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Because in my own strength I can't change anything about me. I totally get what Paul said when he said, "There's nothing good in me." I totally get it. So my only hope is to ask God to pull back the curtain a little bit and let me see who he is because that will make me want to change. We think, we'll give people a bunch of rules and that will pull their heart along.

How did your understanding of who God was change as you began trying to get a clearer picture of him?

The whole way through the New Testament you hear talk of what it's going to be like at the end of the age. Paul tells us, at some point, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. But John got, for a minute, to see what it's going to look like. He saw the last paragraph and absolutely, totally changed the way that he lived his life. Because he saw that every single person above the earth and below the earth was doing one thing, and that was that they were worshiping.

That would not always have been good news for me. Because I've never quite got worship. My picture of heaven was of bunches of people kind of jockeying to get a better position to see Jesus on the throne and singing kumbaya one more time. So I can't honestly say I ever used to look forward to heaven because that just sounds incredibly boring to me.

But what I discovered is that worship actually changes everything about who we are. It came through a very simple thing. I had to go for a routine heart scan. I get one every couple of years because my father had a massive heart attack in his 30s. And my last scan came back good, but my doctor called me back and said, Look, we've picked up a spot on your liver, and you need to be at the hospital tomorrow at 6 a.m. And so I went through the usual CAT scans and all that kind of stuff. I had nursed my mother-in-law through liver cancer, and I knew that it was not a good prognosis. And I couldn't come up with anything that was helping me. So when I got home and went through this waiting process—which I just hate—I began to worship.

Initially I think I did it because I thought If I'm really good at it, God might keep me around for a bit longer. But worship changed me because I began in just simple ways. I did what the Old Testament people used to do. I got the Psalms and I walked from my bedroom and I read them out loud. And when I came to ones that were praise psalms, I praised them out loud. And when I came to ones where David's heart was breaking, I found myself on the floor weeping along with him.

And I began to sing and to say what I believed to be true in the matter what I could see in my own heart. And I realized the more you get to know God, perfect love casts out fear. In fact, the more God fills your heart with his love, there's not that much room left for fear and dread.

It doesn't mean that everything changes, but it means that you have this bigger picture of who God is. So no matter whether you get the good answer or the bad answer, I was very blessed. It turns out I have a birthmark on my liver.

But the process absolutely made a huge impact on me that continues to this day. Worship is now a huge part of my everyday life, because I know it's the only way that I can live in this world.

What are you learning about the needs of American women by speaking at the Women of Faith Conferences?

How incredibly lonely women are. I mean they're very busy, very overcommitted, and that's why I think Women of Faith is very different than Promise Keepers. Women don't need to be asked to commit to one more thing. But so often they feel disconnected and as if they're not meeting anyone's standards—not their own, not their husband's or kids', not the church's, and certainly not God's.

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47