My Salvation Testimony by Holly D. Sands

 

    Of all the stories that have been deemed “my favorite” – the story of how the Lord redeemed my life from destruction stands at the top. It is my story. It is my song. It is why I will continue to praise my Savior until my last breath, and why for all eternity my song shall resound from the city of Glory. 

    Jesus – the name that rings in my ears as the sweetest of melodies.

“For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified He also glorified.” – Romans 8:29-30

The Soil I Came From   

    During my early years, my home life was unpredictable and volatile. Both of my parents were deeply wounded people. You've probably heard it said that "hurt people hurt people." They were carrying pain they didn't know how to deal with, and most of it was taken out on me. 

    My father grew up with an alcoholic father of his own. As a young Marine, he watched his best friend killed in a training exercise, and it broke something in him that never healed. I believe it left an anger in him he never dealt with, and much of it landed on me as physical abuse. When I was five, my baby brother died a day after he was born. My father had desperately wanted a son. I think he hoped to be the father to a boy that his own father never was to him. Losing his son was more than he could bear, and that's when he started drinking.

    My mother's father was Sicilian, and he came home from World War II when she was two. He had suffered horrendous abuse from his own father, not to mention the absolute horrors of war, and he passed the pain right down. My mother and her brother lived at the mercy of his anger. What she carried from him came out on me as verbal and emotional abuse and constant criticism.

    By the time I was old enough to understand what I believed about myself, none of it was good. I believed I was hard to love, that I had to earn approval I would never quite reach, and that God, if He was watching at all, wasn't especially interested in me. I learned to be funny as a way to survive. If I could make people laugh, maybe they'd want me around, maybe they'd love me. Humor became armor long before it became who I actually am. That was the soil I came from.

    We were "culturally Roman Catholic" - and by that, I mean we were generationally Catholic, attended Catholic school and showed up to Mass when our guilt got the best of us - but we had no true knowledge of God. We were taught to pray to Mary and the saints, to confess to a priest instead of going straight to God, and to trust in ritual and works to make us right with Him - none of which brought us any closer to actually knowing Him. It was religion without truth, idolatry dressed up as devotion, and it left us just as lost as if we'd never darkened a church door. 

A Door Left Wide Open    

    
    You see, ours wasn't just a home without truth - it was a home with a supernatural darkness in it. I grew up around things that had no natural explanation, and I came to understand later exactly what I'd been living with.

    We lived in a house most people would have called haunted. A man had killed his wife and children there, then shot himself. Every year, at the same time, a bloodstain appeared in the hardwood floor at the foot of my bed. At night we heard heavy footsteps come down the hallway and stop outside my parents' door. Friends who spent the night heard their names whispered in their ears. All sorts of paranormal things happened on a regular basis.

    And instead of running from it, we invited it in. We held séances in the very house where all of it was happening, opening doors that should have been slammed shut. And without me even realizing it, it was setting the stage for my rebellion yet to come. 

Looking for Him    

    From my earliest years – five, maybe younger – I felt drawn to God. I remember looking up into the heavens and longing to know the One who made them. But I had no way of finding Him out — no one around me knew Him, as far as I could tell. When I was eight, I asked my parents for a Bible for Christmas. I wanted nothing else – no toys, no clothes – only that Bible. I remember unwrapping that gift and holding it as if it were the most precious thing in all the world. I smelled the pages; I ran my finger over the words – but I could not understand what they meant. I tried to read it anyway, but it made no sense to me. It became something more like a relic I kept close, hoping it would somehow protect me and lead me to the truth I longed to know. 

“They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.” – Ephesians 4:18

    At eleven, I came to a turning point. I sought answers about the crucified man whose statue hung at the front of our Catholic parish. Who was He? What had He done to be crucified? Was He dead like all the saints whose statues stood around Him? My questions about Jesus proved too insistent for the nuns I came to for help. One of them grabbed me and dragged me to the statue of Mary, demanding, "Bow to the Blessed Mother and ask for forgiveness!" Confused about my punishment for wanting to know who Jesus was, I adamantly refused to bow. The nun told me I was no longer welcome in the church and put me out on the steps of the parish while she called my mother to come get me. The system that should have led me to the cross cast me out - abandoned, confused, and angry. So very angry. 

