“Promise you won’t laugh when I tell you what I want to say?” twelve year old Kathy asked, looking worried. “I promise.” I had just finished a week long seminar on “Life, Freedom and Power” in her church. “I’m glad you didn’t ask people to come forward to receive Jesus. I would come forward, but I hate coming.” “Why?” “That would be the tenth time,” Kathy said and looked away to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “I don’t think I understand the good news,” she continued. “If I did, I wouldn’t go forward every time I hear it. Tell me the good news so I get it. Isn’t that what Jesus wants? Then I can tell others, right?”
So begins the true story of a five month long “conversation” by e-mail between the young Kathy and the author, Doctor Wilson Asawu, after he returns home from the suburban community where she attended his church seminar. The sequence of e-mail between them shows how – one cautious, but trusting step after another -- she finally fulfills her desire to enter a personal relationship with God. When she has and after she makes her testimony to her sister and her mother, they do the same. Kathy’s story exposes and addresses the “false start” syndrome: growing up in a comfortable Christian home, believing all the right things, but finally lacking the assurance in one’s heart that one is a child of God. For any such children, Kathy’s Good News could be their good news, too.
