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My name is Grant and to truly tell my testimony I must start from the beginning and set the foundation for the person God made me to be, the damage I went through, and the re-creation for better as a son of God being conformed into the image of Christ.
My parents have always told me since I was young that they knew God was going to call me away. The first sign was when I was two years old watching a Jesus movie. I would sleep throughout the entire movie, but every time Jesus would preach I would stand up and wave my arms, then go back to sleep when He was off the screen again. They always thought it was funny and joked that I was destined to be some sort of pastor or missionary one day.
The first time I can remember recognizing my own calling would be when I first started going to school. I would always go in with a natural smile on my face and try to make everyone get along, hence obtaining the nickname “Peace-maker”. When there was a fight I would always grab my parents, sisters, or friends hands and put them together saying, “Okay, everything is better now!” When a new student would join the class I would always go befriend them and add them into our games so that they would feel welcome and others would get to know and like them as well. What really shaped me was my parent’s great support when bad things did happen at school and I would come home crying. My heroes were always Jesus and Superman, so they would always tell me to be light-hearted and know that everyone has a story causing them to be the way they are. They said those that tried to cause the most hurt are always the ones that need the most love, so that is why I always tried to create peace and make everyone feel loved.
However, as I got older I started to think it was less of a joke and started to talk seriously about being called by God. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember talking about my calling with my parents one day and them saying they didn’t want me to leave home since they thought it meant they would never see me again, or I could even die. Up to this point I still couldn’t comprehend what a missionary was and going to foreign lands just seemed surreal to me.
However, the fourth grade is really what began to change my life and affect my character for the majority of my life so far. At the end of third grade I prayed to God that I could know Him more deeply since I saw all these great testimonies from people that absolutely loved God from the bottom of their heart, and I wanted that. When I started fourth grade we had a new teacher at the school that was very strict and gave us very advanced assignments. I failed an assignment for the very first time and my parents had to begin helping me in order to pass. When my parents began talking to other parents of students in my class apparently they all had to help their children on our assignments. This really demoralized us all and took away my genuine love for school and learning I had up to that point.
During the same year we had a new student join our class who was left out of everything for nearly a week. Therefore, I began talking to him, inviting him over, and becoming friends with him so that others would start to like him as well. However, then something happened I had never experienced before. When everyone else started to like him he turned on my best friend from kindergarten and started to make fun of him. Therefore, I decided to stick up for my friend, but then this new student started to tell others about how I would cry after school due to my grades or having a bad day and smeared my reputation as well. One day he kept kicking me in the leg over and over until I got really mad, causing me to clinch my fist and glare at him in complete rage. When I saw his smile I just broke down in class for the first time and started crying since I hated this feeling of evil coming over me. Everyone in class started to glimpse over at me, but the teacher never said anything.
Fourth grade was finally over and the teacher ended up getting fired with so many complaints from the parents. However, things still got worse for me from fifth to sixth grade as that new student had then gotten the whole class to isolate my friend and me. In the sixth grade he started to yell at me in class when I tried defending myself and the teacher asked us to go outside and talk with her. This was the first time I had ever gotten in trouble at school, so I was mortified. At the end of the discussion I made a vow that I would just never talk again if all it does is get me in trouble and cause heart ache.
Regardless, my home was always a safe haven filled with love and they always encouraged my sister and I to stay in the light (she was also going through trouble). Home was the one place that I felt was perfect and kept my hope intact that there was light in the world and we were just fighting against darkness. After seventh grade they decided to move us to a new school. My sister blossomed and became very popular with her new beginning, but I kept my vow and didn’t talk to anyone my first year. I started to make a couple friends the second year with people who really wanted to get to know me, but then my light was destroyed. Apparently while my mom, sister, and I moved to the farm, my dad who kept his job in the city and had a mental breakdown spending all of our money and attempting to commit suicide. I didn’t know there was any problem until my mom said they were going to get divorced since she was afraid of losing everything and for our safety since he had bought guns. My sister graduated that year, so I said that I wanted to go back home even though I finally started to make friends again so that we could repair the marriage. In the end, no matter how much I fought, they still got divorced.