Into the Dark    

    I remember that anger vividly. It was as if a veil of darkness engulfed me and my heart was filled with rebellion. I was tired of the abuse and hopelessness in my home. There was no one who would help me. I needed control. I wanted power and I knew where power actually was - it was in the darkness. I'd seen it with my own eyes, in my own home. Darkness moved things around. It was active, tangible...and enticing.

    I went to my local library and checked out books on "white magic" and tarot cards. Then I found a book of spells and incantations, but it didn't belong to the library. When I brought it to the front desk, the clerk went white. She told me it wasn't theirs. Then she pushed it back across the counter like it carried the plague and said if I wanted it, I could take it.

    And take it I did. That book opened the door to demonic possession.

    For four years I walked in the deepest bondage, chasing the hidden things I thought would give me power. But the enemy I thought I commanded held me captive instead. The terror was relentless, the hopelessness suffocating. I couldn't even look in a mirror. My own eyes frightened me, because someone else was looking out through them. Most people kept their distance from me. I was darkness, and on some level they could feel it.

“Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, expose them. It is shameful even to talk about the things that ungodly people do in secret.” – Ephesians 5:11-12

He Was Calling Me

    At fifteen, I was planning to run away from home with my best friend and my boyfriend, a twenty-two-year-old man who promised to whisk us away with him across the border. I didn't have a passport. It never occurred to me to ask how he planned to get us there. Looking back, I shudder to think where that road would have led. 

    But the Lord interrupted my plans. My mother found the letter I'd hidden away to leave her after I was gone. Desperate, she reached out to the pastor of the non-denominational church my aunt had started attending, and he came to our house. I thought the whole thing was a big joke, until he began to pray. When he said the name "Jesus," I looked up and sucked in my breath. He hadn't mentioned Mary or the saints. He was speaking to Jesus as if He were a real person. As if He were alive! My curiosity was rekindled, but curiosity and a changed heart are two different things. I was still hard and cold underneath.

    Around that same time, my cousins and I went to buy fishing tackle from an elderly couple's home. When the wife came out to greet us, her face shone with a light I had never seen. Joy bubbled from her – genuine, unexplainable joy. Out of all of us, she invited only me inside. She was as drawn to me as I was to her and as I sat and talked with her, the stone wall around my heart began to crack. I told her everything – the darkness, the fear, the wickedness I had embraced. She did not recoil. She looked at me with a love I had never known and said, "If you really want to know what to do, go home tonight and pray. Ask the Lord Jesus to help you, and He will."

    That name – 

    Jesus.

    It sounded like a song on her lips, the most beautiful word I had ever heard. Could I really speak to Him? Would He help me after everything I had done? And yet I felt it – that irresistible pull toward Him, like when I was a child.

    He was calling me.

    That night, I prayed to Jesus for the first time in my life. I stumbled through the words and went to sleep. When I woke the next morning, I felt peace — real peace, the kind I couldn't remember ever having. I wasn't saved yet — I didn't even understand what that meant — but God was drawing me, and I could feel it. I was so undone by that peace that the first thing I felt compelled to do was end things with my boyfriend. This time I wrote a different kind of letter, and I asked my mother to mail it for me. I wanted her to know I wasn't going down that road anymore, and I wanted to make sure I didn't chicken out. More than that, I wanted her to see that something in me was beginning to change. She gladly mailed it. And I never looked back.

Finally, Answers    

    Every day, for the next two weeks I walked a mile from my school to the church, laying question after question before the pastor who had prayed in our home. To my amazement, he had answers. He took me through the Scriptures, showing me who Christ was, and is. He explained what sin was – that it was against God Himself. The weight of it hit me, and I felt a certain sorrow I had never known.

"Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight." - Psalm 51:4

"Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation..." - 2 Corinthians 7:10

    He warned me that to become a disciple of Christ was not something to decide flippantly. It was a life-long commitment, one sure to involve suffering for His name. He told me to count the cost. This was no forced ritual before a statue, no empty demand for penance — this was truth, and it cost something real to receive it.

"For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it — lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple."- Luke 14:28-33

"Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution." - 2 Timothy 3:12 

    I put my faith in Christ. I desired to follow Him with all my heart. We knelt together on that dirty parsonage floor, and he guided me in prayer. I repented of my wickedness. I renounced the hidden things of darkness. I received the Light of Life. My soul became clean – washed from the filth I had carried, light where there had only been weight, pure where I had only known shame. I became a new creation in Christ Jesus – justified by the faith He gifted to me. The old was gone. The new had come!

“This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” – 2 Corinthians 5:17

Light in the Lord    

    Coming out of the church that day, everything looked as though it were in Ultra HD. The air was crisp and fresh. All creation seemed alive, rejoicing with me. I was overwhelmed with indescribable joy. I felt so clean. So absolutely free! I could have danced down the street!

"Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory." - 1 Peter 1:8

    I went straight to my grandparents' house. They had been my refuge growing up and loved me when home was hard, so they were the first people I wanted to see me this way. My mother happened to be there too. When I came through the door, she looked shocked.

"Holly, is that you?" she asked.

"Yes, Mom!"

"What happened to you?!"

"I got saved!"

    Everything about me had changed, even the way I walked. I was no longer darkness. I was light in the Lord. And it wasn't a slow fade or something I had to convince anyone of. People could see it.

“For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.” – Ephesians 5:8

    I had an insatiable hunger for Him, and for the first time in my life, the Bible made sense.

    I thought of that eight-year-old girl on Christmas morning, holding the only gift she'd asked for, running her finger over words she couldn't understand. She had wanted so badly to know what they meant. Now I opened the Scriptures and they came alive. The same words that had been closed to me were suddenly open. Not because I'd gotten any smarter, but because I'd been born again. I read the entire New Testament in one week. I carried my Bible everywhere.

"Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away." - 2 Corinthians 3:16

     I burned everything from my occult days, and I didn't do it alone. I called the friends who had been part of that world with me and asked them to join me. We built a bonfire and threw in every item we had used, all of it, and watched it burn. Just like the believers in Ephesus in Acts 19, we wanted nothing left of the old life.

    I spent many days and nights on my face before Him. I was like a starving person finally set before food – I could not get enough time with Jesus. He meant more to me than life itself. I had found the One my soul desired.

“Your words were found, and I ate them, and Your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by Your name, O Lord, God of hosts.” – Jeremiah 15:16

“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for You, O God... How lovely is Your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.” – Psalm 42:1; 84:1-2

    I immediately set out to share what the Lord had done in me. I could not contain it. I felt that if I kept silent, I would explode. I went all over our town, knocking on doors and asking whoever answered if I could tell them how Christ had saved me, and how He would do the same for them if they would call on His Name. Anyone who would listen heard about Jesus. And on the days I couldn't get into town, since we lived out in the country, I walked out to a neighboring pasture and preached to the cows. Turns out, they were good listeners!

“Go home to your friends and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you.”- Mark 5:19

“If I say, “I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” – Jeremiah 20:9

Counting the Cost

    By then, word of my transformation had spread through our little southern town, and it eventually reached my great-uncle — my grandfather's brother, Sicilian and devoutly Roman Catholic. I ran into him at the library, and he approached me warmly at first. "When are you coming back to the church?" he asked.

    "Uncle, I am in church," I said.

    "No. The Catholic church."

    "I'm not. I got saved, and I attend a non-denominational church now."

    He grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard, his voice rising loud enough for the whole library to hear. "YOU ARE A CATHOLIC!"

    I raised my voice back. "No. I am a CHRISTIAN!"

    He shoved me back, exasperated. "Then I no longer know you."

    He never spoke to me again. Even years later, if he saw me walking down the street, he would cross to the other side rather than pass near me. He kept that vow until the day he died.

