2025-10-28
I have been a Christian for about 2 ½ years. I was born to two Protestant parents. When I was a little kid, me and my family went to church every Sunday but we never took church back into the home. We never brought up the Word at home, either. When I went to the kid's service at my church, I was more enamored with the activities, music, and snacks than anything else, and I certainly didn't know who Jesus was or why He mattered to my life.
Fast forward to middle school and we had completely stopped going to church, and Jesus wasn't a thought in our heads anymore. As I entered middle school, I felt mental illness and atheism taking hold of me. It was also at this time I gained an addiction to lust. I started watching porn around this time and continued almost every day through college. I started to listen to immoral music and I would play video games from the minute I came home until 1am. The day after, I'd be so tired that I would fall asleep in almost every class period. I often slept through important bits of class, and I was never a diligent student. I started to accumulate friends that did nothing other than motivate me to continue practicing this lifestyle.
By high school, I was completely an atheist, and I started to become ideologically far-left. I started to adopt harmful ideas and ideologies like abortion and sexual liberation. I gathered even more friends that would reinforce these ideas in my head. By the end of high school, I was a complete slave to sin. I had a mentor at this time who tried to share the gospel with me, but I always politely refused, thinking I could handle myself. After all, you don't need religion to be a good person, right? By the end of high school, my anxiety and depression had gotten so bad that I found it hard to even show up to school. I was surprised that they handed me a diploma at graduation.
By college, I entered into a few relationships that were completely sinful and lust-driven, all of which ended disastrously. I eventually dropped out of college due to lack of motivation and willpower. I had a few short-lived jobs, all of which I quit after spats of tardiness. I had tried smoking weed to try to solve my problems, but naturally it didn't. After quitting my last job, I internally gave myself 6 months to keep trying in life. After which, I would completely give up. At the time, I hadn't fully conceptualized what giving up meant, but I know it was something that would have led to death.
There came a point in all that darkness where I realized that everything that I had tried to do failed. I failed in work, in academia, in relationships, and in friendships. My life and my mental state kept getting worse and worse without signs of stopping. I genuinely saw no future outside of staying in my room all the time and working short-lived jobs. I frequently had panic attacks from the idea that my life was pointless. A question I kept asking myself was: Is this really all there is?
Then there was a night in 2023 where I had the worst panic attack of my life. The weight of my past, the perceived meaninglessness of my existence and the uncertainty of my future was too much for me to bear and came crashing down on top of me. My heart was racing, I was hyperventilating, and I was crying incoherently like a demon was manifesting inside of me. I began to cry out to God for help. I cried out "God, please help me" over and over again. It was something I had never done or thought of doing before in my life and at the moment, I didn't know why I was doing it, but it felt like an inner instinct. Almost immediately I felt a kind of peace wash over me and my panic attack started to abate. Soon after that, I reconnected with one of my good friends who is a believer which motivated me to go back to church the next Sunday. So I went with my family, and that day at church they just so happened to be hosting impromptu water baptisms so I walked up and accepted Jesus into my life that day. Later I discovered the verse Romans 10:13 that says "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."
The next few months of my life were physically and emotionally tough, but God got me through them. Initially, it took a while for me to start emulating Jesus. I did not go to church regularly, and I did not delve into the Word often. I was still sinning regularly. However, I felt a newfound conviction that I had never felt before and I felt like I was no longer a slave to sin. I found that my depression and anxiety, which was something I experienced nearly every day, had completely gone away. And it was Him who healed me of it. And I still prayed every night for protection that God would guide me down the path that He wanted me to go. And He answered, by giving me a career.
A little over a year ago, my faith started to grow a lot more. I started to go to church and engage in fellowship more. I veered off at times, but the Holy Spirit got me back on track through people in my ministry. The past year of my faith has been radically transformative, each month more than the last. The Lord keeps finding new ways to surprise, test, challenge, and reward me. He often gives me more than what I pray for, and He sometimes gives me things I didn't even know I needed. He gives me an inner peace that nothing can disrupt. I feel safe knowing that He is on my side, that nobody can snatch me out of His hands, and that He saved me not because I was good enough for Him but because He died and rose for me. There is no greater blessing knowing that He was not willing to spend eternity without me, and the feeling is mutual. I constantly think about verses like Romans 8:38-39 which says "For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness.
for his name's sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
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