My Story- Part 1:The Spirit of Knowledge

In 1994, I moved to Michigan after having pulled off a massive wedding charade with my inheritance. You see, in reality, I had gotten married in June of 1992. Eight short months after having found my father dead in his lazy boy.  But I was only eighteen and a total people pleaser; I thought for sure my mom would kill me if I told her I was getting married.  So, Paul and I secretly tied the knot at the justice of the peace in Bridgeview, IL. Now with only $400 dollars to our names we were headed to Holland, MI to raise the 3-year-old that Paul had fathered while sowing his wild oats.  Looking back, it’s crazy to see that newly 20-year-old girl in a foreign land surrounded by strangers trying her hardest to triumph amid heartache and uncertainty while completely oblivious of her own pain.   You see…. she was going to change the world.

With a strong sense of social justice and a pretty quick mind, I was confident in my ability to make a significant impact on the world.  After moving, I quickly enrolled at a local university and decided International Business was the way to go.  I had always had a place in my heart for foreigners since my father was a first-generation Greek and both of my parents were entrepreneurs; it was in my blood.  At this point in my spiritual journey, I had come to the conclusion that there must be a God, because I knew that body I found in the lazy boy was only a shell of the human that had owned a huge piece of my heart.  Prior to that I had denounced any belief in a God because if there was One, He was frankly doing a lousy job.  I had heard the Good News that Jesus had died for my sins, but truthfully, I had no conviction of any sin in my life and the people who claimed to be Christians were less moral than I was.

I was juggling a lot of balls in the air at that time: wife, stepmom, full time employee and full-time student. But on New Year’s Eve of 1995, when my best friend told me that she couldn’t continue our relationship because her boyfriend had deemed me a bad influence, I could no longer continue to make sense of things.  This girl, whom I loved, had cut ties with me simply because I suggested that she was not being treated right?  The injustice of it all nearly put me over the edge.  I became completely obsessed with the situation and it consumed my thoughts.  My husband too, was disappointed in me because the guy was his best friend from childhood AND they happened to be born on the same day, so the bond was strong.  And here I was the new wife from a totally different world coming in and wreaking havoc on a long trail of how things were done around there.   I could in good conscience have no part of it.   But what could I do?

Now I realize that it was a Divine set up and I was being prepared.  In May of 1996 I was finishing up a creative writing class where we were reading Dante’s Inferno.  It intrigued me to the point that I wondered if it in fact contained similar knowledge to what would be found in the Bible. Being raised by a Catholic and a Greek Orthodox, I had never really explored the scriptures for myself, but now I was being drawn to open the paperback New Testament that Paul recently picked up at a Promise Keepers event.   That is were I first heard the voice of the Lord Jesus and It was clear.   I was reading the Book like a novel.  I wondered why the first three chapters were basically a repeat.  But then, I came to the book of John and something shifted.  I reached John 3:18-21 and read these words of Jesus:

¹⁸Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. ¹⁹This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. ²¹But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

And that is when it happened.  I heard his voice plain and clear from deep within my being and He said simply, “Nina, that is you.”  And I agreed. 

If you are impatient and want the whole enchilda....here is a video link to my testimony Part 1 and Part 2.