EARLY  YEARS/  FINDING  A  CHURCH

I grew up with two older brothers (Matt and Mike) and a mother and father who stayed together. For the first part of my life I had no idea about any religion. One time my friend came over and randomly asked what religion I was and I had to go ask my mom. My mom responded by asking my friend what she was, and when she said she was Catholic, my mom said that we were also Catholic. It kind of seems like I’ve always been the way I am, but this goes to show that at one point I didn’t have a religion, nor did I know anything about it. My mom’s parents are Catholic, so I guess she just claimed to be one too, even though I’m not quite sure she was involved in the Catholic church or anything at all. 

Later, when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom came to God and started looking for churches to go to, and eventually she chose Open Bible. I started going to church there with her, and I still do. I believed in God right away, because I was young and therefore very trusting, but going to church began my foundation in Christianity. My younger older brother went to my church’s youth group for a time, but then stopped. Probably because no one really made him feel welcome. That was almost 10 years ago. The rest of my family doesn’t normally go to church, but my Dad has started to come every once in a while!

MY  OH  MY,  SO  TERRIBLY  SHY

During one summer around sixth or seventh grade, I went to church camp with my best friend Katie and her youth group. With the exception of a couple events during that week, her church camp was extremely boring for me. The main reason was because I didn’t really have any friends there, and the only one that I had, had other friends that she wanted to spend time with too. This left me with really no one to hang out with, and since there weren’t a lot of activities, it was really boring. It was because of Katie’s church camp that I avoided ever going to my churches camp.

In sixth grade I joined Gymnastics, and in seventh grade I joined Cheerleading. I was really shy at the beginning of both of these, but after a while, I warmed up to the gymnasts. There are a lot of reasons why I warmed up to the gymnasts and not the cheerleaders, but whenever I was at cheerleading, it was like everyone already had their own friends, and I was younger than most of them and I didn’t really want to annoy any of them. I stuck with cheerleading for two years, and at the end of ninth grade, I quit because I didn’t like it and a lot of the reason was because I didn’t have friends on the team. Then, freshman year, I became a football cheerleader, but I quit before the basketball season because I was too shy to make any friends there, too. I took a year off from cheer, and eventually I missed the sport and decided to rejoin. This time I was one of the older girls, so it was easier to talk to the other girls because they were younger than me.

I also got another opportunity to practice talking to people when I got a job at the grocery store at the end of my tenth grade year. This allowed me to come out of my shell a little, and talk to new people (the customers).

I think that God is trying to show me how it feels to not be included. This would be important to know, because then I would know how important it is to talk to people who are new to something and don’t have any friends involved with them. This could be especially important in a church setting. God said to love your neighbor as you love yourself, so God must want me to include others, because I know how much I want to be included or to have friends when I’m in any situation. Also, perhaps God wants me to stop being so shy, that way I could spread the good news about Him to more people.

IT’S  ALWAYS  GOOD  TO  TRY

When I started going to church, I went Sundays and Wednesdays. However, once I got to sixth grade, I was afraid the youth group would be really boring because my brother had gone a few times and he hated it. So the first time I ended up going to youth group was in the summer after sixth grade, and I have no idea why I even decided to go then. To my surprise, I ended up loving youth group! When I started youth group I felt a really strong connection with God. I think this was the first time I really had a relationship with Him, when before I just knew random facts about Him and The Bible. I ended up getting baptized that fall. If I didn’t try out youth group, I don’t know what would have happened in my walk with Christ, so I think it was very important in my life

The summer after ninth grade, I finally decided to go to my church camp. The only reason for this was because my friend was going. I showed up to church on camp day, and found out that she decided not to go because of the large number of high schoolers attending. I ended up going anyways, and spent the first couple days with someone I was kind of friends with, and after that I made some friends from another church. So, at first, the week was kind of awkward, but after a while I loved it! I believe God is trying to show me that if there is something that I don’t think I will like (especially if it involves Him) I should give it a try, and more than likely, I will end up loving it. This will help me as a future leader if I get this in my brain, because then when God tells me to do something I don’t want to do, I will do it anyways.

OBSESSION

During ninth grade, there were two senior guys that I ended up becoming really obsessed with. One of them, I just talked to way too much because I had a crush on him. And the other one, I ended up stalking, more or less, because it was just really fun and funny to see his reactions to me doing creepy things. I never realized how annoying I was to them, until the next year, when this other guy started stalking me. He didn’t really do anything too creepy, he just talked to me in between classes every chance he got, and it was actually really annoying. I realize now that I was way too obsessive, and I put these guys almost as idols in my life, and I think God wants me to know how easy it is to make the mistake of putting things higher than him in our lives and he also wants me to know that if that happens, the idol cannot fill my life in the right way, and it will go wrong.

A couple months before I turned eighteen, I started hanging out with a guy from work, and after a while he became my first boyfriend. We dated seven months before we broke up. I’m not sure what his beliefs are about God, but I do know that God is not the number one thing in his life. I asked God to show me whether or not we should keep dating for marriage or if we should break up. After a while of fighting it, I realized that God was telling me to break up with him. Dating my first boyfriend helped me learn about relationships and what I want in a husband. This relationship also helped teach me that not everything is about me, but it’s about everyone and we all need to give and take.

WHEN  LIFE  GETS  YOU  DOWN

When I think about eighth grade, something that really sticks out to me is the homework amount. I remember having a ton of homework, and since I tend to procrastinate, I was really stressed out sometimes. This being said, I feel like it is a terrible idea to put things off until the last minute, because it is stressful. So God is probably trying to teach me not to do that, by giving me small tasks like homework. If I can learn not to procrastinate, I feel like life would be that much easier and I would be a more effective leader if I become more organized and less rushed. However, I think the main thing God is trying to teach me is to trust in Him that bad situations won’t last forever. God allows us to go through bad situations so that we will draw closer to him.

When the two guys I stalked graduated, I got really down because I wouldn’t really get to see them ever again, plus I finally figured out that they hated me. Since I liked them so much at that point, I got kind of depressed. In every bad thing I’ve gone through though, God has been faithful to help me out. When I was feeling down about these guys, we watched a video from Godtube during church, and immediately I felt better. The video reminded me of God’s love for me and that he is always there. It also reminded me of how powerful he is, and that he can overcome any issue that I’m facing.

I also felt really down three years later, when my boyfriend and I broke up. I felt like I had no friends and nothing to do, because I had spent the majority of my time with him for the last seven months. In response to this, I spent a lot of my time complaining about how bad life was without him. During my slump, the worship leader at my church went out of his way to mention something from Job about not complaining, but instead to delight in the Lord. Again, I immediately felt better. I felt like this was directed toward me, because I was constantly complaining, and now I have learned that complaining is a terrible thing to do.

GET  ADVICE  FROM  THE  ONE  WHO  KNOWS  ALL

Right after I broke up with my boyfriend, my mom started throwing in her opinion about how we didn’t necessarily need to break up. She was also way too empathetic over the situation, and she was feeling sad before I even could get it into my head. All I knew was that I didn’t want to talk about the situation anymore. This made my mom really upset because she thought I just didn’t want to tell her anything about anything. This was a really rough time for me, because I couldn’t even focus on what was happening, because I was so angry with my mom. Even though she felt one way towards my situation, I really felt like God felt the opposite. I learned from this, that we people don’t always know what to do, so we need to make sure we consult God and do what he says. He really does know all and he knows what is best for me.