By Michael Ashcraft —
Emma Kirb had come with college friends to the Leeds Music Festival for fun, but as she stood “stone cold sober” observing hordes of drunk and promiscuous youth, she shuddered. Her own family was destroyed by alcohol.
“This is what pleasure is,” she surmised. “It was really empty to me. I just thought there was no point to life.”
So she dragged herself over to the Salvation Army tent in the farm field.
Emma Kirby had no idea what salvation was. Her mom was so strictly opposed to Christianity that she removed Emma from a school just because once a month it had assembly that mentioned God. That day at the concert, Emma thought the Salvation Army were volunteers for the UK’s army.
But the people were super nice and radiated joy. In appreciation for their selfless help to intoxicated youth, Emma bought a bracelet with the word “Salvation” on it. She wore it everywhere.
“I didn’t take the bracelet off,” she says on her husband’s YouTube channel, Off The Kirb. “I had no idea what salvation meant. But for me that wristband represented the thing I was searching for, that peace, that security, that joy.”
In college class, a fellow student asked her about it: “Oh, are you a believer?”
What a weird question, she thought.
“A believer?” she responded. “A believer in what?”
“I’m really sorry,” the student responded. “It’s just that you’re wearing a wristband with the word salvation. That’s a Christian word like you’re born again. Are you born again?”
Born again? It was another sample of foreign language for her.
“I just laughed in this person‘s face,” Emma remembers. “I was actually quite rude to this person. I was absolutely not a Christian. Everybody knows that the Bible is a fairytale book of made-up stories for people who can’t cope.”
Though she ridiculed, the question bugged her. What is salvation? She went home and googled it.
”That’s when the penny dropped,” she remembered. All of a sudden, she understood that Salvation Army was a Christian entity.
“I was faced with a dilemma. I was at a bit of a crossroads,” Emma reports. “Those people at the festival had what I wanted. I spent my whole life thinking that Christianity is a load of rubbish, it’s nonsense.”
She mulled this for days, after which she realized she was being a hypocrite for rejecting Christianity without even giving it a hearing. She decided to investigate and bought a Bible. Some Christians recommended that she go to church, but she was very much afraid to do this for quite some time.
To go to church, she thought, “you wear this big funny hat, you’ll be sprinkled by holy water at the door, I’ll be judged as the worst sinner. I was terrified.”
Eventually, she mustered her courage and went to church. She was pleasantly surprised.
“It was nothing like the picture I had conjured in my mind,” she recalls. “I came from a broken home. I saw people from all different walks of life, different races, different classes, rich and poor, young and old, disabled or intelligent. It was a good mix of people.
“The thing that made the biggest impact on me was thinking this is what family is.”
Emma continued to go to church and read her Bible. “I felt like all of my questions were being answered,” Emma says. “There is a bigger picture. There is a God in heaven who loves me.”
While many of her questions about reality were answered, she didn’t fully understand salvation. She thought it was about behaving well.
“I failed miserably and got disillusioned with Christianity,” she says.
Clarity finally came when she read Psalm 51:7: Wash me and I’ll be whiter than snow.
“I remember setting my pen down,” she says. “Now I get it. It’s not about us keeping the perfect standard. If I could get to heaven off my own steam, then Jesus died in vain. We trust in the finished work of Christ. It’s all him.”
She surrendered her life and repented of her sins. Today she is married and serving Jesus alongside her husband in ministry.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
Related articles: He was raised by two lesbian mothers, a Japanese atheist finds Jesus, he turned to Christ because a Muslim tried to lead him to Allah.
About this writer: Michael Ashcraft pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.
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