At midnight, right before the new millennium, I was all alone. I did not celebrate, but, with a beer in my hand, leaning on a bicycle, at the waterfront in Pula I was looking in the distance. I had no reason to celebrate. My studies got stuck, I had no job, and no money, and, what hurt me the most – I was without “the love of my life”. I was a total atheist, but I looked up to the sky (literally) and prayed to God in that freezing cold weather, briefly and clearly: “God, if you exist – help me”.
I did not have to wait for a long time. In two weeks I got a chance to finish my studies in Zagreb and finally face myself, after such a long period of wandering around. In the meantime, I forgot about that prayer, but God didn’t. It wasn’t easy to study again, but I decided to graduate until summer. It seemed that it was enough to keep away from girls.
As though to spite me, Tomislav kept on insisting that I should meet his best friend, a girl who “had met Jesus”. I had always liked to provoke believers, but I could not do so at that time. That girl had really experienced something, and I was left speechless. Listening to her experiences with God that evening, I experienced something unusual – as though something as gentle as a feather slowly descended upon me and then it stayed in me. It was faith. The following days I was not the same. I could not swear – that was the first thing I noticed and it was strange. I would feel embarrassed when such a word would slip my tongue. That girl gave me a New Testament and said that it contains everything I needed to know, and I thought: “OK, I have never read it, so it is about the time I do so. “ Second miracle: I never let it out of my hands. I would fall asleep with it, wake up with it, and read it again and again and…believed. I was surprised to find myself believing in everything that was written in it, and stories in it were so powerful that I had an impression that I’m more in Capernaum or Jerusalem, then in Zagreb. I talked about my experiences, and the girl become suspicious, thinking I am flirting with her. I prayed for my exams, but this wasn’t going smoothly, because there were no questions from the New Testament, but only boring law stuff. Summer was approaching. My mother in Pula was very angry and I started to panic. Oh, God, why don’t you help me! I received an answer very soon from one lady who prayed for me and heard the following thing from God: “Study and you will graduate on the 15th of November.” That seemed too good to be true. The lady also said to me that God had told her that I would not believe, but if I started studying – that is what is going to happen and I would soon be telling others about it. OK, I thought, I have nothing to lose. I passed my last three exams in really mystical circumstances. Students around me were failing one by one, and I was getting low grades for minimal knowledge, which meant that I passed. In the meantime, I told my mother about the girl, her experiences with Jesus (mine were still very few), and my mother repented and was born again. I graduated on the prophesized day and nobody was happier than me! My walk with God had only started.
Today, when I remember it all seems so distant and simple, but that was not the case. There was a battle between my old nature and the Holy Spirit going on inside me from day to day. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit was winning. My friends and relatives thought that it is again something that I would hold on to for some time, but they realized that was not the case. God always wanted me to trust his promises, which was not the case even after I graduated. I am still learning this today. I was blessed by the fact that few of my colleagues from my first job came to Christ, despite my clumsy aggressiveness in testifying. At the beginning I did not go to any church, because I was always quite individualistic, but God persuaded me to start serving others, and not only myself. Finally, it took a lot of faith to wait for the woman of my life, the girl from the beginning of my story.
God truly wants us to seek Him, to trust Him, and not only with our words. Although I had always been trying to find something, knowing that “there is something” – I did not meet Jesus till then, and not one person who did. Religious people never made an impression on me, because they had nothing but form, ritual and conceited sense of self-importance. Faith I received from God is not religion. Faith is alive, and it changes a person from within, and this cannot be hidden. Through receiving a faith from God, in God, I have also received everything else with it – life blessed in peace, love and harmony, life which is never boring. In God I have also received many sincere friends, brothers and sisters. I am not perfect, but I want to be led by Him in all I do, and that is exactly what He is doing.
Life in Christ is a parallel reality which is hard to describe by words, because when a person experiences “new birth” he/she is transferred to the God’s side, where all things look very different, I would like for everyone to cross that border, but people are often bound by fear that they might lose something or somebody valuable to them, something or somebody they feel attached to. Fortunately, I cried out to God, feeling even then that there are very few valuable things in life – without Him.
