From Darkness to Light

I BELIEVE

Kathy Simonini Burke

Came alive in ‘85

I made up the little rhyming jingle to remember the most significant moment in my life. April 4, 1985, around 10 p.m. to be exact. I remember it perfectly because I experienced a “road to Damascus” type of conversion. The experience was so profound I find it difficult to put into words. All I know is that one day I didn’t believe God existed and the next day I knew with every fiber of my being that he did. The reality of that knowledge simply blew me away.

I was once asked, along with a room full of other believers, if any of us had ever doubted our salvation. I was genuinely shocked when every hand went up but mine. Dr. Donald S. Whitney, my pastor at the time, was the one who had asked the question. It wasn’t until I read his book How Can I Be Sure I Am a Christian that I discovered he too found it odd that I didn’t raise my hand. Here’s what Pastor Don wrote.

During an after-church fellowship/theological discussion meeting in our home, a woman admitted, “I just can’t understand how anyone who is born again could ever have doubts about it.”

At first her remark concerned me, but then I understood how she could say this. Presently in her forties, she wasn’t brought to faith in Christ until her late thirties. She had been raised in a ritualistic religious environment, but by the time she finished college she was an atheist. She persisted in denying God’s existence for fifteen years, all the while reading philosophy and psychology in search of answers. When God opened her eyes to the truth of the gospel and brought her to Himself, her mind and life were suddenly turned rightside-up. She was transferred so quickly and clearly from darkness into light, and was so dramatically changed, that she has never had one doubt about her salvation.

Hearing her testimony made me realize that those whose conversion experience is like hers may, like her, have fewer struggles with assurance.That’s the short version of my story of faith. Here’s the longer one.

I was raised as a Catholic and believed all I was taught. I followed my beliefs arduously, thinking it was the one and only true church Jesus founded. From my perspective, I believed the priests and bishops and the hierarchy had the power to declare absolute truth, with authority, about the things of God.

Then I went to college. There, I began to question these absolutes as I saw some serious inconsistencies that had man’s fallible fingerprints all over them. Extremely let down from having been so duped, I walked away from organized religion. However, I did leave an opening in my beliefs for God to exist.

That lasted only a few years. As I continued my studies, what little concept I had left about God were challenged on a regular basis. Between a zoology course that taught that DNA had been created in a test tube or art history courses that showcased the various gods humans worshipped, my thinking changed dramatically.

I concluded that people either worshipped gods out of ignorance or fear, hoping they could appease the gods and escape judgment or death. From my perspective, I decided that God existed only in the creative imaginations of men. (Unbeknown to me at the time, I had stumbled on the truth that many religions or concepts about God do stem from the mind of man rather from his revealed Word. See Colossians 2:8.)

Refusing to fall into the category of fearful or ignorant, I finished college sincerely believing God was a man-made coping mechanism—and one I didn’t need. With this revelation, I freely joined in the 70s revolution.

I lived the life of a heathen with no moral compass for about the next 15 years. I still feared temporal punishment for breaking man’s laws but was not at all concerned about eternal consequences from breaking God’s laws. I had no fear that I would ever answer to a Holy God. He simply did not exist in my world. I was an extremely comfortable atheist.

Everything began to unravel when my youngest brother, Joey, died in a car accident on January 12, 1983, at the age of 18. As an atheist, I’d had no problems with the “dust to dust” part of his death. My problems came when I tried to resolve what had happened to intangible things about him—his sense of humor or his ability to love—things that were immaterial and not part of his physical body. Where were these aspects of my brother? Did they still exist? Were they floating somewhere? If so, where did they float to? Could I connect to them? To Joey again? I had so many questions in my head, and no frame of reference to sort through them.

I did not believe in anything spiritual, metaphysical or supernatural. I was a “show-me-concrete-evidence” skeptic but now I was wondering about such things. I made up my mind to read and ask questions with the goal of finding out what really happens after a person dies. My former pastor Don Whitney had said I read a lot of philosophy and psychology books, which I did, but I also looked at books about ghosts, ESP, psychic phenomena and other unexplainable things as well. I truly was searching high and low for answers to the great mysteries man has questioned since the beginning of time—the search for the meaning of life.

Now comes the cool part. I asked my sister Ellen about God, who was also seeking answers to life’s tough questions. I still didn’t believe God existed but decided to revisit him since I was beginning to suspect that there was a spiritual realm that I couldn’t see. Ellen’s simple suggestion: “If you want to know if God really exists, why don’t you just ask him? If he really exists, he will answer.”

Hmmm, quite a thought-provoking concept. Here I go, I thought, and said to the air, “God, if you truly exist, I would really like to know.” That was it. That was “the prayer” I prayed.

“Ask and I will answer, seek and you shall find.” The minute I asked for the truth from the depths of my soul, God began revealing himself and his Son, Jesus, to me.

Within a year or so as I watched the movie A.D. (about how the Apostles willingly died for Jesus), a light bulb exploded in my head. I got it. I could see the truth about who Jesus was. I knew he was really God. I knew he really came to earth to rescue us from our sins, even though we rejected him.

I had finally found the truth I searched for all my life. God himself revealed it to me with power and conviction. And like the people in 1 Kings 18:39, I saw and worshipped the one true God, “When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, ‘The LORD—He is God! The LORD—He is God!”

Since that moment I believed, I have never once doubted who he is or what he did on that cross for me.