Caitlyn Spence's Testimony [Nanaimo, BC]

The War College was the hardest and most trying year of my life. A time of intense love and overwhelming heartbreak, breathless joy and signifigant sorrow. God broke me and began rebuilding my foundation on Him, that I might live for the unseen eternal instead of what is seen and temporal. Things like grace, mercy, trust, love and compassion were only abstract truths that I had studied before I moved to the Downtown Eastside and experianced them firsthand. God taught me more about His character through every person I met on the streets and challenged me to be made more like Him. I put to death the person I was when I originally came to the War College and embraced Christ's resurrection as the chance to live as a new creation as His bride, not his enemy. YHWH taught me to start living as Christ lived, not just reading and arguing about it but allowing myself to be changed by Him. God became more real to me than He had ever been, and no longer just fit in my head: His truth started to overflow into my actions and character. I learned what it meant to choose life and be light in the darkness; not of this world, nor reflecting it's surroundings, but acting as Christ's ambassador in every circumstance. God used the Downtown Eastside to teach me to bring life into places of death, joy into places of depression and love into places of hate.