? 6 years ago I was in the lap of Satan and Satanist rituals. I was crazily, madly in love with Marilyn Manson and proudly proclaimed myself to be, like Manson, an “all American anti-Christ”. I discovered Manson when I was only 11 years old and started cutting myself, lightly at first but this soon became an addiction that spiralled out of control and sneakily possessed my life. This was Satan at work. If I was upset, I only had to grab a piece of broken glass, a cutter, a razor blade, lash at my skin, and watched the blood flow. This had a profoundly soothing effect upon me.

Sometimes I would enjoy slicing straight into an open wound and watch the blade glide over flesh….Sometimes I would run my open wounds over boiling water. Sometimes I would pour acetone into the open wounds. I knew no pain, and there was this voice in my head that constantly urged me to go on and on. To never stop. To experiment with various types of cutting, with a varying number of torture methods that grew more grotesque every day. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it didn’t. But I loved the attention my scars were getting me; I thrived on the attention I got from my friends when they grew concerned and begged me to stop cutting. It made me feel popular, at the top of the world. I had a strange, sick fascination with blood.

My best friend at the time was also into cutting and if am not mistaken, we used to slice our arms open and drink each other’s blood. Vampires and witchcraft were all in the rage then and we easily fell prey to pop culture. If we weren’t drinking each other’s blood, or our own blood, we were trying to experiment with self-made Ouija boards, trying to channel the spirits and all. And the more I indulged in these “harmless” activities, the more I started changing. And not for the better. In the end, my life had spiralled out of control and I loved drinking my own blood and I absolutely had to cut myself, every day.

While the blood-drinking phrase stopped after a few years, the self-mutilation one plagued me every day from 11 years old to 16-17years old. I loved what I was doing, I felt good about what I was doing. It brought me peace; it brought me a sense of joy I never felt before. I certainly wasn’t harming anybody. My passion for Marilyn Manson can only be described as an intense, powerful, heavy sense of belonging to him. Listening to the sound of his voice was like coming home. And there was nowhere else I’d rather be than in my room, listening to him. He brought me peace and love, and joy and a profound sense of happiness like I’d never known before. It was fate, it was meant to be. I belonged to him for life and that was something I was convinced of, even as a child.

Until God glided into my life and showed me how deceiving the human flesh, human heart, and human head is. You see, MY head, MY heart, MY feelings were telling me I belonged to Manson, I belonged to the perfect world he’d created. But what was I, really? Human. Flesh and bone and feelings that spiralled out of control. Any sense of belonging, any sense of peace, any sense of happiness I had since I was a child were human senses. Deceiving. My choice. My judgement. Not God’s.

But God’s love never fails. I heard of the Bible but it never interested me, my friends and family were not Christians and I had absolutely no reason to follow Jesus. To me, Jesus was simply the son of God who was nailed upon a cross. I couldn’t care less that this sacrifice was for ME, that he was tortured to death as a MAN, therefore experienced all the agony and sheer pain that the human flesh experiences. I didn’t even pause to ask myself why? Why is it that Jesus would leave Heaven and come down here to be mocked, humiliated, spit upon, tortured and killed? I simply couldn’t be bothered. I respected Christians and Christianity, just like I respect any other belief. But I’d found my way.

My life was complete, I was happy. I didn’t need Jesus. Not that I didn’t like Jesus. I just didn’t need to follow him- and his multiples restrictions and laws- because I HAD FOUND MY WAY. Whenever somebody talked against Marilyn Manson, I had over 100 arguments to defend him and none of them were fake. My arguments made sense to the point that nobody could even refute my points. They were clear, logical and sound. No one and nothing could win a debate against me when it came to arguing in favour of Marilyn Manson. No one but God who loves me so much that he sent his son to be tortured for me- for a girl who knew Jesus and respected Him but refused to follow Him since she’d found her own way. I believed in what I believed with MY own mind, MY own soul, somehow thinking that MY mind was wiser than God’s.

To this day I remain stunned as I realized that even if I’d been going against Jesus every day, his love for me never faltered. The proof to that is that he revealed his word to me, he poured his love upon me and altered the course of my life forever. He created an upheaval in my life like I’d never known before. And this had nothing to do with any sense of belonging, any sense of happiness or any human feelings that told me “this is where you’re meant to be.”

Anything I felt when I accepted Christ into my life had NOTHING to do with human feelings/thoughts. It was then that I realized how deceiving and mediocre and just plain silly it is to follow one’s own emotions. Satan thrives on these feelings of acceptance and belonging and plagued me to go according to MY mind, MY head and MY heart- NOT God’s. Certainly NOT God’s. In 1 Corinthians, isn’t is specifically said that: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight” (1 Corinthians 3:19, NIV 1984). My wisdom and my sense of belonging were- ultimately- “foolishness” in God’s eyes.

At first I tried to work around the loopholes: I read my first Bible and fell in love with it. I was hooked to the Bible. But I didn’t want to let go of my old ways either, refused to let go of that feeling of peace and acceptance I had with my old ways. So, working around the loopholes, I started being both Christian and non-Christian. I said I believed in Jesus and yet did things that were against the Bible, telling myself that I did really believe in Jesus but I had to be practical, tolerant and follow my heart and feelings. But thing is, the Bible has NO loopholes. A is A, B is B, Z is Z. No way out of that. If God says A, I couldn’t say A- or A+. I pretended to accept Jesus and yet held on to my old ways; I was pathetically kidding myself.

I can’t argue with God or bring my reasons to him. I couldn’t have my cake and eat it too. It was therefore time to make a choice- Jesus or no Jesus. With Jesus I had to follow everything Jesus says and follow his ways and let go of my old ways. With “no-Jesus” I was free to go my own way, follow whatever practices/religion I wanted to follow and indulge in my sense of acceptance and belonging. God wouldn’t force me. I acted out of free will and choose Jesus.

How overwhelming it is to think that God still loved me, even when I tried to accept both him- and other practices- into my life. God hates sin, he condemns other practices, but he loves Mankind. He loved me as a Marilyn Manson fan, just as he loves me now. He was merely asking me to give up my old ways, let go of my comfort zone, ignore the pull I felt towards my old ways, ignore my sense of belonging….and turn my heart over to him. ONLY to him.

My life changed forever. I've never looked back since.