Testimony Tuesday: Putting Together the Pieces

TC Neshangwe • Feb 16, 2021

I look at my Christian journey as a puzzle. All the experiences, people and decisions that were made were all part of a much bigger picture. The first puzzle piece was already put in place long before I was born. I was born in Zimbabwe, into a very religious family. Throughout my childhood, my dad was, and still is, a pastor in Presbyterian church in Zimbabwe. Being brought up in a Christian household gave me a bit of insight of God very early on. Though I didn’t really understand God completely, I played the pastor kid role as best I could.


The next puzzle piece was a big one: my family moved here to America. We moved because my mom had decided that she wanted to be a pastor as well and wanted to go to Denver Seminary. We lived on the Denver Seminary campus housing for five years. During that time my little brother, Melusi, and I were enrolled in the Littleton public schools. I went through Elementary school, middle school and the first semester of high school in the schools in this district. I made lifelong friends that would impact my life moving forward.
While here, another puzzle piece was put in place. I started getting more involved in the Presbyterian church and began confirmation. This is a practice of confirming your baby baptism at a later age of your life. I was not baptized as a baby. However, to cement this confirmation process I did need to get baptized. So I did. Though I felt that I was right with God at the time, there was still something missing. This was the missing piece that I would eventually go and seek out.

At the end of 2013, God put down probably the most difficult piece of my puzzle. My family moved back to Zimbabwe. At the time, I felt as if this move was not worth it. My mom and dad were being placed to lead two different churches. Because of the shortage of pastors within the Zimbabwe Presbytery, they could not have two pastors at one church. The city we moved to was different from where we lived before. Bulawayo is the second largest city in Zimbabwe. It is also known as the capital of the Ndebele tribe. I belong to the Shona tribe, growing up I spoke Shona and English. I felt at the time that we were basically moving to a different country, moving backwards, away from opportunity and success. 

I was mad at God during this time. I didn’t understand why I needed to go back to Zimbabwe. It didn’t make sense to me that I was being put in a tough, unnecessary situation. My heart got hard, and I decided to just do whatever I wanted. I showed hatred to anyone that tried to come close to me and made very bad decisions that led to me being put in bad situations. It wasn’t until the end of my first year being back that I realized what exactly I was doing. My parents sat me down one night and my mom asked, “Is this who really you want to be?”. It was a sobering question because I was not taking responsibility for anything. In my mind, it was everyone else’s fault. It took a while, but I came to the realization that holding on to the hate, being selfish with my life, and being mad at God was just making everything worse. With this realization, I decided to make some changes.

Throughout high school, I was trying to play two people. On Sundays and with church people, I was very careful and played the pastor’s kid role, the godly kid very well. I was the youth chairperson and was heavily involved in the church. At school or with my close friends, I was less “churchy” and more of a rebel. I thought if I respected God at church events and among church people, everything else that I did outside of that didn’t matter. This again put me in tough situations at times. There were times that I would come home drunk and not remember anything the next day. Sometimes I would sleep over at a friend’s house on a Saturday night and go to church really hungover. These are just a few examples of many more situations I put myself in. 


And then, another piece was added to the puzzle. I moved back here to America for college. I enrolled at MSU Denver as an Aviation major. One of my closest friends at the time invited me to an ultimate frisbee event that the campus ministry was having on the MSU campus. It was there that I met Miguel Perez, Cory Stanek, and Nick Connor. I started to study the Bible with them. At first, I thought of it as a review. I felt as if there was nothing that they could tell me that I don’t already know, but as we went deeper into the studies I was convicted. It wasn’t until then that I understood the baptism process, how my sin put Jesus on that cross, and how much God loved me, even though I was not perfect. It took awhile for me to commit to getting baptized again, but I did on March 26th, 2019.


My puzzle is not over. Each day, each month, each year there are always pieces being part together to make me who I am as a proud disciple of Christ. Now, I have more genuine, authentic friendships. I feel as if I can lean on anyone in the church when I'm struggling and the right help will be available to me. It's different from worldly relationships and friendships in the sense that because we are God's child and part of his body, when one us suffer and struggle, we all band around them and help them get through it. I finally understand what God's love looks like and feels as I experience it firsthand.
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