My Christian Walk
Romans 8:38–39
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I was 20 years old, my second year studying Chemical Engineering at UCLA, when these simple verses changed my life. Up to this point, my education was probably the biggest focus in my life. I was used to being the smart one in the class, used to having the answers to all the questions, and life was pretty good. Even after going through non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 15, I’d say I had my life pretty well together. A prestigious degree from a prestigious university…what more could someone ask for? I had started going to church on Sundays with my cousins, not really out of a great interest in God as much as something to do to hang out with my cousins. Yet as I started attending, I couldn’t help but notice there was something more; something more than good grades and admiration from people. The people at church…they had something…it was something real…something I hadn’t experienced before. I got interested in studying the Bible from the intellectual level, there was wisdom and knowledge there that I had never seen. Perhaps I had some glimpses of it occasionally being taken to church by my grandmother as a kid, or going to a week-long bible camp here or there in elementary school, but this was something more…something tangible.
I took advantage of it; joining Bible study groups and asking questions, challenging the teachers, seeking answers, but the more I asked the more my curiosity grew. Was this Jesus person real? Did he really perform miracles? Did he really rise from the dead? Then came the opportunity…a weekend college getaway where we could just focus on learning about the Bible and asking questions about. No shallow, 4th-grade level answers. Instead, real, in-depth discussions. That weekend transformed me. I’ll never forget the theme of the weekend: the power of prayer. We looked at the book of James, and talked about what it meant to make a real prayer of faith; to pray and believe God was going to respond. And as we studied these Bible passages, I realized I didn’t have that faith, but if I prayed for it God would answer and give me the faith. I realized it wasn’t my intellectual doubts getting in my way of true prayer, but rather my own pride. I had a pretty good life going for me; a great career path, admiration from the people around me; I wasn’t interested in giving up my life to follow some God who might send me half-way around the world to serve some random people I never met before. But as I read my Bible that night, I came across Romans 8:38–39, and I realized any plan God had for my life would be a better plan than anything I could come up with on my own, and it was time to face the reality that this God was real and was in control. So in humility, I prayed a simple prayer; “God, give me the faith to make a prayer of faith.”
In that moment, everything changed. It was like a wrecking ball crashed through some unseen wall in my heart, and the very next words I heard was someone in the room behind me reading out loud those very same words in Romans 8:38–39. My life changed coming down from that mountain. My priorities were now about serving this God who rescued me; the God who came down to earth to pay the price for our sins; who died the death of the cross so that we would have eternal life. To top it off, I’ve even found myself traveling to Haiti almost a dozen times, serving the poorest people in the western hemisphere, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. As I find myself counting down my final days at the age of 40 alongside my beautiful wife, dying from a terminal intestinal cancer, I’m grateful that God has blessed me with 20 years of fruitful ministry; decades of opportunities to impact lives, countless relationships to encourage me along the way, and most importantly the knowledge that this salvation Jesus offers can never be taken away. No power of hell, no crafty scheme of any human, can ever take away the perfect gifts of God, and I go home now to a rest that is sweeter than the greatest treasures this world has to offer. I have Heaven, where there will be no more sickness, pain or death, and can spend all my days with my God who loved me to the death.
