The Day I Got Saved

By Emmet L.

One Saturday morning 2 neatly dressed guys called to my door. This was strange, as no-one in my area dressed in shirt & tie on Saturday morning. They wanted to know if I had ever thought about what happens after I die. This was it! My chance to show these Bible bashers a thing or two. I mean, I am a smart guy, and some would call me an intellectual. After all I had read philosophy and discussed the universe into the wee hours in college. I knew stuff. These guys were brain washed. I let them start. And it was downhill for me from there.

The Bible is the word of God, they said. Yea, but it was written hundreds of years after Jesus died, I replied. Who says? Well, my friends. Did they read the Bible? No. Did I? No. So how do you know? The Bible was a parable, a metaphor for less educated people, I said. Do you mean that God doesn’t tell the truth?, they said.

This went on for a while, and I found myself deeper and deeper in trouble. All my ideas about God, the after life, and the Bible were a mish-mash of ideas and beliefs I had heard over the years. None of them had come from the Bible. I mean I knew I was a sinner, everyone is (my father had always said “There wasn’t a sinner there” to imply that there was no-one there), but I thought my good deeds would out-weigh my sins in the end. I thought that I would pay-off any debt in purgatory. God never said that. People said that.

Over and over again (yet for the first time) I saw passages in the Bible that said if you believe Jesus paid for your sins, then you would have everlasting life. It wasn’t a single cryptic reference, it was all over the place! How had I never seen it before? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Then I remembered all the people I had turned away from my door on previous occasions. Someone had really wanted to get through to me. I invited the guys in, and we read some more. After a while, they asked if I was ready to ask Jesus to save me, I said “Yes” (… at last).