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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I railed against a God who would allow all these bad things to converge on one scrawny girl. I asked to sit out because I didn’t know what I believed. And they let me! No papers for my parents to sign or permission to be granted. The teachers respected me and my needs—I only now realize how amazing that was. They let me sit in the auditorium by myself and read books. Somehow, I gained access to philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I read and I debated with these long-dead men.

Then, my father hit my mother again, and she gathered us up and fled back home to her parents. Their home was only half an hour away, but the distance meant we attended an entirely different school for days, weeks, I can’t recall—I only know that when my father came to bring us home again, I hid on the back porch like a toddler. Of course, they found me, and of course, we went home.

Of course, I returned to that fifth-grade class where I dreaded the idea of going out on that playground and facing those girls who taunted me and made my life miserable on top of misery. One of my most vivid memories is standing at those double doors, my hand on the push bar, with the edges of my vision dimming.

Then. A feeling of peace and comfort and care came over me. While the voice wasn’t audible to anyone else, I heard this presence tell me that He had me, He would take care of me.

In the end, the philosophers couldn’t stand against this love that carried me through—and still does to this day. I have doubted since that day; I have struggled against other hardships, but there is something about God speaking to you that stays.

He is a God who stays when chaos swirls around you. He is a God who loves you when everyone around you makes you doubt you are worthy of love. He is the God who opened that door and gave me the strength to keep going. He can do the same for you.

“What He opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.” (Revelation 3:7 NIV)

Christina Sinisi

Christina Sinisi writes stories about families, both the broken and blessed. A member of American Christian Fiction Writers, her works include a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest and the American Title IV Contest in which she appeared in the top ten in the Romantic Times magazine. Her published books include The Christmas Confusion and Sweet Summer, the first two books in the Summer Creek Series, and Christmas On Ocracoke. By day, she is a psychology professor and lives in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with her husband and two children, and cat, Chessie Mae.

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