Jean-Paul Bergeaux's Testimony
When I was a teenager I
started looking for happiness. I
knew something was missing and didn’t know where to start to find it.
At first I looked into a bottle for happiness.
Drinking seemed an easy way to “have fun” and connected with my
peers. After high school I kept on
going. I had no plans to go to
college; I was to busy drinking and hanging out.
When that wasn’t making me sufficiently happy, I looked around and saw educated friends that seemed content. So I decided to get an education and do something with my life. I enrolled at the University of New Orleans and began working on my degree. I did well and found some happiness in learning.
I realized as I went through school that I still was missing something. I looked to women for that completeness. I slept around, had my way and tried to search for happiness in sex. That didn’t last long. Very soon, I felt emptier than I started.
I then found a wonderful woman and fell in love. We moved in together and I found some happiness in our relationship. After a while I graduated from college and still felt incomplete. I became consumed by my career, broke up with her and moved to Virginia to be close to my family and start my computer career.
I dove into my career and searched for success. In the mean time, I dated and wasn’t too serious with any women. I did well in my career and financially. I found temporary happiness in the respect I received from my peers, my friends and my family for my successes. I also found temporary happiness from the respect of “being a good person”. I worked on these two things for a few years and eventually did not get much gratification from them any more.
I looked back and realized that I was happiest during my relationship with my college sweetheart and decided to stop dating and become very picky about who I spent time with and find someone that I felt I could have a long term relationship with and possibly marry. I found a person that I thought I was everything I was looking for and we progressed into a serious relationship. We put a contract down to build a house, we planned on getting engaged when we moved in together and get married later that year.
As the relationship progressed I looked around and realized I had been through everything you could ever want materially, and currently had everything I thought would make me happy. I had a good job, I had money, I had respect of my friends, co-workers, I had a good family to depend on and now I had a future wife with a beautiful house and wonderful life ahead of me and I still wasn’t complete. What was missing? I started going to church with my girl friend and started looking.
Slowly I started to think about God and religion deeper than I ever had, but I wasn’t getting anywhere at the church I was going to. Following a friend’s suggestion, I went to the CrossCurrent service at Christian Fellowship Church in Ashburn, VA. That day changed my life. Something hit me in that church. I realized that everything I had, meant nothing. I realized that all the success in so many areas of my life was worthless, and therefore I felt like I was worthless.
I didn’t completely understand what was going on, but I knew one thing, something was wrong with my life. Within days I broke up with my girlfriend, and shook up my life. I began to spend 3 days a week or more at church activities and searching for the answer. I began to pray regularly and began to attempt to trust Jesus Christ. Amazing things began to happen in my life. Wonderful things! But I was still not ready to say, “I believe”.
Easter Sunday I went to the sunrise service in Washington DC and over the next day, I started to get the answers. That’s why I was incomplete. I was trying to find worth in the wrong things. After a long intellectual investigation of Christianity I decided that if you chose not to believe, it was a leap of faith and if you chose to believe, it was a leap of faith.
Which one looked more reasonable? That 12 guys started this lie, were imprisoned, tortured and murdered for it and still ALL stuck to the lie? That they turned it into a cult of billions of people? Christians tended to have safer, more blessed lives, was it just luck? Or was there a higher being in charge of this community and working in these people’s lives? I looked both ways and both were a huge cliff with no bottom. I chose the side that made more sense to me. I became a Christian. (I highly recommend the book “More Than A Carpenter” by Josh McDowell.)
Since then my life has been completely different. I have devoted a majority of my time to serving Christ and loving people. My life hasn’t been perfect at all, but the love and warmth He provides is amazing. Nothing can bring you down if you rely on God for your completeness. (Col. 2:9,10) He fills in the gaps that are missing in us. The bottom line is, He is love! ( I John 4:17 )
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