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| me at the age of 16 in San Diego with my choir. |
My
Testimony
In 1972 when I was nine years old, I attended church
camp for a week in New Hampshire. After a week of fun and teaching, the week
culminated with a bonfire on the lake-front beach. As I watched the sparks being sucked into the
dark sky, I listened intently to the speaker who said something that
electrified me. He said “Just as being
born in a garage does not make you a car, so too does being born of Christian
parents not make you a Christian.” This
was something I never had considered so when the pastor gave the invitation at the
end of the service, I raised my hand and made Jesus my Savior.
I grew in the faith and in high school during my
Junior and Senior years I was the president of a youth group of about 50
teens. Everyone thought I was a paragon
of virtue—and I thought so too. However,
there were areas of my life that I had not surrendered to the Lord and, as a
result, there were strongholds of sin in my life.
I ended up breaking up with my pastor-in-training
boyfriend and went off to a liberal women’s college where there were no active
churches in the area for me to attend.
Soon the Lord was only a distant thought…
Then disaster struck. I became clinically depressed….so depressed I
could not even draw a breath, and indeed, I desperately wanted to stop
breathing. Soon, the idea of seeking my
own death became an obsession. I prayed
to God for help but was so far from him I no longer was really on speaking
terms to my only possible source of help.
Long story short, I attempted suicide and
failed…then followed many years of mental illness: a diagnosis of schizophrenia
and depression. I bounced from hospital
to hospital becoming more and more ill.
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| me at approximately 21 years old |
I had moved to CT after my Sophomore year of college after having taken
some years off due to my illness. In CT,
things went from bad to worse and eventually, after a 6-month hospital stay, I
was sent back to NY where my parents lived.
The pastor of my old church, where my parents were still active,
befriended me and really was instrumental in opening the doors for me to once
more learn what it meant to walk with God.
However, that didn’t happen right away.
During one of my hospital stays, I met a young man,
a drummer--a Jewish man who did not share my faith. After time, after we dated a while, he asked
me to marry him. I struggled with the Lord. I knew that it is forbidden in
Scripture to be “unequally yoked” with an unbeliever. Yet, once again, I
stuffed God into a closet and agreed to marry him.
Then followed some hard years of a rocky
marriage…but there was a bright spot: once more, I found my Lord, patiently
waiting for me to get a clue, and once more--or maybe really for the first time--I turned my life over to God. I ended up
being the unlikely leader of a women’s Bible study in my church and God blessed
that venture.
However, in 2000, I contracted a terrible case of
fungal pneumonia which left me with severe asthma. I was in the hospital sometimes for a month
at a time. And I was treated
aggressively with IV steroids…which finally destroyed my muscles (a condition
called Steroid Myopathy). I ended up in a wheelchair and was told, after 3
months of inpatient rehab, that I would never walk again. But the Lord had
other plans and after about 2 years of PT, I finally walked.
And it was during that time of rehabilitation that I
really got serious with God. I fasted
for 15 days, only eating a few bites for dinner each day…and I studied my Bible
and read and read and prayed and prayed, and God took the blinders off my eyes
and unstopped my ears and I dove deep into his goodness.
Since that time, there has been more mental illness
and another trek away from God, although not as severe. But in the end, I came back to the Lord as
that prodigal sheep that Jesus had to keep going after and rescuing. I realized that my life is not my own to
take…and I finally after 40+ years got serious about dealing with some patterns
of sin that had lingered for all those years in one form or another. And in the case of some sins, even though I
had ceased practicing the sin, I was still in bondage to it, never having asked
God for forgiveness and repented. In
fact, God took me on a journey lasting several years, where one by one he
brought old and current sins to light so that I could confess them and be
cleansed. I do believe that he allowed me to live--not to die by suicide or illness, for the purpose of allowing me to confess and be cleansed of my sins.
I have come to understand that, sometimes, although
we are God’s children, there are ebbs and tides and as we age, we grow in
understanding, we grow in godliness, and we see—to a greater and greater
degree—our absolute sinfulness and need for a new touch from God. The Christians we are at 10 years old, are very
unlike the believers we are at 50. And
this is as it should be. All life must
grow or it ceases to be life.
Cynthia Lott Vogel
4/16/19
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| me, back in NY once more. Very Ill and very anorexic |
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| Me and Mandy |
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