All Little Girls Want to Go to Heaven

"How many of you little girls want to go to Heaven and see Jesus?" One Sunday morning in Sunday School, this was the question the teacher asked her class of five year old girls. Like everyone else, I eagerly responded with the uplifting of my hand. The teacher then instructed each of us to repeat after her the words to a simple prayer and then she pronounced that we were all saved. For the next ten years of my life, I felt secure and I became very active in my service to God rarely missing a single service. As a teenager, I attended every youth activity and camp, I sang in the choir and during the summer helped with Vacation Bible School. There wasn't anything I would not do when asked.

At the age of 15, this security and happiness disappeared. As I listened to sermon after sermon, I became increasingly frightened of dying and going to hell. But then I would recall the incident when I was five and I would tell myself that I was saved. For months I was tormented with the question that kept repeating itself in my mind, "Are you sure you are saved?" I would cry myself to sleep each night asking God to save me if I wasn't saved. But that did not work. I found no assurance or peace. During every invitation, I found myself wanting to go forward, but I couldn't make my feet move. I kept telling myself, "How can I go forward? Everyone thinks I am saved. What will they think of me?" I was feeling all this conviction and I was too afraid to do something about it and too afraid not to do something. I was miserable.

The Sunday night two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, the conviction I felt during the invitation was so overwhelming, I forced myself to take that first step into the aisle. An amazing and wonderful thing happened--I seemed to float the rest of the way to the altar. In tears, I knelt at the altar realizing that at the age of five I did not understand repentance of my sins. I also realized that the reason I did not receive comfort from my feeble attempt each night asking God to "please save me if I wasn't saved" was because I had to admit that I wasn't saved and that I had to repent of my sins. The woman who dealt with me at the altar tried to convince me that I was saved and was just experiencing some doubt. Through my tears I almost had to shout at her that I was not saved and I was not leaving the altar until I asked God to forgive me of my sins and to save me for all eternity. After doing this, there was instant peace in my heart and that peace has been there for forty years.

That was a dangerous question for a Sunday School teacher to ask a group of sweet and innocent five year old girls who only wanted to please their teacher and to some day go to heaven to see Jesus. I thank God that He watched over me during those ten years when my soul was in danger. I thank Him for giving me the courage to take that first step and I thank Him for making me His child, not as a little girl, but as a woman. When my life and service to God on earth has ended, then I will "Go to Heaven to see Jesus."

Belinda Gabbard ( husband-Coleman Gabbard)
Our Missionary wife to New Zealand for 22 years