If you have read my many posts on this forum you have already read a number of my testimonies, but since you raise the idea this is about what happened back quite a few years ago... Please note that if it were only for you, I might remain silent, but others reading it here might be edified:
My wife and I met in a bar in 1971 when we were both at best nominal Catholics. We moved forward quickly to marriage in 1972 and by 1976 we had two young toddlers, a boy the elder [born 1973] and a girl [born 1974].
We needed something, but were unable to find it and as a result our marriage was coming to an end. We had lasted as long as we had for the sake of the children, but that was no longer enough, but we would try one more time... in our own way... to fix it.
Back in 1974 with a little boy, and our daughter nearly due, we moved into an apartment in Sunnyvale CA at the same time as a younger black family. They already had three children and the wife was also pregnant expecting their 4th. They were moving in upstairs while we were moving in downstairs immediately below them. They were the most sincere Christians I had ever known besides my paternal grandmother. They befriended us and helped us many times financially and otherwise over those few months we lived there as neighbors. Their continuous witness to us was their lives, but we really were not buying it, not yet. In November of 1974. the U.S. Government called me to work. From construction labor, and limousine driver, and taxi cab driver in the San Francisco Bay Area, I went all of a sudden to an employee of the Social Security Administration. My income doubled and we thought we were on the way to easy street with all of our troubles behind us. Not quite!
My job was to start in San Francisco which was about 50 miles north of our home in Sunnyvale. My wife’s doctor would not release her to move until after the baby was born so I rode a commuter train to work for a while. When we could we moved in closer to where my job was going finally be, in Richmond, CA on the east side of the Bay across from San Francisco. This was the scene when our rocky marriage was just about to break and we knew it. We had kept in touch with our friends in Sunnyvale who had always been there to help us in times of need.
Our solution to the marriage problem was to go off alone together for a couple of days. Without hesitation we called that mother of four to ask her to babysit our two little ones so we could go. She immediately agreed and so we gathered our youngsters and their stuff in the car and proceeded to drive the nearly 60 miles to Sunnyvale.
As we were driving toward Sunnyvale one of the things we discussed was the Christianity of our Sunnyvale friends. They were tea-totaling friends who allowed us to take advantage of them repeatedly because that was part of how they served God. They were always ready to help us as they were doing now. We had regularly laughed at them behind their backs while we guzzled our beer and lived our lives our way... and our way was failing so very badly. [The doubled income had not solved our problems.]
One of us, [to this day, neither of us remembers which] recalled that while they had never pressed it, they had invited us to attend a church service with them. Once the subject was brought up we decided we would ask if the invitation was still open. Maybe that would help us resolve our problems.
We arrived at the apartment and the wife, Rosalee, invited us in... We sat down at her small kitchen table and immediately we mentioned our decision to ask about attending a church service with them. She was delighted with our suggestion and she called her husband, Charles, at work about it.
It was a Monday. I remember it was a Monday because almost no one anywhere had or has regularly scheduled church services on Monday. Her husband called back after a bit and advised he had found a church in the greater San Jose area with a Monday evening service and asked if we would we like to go with them that night. We went and thus it began. God had entered the picture for us and has not left since.
There were no great revelations or transformations that first night in a church service together but our relationship with our old friends changed. Now living 60 miles apart we began to ask questions of our Sunnyvale friends, questions we had never asked before, about God and the Bible and the Holy Ghost as our interest flared. Regular visits with them to discuss the things of God began.
They helped us find a church affiliated with their own in our area. That church was having revival meetings 7 days a week when we began to attend. On January 15, 1976 my wife and I went up front separately when the lady preacher asked if anyone wanted to come forward and be prayed for. Someone close to us watched our children who were asleep on the floor and both of us repented that night. Two days later my wife received what they called the Baptism of the Holy Ghost. Suddenly while she was praying and as I watched she began speaking in an unknown language. I was a student of a couple languages besides English but it was neither of those. My wife had never known any languages besides English.
When we went home that night, I cried because I wanted what my wife had received.
The revival services continued every night, seven days a week and we were always there. I was always reaching out to get hold of God, but days and weeks past and everyone just about gave up on me... except my wife and God.
Frequently at the beginning of a service our new pastor would say to me something like: “Brother John, if you don’t receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost you are going to hell”. In later years people told me I should have been offended, but at the time I was more worried about fixing my problem than accusing anyone else. My only really knowledge about God had come from the Catholic Church and no one there ever talked me like this. Before we started going to that church, I had never read or owned a Bible of my own. That was changing for while the revival services continued, [Does anyone these days anywhere hold services 7 days a week for 3 months without interruption?], we were also now attending regular services as well and a Bible class for new converts. We began to read the Bible for the first in our lives.
While I had not talked to anyone about it but my wife, I knew why I was not getting baptized with the Holy Ghost. I loved my job. I loved it too much and it interfered with my willingness to surrender everything to God.
On March 6,1976 we got ready and went to the evening revival service as usual, but this time I had decided to ask God to help me with this love for my job, to help me put it aside so I could receive what my wife had received. I went at it immediately praying and talking to God and telling Him if I needed to I would quit my job. The lady evangelist as usual asked if some of the brothers would come and pray with me, but I guess they were tired of praying with me. Brothers were supposed to pray with brothers and sisters with sisters. Not one brother came up and prayed with me that night, but my wife did. Between her and my own resolve to give up even my job if necessary, it wasn’t long before my prayers were coming out of my mouth in a language unknown to me. I felt an unbelievable warmth pass through my entire body like nothing even close to anything I had ever previously experienced. That was the real beginning.
God did not require me to quit my job, not yet. That was to come many years later and is the beginning of another testimony.
Our marriage was saved indeed, as were we. We have had our troubles over the years, but never again was our marriage in serious jeopardy.
Give God the glory!