I became very bitter and felt rejected, alone, and worthless since I knew everything I did was in vain. I didn’t even know anything about those who lived where I do 100 years ago, let alone my great, great grandpa. I knew that once I died I would quickly be replaced and forgotten within a couple generations anyway. I never dated since my parents, who I thought were perfect, also came to divorce. I figured that if they couldn’t do it, then there was no way I could. I knew that even if I did find a girl I liked I wouldn’t be worthy for her since my mindset was set on vanity and I felt stuck with no passion. I also knew that I could never make a pure girl happy and that she would be guaranteed to have a better relationship elsewhere. As time went on however, I became even more cynical and felt like there was no such thing as a pure person anymore and that deep down in the core everyone’s corrupt and self-centered; they were only kind for their own benefit, not for others.
This is when I quit going to church and speaking altogether. At my new high school I would always sit in the back of the room and just stand at an empty wall by myself at lunch. I figured there was no need to talk to anyone at school since I would just graduate in two years anyway and never see them again. Therefore, I graduated without making one friend and continued on to my job and college to make money and continue my education. When I joined my job I was given the name “robot” since I never ate, drank, or went to the bathroom and I would always start early, work through breaks, and leave without ever saying a word. What really started to give me attention was when my supervisor asked me to get him an appliance from another part of the building and the person I took it from started to yell at me for not asking permission. He was yelling at me for nearly three minutes and everyone who knew me started to laugh since I didn’t even look at him or acknowledge that he was talking to me at all, I just kept on working as I always did.
My co-workers at that point decided to make a game on who would be the first one to make me smile, and who would be the first one to make me talk. It took 9 months for someone to finally make me smile at a random joke and 1 ½ years to finally get me to speak. The most interesting part in this period of my life is that people would come tell me all about their lives even though I never talked back or reacted to their presence. I suppose it’s because they knew I would never reveal their secrets and people just want someone to listen to them. I did a lot of self-reflection during this time since I literally had nothing else to do. Interestingly enough I never felt suicidal this whole time, and it was because of the hope of Christ. The whole time I was silent through my high school and beginning college/work years I just wanted someone to reach our their hand and accept/save me from this isolation/loneliness and lead me in the way of Christ as a disciple.
I finally decided to quit waiting for someone to grasp my hand and show me the truth, so I picked up the Bible to read for myself for the first time in December 2009. I finally started to remember my original calling to missions which I had forgotten during my years of silence. However, it just seemed like a dream since Kansas was my whole earth and anything outside was a whole different planet. As with God, right after I said I have never left Kansas since the age of 12 we ended up going to the Caribbean on my grandparent’s 50[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary! Going on that cruise was a dream come true and seeing things around the world outside of United States was one of the most amazing things I had ever felt. However, when I got home I knew something like that would never happen again, and thanked God for allowing me such a great opportunity to live my dream for a week. Well, God didn’t stop there, one year later I was invited to go to Hawaii for free! While there I met a Japanese man who was fishing all by himself in a very remote area. We talked for over five hours and I learned all about his life in Japan, the war, his trip to America, his family’s life, and the history of the island. For the first time since I was a little kid I felt the strong calling to be a missionary again and that it was no longer a dream, but reality!
Since then I have gone to Hawaii and the Caribbean again for free, Japan twice, and China once! Each time I have traveled I have grown closer and closer to God by reading books and speaking to other cultures. One thing people have noticed when going on trips with me is that I don’t suffer from jet lag at all, but look more alive than ever. When I am in a foreign land speaking to different cultures, it is like I am where I’m supposed to be. Since then I have really opened up out of the shell of silence I had been living in and started speaking to my co-workers about Christ and how much He has changed my life. I also started to focus most of my papers and public speeches at my secular college around Christianity. To my surprise people really liked it and would often ask me questions or say that they really enjoyed what I had to say. Just one year later after going on my first trip my co-workers started to view me as an equal and we started exchanging philosophies about atheism/Christianity. However, without even doing anything, they are now viewing me as some sort of teacher when it comes to speaking about religion. When my old co-workers speak about who I used to be no one can believe it since they see me so passionate about His Word and talk so much now.
Upon coming back from the trips I decided to start looking at Bible colleges to become a missionary. I decided to look up both teacher reviews and school reviews of every Christian university in America and prayed for God to send me to the college where I could learn His Word and grow closer to Him. It took nearly three months, but I was finally able to get it down to the top five and made an excel sheet on how much they cost, the classes I would need to take, the mission opportunities they had, and jobs that I could pick up near the school to help pay for tuition. At this point I was doing it all in secret since I wasn’t sure how realistic it would be to leave college when I was one year away from a double Bachelor’s Degree with a starting salary of $125,000/yr. However, the Holy Spirit was really nudging that He wanted me to go to Bible College as soon as possible, so I informed my parents of my plans and my research. At first they just wanted me to finish my degree, but as I continued to speak to them they could see there was life in my eyes. Therefore, they said that if the college I chose had a plan which would allow me to finish my two degrees than they would be okay with it.