    I understood, even then, that I hadn't lost a relationship over something small. I had become, in his eyes, a traitor to everything he held sacred — his church, his heritage, our family's faith going back generations. Jesus warned that this would happen. He said He did not come to bring peace but a sword, that following Him would set family against family, and that a man's enemies would be found in his own household. 

    My great-uncle loved his church more than he loved me, and when I chose Christ over Catholicism, I lost him for it. It was a small taste of what Jesus meant when He said anyone who loves father or mother more than Him is not worthy of Him. The pastor had told me to count the cost. I was beginning to learn it was not hypothetical. It was real, and it was personal, and it had a face I had known my whole life. 

"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword..." — Matthew 10:34-36
"He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me." — Matthew 10:37

    That was the first time I understood what it would cost me to follow Jesus, but it wasn't the last. The cost has shown up in more than one place over the years — sometimes with others in my family over leaving the church of my heritage, sometimes over choosing sound doctrine when it wasn't the popular choice, even within the church. I've lost relationships I still grieve. But every time, the choice has been the same, and I've never once regretted making it. He has always been worth it.

"Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ."  - Philippians 3:8 

A Word of Warning    

    Hear me on this: real salvation always produces change. Always. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). I didn't have to convince anyone I'd been saved. They could see it.

    If you say you belong to Christ but nothing about you has changed — you still love what you've always loved, still live how you've always lived, and your sin doesn't grieve you — do not assume you're safe. Jesus said many would call Him "Lord, Lord" on that day, only to hear Him answer, "I never knew you; depart from Me" (Matthew 7:21–23). A prayer you once prayed, a card you once signed, a pew you sit in on Sunday will not save you. Only Christ saves, and when He saves, He changes. "Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith" (2 Corinthians 13:5). 

    And if you’ve never truly come to Him, hear what that pastor told me, because it’s just as true for you. Following Jesus is not something to decide flippantly. It isn’t a prayer you pray to feel better or a box you check to be safe. It’s a lifelong surrender, and it will cost you. He promised it would. It may cost you relationships, comfort, reputation, even the approval of people you love. Count that cost honestly before you come. But know this, too: whatever it costs, He is worth it. 

Call on His Name

    I will never forget that elderly woman who invited me into her home that day. She simply pointed me to Jesus and told me to call on Him. So let me do for you what she did for me, and point you to Him.

    Here is the truth: You have sinned against a holy God. Not just made mistakes - sinned, against Him. You can’t fix it, earn your way out of it, or outrun it. But Jesus, the eternal Son of God, took the punishment you deserve when He died on the cross. He was buried, and on the third day, He rose again. He isn’t a statue hanging at the front of a church. He is alive, and He hears when you call!

    Wherever you are, go to Him. Confess your sin. Turn from it. Put your trust in what He has done for you, not in anything you could ever do for Him. Ask Him to save you, and He will. The same Jesus who met a fifteen-year-old girl on a dirty parsonage floor will meet you right where you are today. 

“For whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” - Romans 10:13

He is My Song   

    I don't tell my story so you can be entertained, as dramatic as it is. I tell it because every part of it — the wreckage and the rescue — belongs to Christ. If it points anywhere, it should point past me, straight to the One who did the saving. He gave me this testimony. He has become my song. I have no story worth telling apart from Him.

"The LORD is my strength and song, and He has become my salvation." - Exodus 15:2

    You don't really know me until you know this: I am His, bought at a price I could never have paid myself, and I would not trade one day of walking with Him for anything this world has or ever will offer.

    He saved me. He has kept me every day since. And He is not finished with me yet.

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About the Author

Holly D. Sands has walked with Christ since 1983. She writes at He is My Song, helping fellow believers walk faithfully through every season with biblical encouragement, sound doctrine, and honest reflection.  She lives in South Carolina, where she and her husband, Shane Sands, are members of a local Baptist church. Shane's been called by God as an evangelist and leads United in Christ Jesus ministry. At home, they're joined by their idiot cat, Mister Bojangles, whose main contribution to the household is sleeping and eating treats.

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