I have been intentionally quiet on testimonies for the past year. What happened is that someone who's opinion is important to me told me that I wrote them not to glory God but because of a deep inner need for attention and/or recognition. They thought I got a large sense of my self value out of my testimonies and people's responses to them, instead of getting my sense of value from God.

I did not agree with what they said, it did not ring true to my spirit. I felt my testimonies were a ministry to encourage others... to give them a "target" to shoot for so they could press into the Lord for similar experiences. However, I realized that if someone confronts you with a blind spot, it never does ring true. So I decided to prayerfully test it. I decided to go quite for a while and see how it went. I continued to have a lot of testimony types of experiences, but I simply stopped recording them.

Here is the interesting part. I did not miss recording them at all. I did not feel at all incomplete or bothered by not sharing testimonies with others. However, after about 9 months, I began to get some emails from people asking me why I wasn't sharing testimonies any more. Apparently other people missed them more than I did. Then one day I tried to mentally review an experience I had with the Lord several months before, and I could not remember all of the details clearly anymore. So I wanted to go look it up and read it to clarify in my mind precisely what that experience had been. But I could not because I had never written it up. And I realized that experience was "forever lost," and I felt sadness at that.

Then God began to speak to me that part of what He has appointed me to do was to be a showcase of His glory. (That means I allow Him to glorify His name in my life.) And part of being that "showcase" is to share testimonies of what God is doing. It is not so much for my own sake as it is a tool to encourage and inspire others. However I also benefit from my write-ups, because when I am feeling weary or discouraged, I can go back and read them to remind me of what God has done in my life. God continued to speak to me and gave me the sense that it was time to start writing these testimonies again.

That was shortly before I was to leave for a month-long missions trip to Asia. I met with that person just before I left for Asia and told them that God had been putting it on my heart to begin writing testimonies again, and that I was convinced that these were not some self-gratification ego thing, but a true ministry the Lord has given to me.

So I am going to start sharing personal testimonies again. Some of them will be little day-to-day stuff that God does in my life and some of them will be larger scale things. But I believe that testimony of God's goodness and faithfulness is one of the tools God uses to encourage His body. Rev 19:10 says, "Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."

So I want to worship God by sharing testimonies of His goodness and of His faithfulness. I hope these will be an encouragement to you in your own walk with the Lord. It is my hope that you will look at some of the things God does in my life and say, "God I want that too." And as you being to ask, you will begin to receive, because God wants to take each of us higher and deeper in our walks with Him.