How God Changed My Life
Summer Neal
By: Paul Jacobson
Edited by: Summer Neal
This is my story of how God changed my life.
To understand this, you must understand who I was and what I have been brought from.
“This is my story of how God changed my life.”
Growing up, I was raised in a Lutheran home that placed an emphasis on believing in God. As I grew up, however, I found that believing in God became something I cared less and less about.
When I graduated high school, I was respected in the sports I played, had won homecoming king, passed on the opportunity to win prom king, and ended the year with an average GPA. Thanks to my large involvement in other activities at school, I was able to go to college due to football.
Once I finally arrived in college, my belief in God became irrelevant. I quickly started down a path where I cared more about fitting in with my peers and teammates than my relationship with God.
During the five years I spent in college, my life began to take a fall that became steeper with every decision I made. By the end, I was broken.
I dropped out of football and out of college.
I was full of lust and anger. I became manipulative.
Yet, worst of all was a sadness within my soul that I couldn’t understand. Knowing that I had completely failed, I moved back home with my parents.
The students of Conyers Faith at 2022 Winter Youth Conference.
At first, a lot of the habits I developed while away from home were unknown by my family, but soon after moving back my problems became apparent. At the top of the list of these problems was the fact that I no longer believed in God. I came to a point where I felt more comfortable with saying that I deserved to be sent to hell.
Oh, how thankful I am that God doesn’t give up so easily!
The first miracle was when my older sister received the Holy Ghost. Her life was suddenly transformed from a life of drinking and partying to a life lived for God. Seeing this absolutely stunned me and my family.
Soon after, in 2018, my family began attending an Apostolic Pentecostal church. A year later, I received the true evidence of God’s existence, love, and mercy – I was filled with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus changed everything about me, starting with my heart.
For the first time in my life, I began to feel conviction, which led to a boldness to start speaking truthfully about the wickedness I had been living in.
Learning to have a repentant heart early on is what opened the door to the Lord bringing miraculous healing into my life.
From that point on, Jesus started using me for His purpose. He took me from my home in Wisconsin and sent me 900 miles down to the state of Georgia. It was in this isolated and lonely place that I learned to turn to Him for help.
When we turn to God faithfully and put our trust in Him, He is faithful to see us through!
After moving to Georgia and receiving a job opportunity in July of 2019, the Lord blessed me with not only a career, but also my wife – the woman of my dreams.
This new family I had been brought into gave me love, but also connected me with Faith Tabernacle Church.
My life is a testament that although Jesus may move you out of a place of familiarity and comfort – things we think we need – He will provide you with exactly what you need.
Pastor Paul & his wife, Elizabeth.
He blessed me with a family and a church where I could feel the presence of God. I may have been far away from home, but the presence of God I felt at home in Wisconsin is the same presence I feet all the way down in Georgia.
Knowing who God is changed everything about my life and who I was.
Many of my old friends and teammates talk to me now with looks of confusion about how my life has been so transformed. What they don’t understand is that when you are covered by God’s presence and filled with his Spirit, anything is possible.
My testimony is not something that only happens for the select few. Any who comes and seeks Jesus will have their lives transformed just like mine!!