Testimonies are stories of personal ways we have encountered God. Sometimes we think that testimonies have to be radical, something like “I was a drug addict in jail and then an angel appeared and now I run a homeless shelter,” but in reality testimonies can be as ‘small’ or simple as, “I lost my car keys and then when I prayed I remembered that I left them in the door of my car!”

When we stop to think about it, we have heaps of testimonies where we see the goodness of God act in all different areas of our lives. We all also have a specific ‘conversion testimony’ – this is where we have encountered God in a personal way, and committed our lives to Him.

For many of us, this will sound something like, “I was raised in a Catholic family. In high school I wasn’t too interested in my faith and started making some bad choices. I just went to Mass because it was what my family did. Then at a youth camp, I heard about how God’s love and forgiveness were personally for me, so I went to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Afterwards I felt so light, and I knew I needed to take my faith more seriously, for myself. God is the best part of my life!”

These ‘normal’ conversion testimonies are just as important as the crazy, radical ones, because different people will relate to different stories. Some people locked in addiction need to hear about how someone else got free by the power of God, and in a highschool there’s a young person hoping to hear that their ‘boring’ experience of faith is normal and there’s something more for them. There’s always someone else who needs to hear a story like ours, of how we met the goodness of God.