Ruth Chesney

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world shares the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. This week’s contributor is Veronica Thomson, who grew up in Valencia, Carabobo State, Venezuela, and now lives in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband, Neal, and baby son, Nathan. I was born in the South American country of Venezuela, to a Christian family.  Attending meetings and Sunday school was a big part of my life while growing up, which means I grew up hearing the Gospel. One day, when I was around 10 years old, my Sunday school teacher asked the students in our class if any of us were saved. I said I was, even providing her with a date. I remember some Sundays following how she told the class that they needed to trust the Saviour, as she and I had done. Time went by, and I kept believing I was right with God; I attended all meetings with my parents and at some point I started to read my Bible every day. In late ...

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world shares the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. This week’s contributor is Pamella Watt who was born in South Africa in the 1980s and now lives in Inverness, Scotland. She has been married to Craig for seven years and they have three-year-old twin girls.  Pamella and Craig are in fellowship at Culloden Christian Assembly. “I’ll have to make sure my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds?” I asked my friend, who, like me, was just 4 years old at the time.  I mentally went through all the bad things I had done that I could remember. Most of which involved fighting with my older sister. In self-defence, I thought. It was her fault, really, since she teased me mercilessly, mostly about being overweight. But then, there was the time I had thrown a fistful of sand on the meat my family was cooking on the braai. My sister had nothing to do with that incident! There had just...

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world will share the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. This week’s contributor is Denis Romkes, who lives in a village in Drenthe, the Netherlands, with his wife, Esther, and three children. I was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and raised in a somewhat religious but non-Christian family; my mother was raised as a Roman Catholic but did not practice herself. At Christmas, we attended a church service and that was the only time each year. We never read the Bible or prayed in the home. As children, we went to a Catholic primary school. I finished school at the age of 19 and worked for various companies. I was interested in sports and music; the main ambition of my life was cycling. In October 1994, at the age of 23, I started working for a new company as an assistant surveyor. The colleague I worked with was a Christian and he asked me if I believed in God; the answer was short...

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world will share the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. This week’s contributor is a lady from Brazil. The story of my conversion goes back many years ago, to a Christmas morning when I was born in a small town in the interior of the most southernly state of Brazil. I was the only daughter in a family of five and we were very poor. At that time, we lived in a small rural village and shortly after, we moved out to the country, my parents having bought a small piece of land on the side of a mountain. My father was a subsistence farmer who, with the help of my mother and his young family, eked out a miserable living off this small piece of ground. Every day before sunrise, we were up and away to the mountain to spend many hours weeding and planting. I vividly remember climbing barefoot up over the rocks and scrub to reach our patch of land and waiting until the sun rose to warm our...

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world will share the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. This week’s contributor is a wife and mother from Northern Ireland. I have never been asked to formally tell my testimony before but I’m glad for the opportunity. I hope you can see the simplicity of salvation and that I can encourage those searching for salvation for a while not to give up. I can never think of a time when I didn’t want to be saved. It hung over me all the time. Many birthdays passed when I would blow out the candles and (unscripturally!) wish to be saved, and many evenings where I would lie in bed and try to fit myself into the testimonies of others. Even when everything else was going well, I felt I was never really happy as the most important thing was missing. I worried about my family too – only my mum was saved. I hated thinking of Dad or my younger siblings being in hell, and spent nights worrying a...

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world will share the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. This week’s contributor is Ángel Baez, who lives in Veracruz, Mexico with his wife, Monica. My name Is Ángel Baez, and it is a privilege to share my testimony with you of how God saved my soul. It was 1997, when I was a high school student, that I had heard about the success of others who had left Mexico and gone to work in the United States. In 2001, I was contacted by an uncle in Florida who encouraged me to come to the US. He knew a ‘coyote’ (a human trafficker) who would help me cross into the United States. The coyote contacted me and made arrangements about where I could meet him near the US border. It was well known that many people from Mexico, Central and South America took their route through the Sonora desert into Arizona, US. I made arrangements with the coyote on where in Sonora I should meet up with him to cro...

Each Monday, for a number of weeks, someone from around the world will be sharing the story of how they heard the gospel and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. Our first contributor to the series is Catherine Brown from Canada. Hello friends! Thanks for taking the time to read this blog! When Ruth asked me to contribute, my mind immediately started going down memory’s lane. I was born and brought up in a little town in northeast New Brunswick, Canada. I have many happy memories of childhood days, playing on the beach of the Chaleur Bay with my brother, baking cakes and cookies, growing vegetables in a little plot and continually losing myself in a good book. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and my family always spoke both French and English. The church we attended when I was growing up was French speaking. I later studied in Halifax, Nova Scotia and now live in Northern Ireland with my husband and four boys. Those happy childhood memories are...