Now that a woman knows her sins are truly forgiven, nothing can stop her from sharing that message with others.

Shirley Metiva was raised knowing about God. It was a general idea about a God somewhere. Yet instead of a church home, she attended multiple churches and never really heard the message that Jesus suffered for her sins and that her sins were forgiven.

NO CHURCH HOME

"At age five, I was the proud owner of a small New Testament for perfect attendance," Metiva says. An older cousin sent Metiva to her church's catechism class, which is where Metiva learned the rosary. "To this day I remember the words to Hail Mary, though I don't recite it. The Our Father is still a daily prayer," Metiva says.

She also remembers her parents taking her to church on Easter and Christmas, but what she remembers most is that those were days when she got new clothes. "At age 12, I attended a Billy Graham crusade and for a while I completed the Bible studies," she says. "Then, during my teen years, I attended a Methodist church and youth group."

In 1967, at age 16, she got married. Because she married young and had no home church, when her son was three months old, he was baptized at St. John's, Hemlock, Mich., where her older sister was a member. That was her first introduction to the Lutheran faith.

However, when a Baptist evangelist showed up at her door, she joined that church and was baptized by full immersion. Even there she didn't find the church home she wanted. "The guilt of sins haunted me, and I felt I could not live up to the church's expectation of me," she says. The guilt intensified when she and her husband divorced seven years after their wedding. Metiva was only 24.

In 1976, she married her current husband, Howard. Though he had a WELS background, he wasn't attending church at the time. "I, with him, became a 'C and E' [Christian]," she says. They remained "Christmas and Easter" Christians until 1982 when their children—his 12-year-old daughter and her 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son—began taking confirmation classes at St. John's, Zilwaukee, Mich.

That was when Metiva began attending church regularly and was moved to take confirmation classes herself. Getting to classes was challenging because she worked more than one hundred miles away from home and had only been coming home on weekends. Unfortunately, classes were held on a weeknight. A bit reluctantly, for ten weeks, Metiva made the long trip home after work on Thursday evening, only to travel back to work on Friday morning for her final workday.

Though it was tiring, Metiva did it because she loved hearing the gospel. "I now knew of God's grace and love for me," she says. "I did not need to bear the guilt I felt when I belonged to the Baptist church. I could never be free of that guilt if it were left to me. I would never be good enough, but God forgives and loves me—a sinner."