Coming back to Christ

---By Sarah Wang, 2021/05/24

Hi, my name is Sarah Wang and I currently live in Edmonton. I used to attend the Church in Montreal about 10 years ago, when I did my undergraduate studies there - since then I have moved to several other cities to pursue further studies.

This pandemic has been very difficult, but I had really appreciated this past year as a time that God called me back to Him. When I left Montreal, I thought I had a pretty good start of a relationship with God. However, over the next 9 years, I became very busy with my work and my studies as I went through medical school and residency training. I was so focused on building my career that I did not even realize how far I had drifted from God. It really took a global pandemic for me to hear God calling me! How amazing it is, that He can really use any circumstance, even in the least expected times, to work in us!

With the pandemic, I had a lot less distractions like social visits and travelling that used to take up my free time. My plans to study abroad next year also got halted, and my visits to potential job locations got cancelled. Instead, I had more opportunities to come to the Lord, especially through the Zoom meetings. Over the year, I was able to attend many prayer meetings, Lord's day, fellowship, and now Bible classes, more than I ever did before. I was encouraged to write down my testimonies, fellowship, engage in sharing, and really give God my priority in the midst of my busy schedule. The pandemic seemed to have stopped everything I wanted to do for my career, and allowed me to re-direct that focus on God. I am still not perfect at this, but I know God is helping me along the way.

Now that a year has passed, I am still often unsure what to do next. I don't know if I can hear God clearly when I pray about human needs such as what to do with my job search, where I should live, or spiritual needs, like how to grow even more, how to serve. As I am going through Abraham's life in Bible Class, I see that the relationship Abraham had with God was also not built in one day, or a year, or a few years. It was over many, many years, through following the Lord, and building altars where-ever God led him. I am very encouraged by this. In days when I feel like I have not made progress, I remind myself to just keep building the altars - ex writing down how God responded to my prayers, praising Him, repenting, and spending time in the Word.

Sometimes I wonder what took so long for God to speak to me again (maybe He did I didn't hear). In Genesis, God did not appear to Abraham for 13 years after the birth of Ishmael. We discussed in class that maybe this is to allow his "natural strengths" to disappear - ex. they relied on themselves to devise a plan for Abraham to conceive a child with Hagar. And maybe this is what I needed too - a period of time for molding so I no longer rely on my own abilities, my own successes, my own ambitions to define my life; and this definitely takes a long time (9 years!). But I am very encouraged that God is still working in me even after all this time, and I pray I continue to get rid of more of me, and gain more of Him.