TESTIMONY
Ron Williams: Healing the Soul Wounds
By Kristi Watts
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– What kind of drive must a person have to sculpt their body into a human masterpiece?
How much dedication does it take for someone to win over 250 awards for bodybuilding? Including top honors as the “Natural Bodybuilder of the Decade”?
For Ron Williams, his quest to succeed could be summed up in one simple word… fear.
“One reason bodybuilding really intrigued me so much is because if I could build this big strong body, this armor around myself, then nobody could hurt me again,” Ron tells The 700 Club.
Hurt was all Ron knew his entire life. He says, “One of my earliest memories is sitting on the doorstep, waiting for my mom to come and pick me up after being dropped off and the devastation of her never coming back.”
Abandoned at four years old, Ron was shuffled from house to house often left with people who told him he was a burden, unwanted or simply just another mouth to feed.
“I felt like if my mother didn’t love me, my biological father didn’t love me, then how in the world could anyone else love me?”
To make matters worse, for over nine years, Ron was raped and molested in some of those homes.
“I was in such pain that the thought of not living was comforting. I was suicidal at 13 years old. My whole young life was a life of depression.”
The only time Ron felt any sense of self-worth was when he played sports.
“I would watch people, how they interacted with winners. I made up my mind early. I want to be that person who wins. Winning became my family. It became everything to me. It became life and death for me.”
Ron excelled at every sport, but one he mastered: bodybuilding. It became his obsession, and in 1988, he won the coveted title of Mr. Natural Universe. But his reaction to his big win wasn’t what he expected.
“I wished that I was dead that day, because I realized regardless of how many contests I would win or how many Mr. Universe competitions I could put under my belt, it was not going to be satisfying. I can remember standing and looking in the mirror saying, ‘I hate you. Why would a person give you the time of day? I hate you.’”
He couldn’t erase the hurtful memories and the questions that haunted him every day of his life.
“I thought, what was so ugly about me that I’m the one that was taken away? I thought she didn’t love me. I thought she gave me away. I thought that I wasn’t good enough.”
Ron was a ticking time bomb although he tried to mask his hurt behind a tough exterior the anger and rejection grew worse especially when he came across a particular kind of person.
“When I saw Christians, I would duck and run. They would always come to me and say, ‘If you died today, where do you think you would go?’ I’d say, ‘I’d go to hell. Why are you talking to me about this? I’ve got real problems. I don’t want to hear about God right now.’ I mean, I was angry with God.
“If God loved me like all of these Christian people would say, why did He allow all of the pain and suffering to come into my life when He could have stopped it? So I felt like He was directly the cause of it. That it was me against the world and against God.”
Although Ron claimed he hated God, in his heart Ron knew that God was the only one who could answer his questions.
“I began to want to find out who am I? What is my significance? Why was I ever here? In my apartment, I dropped to my knees and I began to weep.”
That night Ron asked God to forgive him for the hate he harbored in his heart and to show him how to live a life right before the Lord.
“God baptized me in the Holy Spirit right there in my apartment, and He began to tell me and teach me how to live. This was a process, because once He saved me, my spirit was fine, my body was still the same, and my mind was the same. So now that I’d been born again; that’s a spiritual birth. But He says, ‘It’s your job to renew your mind to the mind of Christ. You can no longer believe what people have said about you. You can no longer believe what you think about yourself.’ So I started at that point reconditioning my mind to believe what God had to say.”
He did that by reading his Bible to see who God said he was. He prayed and fasting on a regular basis. Little by little he began to learn God’s heart and how much God loved him.
“When I accepted Christ in my life, one of the first things I learned is you’ve got to forgive. I said, ‘Forgive all these people that have hurt me? Why would I ever do that? So that they can hurt me again? I’m not going to forgive. They don’t deserve my forgiveness.’ Little did I know that the forgiveness was for me. That if I wanted to be whole, that I had to release all of that hurt and pain. So I went on this quest to forgive. I would say the words, ‘I forgive. I forgive. I love you. I love you.’ But the hurt was bigger than me. So all of my forgiveness wasn’t enough because the pain was still there. I didn’t have the capacity to truly forgive.
“So I remember one day I went before God in prayer and said, ‘God, I’m tired of this hurt. I’m tired of the pain that has been inflicted on my life, continuing to control my life. I don’t have the capacity to forgive; give me Your forgiveness.’ When I said that, something rushed through my body, and it was like I was born again all over again. Everything looked new and different, and the pain was gone for the first time. I could look back, and I could see all the things that had happened to me and there was just no pain. It was like watching a movie screen of my past, but there was no pain attached to it. That’s when I knew that I had truly forgiven and that healing was taken place.”
Today, Ron is a completely different person. He travels the country as a motivational speaker, a pastor and a fitness expert. But his says, his greatest accomplishment came when he stood face to face with his mother.
“She said, ‘Baby, you’ve got something different.’ I led her to the Lord. That was probably one of the greatest days of my life is leading my mother to the Lord.”
In his continuing journey towards complete healing, Ron has learned one of the greatest keys in life: “God loves us, and He wants the best for us. I’m living proof of that. Just give Him a chance.”
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