I thanked God for opening their hearts and prayed even more that He could open them further to allow me to become a missionary. Since I paid for my own college, I decided that the first year I would find all the classes that would count for both my old degree and a mission’s degree. The reason I didn’t just go straight into a mission’s degree is that I believe it is important to get my parents blessing, and I wanted them to be a part of my growth with God.
Well, after the first semester my parents began to see my dramatic change and started to support me to move my major to theology since they could see how much joy I had in learning about God. They still didn’t want me to go into mission’s, so I once again decided to find all the classes that worked towards my degree in theology and mission’s and pray that God would open their hearts more. By the end of the second semester my mom said that her watching me grow has really changed her and come closer to God herself. She said that while she doesn’t want to lose me, she will not stand in God’s way, but support me in wherever He leads me. Therefore, I was finally able to switch over to Inter-Cultural Studies (Missions) with a clear conscious and run towards God’s path He has set before me. However, when my grandparents found out they were totally against it and wanted me to finish my old degrees so that I could save up a lot of money. However, my growth has also brought my grandma to be in support of the path God has laid before me and loves reading books I give her about Asia. My grandpa was still against it since he wanted me to build up a livelihood with my 4.0 GPA, but there is no amount of money that could replace these last four years I have grown in Christ.
As seen in 2 Corinthians 5:17, I truly do feel like a whole new creation in Christ. While I felt dead and frozen in those years I left my calling from God, these last four years have literally felt like ten years; He has given me more than I could ever ask or imagine as seen in Ephesians 3:20. Proverbs 3:5-6 and Romans 8:28 also shine true for me as I can now understand that there is nothing I could have done in all those years that could have brought me further than God has. My love has transformed from self-centeredness waiting for others to fill me, to Christ-centeredness wanting others to gain this love that fills the void in all our hearts. I can now see that my view of the core was distorted; all people aren’t rotten deep down in their core, but just the opposite, yearning for acceptance and love! I want to be the instrument of God that reaches out and grabs people’s hands that I wanted for all those years.
My parents have always told me since I was young that they knew God was going to call me away. The first sign was when I was two years old watching a Jesus movie. I would sleep throughout the entire movie, but every time Jesus would preach I would stand up and wave my arms, then go back to sleep when He was off the screen again. They always thought it was funny and joked that I was destined to be some sort of pastor or missionary one day.
The first time I can remember recognizing my own calling would be when I first started going to school. I would always go in with a natural smile on my face and try to make everyone get along, hence obtaining the nickname “Peace-maker”. When there was a fight I would always grab my parents, sisters, or friends hands and put them together saying, “Okay, everything is better now!” When a new student would join the class I would always go befriend them and add them into our games so that they would feel welcome and others would get to know and like them as well. What really shaped me was my parent’s great support when bad things did happen at school and I would come home crying. My heroes were always Jesus and Superman, so they would always tell me to be light-hearted and know that everyone has a story causing them to be the way they are. They said those that tried to cause the most hurt are always the ones that need the most love, so that is why I always tried to create peace and make everyone feel loved.
However, as I got older I started to think it was less of a joke and started to talk seriously about being called by God. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember talking about my calling with my parents one day and them saying they didn’t want me to leave home since they thought it meant they would never see me again, or I could even die. Up to this point I still couldn’t comprehend what a missionary was and going to foreign lands just seemed surreal to me.
However, the fourth grade is really what began to change my life and affect my character for the majority of my life so far. At the end of third grade I prayed to God that I could know Him more deeply since I saw all these great testimonies from people that absolutely loved God from the bottom of their heart, and I wanted that. When I started fourth grade we had a new teacher at the school that was very strict and gave us very advanced assignments. I failed an assignment for the very first time and my parents had to begin helping me in order to pass. When my parents began talking to other parents of students in my class apparently they all had to help their children on our assignments. This really demoralized us all and took away my genuine love for school and learning I had up to that point.
