To be honest I’m a little nervous about this post. BUT, the way I figure it, if youv’e got a personal testimony to tell, tell it. I’ll do this by giving you, verbatim, my personal journal entry from October 26th this year. The entry is title Mark 8:36.
”What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” The first thing I should say is that this verse alone is taken out of context. The second is that this verse saved me. I have feeling that I’ll take time to write about other scripture verses, but Mark 8:36 hold a special place in my soul.
Back in 2006 I interviewed for a position called ‘Rights Management Specialist’ at the Ohio State University Libraries. The weeks leading up to this interview were, perhaps, the most stressful weeks I’ve ever endured. I believed at the time that the stress would subside once I had gotten the job and was accustomed to the new routine. For a whole year I believed that ‘It will get better’. By no fault of my supervisors or co-workers, it never did. As a matter of fact, as the days went by and the responsibilities piled up the stress broke me.
I have no idea when the Schizophrenia began to manifest itself, but manifest itself it did. By June and July of 2007 I was deeply paranoid about everyone and everything. I was deeply suspicious of people’s true motivations towards me. As a result of this, I did my chemically-imbalanced best to stay one step ahead of everyone else. I did this by trying to predict what other people were saying about me, or were going to say, and reacted to these predictions despite them having no foundation in reality.
By August of 2007 I was writing entries in my regular journal and work journal titled ‘Fire’. I now believe this was my subconscious trying to get my attention. My illness was hitting me hard by the end of August. The things I believed bout people, places, and events shall, for the most part, remain in my memories for the time being.
However, one belief, a delusion of grandeur, will make it to these pages. This belief was that I was going to be offered the world. And when I say that I mean it very, very literally. I won’t say who or what group of people was going to do this, but I truly believed that somehow ‘they’ had read my four short stories (Joy, Legend, Nenya, Capture the Flag) and had heard my three compositions (Dream Traveller, Tropical Storm, Haunted Cathedral) and considered each and every one to be a work of ‘Genius’ comparable to the works of Mozart or Einstein. I do not know if one of the inherent traces of Schizophrenia is a hyper inflated sense of ego centrism and sense of self-worth, but I had both of these in spades.
As a result of these beliefs I began to feel that ‘they’ were going to offer me extremely high positions of authority, which included perks such as all the time in the world to write and compose and also all the women I could imagine in order that my ‘Genius’ would be passed on as much as possible. These two specific positions, I believed, would have put me in a position to control the world.
Then on August 27th, 2007 a simple bible verse came to me. The aforementioned Mark 8:36. The words of this verse hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was faced with a choice, accept these new positions and rule the world and be famous beyond reckoning, or reject the world and follow Jesus Christ. I chose the latter. I lay on my bed inside my apartment at 1472 Neil Ave. Apt. V and prayed for Jesus to enter my heart and that I accepted Him and His teachings and would follow him rather than the path I believed(key word) was laid out before me.
I look back on that day and say, “In my mind I was being offered the world, and I rejected it for the sake of my eternal soul.” That is my testimony.
-Shadowrunner/Dan
…..William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. The book is HUGE! 
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