the storyteller

Leo Bartibogue (Mi'kmaq) Part 2 - 8 Feb, 2010

I’ve starting inflicting on others, was the same things that were inflicted on me when I was a young man. And I had these barriers and all these walls all around me cause I was never going to let anybody ever hurt me again.

But nobody told me about my heart. When your spouse leaves you, and you think that you’ve got it all, and all of a sudden, when your children leave, and they leave, and then you’re all alone in your home and nothing to turn to, then you start realizing that, you know, there’s a life here, the life that you’ve just thrown away again.

So what I did was, I tried to make it a little bit better for all of us. I said I would start going to church, I would start making up for all the lost time that I did, and I’d certainly sold everything in our community to move to another community.

And the ‘geographical cure’ they call it, doesn’t work anywheres you go.

So when I moved to her territory, it worked for a little while, but old wounds started opening up again, and things started surfacing that I couldn’t explain. And, in the meantime, you know, the kids were starting to notice things. And they’re getting a lot older, to a point that one day my oldest son came up to me and said that I wasn’t a happy man at home, and that I shouldn’t be there only for them, because they realized that I wasn’t in love with their mom anymore.

And I don’t know if that was just something that I started finally seeing or, I don’t know, but anyway I left. And then I got to a point where of no return, that my life was so unmanageable, that I didn’t know what else to do.

I’ve done so much sin, I think, in my life, that it was beyond what I can count, and then one day I just couldn’t get out of this mess that I’ve made for myself. It’s just a gigantic hole that I’ve dug so much that I could not… I just could not climb over.

And so I shouted, and I said, “Lord, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know how to do this. I need you. I need for you to help me, and I need for you to get me out of this.”

That was the best decision I ever made in my life, to cry out to God.

And you know, when He put His hand in that hole and grabbed my hand and pulled me out, not only did He pull me out, He never let go. He still holds my hand today.

He gave me a life, and He showed me there is a way of escape. And all I had to do, all these times that I thought there was nobody there to help me, He found me.

When I called out to the Lord, is because of… I had studied the Bible, even at that time, when I was not intoxicated or using drugs. For some reason the Bible was always one of the things that people used to come to me with, and one of them was a good friend of mine that just never gave up on me, snd I realize today that was the Lord using Him for that.

But also my grandmother was the one that taught me who Jesus was. In the back of my mind, these things resurfaced, and the Lord says, He looks at your heart and He knows that if you cry out to Him sincerely from your heart. I didn’t know that part at the time, but that’s exactly what I probably did for Him to hear me.

I was dying; I was going to die. I had tried to commit suicide a few times, to a point of no return, but apparently people was there at the right time to stop the whole thing from happening.

And so, these are the things that was going in my life, they were going to an extreme, and yet, if I didn’t cry out to God at that time, I would have left this world in a way that it wouldn’t have been good for myself.

The Bible talks about condemnation. and so there’s a punishment for all these things that cannot be left unsaid. “For the wages of sin is death.”

I’ve always tried other avenues, everywheres, but when I opened my heart to the Lord and asked Him to come, He has saved me from death.

He reminds me in His Word, today, that we have to accept Him as our personal Savior, and I believe in my heart that He is the Son of God. I believe He has died for all, and that they crucified Him, and on the third day He rose again, and ascended to the Heaven and sitting at the right hand of the Father.

Our Lord Jesus Christ gave up His precious life because our Father loves us so much. He gave up His life for all. He shed His precious blood on the cross for our sins to be forgiven.

For Him giving up His life is the love our Father has for us, that is so unconditional, so overwhelming, for Him to give up His Son, I could never even begin to think the pain that our Father went through watching His Son going through. Because as we know as fathers to our children, we could not even begin to even think if that was inflicted on our own.

So I believe our Lord Savior endured the pain He did, but also our Father, as well, because He watched His Son, and He allowed it, because the love that He had for all of us so His Son can save whoever accepts Him.

God also gave us a choice, whether we do accept or not, God is not gonna force this on us. We have to make that choice. I’ve tried everything, from other denominations to my own traditions and our own culture, and I’ve tried to find the joy or the peace that I needed, and I looked, and I could never find any of that. A lot of times, when I’ve sat in the sweat lodges, we’ve talked about the Creator, but there was never any time that I’ve heard the name of Jesus.

And I thought there was always something missing, so, you know, in saying that, I felt that I needed to go and find and keep looking, the Savior that I thought that can fill in the emptiness in my heart, which I did. His name was Jesus.

Today, you know, I look at so many things so differently, so amazing how this life can be. He is a God of love. When you talk about our traditions and cultures and all this other stuff, I don’t know sometimes how to say these things but, you know, I can only say one thing; that the name of Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, and Jesus is the way to the Father, no other. There is no strange object in this world that can get you there, or anything that we feel that is sacred. Jesus is the only name that will get you to the Father.

I have gone through so many journeys in my life, and I just one day opened the door, because He says I am at the door. You know, we’re the ones that got to open it and let Him in, and when we did that, when I do that, it’s the most special time in my life, and you can have that personal relationship with our Savior.

So you see all these things that I have done in the past, and all the things that I’ve created for myself was my own decisions and my own ways of how the devil has stolen from me and how he has deceived me over and over and over.

But when Jesus revealed Himself to me, He was the way, the truth and the life. He is the greatest King ever.