My
spiritual story: it sounds odd in a
way. Yes, I suppose that I must own it,
as it is mine; but I can’t help mulling over the fact that all of our stories
seem to connect in an inexplicable way.
I think that this is God telling us that we are never meant to truly be
alone. We are communal. I hope that, in my story, you find an aspect
of yourself or, even better, you see God’s grace in my story which will further
prompt you to see Him in your own. To
God be the glory.
Childhood
To say that I was shy as a child
would be an understatement. In the
places where I was out of my element (so…everywhere but my house), I would
begin to hysterically cry or become frozen in terror. To my young mind, security was
everything. This meant that I was
essentially a home body, completely comfortable only with my immediate family. As the youngest child and the only girl, I
strove to emulate my two older brothers by doing everything that they did: exploring outside, playing video games,
talking about Pokémon, and going to church and Sunday School every Sunday. I actively took part in all of the crafts and
loved listening to the Bible stories that the teacher would read and my dad
would read to me every night before I went to bed. To me, these stories symbolized quality, safe
time with people who I knew and respected and were just stories. Like I said
earlier, my family was everything to me.
They, essentially, were the ones that pointed me towards God. Childhood was a time of me learning all about
God and really never truly understanding or taking ownership of this faith.
The first time that I really thought
about giving my life and everything up for the Gospel occurred when I was ten
years old. My parents told me that my
uncle and aunt and their five daughters had decided to move to Bolivia to
minister to the orphaned children and spread God’s love. This was the first time that I really
recognized that there was a world outside of my circle of family, friends, and
church. From these family members’
voluntary move to another country, it made me curious about a God who had
enough power to influence people to give up their safe and secure life and go
to do His work. From this one instance
and many more, my passion for international work and awareness began.
Adolescence
As I entered Middle School, I
quickly discovered two things about myself.
The first was that I was a pretty good student, almost to the point of
obsession. I would spend hours doing
homework and triple checking my work to see if it was correct. If I didn’t get something right away, I was
very hard on myself. The other thing
that I discovered was that I didn’t like myself very much. I was insecure and would constantly compare
myself to the other people in my class and find that I always somehow came up
short. But, God was faithful in that
time. He provided me with a group of
friends which kept me sane throughout middle school, high school, and even today. We were all so different and didn’t really
know where we fit into the ruthlessness of public school. I think that that is what kept us all as a
group for so long.
But, when I was away from the
support system of friends and finally got through the busyness of being the
perfect student, I would crawl into bed and cry night after night. Although I had the security of my family and
friends and even schoolwork, I would still feel alone. Usually, I would blame this season of “moppyness”
and depression as your typical hormones, but I really feel like it was God
pursuing me in the loneliness that I had chosen. As I would sit in bed, I would contemplate my
salvation and death, sometimes longing for death in an unhealthy way.
One night, I was just so sick of the
life that I had been living and the loneliness that I was imposing upon myself. I went downstairs and found my mom in the
living room. This in itself was unusual
because my mother usually goes to bed at quite an early hour. As I stood in the doorway, I was faced with a
choice: would I walk in and begin this
step to change my life? Or would I
simply go back upstairs and try to figure life out for myself? Needless to say, God gave me the courage to
go to my mother and ask her to pray with me and accept the Holy Spirit to
reside in me and give me a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. Because of this experience, God has blessed
me with an open and honest relationship with my parents, specifically my mom;
something that I hear is rare when one has pre-teen and teenage daughters. All at once, I felt this peace come upon me;
this flitting feeling that I had been looking for. However, it is important to realize that this
feeling, at least in the way that I wanted it, was something that was temporary.
After I had this “conversion
experience,” I went through a period of bliss.
Everything was possible because of this relationship with God. Then, reality happened. The feeling of peace and assurance slowly
went away, replaced again by feelings of insecurity and panic as the busyness
of life started to set in. School was
getting more difficult, and I was beginning to feel the pressure of living up
to the roles that my two brothers had played – they were both really smart and
generally popular and I felt that I had to even raise the standard. I then went through this phase of feeling
alone again and then going to a middle school youth group or event that asked
students if they wanted to give their lives to Christ or reaffirm their
faith. Every time that this would
happen, I would always raise my hand and reaffirm my faith. Looking back now, I guess I would say that I
had some assurance issues. Again, after
reaffirming my faith, I would feel this sense of peace; then it would “leave” a
short while later. These assurance
issues still come and go even now at times; I think that it is because I long
to feel like I am in a relationship with God and still haven’t quite figured
out how to really enter in. Any thoughts
or advice on this would be wonderful!
As I entered high school, I was
thrust into an environment that wasn’t familiar. Once again, I was a very small fish in a relatively
large, public school pond. Amazingly, I
adjusted relatively well for a person who really didn’t like change and still
felt insecure. Then, two things happened
relatively around the same time. The
first was that a person that I respected and was a leader stumbled in his
life. The ensuing chaos in my community
made me realize the power of sin and the destructive path that it can
take. The second, and more important
event in my spiritual walk, was the death one of the friends that my brothers
and I had grown up with. This young man
was only twenty years old when he died.
It was during that time that I really began to wrestle with God; it was
then when I really knew it was alright to ask God the big questions of life as
I watched a family that I was close to being torn apart by grief and their own
questions. One of the first places that
I remember going to when I got my license was to this young man’s grave. I sat there in that cemetery and really
engaged in the discipline of meditation…my professor of this course would be so
dang proud! Eventually, I began to let
the bitter thought and angry phrases to God go, replacing them with the small
assurances that God was listening and that I could trust Him. I’d have to say that it was during this time
when I really chose to be “all in” for God.
Later that year, I made profession of faith and really felt like an
active participant in the Body of Christ.
Young Adulthood
In my spiritual journey, it seems
like just as I feel confident of my faith in God, something comes along to keep
me very humble and broken, crying out to God.
This cycle has been really evident to me throughout the years that I
have spent in college. College has been
a huge blessing to me in seeing evidence of God’s faithfulness throughout the
classes that I have taken and the wonderful testimonies from the people that I
have met. However, college has also
pointed out some major issues that I face in my own life. For example, I have always been a person that
has liked to know exactly what is going on.
In short, I liked to be in control of my life. When I don’t feel in control, I struggle with
almost crippling amounts of anxiety.
This semester especially, God has pointed out this weakness in myself
and has sent me different people and situations to show that He is actually the
One in control.
As I look back on my life, it is so
easy to dwell on all of the failures and mistakes that I have made in my walk
with Christ. However, Paul tells us in
Romans 3 that there is righteousness from God that “comes through faith in
Jesus Christ to all who believe. There
is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and
are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ
Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice
of atonement, through faith in his blood.”
If that doesn’t sound beautiful, what does?
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