During the same year we had a new student join our class who was left out of everything for nearly a week. Therefore, I began talking to him, inviting him over, and becoming friends with him so that others would start to like him as well. However, then something happened I had never experienced before. When everyone else started to like him he turned on my best friend from kindergarten and started to make fun of him. Therefore, I decided to stick up for my friend, but then this new student started to tell others about how I would cry after school due to my grades or having a bad day and smeared my reputation as well. One day he kept kicking me in the leg over and over until I got really mad, causing me to clinch my fist and glare at him in complete rage. When I saw his smile I just broke down in class for the first time and started crying since I hated this feeling of evil coming over me. Everyone in class started to glimpse over at me, but the teacher never said anything.
Fourth grade was finally over and the teacher ended up getting fired with so many complaints from the parents. However, things still got worse for me from fifth to sixth grade as that new student had then gotten the whole class to isolate my friend and me. In the sixth grade he started to yell at me in class when I tried defending myself and the teacher asked us to go outside and talk with her. This was the first time I had ever gotten in trouble at school, so I was mortified. At the end of the discussion I made a vow that I would just never talk again if all it does is get me in trouble and cause heart ache.
Regardless, my home was always a safe haven filled with love and they always encouraged my sister and I to stay in the light (she was also going through trouble). Home was the one place that I felt was perfect and kept my hope intact that there was light in the world and we were just fighting against darkness. After seventh grade they decided to move us to a new school. My sister blossomed and became very popular with her new beginning, but I kept my vow and didn’t talk to anyone my first year. I started to make a couple friends the second year with people who really wanted to get to know me, but then my light was destroyed. Apparently while my mom, sister, and I moved to the farm, my dad who kept his job in the city and had a mental breakdown spending all of our money and attempting to commit suicide. I didn’t know there was any problem until my mom said they were going to get divorced since she was afraid of losing everything and for our safety since he had bought guns. My sister graduated that year, so I said that I wanted to go back home even though I finally started to make friends again so that we could repair the marriage. In the end, no matter how much I fought, they still got divorced.
I became very bitter and felt rejected, alone, and worthless since I knew everything I did was in vain. I didn’t even know anything about those who lived where I do 100 years ago, let alone my great, great grandpa. I knew that once I died I would quickly be replaced and forgotten within a couple generations anyway. I never dated since my parents, who I thought were perfect, also came to divorce. I figured that if they couldn’t do it, then there was no way I could. I knew that even if I did find a girl I liked I wouldn’t be worthy for her since my mindset was set on vanity and I felt stuck with no passion. I also knew that I could never make a pure girl happy and that she would be guaranteed to have a better relationship elsewhere. As time went on however, I became even more cynical and felt like there was no such thing as a pure person anymore and that deep down in the core everyone’s corrupt and self-centered; they were only kind for their own benefit, not for others.
This is when I quit going to church and speaking altogether. At my new high school I would always sit in the back of the room and just stand at an empty wall by myself at lunch. I figured there was no need to talk to anyone at school since I would just graduate in two years anyway and never see them again. Therefore, I graduated without making one friend and continued on to my job and college to make money and continue my education. When I joined my job I was given the name “robot” since I never ate, drank, or went to the bathroom and I would always start early, work through breaks, and leave without ever saying a word. What really started to give me attention was when my supervisor asked me to get him an appliance from another part of the building and the person I took it from started to yell at me for not asking permission. He was yelling at me for nearly three minutes and everyone who knew me started to laugh since I didn’t even look at him or acknowledge that he was talking to me at all, I just kept on working as I always did.
My co-workers at that point decided to make a game on who would be the first one to make me smile, and who would be the first one to make me talk. It took 9 months for someone to finally make me smile at a random joke and 1 ½ years to finally get me to speak. The most interesting part in this period of my life is that people would come tell me all about their lives even though I never talked back or reacted to their presence. I suppose it’s because they knew I would never reveal their secrets and people just want someone to listen to them. I did a lot of self-reflection during this time since I literally had nothing else to do. Interestingly enough I never felt suicidal this whole time, and it was because of the hope of Christ. The whole time I was silent through my high school and beginning college/work years I just wanted someone to reach our their hand and accept/save me from this isolation/loneliness and lead me in the way of Christ as a disciple.
