I did not grow up in a Christian home. My parents dragged me
to church when I was little because that is just what you do when you have a
child in Georgia. My mother and father were both raised in church but it had
become something that was incredibly unimportant in their lives. Yet now that I
was in the picture, there was a sense of social obligation to go to church. So
we went. My parents had one amazing Sunday school teacher, Matt Farmer, whose
investment in them caused them to begin to take their faith more seriously.
Around the age of 8, many of the children in the children’s ministry were
getting baptized and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. A few
weeks later, one of the Pastors from the church came over to meet with me. He
explained the Gospel to me and the following weekend I prayed “the prayer” and
was baptized. Life seemed great.
Looking back on it, I was going along with the flow of the
youth group. I had no real understanding of sin, grace, and repentance. I did
not understand the point of the cross. For me, this was just the religious
thing to do. Soon after I was baptized, my parents Sunday school teacher was
killed in a car accident. This pretty much wrecked my parent’s faith. They
pulled us out of church and I honestly did not care. Church and Jesus seemed
very boring and totally irrelevant to my life.
So I spent the next 9 years living totally devoid of
anything that would resemble Christ. My life began to focus totally on
wrestling, partying, my social life, women, and anything that I could find that
was fun. I lived for myself in every single way and my life was dedicated to
the pursuit of self. My senior year came around and I was still in the middle
of this pursuit, yet I was now at the point of beginning to experience some
depression. Everything that I had been living for was not bringing any kind
satisfaction and I was becoming miserable.
On the way back from party one night, I pulled into a church
parking lot and began to beg God to make my life better. I was so empty and
nothing was filling my life. I did not have any kind of revelation or anything
in that moment and God was silent. So I continued to lean into my own depravity
believing that if I just partied harder, then maybe the pieces would fall into
place. I did not have enough foresight at the time to understand that even if I
could find satisfaction though this level of intense partying, the level I was
operating at would be unsustainable for any length of time.
Bit by bit, the Lord brought a season of brokenness into my
life. Everything with wrestling, relationships, and school began to fall apart
bit by bit. I could not understand why my life seemed to be in such a downward
spiral. At the end of this season, I was smashed and my world seemed very dark.
It was at the point in my life that God began to open up my heart towards Him
and help me to start looking up to Him.
During the summer before I went off to college, I bought and
Bible and began to read it. My entire goal in the process was to just figure
out what I believed about God. I was not trying to have my life put back
together. Yet that is exactly what happen. As I was reading the Bible, Jesus
made sense and I began to seek Him and for the first time in my life, I found
life. Jesus was not this rule driven dictator, but a kind and compassionate Lord whom I fell in love with. Bit by bit, the Lord began to put the broken pieces of my life back
together and I became more alive than I ever have. It has been one heck of a
ride since but I am so excited about the next adventure the Lord is taking me
on.
