Ralph & Vickie Green

by Sis. Vickie Green

Hi! My name is Vickie Green and I would like to share with you my testimony of how I came to the Lord.

It was a beautiful Easter Sunday morning and my sister had asked me to attend church with her. I thought “well, I’ve tried everything else, and nothing has worked, so why not God.” I carefully picked out the best dress that I had. It was very stylish, a green and brown mini-skirt. I only weighed about a hundred pounds so I could look good in just about anything. As I put the finishing touches to my perfect make-up, the door bell rang. It was my sister and off we went.

To my surprise, she parked in a bank parking lot. I helped her with her two children and we crossed the street to a building that didn’t look much like a church. There in front of it set a yellow school bus. I barely noticed the driver, but later found out that as he watched me crossing the street he said in his heart, “Now God, she would make a beautiful Pentecostal wife for someone.”

I want to note here that as a teenager growing up I had a mom that went to one of those “not so normal” churches. All of us admired her commitment and dedication but knew something was not right. There was no “true love” there and believe me, children, teenagers and grown-ups, they all know the love that they’re looking for. Anyway, I went in to this not so traditional church and as I listened to what the preacher said, something stirred in my heart. There was an awakening…a question that formed itself within me, “Could this Jesus really love me?” Every week that I went back, that hunger grew into a love, but the question grew too… “could He love me? Could He love the person that I am right now?”

I was hooked on cigarettes, liked to party and liked the way men looked at me. But there was an emptiness in me…I had no self esteem, I thought I was a looser and someone that God would never love…too dirty for such a perfect God. Everytime that I went to services though, something would pull on my heart strings and I felt a craving so intense that one night when the preacher said “If anyone wants this Holy Ghost experience, come down to the front,” I did.

There I met the One who filled my longing. Some people thought I had lost my mind and sometimes I thought I had, but I kept going back to services. It was about this time that a certain brother in the church approached me on my way out of the church and as he shook my hand he said, “The Lord said that I’m going to marry you!” I thought to myself, “I’ve just gotten rid of all the ‘stuff’ with men in my heart and life and now here’s this guy telling me that I’m going to marry him!” I didn’t know him very well, but now I was certain that they let crazy people come to this church. As I looked into his eyes, my response to this lunatic was “you’re crazy!!” And of all the nerve, he just smiled, which made me think I was right…he was a nut case.

Apparently, God had let him see something in me that I didn’t because today, some thirty yearts later, he has never given up on me….and God hasn’t either. We have one of the strongest marriages, and greatest love for one another that I have ever known. The question in my heart, “could this Jesus love me?” has been answered again and again, every day of my life…. “Yes…Completely!!!!”