This story shows how God works in different ways to bring people to Him. Audrey’s story shows a different angle of God’s workings in a human heart to what we might be used to.
Audrey was a middle aged home help and addicted to smoking, coffee and T.V. when she wasn’t working. She never gave God a thought. She began working for an elderly God-fearing lady. This lady never spoke to Audrey about her faith, but Audrey saw the Bible beside her bed, and noticed her gentle loving manner.
One day she gave Audrey a CD of testimony to take home and listen to. As usual that evening, Audrey immediately turned the T.V. on, made her coffee and lit a cigarette. Before going to bed, she decided to listen to the CD, and heard the speaker tell how God had given him the strength to give up smoking.
She thought, “If God did that for him, perhaps He could do it for me too!”
Waking up the next morning, she didn’t think of her cigarettes once. After a while, she thought in wonderment, “I haven’t had a smoke yet!” and stretched her hand out for the packet.
While taking the first breath of smoke, she found it was utterly horrid to her, and she threw it down. Twice more she tried to smoke with the same result. After this, she never smoked another cigarette. She took the CD back, not telling the lady of her experience.
Shortly afterwards, her daughter arrived back from Australia and stayed with her. Usually they wouldn’t be together for five minutes without verbally sparring with each other. But this time, Audrey held her tongue when her daughter baited her.
“What’s happened to you Mum?” she asked “You’re different!”
Without even stopping to think, Audrey replied, “It’s the love of Jesus”.
With that confession of the name of Jesus, the light dawned on her soul, and Audrey was never the same again. She found she had a totally different outlook on life. Now she wanted to be with other Christians, and to go to church services….something she had never done before. She wanted to learn what was in the Bible, and found it was a really interesting book to read….she just couldn’t put it down.
Audrey had heard vaguely about Moses….after all they had made a film about the story of crossing the Red Sea, but she had no idea what led up to it. Of course she had heard something about a boy called David killing a giant, but she didn’t have a clue exactly what happened. Then there was the story of the whale swallowing Jonah, but she had thought that no-one with any sense would take any notice of a story like that! But now she read in the New Testament that Jesus had said it really had happened.
Every page she read opened her understanding further. She couldn’t get enough of it. As she read the book of Psalms, she found to her amazement that David was just like we are because sometimes he was terribly happy and other times he was right down in the dumps.
She found that Peter was always opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. He never knew when to shut up! Then there was that young man called Saul who hated the early Christians so much that he was dragging them off to prison and if he could, he would have their heads chopped off.
Yet one day God called out to him from the sky, and he fell to the ground. When he got up he found he was blind. He knew that it was Jesus Himself who had called out to him. Then there was the man who went to him and touched his eyes, making him see again. What a difference it made to him once he believed in Jesus and began to preach about him!
Audrey knew that she was like each of those people she was reading about, and she knew that what God had done for them, He would do for her. As time went by, she realised that her old life held no more appeal for her…her new life gave her all she had been looking for. She now had new ideals and aims, new friends and new attitudes. Her old life had gone now that she knew Jesus Christ as her own personal friend and Saviour. She found she could talk to Him each day and tell Him all her problems, and He gave her the strength to do the right thing.