I think by and large the Lord has been very good to me.
When my mom died I was fostered by her immediate elder sister and in the
home that I then spent the next five years or so, there were brothers and
sisters in the African sense who were already in that home, and they took us in, my two sisters and myself. That became really the family for the next five years or so.
Trying Times
We were provided for at a time when dad had literally become an alcoholic. Because when my mom died we were taken away from him. He basically
lost children and wife literally at the same stroke. So he clearly struggled to
deal with that. But in the meantime we were going through our teenage years
so we were with a foster father and a foster mother looking after us through those years, so I’m definitely grateful to God for that, until we went back to Dad’s home. One by one, as we were going to university, because Dad’s home was across the road from the main university in Zambia at that time. So God graciously took us through those years and then as each one of us came to Dad’s home we were then coming to university and getting saved at about that same period.
The mark of a Christian
But it wasn’t until my elder sister became a Christian in September 1978
that I observed a change that said to me that if she’s a Christian, I’m not. I
think it was it was very, very clear. The way it came out was that a few years prior to that my mom had died, and the situation in the home became fairly miserable.
I observed a change that said to me that if she’s a Christian, I’m not
When my elder sister became a Christian she was buoyant in the
midst of all those trials. She was singing Amazing Grace how sweet
the sound with joy in her heart when I was intensely miserable. And so I
realised there was something she had found that I hadn’t and I needed to
search for it.
Learning to Trust in Jesus
Thankfully in December 1978 a friend of mine wrote me an evangelistic letter in which he pointed beyond religion, beyond going to church. He pointed to repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So I realised at that point that that’s where the difference was. It took another three months so that was now March 1979 for me to give up on trying and begin trusting.
give up on trying and begin trusting
And so on that day I knelt down by my bedside and asked the Lord Jesus Christ to save me. I’d come to the end of myself and I really needed Him. And sure enough, He did.
