HOW GOD HAS WORKED IN MY LIFE By Christina Sinisi I have shared the testimony of how I came to accept Christ to very few and many at the same time. In my day job, I am a psychology professor at Charleston Southern University, a Baptist-affiliated university in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the courses I teach is Psychology of Religion. As part of the course, I ask students to choose among many journal topics and sometimes share deeply personal stories with me. To be fair, I share my story on the first day of class. At the same time, I soften parts of the story.
My first memory of church is being at Zion Hill Baptist and some other kids teased my youngest sister, calling her names, partially because we babied her and called her by a nickname ourselves. My mother got angry, and we never went back to that church. From there, we attended a Pentecostal church. The service was too different, and we were uncomfortable. Then, some neighbors invited us to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ meeting. After several years, my mother recognized that she didn’t agree with all their beliefs and again we left.
Lately, I have been convicted that hiding the hard parts prevents the listener from knowing just how wonderful our Savior God has been in my life. I have done so to protect my family and maybe myself. I have left out parts of the story perhaps because I was a coward or maybe because I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. Finally, I do so because I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable or burdened. But God deserves the credit.
Thrown into all this chaos was my young self. I was of above-average intelligence and loved to read, and no one knows where those characteristics came from, even though my sisters are more like me than not. Friends have argued that I was dropped into the nest by accident. Not that I am bragging, since those characteristics made everything worse. The other children in my backwoods elementary bullied me to the point of knocking me down on the asphalt playground and dislodging a tooth.
My earliest childhood memory is my father beating my sister and me because we hadn’t cleaned our plates. I don’t remember what the food was or why neither of us ate it or if the real problem was something else entirely, but I was four years old and that’s what I remember. An endless string of similar memories color the rest of my childhood, but it wasn’t just us kids. My father hit my mother. His mother hit my mother. They all hit us. My parents fought and broke up, got back together again, in the rich tradition of abusive relationships. 74 | M AG A Z I N E N A M E PAGE 3 23
All the above coalesced in a fifth-grade Bible class. Our public school in the 1970s hosted Mrs. Caldwell. She drove around the county teaching at all the elementary schools at an academic level—with maps and details. Looking back, I wish I could go back and undo what I did, but then again, I wouldn’t be who I am.
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