I BELIEVE!
Through Many Toils and Snares Dyanne Martin
I came to the Lord late in life at the age of twenty-five. I was raised as a nominal Anglican in Jamaica, and my paternal grandmother made sure I attended church as a child, but when my family moved to the United States, church fell by the wayside. My grandmother had given me a beautiful picture Bible, and my mother claims that even as a very young child I read voraciously; however, I did not like that particular book because the pictures frightened me. I think the rather zealous and macabre illustrator forgot that his audience included small children. As a teenager, I tried several times to read the tiny, pocket-sized New Testament my grandmother had given me, but the thees and thous were off-putting to a young girl more interested in mastering the nuances of a foreign culture and in “fitting in” with her new peers. Even so, God was calling— speaking quietly into my life through various people and in subtle ways. I always believed in God, but I did not know God. I did not know one could know God personally. But in my mid-twenties, I began dating a man who gave me a study Bible and several apologetics books. As I read one particular text alongside the Gospel of John, I became piercingly aware of my sin and my need for a Savior. Mid-page, I lifted my eyes and my heart to heaven and prayed, “Lord, I don’t know what this all means, but I want to know. Please show me.” And he did. I learned that Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross enabled me to have a personal relationship with God and delivered me from the eternal consequences of my sin. I also learned that this gift was by grace alone and not through efforts of my own—a difficult lesson for someone who was accustomed to performance-based acceptance. God transformed the spark in my soul to a firestorm and filled me with an insatiable hunger for his word and for sound teaching. The way in which I regarded death changed almost immediately. Before I accepted Christ, I harbored an unnatural fear of my mortality, even wishing I had never been born so that I would not have to die. I searched for meaning and purpose in books about reincarnation and the power of love. The feel-good nature of these books eschewed the idea of an Absolute Truth or of moral accountability while promoting universal oneness through love. They were comforting, yet something kept niggling at my soul. I was, as the song goes, searching for God “in all the wrong
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places.” At dinner one night, I shared my enthusiasm about the New Age books with my then-boyfriend. He countered my statements and challenged me to read a Bible. I responded, “Why? It was written by fallible people. Why should I trust it?” He asked how I could possibly argue against something I had never even bothered to read. So, I read. And in my quest to prove him wrong, God proved me wrong. In that proving, God brought the light of his love and expelled my fear of death. The surety of what comes next now fills me with peace: I may not know how I am going, but I know where I am going. The next six years entailed severe trials and hardships because of my relationship with the man who had given me the Bible. We married, but his ongoing abuse and adultery made the relationship impossible. When the marriage dissolved, I thought I would never recover from the pain of divorce, but God used that suffering to build my faith. I devoured the Bible. I attended church faithfully and used my experience as a professional dancer and choreographer to start a worship dance ministry for the youth. I bought almost every sermon I heard on the local Christian radio station because I could not get enough of God’s truth. I memorized Scripture and hid it deep in my heart, where the Lord knew it needed to be for the trials that loomed ahead. Many years later, my second husband died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive heart attack three months after our ten-year anniversary. The pain I felt throughout my divorce was but a grain of sand compared to the vast, gritty desert of sudden, unexpected widowhood. In addition to the icy shock of my husband’s death, confusion and fear threatened to heave me off the edge of the cliff to which I was so desperately clinging. A selfmade businessman, my late husband had no life insurance and
