My Testimony

Like all the other first-conceived children from certain branches of my family, I was threatened with destruction, but God’s grace allowed me to see the light of day. Days later my believing mother committed me to a life of faith through baptism.

I don’t remember a time when I did not believe and follow God, though, as we shall see, his purifying work has nevertheless been required. I remember praying the Lord’s Prayer in kindergarten at an altar fabricated from turquoise contact paper, brass studs, and a large cardboard box. I loved the stories my mother read from our Bible picture book and could hardly wait to learn to read it for myself.

From the picture book I quickly graduated to the real thing and dedicated myself, at the age of eight or so, to reading the Bible cover to cover. Certain sections after Genesis proved daunting, but I absorbed enough Mosaic law to learn what God requires. I remember focusing on the commandment about false witness—the inducements to murder, adultery, and stealing seemingly trivial to avoid. So I renounced social niceties like smiling when one is not really happy or the evasive reply of, “I’m fine, thank you!” The New Testament perspective on vows bred in me an aversion to making promises, a reluctance that persists to this day.

That era in my spiritual life is also special to me for the way God walked with me. I would pray nightly over what I was reading, “What does this mean?” and God would explain it. Later, I learned to gain direction and insight the same way. This level of intimacy is the standard I have since used to measure my spiritual life.

However, in the same period, the seeds of the significant storms in my life were germinating. It was the touchy age of Vietnam and détente. To my fetal nightmares of being crushed by giants were added the specters of police states and nuclear annihilation. I became convinced I would not live to see my twentieth year. Inspired somewhat by Ecclesiastes, I became quite the cynic and fatalist, and God’s promise of eternal life freed me from the fear of death. When my family broke up in my early teens, however, this blossomed into a deep, seven-year depression. I mistook Death for a friend and flirted with him on several occasions.

A tougher nemesis was the legacy I inherited from the prostitutes and philanderers who were my forbears. I remember sexual content from dreams I was having as early as age six, but this was nothing compared to my family’s return from Pakistan when I was eleven. Provocative advertising was everywhere and my friends from a more innocent time were experimenting with sex. America seemed to me to be the foulest and most promiscuous place on earth. I guiltily withdrew to struggle by myself to remain pure before God.

My preparation for confirmation provided some relief. Fully understanding the mechanism of grace relieved my guilt, but I still had not learned to resist sin to the point of shedding blood. After high school, I finally gave in to the temptation of kissing and making out with a woman. This eventually led to some of the darkest days of my life and the injury and loss of several treasured friends.

One night, I was hiding out in my room from a dorm party, and the depression came to a head. I’d passed the age of nineteen and panicked to see that my life would apparently go on. Over my bed lay a large Igorot spearhead I’d brought back from the Philippines and kept close at hand for just such an occasion. I knew if I got up, I would use it, and I cried before God. My limbs were drained of strength and I could not obey the force dragging me upward. Suddenly, it disappeared, and with it my depression and cynicism. It’s not that my disappointment with myself and the world ended, but the power and bitterness of disappointment had been broken. Later, I realized that the Lord had delivered me from a spirit.

I still keep the knife, sharpened and well oiled. My wife thinks it a terrible memento, but for me it is an object of wonder. I remember how that which threatened my existence was vanquished, and I worship God. It is my nine-inch Goliath’s sword.

I was still at a loss over what to do with myself after college. Having not believed I had a future, I certainly hadn’t thought much about it! At an Intervarsity meeting one evening, members of an inner-city church gave a presentation of their ministry. “If God is working powerfully anywhere,” I reasoned, “it is there, among those most in need.” And I prayed to see him working there first hand.

I had just about given up on hearing back from that church when I received a call. “Go to such-and-such an address on Whipple Street at 7:00 p.m. Wednesday.” Off I innocently went, into a place unlike any I had ever known, and for thirteen years longer than I had planned.

I spent the first year and a half in absolute terror of the violence and a culture I could barely understand. I’d wake up every night counting shots and learning to distinguish the guns by the size of their magazines and the sound they made. Twice people were murdered on the sidewalk in front of my building. I was in several fires, enough in my own building to be blackballed for renter’s insurance. People came to my door with knives and sawed-off shotguns. Some of the people on the other side of my door were recoiling from murder on their hands, cocaine in their heads, and AIDS in their bloodstream.

And everywhere, as promised, God’s hand was at work. In the small group that gathered in our storefront church were those that had been healed of drug addiction immediately, without withdrawal; those that had been redeemed from prostitution and saw their youngest children head off to college; others that were gradually freed of addiction or depression. I saw older women of the church come alongside teenage mothers who now have masters’ degrees and stable homes. Almost all the children graduated from high schools where the majority of students drop out. And not only did God preserve me, but he gave me a caring family to come along side me with teaching, encouragement, and exhortation during my hardest struggles and worst failures.