I finally decided to quit waiting for someone to grasp my hand and show me the truth, so I picked up the Bible to read for myself for the first time in December 2009. I finally started to remember my original calling to missions which I had forgotten during my years of silence. However, it just seemed like a dream since Kansas was my whole earth and anything outside was a whole different planet. As with God, right after I said I have never left Kansas since the age of 12 we ended up going to the Caribbean on my grandparent’s 50[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary! Going on that cruise was a dream come true and seeing things around the world outside of United States was one of the most amazing things I had ever felt. However, when I got home I knew something like that would never happen again, and thanked God for allowing me such a great opportunity to live my dream for a week. Well, God didn’t stop there, one year later I was invited to go to Hawaii for free! While there I met a Japanese man who was fishing all by himself in a very remote area. We talked for over five hours and I learned all about his life in Japan, the war, his trip to America, his family’s life, and the history of the island. For the first time since I was a little kid I felt the strong calling to be a missionary again and that it was no longer a dream, but reality!
Since then I have gone to Hawaii and the Caribbean again for free, Japan twice, and China once! Each time I have traveled I have grown closer and closer to God by reading books and speaking to other cultures. One thing people have noticed when going on trips with me is that I don’t suffer from jet lag at all, but look more alive than ever. When I am in a foreign land speaking to different cultures, it is like I am where I’m supposed to be. Since then I have really opened up out of the shell of silence I had been living in and started speaking to my co-workers about Christ and how much He has changed my life. I also started to focus most of my papers and public speeches at my secular college around Christianity. To my surprise people really liked it and would often ask me questions or say that they really enjoyed what I had to say. Just one year later after going on my first trip my co-workers started to view me as an equal and we started exchanging philosophies about atheism/Christianity. However, without even doing anything, they are now viewing me as some sort of teacher when it comes to speaking about religion. When my old co-workers speak about who I used to be no one can believe it since they see me so passionate about His Word and talk so much now.
Upon coming back from the trips I decided to start looking at Bible colleges to become a missionary. I decided to look up both teacher reviews and school reviews of every Christian university in America and prayed for God to send me to the college where I could learn His Word and grow closer to Him. It took nearly three months, but I was finally able to get it down to the top five and made an excel sheet on how much they cost, the classes I would need to take, the mission opportunities they had, and jobs that I could pick up near the school to help pay for tuition. At this point I was doing it all in secret since I wasn’t sure how realistic it would be to leave college when I was one year away from a double Bachelor’s Degree with a starting salary of $125,000/yr. However, the Holy Spirit was really nudging that He wanted me to go to Bible College as soon as possible, so I informed my parents of my plans and my research. At first they just wanted me to finish my degree, but as I continued to speak to them they could see there was life in my eyes. Therefore, they said that if the college I chose had a plan which would allow me to finish my two degrees than they would be okay with it.
I thanked God for opening their hearts and prayed even more that He could open them further to allow me to become a missionary. Since I paid for my own college, I decided that the first year I would find all the classes that would count for both my old degree and a mission’s degree. The reason I didn’t just go straight into a mission’s degree is that I believe it is important to get my parents blessing, and I wanted them to be a part of my growth with God.
Well, after the first semester my parents began to see my dramatic change and started to support me to move my major to theology since they could see how much joy I had in learning about God. They still didn’t want me to go into mission’s, so I once again decided to find all the classes that worked towards my degree in theology and mission’s and pray that God would open their hearts more. By the end of the second semester my mom said that her watching me grow has really changed her and come closer to God herself. She said that while she doesn’t want to lose me, she will not stand in God’s way, but support me in wherever He leads me. Therefore, I was finally able to switch over to Inter-Cultural Studies (Missions) with a clear conscious and run towards God’s path He has set before me. However, when my grandparents found out they were totally against it and wanted me to finish my old degrees so that I could save up a lot of money. However, my growth has also brought my grandma to be in support of the path God has laid before me and loves reading books I give her about Asia. My grandpa was still against it since he wanted me to build up a livelihood with my 4.0 GPA, but there is no amount of money that could replace these last four years I have grown in Christ.
As seen in 2 Corinthians 5:17, I truly do feel like a whole new creation in Christ. While I felt dead and frozen in those years I left my calling from God, these last four years have literally felt like ten years; He has given me more than I could ever ask or imagine as seen in Ephesians 3:20. Proverbs 3:5-6 and Romans 8:28 also shine true for me as I can now understand that there is nothing I could have done in all those years that could have brought me further than God has. My love has transformed from self-centeredness waiting for others to fill me, to Christ-centeredness wanting others to gain this love that fills the void in all our hearts. I can now see that my view of the core was distorted; all people aren’t rotten deep down in their core, but just the opposite, yearning for acceptance and love! I want to be the instrument of God that reaches out and grabs people’s hands that I wanted for all those years.
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