I also became a member of the Methodist church at the same time. I had found this inner peace. So I kept going to church and growing in the Lord until my sophomore year of college. Then the enticement of the world grabbed onto me.

Oh, I still believed, but my attendance at church dwindled down a lot.

I did however continue to pray and sometimes read my bible and life went on. I had a good marriage with my first husband, however he died of cancer. As with most tragedy that enters our lives, it either brings us closer to God or it drives us away.

In my case it drew me closer to Him and I started going back to church.

Then I met the man who would later become my husband.

He knew I was a Christian, and that didn’t bother him. You see, my husband is a full-blood Mohawk Native American.

He follows his traditional ways. Shortly after getting married we decided to make our living making Native American crafts and going to the pow-wows and selling them.

My husband is a carver and drum maker and I work with leather and do bead work. We went to a pow-wow every weekend.

We met a lot of wonderful loving people, who accepted us willingly. Soon I was participating in all their ceremonies and talking circles.

I was very intrigued by their teachings, and listened and learned of their ways.

I discovered that except for a few differences, they were very similar to the teachings of Jesus.

They believe in one God, treating everyone with respect, and love.

They accept everyone’s differences, without being mean and they help whoever and whenever they can.

In other words, do unto others, as you would have them do unto you, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Then the teachings start to separate a bit, but I still found nothing really wrong.

Every living thing has a spirit to be respected, but not worshipped.

The eagle is a sacred bird that carries their prayers to the creator.

Their prayers are also carried up to the creator in the smoke from their tobacco, and in some of their songs and dances.

They are a very loving and non-condemning people.

My husbands people have a wampum belt with a teaching on it that they believe came from the creator that represents two canoes going down the same river.

The river is the river of life and the canoes represent the white and red race of people.

They are to travel the river together side by side, but never are the canoes to cross each other’s path.

There beliefs are a way of life and very close to nature, and very personal.

I was becoming restless and I thought I was ready for a change.

Well this all sounded new and exciting.

I’m an outdoor kind of person and I thought this was matched to me.

My native friends welcomed me and taught me their ways.

Of course this worked very well with my husband also.

The only thing that bothered me was that they din’t believe in Jesus Christ.

They believe He was a great Holy Man for the Jewish people, but that is all.

So after much thinking and soul searching, I decided I didn’t need Jesus either.

So I left the church and Jesus.

That was about ten years ago.

For seven years I followed and lived the Native traditional ways.

If you had met me on the streets you would not have thought me a Christian but rather someone who followed the native ways.

During this time I also gave birth to a son and he was also being brought up in the native ways.

Then one weekend my family and I were down visiting my dad and I decided to go to my old church.

I wasn’t going there to worship, but to visit old friends.

However even though I had left Jesus, He didn’t leave or give up on me.

(Praise God) While I was sitting in that old church pew, the Holy Spirit got working inside of me and said “come home, where you belong.

” He made such a powerful impact on me that I knew I had been wrong for those seven years and I did truly need Jesus as my Savior.

So on the way home from my dads’, I remember talking with my husband and telling him what happened.

I said I needed Jesus and I needed to go back to church and I would like to bring our son with me.

So he agreed and that’s what I did.

That was in November of 1996.

In April of 1997 I re-dedicated my life to Christ and my son (of his own choosing) was baptized that Easter.

There were a few times in the beginning that I thought I had made the wrong decision, but I kept praying, asking questions, and relying on the new friends I made at church.

Once I even thought that God hadn’t accepted me back home.

I began to get restless and a bit discouraged, but God sent me a sign that definitely let me know how foolish I was being.

Now I can honestly say I have found the “inner peace” that God promises and I’ll never question where I belong again.

I still go to a few pow-wows and my husband has meetings at our house.

Some of the native community still try to pull me back and some like to ridicule my beliefs (that’s human nature, I guess), but God never said it would be easy.

In fact He warns us that to follow Him won’t be easy.

He did say He would never leave us.

I sure found that to be true.

My husband and I agreed that we would respect each other’s beliefs, because of our love for each other.

We also won’t stand in each other’s way, because both of us believe that how we live on this earth will determine our eternity.

In other words our Spiritualism comes first.

Do we still have conflicts? You bet, sometimes we resolve them and sometimes, out of love, we agree to disagree.

It’s at these times that I pray a lot, and God always seems to smooth the rough edges.

We handle our conflicts because we love each other.

Over all, it’s working for us.

In closing I would like to say that God sometimes has a specific thing that He wants us to do, and it’s sad if we put the family unit first and God second because we then disappoint our Heavenly Father, and deny ourselves the gift He may be wanting to give us, like inner peace.

Peace is the presence of God, not the absence of conflict.

The Christian who knows peace is charged to tell others so that it may come for them, too, through Christ, who brought, preached, and is our peace.

That’s what I hope to accomplish with my testimony. I pray others don’t follow the path that lead me away from Jesus, or any other path that may lead one astray, and that they will stay on the gospel road. However, if they do go astray, I pray they too will discover and realize the way back home Remember the illustrations that Jesus gave in the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son? Our Heavenly Father rejoices when we come home, for He wants all his family to come home. The scriptures tell us, He desires to loose not even one. I pray that everyone has or will find the inner peace that I found. Amen