Transformed by Love

After failing badly as a human being, Tonia was saved when Jesus won her heart in 1979, in spite of her longstanding aversion to becoming “religious.” She immediately began to absorb God’s Word and was determined to test his ways in real life. The same thing that had led her into bad choices before, now motivated her seeking God: to find satisfaction of heart and fullness of life, and the hero for whom she had always been looking. She found all this in knowing God, and more, and it became her passion to share what she had learned with others.

Tonia, through her simple childlike faith in hearing God and believing his Word, had been rooted deeply in God’s love. When she discovered one day that she did not really know how to love God in return, in the way Jesus described — with all her heart and soul and mind and strength — she cried out for help, and God responded by baptizing her in His Holy Spirit.

Today Tonia will say she has been transformed by God’s love — “First his love for me, then my love for Him.” One day in 1993 while walking and talking with God in a mountain valley near her home in Pennsylvania, the Lord revealed her calling: to help others become rooted and established in the love of God, and learn to live by “the greatest commandment,” to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength.