Margie K.

My Journey to Christ
Margie Bruster Kersey

I was not really raised in a home. It was more like people living in the same house and bumping into each other. My mother was married 3 times and there were many men in and out of our lives. My father left when I was 3 years old – not because he wanted to but because she no longer loved him. I spent most of my childhood crying at night for a father who would want me and love me. The men who floated in and out of our house could not be trusted and took advantage of me as a young child. I tell you this because it is crucial to my conversion. My mother was studying Christian Science during my early years and I was taken to church several times. Even as a young child I didn’t believe the things I was being taught. Nothing seemed to make sense to me except that life was not a happy place to be. Then, one day, I was given a small gift – one that I was not ready for but would be a forerunner to what my life would become. There was a girl in my 3rd or 4th grade school class who invited me to her home for dinner on a Monday evening. I liked the warm feeling in her home and we had some kind of family lesson and activity after dinner. It was about 20 years later when, out of the blue, I thought of that girl and realized I had participated in my first Family Home Evening. There was no follow up to that dinner and I was not invited back to her home. But I remembered the feeling.

During my junior high and senior school years, I was a very lost girl with no parental guidance and no faith. I found no satisfaction in life and did many things that were wrong. Then something happened that changed my life. When I was a junior in high school our family moved from LA to northern California where I met a young man in one of my classes. He was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and his father was a Bishop. I was invited to their home often during a time when my family life was most miserable. This young man’s family taught me the gospel. I was quite stubborn about admitting that what I was being taught was right. I went through 3 sets of missionaries before I was baptized. But I kept coming back because the one thing that I heard in the very beginning that I hung onto until my faith was strong enough to accept other concepts, was the idea that I had a Heavenly Father who loved me. I wanted that to be true so very much. The idea that I could have a loving Father in Heaven who was always there for me and who loved me so much that he would give up his own Son in sacrifice for me was an amazing idea. I wanted to believe it so much that I joined the church just before I turned 18yrs. Looking back I can see that I joined the church for reasons of security more than having a burning testimony of the truth of it. I was too emotionally unstable and self-centered to fully understand the implications of it being true. But, as I lived it day by day, I gained – little by little – a deep and abiding understanding of the truth. I have been blessed with many wonderful spiritual experiences that have come at crucial times in my life but the real glue that holds my testimony together are thousands of small peaceful feelings, acts of service, thousands of hours of prayer and scripture study. Line upon line, precept upon precept. I am so grateful that I have been allowed to live long enough on this earth to come to this understanding in preparation for returning to that loving Heavenly Father who is waiting for me. It is part of me now and forever.
Margie Kersey