Nothing in life is handed to you. If you want something, you have to go get it yourself. No one is holding your hand. If you don’t want to drown, you better teach yourself how to swim. I could go on. The list of lies I bought into in high school is longer than that. Even now, I can remember how much sense they seemed to make. While I thought they were raising me up, they were silently telling my something that was actually tearing my down: you are alone.

I’m a third-grader, sitting pretzel-legged on the carpeted floor of the sanctuary inside the church I grew up in, listening with bright-eyed joy to my youth pastor explain who Jesus was, what He had done, and why it mattered. The truth made perfect sense to me back the. Virtually nothing had happened in my life yet that could hold me back from saying yes to a relationship with God.

But then I grew up. I lost my grandpa unexpectedly at a young age and watched my cousins go through the divorce of my aunt and uncle. My family life changed further when my sister began to experience the consequences of a stroke she had had in the right side of her brain when she was a baby. Our church started struggling financially and spiritually, which affected the sanctuary of the community there. The waves seemed to be getting higher, and I found myself fighting for control in the chaos. The voices of everything swirling around me grew louder, and God’s voice grew softer. I spent too much time in my own head. I was often prideful, angry, and bitter. Not to mention sad, as I experienced some of the symptoms of depression during high school.

But all started to change when I came to college. My bible study leader freshman year asked me this question: “On a scale of 0%-100%, how sure are you that you will go to heaven?” My answer was somewhere in the middle. She smiled at me then and told me it was a trick question. It was either 0% or 100%. I was confused at first but then, for the first time in a long time, I stopped, and really listened to God.

In the midst of all my striving, I had started to believe that I needed to earn God’s love. I had forgotten that grace was freely given when Christ died on the cross. The more I started meditating on this, I found the lies  and began replacing them with truth. Through this process, the weight of sadness and anger was lifted again by joy. My journey in college has been more fulfilling than I ever dreamed it could have been. It has taken me both around the world, and deeper into who I am as a child of God. I have found new and satisfying purpose in my work and relationships. I am still working though the habits I’ve built up since childhood, but the draining, self-generated hope that I used to rely on, has been replaced with the abundant hope of Jesus Christ.