Ben's Testimony

I was raised in a Christian family and received the Lord at a young age. It was during the summer before junior high that a brother shared with me about predestination; that is, God's choosing of us like a grain of sand on a beach before time and the foundation of the world. I was touched both by God's love and mercy for me and by my blessed place in God's plan. The sharing lead me to receive the Lord Jesus as my savior and I decided to be baptized later that summer.

Although my junior high and high school years yielded a few genuine experiences of Christ, not until college did God's plan and the meaning of my existence become clear to me. My time here at the University of Washington has been a time of both human development and spiritual growth for me. I could no longer hide in the sheltered life that I had known for so long and I was struck with the realization that I had to begin making decisions affecting my entire future. What should I major in, where I should live, who my friends would be, and what my relationship with the Lord and the Church would be were all questions that were constantly before me. This was not only a time of exploring different possibilities but also a time of realization of who I was and where I had come from. Though I tried with much effort to continue living as my unbelieving friends lived, it became clear to me that I possessed something that my friends didn't. While my friends found their joy in worldly enjoyments, material goods, relationships, partying, and intellectual pursuits, I realized that my joy could only come from Christ. This enjoyment of Christ is the real enjoyment which satisfies and which ruined my taste for the world. What seemed to make my friends happy--at least temporarily--only brought me grief and misery.

One portion of the Word that was a big help during that stage of my life was in John 2 where the Lord Jesus rescues a wedding by creating more wine out of water. We see here that even at a wedding (which many would considered the top experience in human life) the wine, which typifies human life, ran out. In other words, regardless of how enjoyable our lives are, how much money we make, how many friends we have, or even how wonderful our marriages and families are, human life is temporary and always runs short in the end.

Once we have reached this end, we are filled with sense of death. In the story, Jesus told the servants to fill the six waterpots, which signify man, with water, which in this case signifies death. Miraculously, Jesus changed the death waters in to the good wine. What we see here is God's principle of changing death into life. When the temporary enjoyments of our vain human lives run out, we are filled with death until the Lord moves in and changes our death into life. In the early years of my college experience, the enjoyment of the world ran out for me and left me with death. It was then that I learned to turn my heart to the Lord who was waiting to change my death into life, to fill me with Himself. To this day, I am still enjoying the Lord as my good wine, as my real enjoyment. But being the person that I am, I knew that I could only remain in the enjoyment of the Lord for so long by myself. This is where Christian Students Association has been a tremendous help to me while I am on campus. Though I have the Church to meet with outside of school, I also need a group of believers and fellow lovers of Christ to meet with on campus. As a weak believer who can easily fall into the many temptations that the campus atmosphere bombards me with, I desperately depend on the brothers and sisters in CSA to water my spirit and nourish me with spiritual food. Likewise, I can minister Christ to others and nourish other believers. By this mutual care, we grow together in the Christian life, we stand together against the tide of this age, and we accomplish what the Lord is after on the UW campus.