by Rob McKinney
If you happen to be reading this newspaper while on a treadmill, bike, or stair climber, or some other type of exercise apparatus that allows you to read something interesting while you burn away those calories, congratulations!
Either you've managed to keep your New Year's resolution to lose weight or get in shape past Jan. 1, or you've been doing the exercise thing for a while now.
A new year tends to give us the feeling of a new start, a clean slate if you will. It's at this time of the year that many people look at their life and decide to try to change it for the better.
For others, however, getting out of the starting gate is enough of a challenge - their life seeming beyond the hope of change.
Four years ago Natasha McGillis was ready to give up on life. Recently divorced, she was addicted to alcohol, smoking, and drugs, including cocaine.
"I was high on Christmas Eve in a hotel room by myself," McGillis recalls. I was out of money, too."
McGillis started abusing substances when she was in junior high. "I started smoking marijuana and hashish oil and taking magic mushrooms and that sort thing from the time I was 13."
Why?
"At the beginning of my youth it was to escape the pain I was experiencing in my home." She adds, "I had such a low self worth. I was really struggling with a lot of things."
That night alone in the hotel room was a turning point of sorts for her.
"I cried out and asked God - I didn't know who He was - but I remember telling God if He would set me free from this mess that I would live for Him."
God kept His part of the bargain but McGillis didn't. "It's funny how I kind of forgot about that night after He set me free. I quit the cocaine no problem and just moved back to using marijuana and alcohol."
McGillis was born in Calgary but her unwed teenage parents gave her up for adoption to a family in Medicine Hat. She describes her childhood as "difficult." Two years after being set free from cocaine she located her birth mother. Unfortunately, she would never meet her father, discovering he had hung himself on New Year's Eve 13 years earlier.
"That was kind of the last straw," explains McGillis. "At this time I was on a spiritual journey, I had been searching for God probably from the time I told Him I would live for Him in that hotel room.
"But I was looking for Him in all the wrong places. I was reading all of Oprah's bestsellers and going to psychics and into all kinds of New Age stuff, but I wasn't experiencing any kind of freedom or peace."
McGillis, who was working as a hairstylist, recalls a client commenting on how sad she looked. The woman, Christine Oswald, asked her what was wrong. "I told her that I desperately needed spirituality in my life," recalls McGillis.
Oswald invited McGillis to meet her friend Monica Prescott, the co-pastor of Word of Life Church in Leduc where McGillis was living.
The women convinced McGillis to join them at a Christian women's conference in Red Deer. There, McGillis surrendered her life to Jesus.
"The moment I invited Jesus into my heart I was set free from all kinds of things," explains McGillis. "I was released from drug addiction, alcohol addiction, sexual immorality, fears and anxieties, and smoking.
"A lot of things about me changed on the inside too, as far as thoughts and emotions. It was like I had a new life, a new beginning."
In the two years since she was given a new start in life, McGillis says there's been "a procession of healing from all sorts of past wounds."
McGillis credits God with providing her a way to open her own hair salon about a year ago in Leduc, appropriately named Heaven The Salon. Appropriate because for many residents of the community, located just south of Edmonton, the salon has been a spiritual oasis and a place to discover the love of Jesus.
"I haven't been able to stop talking about Jesus and I think that's why the Lord blessed me with the salon and gave me an arena where I can openly and freely share the gospel without any kind of repercussions," explains McGillis.
"It's miracle after miracle everyday in the salon."
The greatest miracle has been the many people who have accepted Christ as their Saviour and also been given a new start in life.
"I'm glad God set things up the way He did because I had spent two years as a hairdresser in this town before I became a Christian. I had a lot of clients. When I became born again they knew something changed in me. That was a huge part in me leading more than 200 people to Christ. They had seen how real and powerful God's love was just through my changed life."
One day a young man came into her salon for a haircut. McGillis had found the man of her dreams - literally. In a dream she had seen a man preaching in a gymnasium while she was looking on as his proud wife.
"Within a few short minutes I realized this was the man I was dreaming about," says McGillis.
She asked the man named Sean a strange question: Have you ever considered preaching? Startled, the man replied that he had. McGillis told him she had seen him preaching in her dreams, but said nothing about the two of them getting married.
Sean would come into the salon about every seven weeks for a haircut. "He wasn't my most faithful client," laughs Natasha. However, some of the haircuts would take up to five hours as the two discussed their passion in life - Jesus.
Like Natasha, Sean's life had been dramatically transformed by Christ. "I was selling drugs, hanging out in the drug dens and bars every single night. I was high more than I was sober, I was quite a bad apple," he says.
Sean says he "tried to clean himself up" but all efforts failed. Eventually he ended up in the psychiatric ward at the University of Alberta Hospital.
Fortunately a few committed Christians in his life had been praying for him and helped him to find Christ at a healing crusade near Edmonton. Says Sean, "I had accepted Christ as my Saviour, it was awesome. It was like a huge burden lifted."
Sean says he flushed the medications down the toilet, stopped smoking and drinking, and using drugs.
Today Sean and Natasha - who married seven months after they met - want everyone to know about the new start Jesus gave to them.
"My heart goes out to people because I know how sad and how horrible my life was before I knew Jesus," says Natasha.
"It's a whole different world now!"
Do you want to experience this kind of Life?
Click here to find out how.
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