By Princess Goodridge
Pastor Lillian Johnson has lived two totally different lives—one full of struggles and sin and another after a dramatic turnaround when she gave her life to God.
She’s now the pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ on Morgan Street in Raleigh, NC, but few people could have predicted from her early days that she would have been a woman of God.
She grew up in a single-parent home with a mom who had only an eleventh grade education and was a disciplinarian and righteous woman raising eight children. Poverty was a huge aspect in Johnson’s life. She worked very hard on a farm near Nashville, NC.
In elementary through high school she was very quiet and lacked self-esteem. She remembers starting high school and not having a boyfriend like all the other young females in school, so she made one up calling the invisible man” JCOL”. At the time she didn’t know why she chose those letters, but she soon realized it was “Jesus Christ Our Lord”. At this stage in life she didn’t attend church; she would occasionally go to Sunday school.
When she entered college she found a whole other world. She had lost her virginity at the end of her senior year, but she said she felt like a baby compared to her roommate and two other friends she linked up with her freshman year at North Carolina Central University. Her roommate influenced her to smoke, drink, steal, and whore around. Throughout Johnson’s four years of college she lusted after married men. She said she actually wanted to kill the wives of the married men she was dating. Yet deep down inside she knew there was something greater.
In 1972, her senior year in college, her brother called her to come to California because she was sinning. Johnson said she didn’t see how it was affecting God or how displeased God was. She hung up on him because he was rejoicing that he had found God. Johnson graduated with a double major in Sociology and Education and a minor in Biology. After many telephone calls she moved to California to live with her little brother and his wife. It was there when she was 21 that she received the Holy Ghost.
It took an unfortunate event, her mom’s passing, to solidify her search for becoming one with the Lord. Her mom was her role model and being a righteous woman she never talked ill about anyone. Pastor Johnson said she felt like she let her mom down and wanted to be better.
And then she began a literal journey to another part of the world when her little brother moved Johnson abroad to Switzerland with him and his family to help babysit his kids while he studied there. After traveling to Switzerland for a year and a half, she went to Indiana to study ministry at Ordain Union College. Upon graduation she went back to California and then her church sent her back to North Carolina.
Even though at first she didn’t want to be a pastor, she knew it would be her calling with confirmation from her church leaders. When Johnson became a pastor, for a long time her family and friends rejected her. They misunderstood the saved Lillian Johnson because they weren’t drawn to God themselves. Only her baby brother understood and accepted her, and she gives him credit for starting her down her path to a holy life.
At first she didn’t want to be married, because she thought a single person could serve the Lord much better than a married person. But eventually she asked God to send her love, someone who was in yoke with the Lord as she was. Because the Holy Spirit gave her the desire to hate all the sinful things in her past, she rejected her old life so strongly that she kept sex from her life. She had stayed sex-free for seven years. Even after she met her husband, they never kissed or did anything physical until they got married.
Connecting with her husband didn’t come in a straight-forward way. In 1976 she was driving to work in downtown Raleigh when she saw a ‘96 grey and black Corvette. For three days straight a voice whispered “that’s your car” into her ear. She wrote down the vehicle’s color, year, and model in her diary.
Then about four months later a policeman came in to a place she was to get donuts and coffee. The officer tried making passes at her, but she ignored him because she knew he wasn’t called by God. Putting the officer to the test, Johnson invited him to church. Arriving late to church she happened to see the exact grey and black 96 Corvette in the church parking lot. She was so unsettled she peed on herself with no time to change so she entered the church wearing a soaked dress.
The church had a small congregation so she couldn’t hide. The police officer turned around and winked at her. And at that service he gave his life to Christ. And now she says that her husband has helped her to be more patient, kind, sensitive, and meek.
Johnson has been saved for forty years. Looking back on her life she wouldn’t change anything because she says her mistakes actually made her wiser. She believes there are certain things people have to go through to encourage others they can pull through the struggle. The advice she gives to others is “you have to get with the right people, people who will lead you to a higher plane whether naturally or spiritually.”
And after many years of manifesting the life that she has, her family now also wants the light of God that shines in her with love, peace, joy, kindness, long suffering, temperance and meekness.
She can now compare the sweetness of her life now to those early days of struggle and sin.
“My life is an open book; I am not ashamed!”
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