Receiving God's Love

By Esther Manogin

FROM THE ARCHIVES PART 5: WINTER 2007

I was raised with a Christian upbringing. My dad was a Baptist pastor and my mom was a praying woman. I went to church regularly and remember being baptized in the Mississippi river as a young girl. If you had asked me if I was a Christian I would have said yes. I thought I was okay because I tried to be a good person and did the best I could. One time my sister, who we regarded as a Christian zealot, put a Bible in my car with this note: “May the Lord become real to you, is my prayer.” I got so mad at her for doing that because, as far as I was concerned, the Lord was real to me. Yet, it wasn’t until I was 37 years old that he actually did become real to me in a way that totally changed my life. Prior to this, I just didn’t understand what it really meant to be saved and to have a personal relationship with God. It wasn’t until I reached a breaking point in my life, that was brought on by too much stress in my job that I finally understood.

As the director of student financial aid and scholarships at Louisiana State University, I was the one primarily responsible for switching all our records to computers. I was working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week and I was exhausted. My home life was in trouble and I was totally miserable. One morning after pulling an all nighter at my office, I ran into a friend of mine at the coffee shop. He could tell how stressed out I was and asked me if I’d be willing to talk to a friend of his who might be able to help me. That friend was his pastor and, after he listened to me for a while, he began to talk to me about the grace and love of God in a way that made sense to me. For the first time ever, I realized that it wasn’t about how hard I worked or what a good person I tried to be, but that it was simply receiving in faith what Jesus Christ did for me when he died on the cross for my sins. What a tremendous sense of release, relief and peace I had as I surrendered to this love. Now that I’ve come to appreciate what it really means to be a Christian, I understand what it means to not understand, so I have great patience and understanding for those who don’t.