My Testimony

	From the time that I was a very small child, I wanted to sing. I never told anyone, I kept it deep in my heart. When I was seven years old, I recollect that with our first television set, I would stand up close to Perry Como and try to make my voice sound like his. My voice was "wavy" and I wanted mine, like his, to be smooth. It was to be many years before that yearning in my heart would be satisfied. It is common knowledge, in the everyday world, to assume that most teenagers just kind of "go through a phase" between 12 and 20 years old. I was certainly not an exception. Many adults just blame it on the hormones beginning to change. I really don't feel that way at all. In retrospect, I can look back and see that it was very simple. The devil just very clearly wanted to kill me. My bed caught on fire when I was a tiny baby, and fortunately, someone happened to come in and find it. There was a plane on which I was riding that caught on fire, but it was landed safely. In Honolulu, in 1969, someone set a bomb at the building in which I was living. I lived in a nice building, but there was a mob personality that lived on one of the higher floors of the building. I lived on the 2nd floor with parking only being on the first level. The bomb was set under the hood of the Lincoln Towncar which was parked immediately across from my own car, and the mob car was parked directly under my bathroom. Every day, my habit was to brush my teeth again right before I walked out the door for work. That morning, I was putting my toothbrush away, ready to walk out the door, and suddenly the whole building shook violently, a loud boom, and all the windows in my apartment fell out! I rushed out my front door to see a billowing plume of purple-white smoke pouring up from underneath the balcony. I ran down the short flight of steps to the open air garage to find the Lincoln had exploded and a man laying over the wheel of the car. Directly across from him, my own car's windows were blown out. Only two short minutes had stood between me and death. God had supernaturally protected me. The next year, in San Francisco, during 6 o'clock, evening airport rush hour, with six lanes of traffic flying down each side of the freeway, my yellow Firebird, going 60 mph, jumped the concrete median of the freeway, went airborne, spinning around, landed on the opposite side, and slid across six lanes, right up against a guard rail, just short of a couple of hundred feet drop-off below, and pointed in the opposite direction of the traffic. Without a scratch on me OR my car, I had just enough room between me and the guardrail to get out of my car. Once again, God had supernaturally protected me. Never had I set out to live a rocky, topsy-turvy life. It was not planned by me. I was just looking for a way to have a happy life, and to finally get rid of the deep dark hole that was silently within my soul, that I, myself, did not understand, and could not ever voice or explain it to anyone else. In my heart, I had reasoned that if I could not sing, which was the only thing that I ever really and deeply wanted to do- if that could not happen- then I was always looking for the next best thing, and would be willing to live my life like that. Long since, I had stopped trying to find my answers in church by the time I was seventeen years old. It is truly amazing to see how very real and reaching is the mercy of God. I think that sometimes, with some people's personalities, God just has to let a person go through some things in order for them to arrive in a place where they are willing to have a truly obedient heart. If God had opened up my voice when I was so young, I may have ended up somewhere as an old and tired singer, without God, with my soul falling off into hell. Finally, at 30 years of age, in the depths of despair (and I found out that the depths of despair is a real place) I met the Lord. Within a few weeks after meeting Christ, God miraculously opened up my voice, and I've been singing ever since, and sharing the love of Christ with people everywhere I go. Hopefully, one day, if the Lord leads that way, you may contact me, and I will come and share and sing for your church or youth group. In His Mercy, Sandra Manley