So most of you may know, I made it to College. I started my freshman year at The University of Oklahoma. When I was on the race the Lord totally changed my perspective on school and how it is going to be the same mindset as the mission field. I’m so blessed to have made it to OU and I’m here to show people Jesus’ love on campus because a lot of people have never seen it or felt it. What you are about to read is my first college essay. we had to write an essay on a value that we have and I saw it as an opportunity to share the Gospel and how it impacted and totally changed my life. I know it’s a little long but I think you’ll enjoy it!
Love is a perfectly designed concept but why are we so bad at it? Most people would say they understand love, but if that is true then why do 50% of marriages end in divorce, relationships fall apart based on selfish desires, and we can’t seem to keep friends or significant others around? It’s because we simply do not understand what real love is, throughout this essay, I will take you through my journey in life how I’ve been deeply affected by love and share with you what I’ve learned along the way.
Growing up love was two different things to me. The romantic love that you have with another person or the natural love that you can only have with your family. I developed this romantic view of love through childhood stories and movies as I grew up. They tend to define true love as magically meeting a person that is a perfect match for you, falling in love with them and getting your well-deserved “happily ever after”. I believed that idea. And even more so that once you found your perfect match and you fell in love that you could never fall out of love if it. That was true love to me. At the same time, I was not in denial that it doesn’t always end up like the movies. I have seen situations play out of divorce, infidelity, and more in my friend’s and families’ lives, but never when it came to my immediate family. At that point in my life, my explanation when it came to these things was that the people involved were not a perfect match and that must be why it didn’t work out. I always thought higher of my parents and that they were the “perfect match” for each other that I had always imagined and wanted them to be. That was until they got divorced when I was 11 years old and my whole view of love shattered right in front of me. I would have never guessed that this essential part of my life and identity would come crumbling down. This changed everything for me.
My view of true love was crushed, I thought to myself: Why my family? Why my parents? Why me? I was let down, hurt and confused. This fairytale “perfect match” view I had of love was all I had been taught and what I wanted to believe was true about love. After reality set in that my parents were getting divorced, I justified it with the same ideas that they just weren’t the “perfect match” I thought they were. So I still leaned on and believed that this love depicted in movies and love stories was authentic true love. By this time I had matured enough that I knew love wasn’t limited to romantic relationships or family members. I received love through friends, teachers, and coaches and learned that you could find it anywhere you truly saught for it. I realized through observation that usually when someone gave love, they received it back so I quickly associated giving love and getting it back in return. I was going through life with hurt from my parents’ divorce and decided that I could potentially find love myself, so I searched for it on my own.
When you get to high school you start to see more serious relationships and friendships form. I knew that friends were a definite place to find love so I figured that if I just found the right friend group that they would accept me and I would finally feel genuine love. Basketball was a huge part of my life when I started high school and ended up giving me a lot of those friends I was searching for. Being an athlete gave me an advantage with this quest that I was on. At my school, athletes were put on a pedestal and thought of as cooler, more important, and worth your while. This definition quickly became my identity and I felt what I thought was love from the people around me. About the middle of my sophomore year, I got hurt and had to give up basketball, I was so lost because basketball was all I invested myself into. I was no longer able to find love, affirmation, and identity in basketball because it was taken away from me.
One thing after another was failing me on the search for love I was on. When basketball was no longer there, I went to status. I would associate myself with some of the most popular people in school because I figured the more people I could surround myself with, the better chance I would have to feel loved again by those around me. Eventually, I started to explore things like drinking, smoking, and other similar activities because everyone else was and I needed to follow if I wanted to keep my status up. I did those things because I wanted affirmation from others and I was finding it. Once I started to realize it was working for me I just began to feed the hunger for more love through the affirmation of others. So everything increased, the number of friends I had, the amount of alcohol I consumed, and the size of the parties just got bigger. But everything felt fake, everything felt like counterfeit love. Did my friends care about me? Yes, but it didn’t feel like the love I had imagined in my head, I wanted to feel truly loved and wanted by someone, I wanted to find someone who was perfect for me. Then I found someone.
At this point in my life, I was so lost and drained in this desperate search for love. I was constantly on the move putting in effort to please others so that they would love me back. In the midst of all of this, I was numbing my pain from the lack of love with alcohol and getting high. Don’t get me wrong, those things were fun for me at the time but they were only temporary pleasures. I was working so hard day in and day out to find someone who thought I was worth loving. Was the love I had imagined a fraud? Was I seeking something that didn’t even exist? I was looking for this so-called “unconditional love” a love without limitations. We talk about this type of love often in today’s society but rarely see it acted upon. We see it being affected by exactly what it’s not supposed to be affected by, and that is selfish desires. It is almost unheard of to find a person that would love you no matter the circumstances, even if you didn’t love them back. A sacrificial love that would lay down everything just to love me.
Towards the end of my junior year in high school in the midst of all my brokenness, I heard the Gospel, the story of Jesus’ life. Now whether you’re religious or not or believe Jesus Christ is God or not, the story of His life is a representation of perfect love. I want to share and the same story I was told and touched by junior year. When God created the world, He made everything perfectly just the way He wanted. He created man in His image and gave him free will because He loves us so much. God knew giving man free will means we could choose to love God back or choose not to. Would it be loving of God to make us love Him back? No! Man rebelled against God, creating eternal separation between them. God sent his only son, Jesus, down to Earth to teach the truth and fulfill the promise that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life. Throughout Jesus’ life on Earth, He did many great things. He taught the truth of God, He did miracles and He loved those who were unseen and unloved. God also sent Jesus to the world die for our sins because our sins separate us from God. It doesn’t matter how good we think we are or that we do good things, we still have sin in our hearts. Jesus lived a life free of sin and showing radical love to us, only to later be tortured, abused and hung on a cross to die. Three days later he rose from the dead proving He is who He says He is and fulfilling the promise to restore the relationship between God and mankind. When I heard this story, I knew I had found true love, A love expressed by Jesus. Coming to the humbling conclusion that I am not good enough and no one will never be good enough but Jesus made a way to be with Him who is good enough!
I gave my life to Jesus April 9th of 2017, promising to love Him for the rest of my days here on Earth until I’m with him in Heaven. This was the best decision I have ever made because now He is the rock of my life, “He will be with you, He will never leave you or forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:8). Throughout my life I had searched for love anywhere I thought it could be found, letting the desires of my flesh guide me. It wasn’t until I found Jesus that I finally found true perfect love and now He is my biggest value and He is the definition of love so that why the value of love has played a massive role in my life.
