Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: At the Pulpit (11/15/07)
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TITLE: Testimony | Previous Challenge Entry
By John Capune
11/20/07 -
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Drinking the last of my coffee, I slid into a gray suit jacket and quietly closed the bedroom door so as not to wake my sleeping wife.
I stepped into the cold iron-gray dawn; the scent of snow heavy in the swirling wind as I headed for the car. Hard bits of snow struck the windshield with a vengeance as the humming engine began to warm. I was only a few miles down Highway 86, heading toward the First Baptist Church of Black Forest, when the weather turned bad.
As the wipers cleared away the thickening snow, I worried about being late. Slowing down, I began worrying about my testimony--what I was going to say. I passed a police cruiser on the side of the highway, lights ablaze, the officer helping a man from an overturned truck. I began to pray as the words of my testimony played through my head.
My wife and I moved from southern California to Parker Colorado in the winter of 1992. Once here, my wife enrolled me in a creative writing course at the local community college.
It was my dream to become a best-selling author; it was my ambition to write the next great American novel. I penned three books in three years and placed tenth with two of them in a national writer’s contest. By 1995 I realized that I wasn’t going to be the kind of writer that I wanted to be. I wasn’t just failing as a writer; I was failing at life.
In 1996 I got a job as a part-time stringer for the Elbert County News, a weekly rag with a circulation of 3,500. I took the assignments nobody else wanted and was paid a dollar a column inch and ten dollars for every photograph they used. In October of ’98 I was assigned to cover a group of born-again-Christians celebrating a year of worshiping at the local high school.
I wasn’t looking forward to the assignment. I didn’t know anything about religion and who would worship God in a high school cafeteria anyway?
I arrived just before the services, with my tape recorder and camera. I met the pastor, Bobby Dean, a bright young man of great presences and enthusiasm for the Lord. As he spoke to me I was inextricably drawn to him for reasons I did not understand. Later, during praise and worship, I was inextricably drawn to the body of believers for reasons I could not comprehend.
Through the lens of the camera I saw something in the hearts of that body of believers that lit up their faces and was present in the shine of their eyes--something I needed, but did not deserve. When Pastor Dean made his invitation to those who did not know Christ to come forward and receive His grace and forgiveness, I desperately wanted to respond, but my unworthiness held me back--my unworthiness refused to let me go.
When I returned home, later that afternoon, and my wife asked me how it went and I replied “fine” just before closing myself in my office to work on my article. The following day I filed my story and went on with my life.
A year later the paper sent me back to cover the same group of Christians who were now constituting as a church. Again I experienced the strange and inextricable pull; again I experienced the same feelings of unworthiness. When I got home my wife asked me how it went. This time I sat down beside her at the kitchen table. Taking her hands in mine, I asked her to go to church with me the following Sunday. One month later, at the very same table, my wife and I received Christ when a faith team, led by Pastor Dean, came to visit.
The pastor introduced me and I ascended the stage and took my place behind the lectern. I gazed out upon the crowd of 1,500 and felt the Holy Spirit fill my heart as the tension melted away. My eyes teared as I began to speak: “My wife and I moved from southern California to Parker Colorado in the winter of 1992....”
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