My name is Phil Harlan and here is my story of God's grace in my life...

My greatest concern in life was being popular at school.  In elementary school I was one of the popular kids, one of the kids that the younger kids looked up to.  When I got to junior high I was put in advanced placement classes, none of my friends were in the classes with me.  My parents wanted me in band so I was in band.  None of my friends were in band.  My parents wouldn’t buy the name brand clothes that I wanted that my friends wore.  I was bitter because I became associated with those that I considered beneath me; my old friends didn’t look at me the same way.  I was cruel to those I was now forced to associate with through bullying and joking, due to my bitterness.

My dad worked afternoons, 5-7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day so I hardly ever saw him.  He had a hard time dealing with the chaos of having three boys and he had a bad temper so when I did see him it usually wasn’t pleasant.  My mom had brought up divorcing my dad several times due to his temper.  I remember crying and telling her to make sure that we went with her.  Sometime around 6th grade my parents decided that we were going to start going to Royal Oak Missionary Church.  I went because I had to but I didn’t really pay attention to what was going on.  Occasionally I would laugh (along with my two brothers) at the people up front, to my parents disdain.  My older brother, Nate, was a mess.

When he was in fourth grade he wrote a note to our mom saying that he didn’t want to live anymore.  He had been overweight all of his life and also had obsessive compulsive disorder.  He was very depressed and was a bit of a bully.  He would spend his days in his bedroom building models over and over again.  When he did come out of his room he and I frequently got into fights.  One day when my older brother and I came home from school for lunch my dad gave us a Christian music tape (Carmen) and had us listen to it.  We thought it was awful and he was very disappointed.

He had started to seem different and we just thought that we was weird.  I don’t totally remember how things progressed from there but sometime during the Fall/Winter of my seventh grade year I remember starting to pick a fight with my older brother (in his 9th grade year) and him saying something to the effect of, “That’s alright Phil, I forgive you”.  Huh?  I remember being dumbstruck.  I had never heard anything like that before in my life, especially not from him.  He changed.  His depression was gone.  His obsessive compulsive disorder was gone.  He didn’t spend all of his time in his room but started helping out around the house.  He started doing well in school.  Within two weeks my brother was a completely different person.  And he gave Christ all of the credit and began to talk to me about Him.

I know that God, Christ must be real-how could my brother become a new creature like that?  God convicted me concerning the way I was treating the people that I was hanging out with at school-I realized my depravity in how cruel I was to them.  I believe that it was at this time that I was saved-I saw Christ for who He is and I saw myself for who I was and repented.