The Power of Testimony

’TIL WE MEET AGAIN
When I was a child, life had felt so safe as I jumped
back and forth between Goffie’s house and my own. I
remembered how certain I’d felt in my faith back then—​
how I’d vowed to follow God, resist temptation, and keep
myself pure. Now life seemed a lot more complicated.
What had changed? It wasn’t that God no longer
seemed real; it was that I doubted whether the Lord was up
to the job at hand. I wasn’t alone, either. For many of my
peers, history was conspiring to make life even more turbulent.
War—​ even if it was halfway across the world—​ was
making everybody nervous.
When I was in high school, news about the situation
in Europe started taking center stage. Week after week, as
conditions intensified overseas, I joined in the lunchtime
conversations with my friends.
“How could those countries get taken over so fast?” I
would ask of no one in particular.
My friends had their own questions.
“Why don’t they just fight back instead of letting themselves
get taken over?”
“If Hitler was trying to invade America, he wouldn’t last
five minutes.”
But beneath the teenage bravado and cheap talk, we
all knew the war was no joke. There was good reason to
fear Hitler and Mussolini, and even if we didn’t voice our
fears, we suspected that at some point America would get
pulled in.
And so, as the war progressed, our conversations became
20