Isaiah 12:5 Sing to the LORD, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world.
We arrived at the Christian Camp on Sunday that was held in Georgia. Donna was from North Carolina and I was from Michigan. We met and were engaged on Monday (see Devotionals for past 2 days). But the best was still to come. The Lord had something scheduled for Donna on Tuesday afternoon that would change her forever.
Donna’s attendance at the camp was a last minute occurrence, just like it was for me. She was invited by a college classmate to go with her to a “dumb old Christian camp” that her folks were making her go to. The friend’s parents would pay her way to come. Donna, on the other hand, was excited to come to the camp because God had been wooing her to Himself.
Donna had spent the previous two school years at St. Mary’s in Raleigh, NC- a private Episcopal Girl’s School. She was there for her senior year of high school and her freshman year of college. At St. Mary’s she found herself attracted by the Church’s Liturgy and enjoyed being an altar girl. Both the morning service and Evening Prayers on Sunday were important to her. She thought the sense of peace and the beauty of the services that she experienced there was as close as she could get to God.
Donna’s honest answer to my question regarding whether she was saved, revealed the fact that she was still in the process of being drawn to God. In her short time at the camp she was already a bit confused by the way people talked about Jesus. They spoke of Him as though He was actually there with them. Donna believed in God but thought of Him as an ethereal being up there somewhere. When she asked people why they spoke of Jesus in this way, they just smiled and said that she would find out, which did little to help. Little did she know the miraculous vision that God would give her in order to reveal the Truth to her.
The following afternoon after we met and were engaged, Donna was in the little chapel for a meeting. After the teaching, people were being prayed for to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to become more effective Christians. When she was prayed for, nothing happened to her as it had for the others in the room. She was sitting in the front row of this small chapel and was too embarrassed to get up and walk out so she just sat there. There was an empty life-size wooden cross hanging on the wall in the front of the chapel and as she sat there looking at it, God gave her a vision.
She saw Jesus nailed to the cross—so clearly that she felt that if she could have stood, she could have touched him! As she looked on, she noticed blood dripping from His hands and feet. Suddenly it was personally real to her that Jesus had died for her! She began to weep and couldn’t stop as she realized that Jesus had loved her enough to die for her, not just “the world” but her, personally. Later she recalled experiencing the feeling of being in a waterfall, only the waterfall was inside her rather than outside her. Afterwards she says she felt scrubbed clean on the inside. Nothing was the same again. She was a different person. Though she couldn’t articulate it clearly, she knew it was true!