My Life. My Journey. Accepting Christ

I came to know Christ when I was eight years old. Neither of my parents were Christians; my grandma and granddad (on my mom’s side) had just become Christians and were attending a church in Toronto. On March 18, 1985, I was invited to a play called Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames. The play portrayed the lives of different people, and at the end of each scene, the people would tragically die and appear at the gates of Heaven. Based on whether or not they knew Christ, they were either taken into Heaven, or sent to Hell. 

One particular scene really struck me. A mother would drop her child off to Sunday school every week, yet said that church was “not for her”. The child would always ask her mom to go to church, but her mom always declined. One day, they were both tragically killed in a car accident. In the next scene, you see them at the gates of Heaven. Jesus takes the child’s hand and walks her through the gate into Heaven, while the mother is taken into Hell. At the end of the play, I walked up the aisle and accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. At the same time, my mother walked up the aisle and accepted Christ with me. 

A non-Christian might look at my testimony and think that I made my decision based on the fact that I didn’t want to go to Hell, but it was actually quite the contrary. The simple reality that I could be with Jesus when I die set my course up the aisle that day. I already had a strong sense of good and evil in the world; this “call to believe in Christ” simply reinforced what I was feeling. It would be years later before I really understood the decision that I made, but this set the precedent for my life ahead.