Finally, the day arrived for my Cursillo. My entry wasn’t as smooth as Dan’s. A certain woman wrote hateful letters to the Chairwoman about me, and therefore, the group rejected my application. My new friends at church strenuously intervened, and at the last minute, they moved another bed into the dormitory so I could attend. One of the earmarks of Cursillo is that the graduates send piles of loving, encouraging cards to the attendees, and the cards delivered literally make mounds on the beds. Well, this woman also sent me hateful cards. When I showed them to my table leader, I burst into tears, and the team apologized profusely for distrusting me, and they withheld her cards for the rest of the weekend. Emotionally, I was a wreck. The talks, given by members of the team describing horrific life events and what Jesus did for them to heal the events, made us all cry. We wanted that. But at the marriage talk on Saturday morning, where I watched a husband and wife kissing between sentences and relating how Jesus put their marriage back together, I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six hours, and during rest period in the afternoon the whole team came to me. I was too ashamed to tell them the story, so they just held me and prayed. Suddenly, I had clarity. Homosexuality did not ruin my marriage. The truth came like a bolt of lightning—Dan never committed himself to me. The words of our wedding ceremony were just words as nothing ever happened in his heart. Commitment is what makes two people one. The vows people make before God are commitments, and God rejects empty words. He knows the heart, and out of the heart flow the issues of life. Our marriage was not of His making as there was nothing on Dan’s part with which to make us one.
After Cursillo, my church held a dinner to celebrate the graduates of both weekends. It was lively and fun, but seething underneath, my rage boiled about my marriage. We got home, Dan walked the babysitter to her house, and came back expecting me to lavish him with love like he had done. But I sat him down and gave him an ultimatum. He had two weeks to decide if he would commit himself to me or not. If not, we would divorce. Highly offended, he accused me of getting nothing out of the weekend. I told him I’d already been born again at church before Cursillo. Because I was angry, he didn’t believe me. He considered the way he found the Lord to be the only way someone could get born again. Though I railed at his accusation, none of this talk altered the fact that I firmly focused on his commitment to me. What’s more, I wasn’t so sure about his salvation! I didn’t see any changes in him. His first night love-making did not have a repeat performance. He didn’t communicate with me any better than before, or with the children. He walked around the house all absorbed in himself. Now, thirty-four years later, I know that no two people have the same experience being born again. For fifteen years I had a radio ministry, starting with one station and ending up with one-hundred-and-seven stations scattered over the world. I took people’s testimonies of how they received Jesus as Lord, or how they received any of His gifts, like healing, and I made them into short stories. Then I hired people to dramatize these stories on the radio. To do this I had to ask people wherever I went to tell me their testimony. I must have interviewed thousands of people, and I never heard the same story twice! Everyone with a true conversion story understood that it would be impossible to be born again a second time. It would mean sending Jesus through that horrible death a second or hundredth time. There’s a popular teaching that you must be born again every day, but the Bible clearly refutes that. What a Christian does daily, if they submit themselves, is to further their sanctification. We work at becoming the image of our Lord Jesus Christ. But back to my story, the strangest thing happened. That other entity that now also occupied my body drew me into a deeper and deeper relationship with the Lord, and I became happier and happier. In fact, emotionally, I climbed into a strata I had never known in my entire life. I was thoroughly in love. I loved God with an indescribable passion. I sang to Him all day long. I’d fall asleep with a spiritual song—meaning one I must have made up, or this other entity sang it through me—surging through my body from the top of my head to the ends of my toes. I’d wake up in the morning with this same song on my lips. A sense of security settled in my soul. No matter what happened, I did not become disturbed. I knew God had my life in His hand, and He would take care of whatever circumstance arose. And He always did. So when Dan came to me after two weeks and said he didn’t think he could commit himself to me, I shrugged it off. I didn’t care anymore. Whatever would happen in the future, Jesus and I would do it together as He was my real husband.
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Marty
Delmon Writer
Evangelist Teacher Writing has been in my blood, so to speak, but when I surren-dered my life to Jesus Christ and He told me to write, all my trepidations rolled away and I began in earnest! After all, if God Almighty says it was His idea that I be a writer, who am I to stand in His way? My hope is that you not only like what I write, but that your life is moved by it, and that your party to Jesus and with Jesus turns your life into days of Heaven on Earth.
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