One Saturday, our pastor invited a nearby Vineyard church to lead a seminar on healing. I’d heard of how television faith healers knocked people about, so I welcomed the opportunity to get a close look at this ministry with people I could trust. After a couple hours of training and prayer, the leader asked if anyone was feeling a manifestation of the Spirit. I was feeling heat in one shoulder, but, not to be fooled by my own imaginings, I turned to a neighbor and asked him, “Put your hands on my shoulders and tell me what you feel.”

“This one’s warm!” he responded with astonishment.

So I reluctantly raised my hand and reported what I was feeling.

“Anyone here have a problem with that shoulder?” asked the leader. A friend of mine indicated that he had dislocated that shoulder during high school football practice. “Go ahead and pray for him as the Spirit leads,” the leader instructed me.

I laid my hand on my friend’s shoulder and prayed until nothing else came. “How does your shoulder feel?” I asked.

“Huh… It’s better,” he answered in surprise, and he started swinging his arm about.

In what was probably the only way possible, God convinced me of the truth of what his Word teaches about the spiritual realm. I was the sort of person who probably would not have believed his own eyes if I had just seen it. Over time, God has been gracious to let me experience at least a little bit of every spiritual gift.

A short time later, my struggle with sexual sin came to a head, and I fathered a daughter out of wedlock. I spent many months under the care and discipline of my church, and God used that time to mature me. Meanwhile, I prayed fervently for my child, knowing she was under a curse. After she was born, her mother and I had quibbled on names for a week when she suggested the name Grace. I knew it was perfect and dedicated my firstborn to the Lord. God’s favor was confirmed when a prophetess spoke many wonderful promises over her the one time she was brought to my church.

Around that time I heard Mahesh Chavda teach on fasting, and immediately I undertook a three day fast. While I was praying at the end, the force of my sexual sin was suddenly and obviously broken. It is taking years to heal all the habits, practices, associations, fantasies, dreams, wounds, strongholds, and lusts, but the thing that had burned in me until I fell was gone. Later, I realized this was a second deliverance.

A couple years later, I was in British Columbia with a friend waiting for a worship conference to start. He spotted an ad in the local Christian paper that featured a Mr. T-like character pointing at the reader and saying something like, “GOD WANTS YOU… to come to our service.”

“It’s tonight. Let’s go!” my friend suggested.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” I responded, nervously realizing that the service was being held in a warehouse on the waterfront. Seemed like a bad place for out-of-towners to wander around late at night.

Well, we ended up going to what turned out to be a divine appointment. In what little down time we had from the worship conference, the pastor of that church, Trevor Macpherson, taught me much about deliverance and the spiritual realm. This sparked an ongoing relationship that we always laugh about, because most of the times God calls us to the fringes of our faith have been when we are in one another’s company.

Once I came into a bit of money. God asked me, “How far would you serve me?”

“Till I reach my last ten dollars,” I boasted. “Only then would I go out and look for a job.” The next day, my heart was grieved, and I prayed for forgiveness for holding out for ten dollars. Thus started a very difficult journey of depending on God for my sustenance while I served him.

And provide he did. I never asked anyone for a cent, but even slight acquaintances would wander up with donations. “Here,” they would say, plainly at the brink of their own faith, “God told me to give this to you.”

A few months later, I spotted a thread in a Christian emailing list about how sinful debt is. “Should a Christian go into debt to serve God?” I asked. No one gave me an answer.

By the time I met my future wife, I was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. That woman of faith stuck with me although there was much to offend her prudence and integrity. Within a few months of being married, my debt had evaporated, along with much of her own. To this day, I marvel at how quickly God caused these mountains to disappear, even though I can cite all the practical measures and generosity of friends and family that led to it.

These are some of the major turning points in my life with my God. There are many more deliverances, prayers, spontaneous songs, prophecies, visions, journeys of faith, redemptions, triumphs, divine appointments, and treasured relationships I don’t often mention, but sometimes speak about if I think it profitable to do so. But what I treasure most is God’s continuing revelation of himself to me.

Once, worried about the poor mating prospect I presented, I asked God, “Will I ever own a house?”

“You build your house in my Word,” came the reply.

I don’t know how successful I have been in following this instruction. Others would be a better witness to that than I. But this I can say: God surpassed in every way and by every measure the little I yielded up to him. To him be the glory. And perhaps, someday, he will grace us with a second home… ;)

—Michael Richter

June, 2001

Des Plaines