In my early childhood, I had grown up in a Christian household. My mother and father would take my brothers and I to church every Sunday morning, and I would also go to a church group for kids to learn about the Bible after each Sunday service. I had always viewed Sunday mornings with a sense of dread and irritation. Church always seemed like a forced obligation to me. My parents would have to drag me to church every weekend. Every Sunday morning, I would hope that my parents would sleep in and we wouldn’t go to church. One day, when I was six years old, my parents decided to get divorced. All of a sudden, I stopped going to church, as my parents couldn’t stand to be anywhere near each other, let alone in the same church. From that point on, Christ was pretty much nonexistent in my life. Without those Sunday mornings, my relationship with Christ deteriorated into nothing.

There was one small facet in which God continued to appear in my life. Every year my family would go on a trip to the mountains of Colorado to a camp called Bear Trap Ranch. BTR is a Christian retreat center, where families can come and focus on growing in their relationships with God. My family found it when I was a year old, and my parents had brought me back every year since. Even though they were separated, they would take turns every year to bring my brothers and I to BTR. That camp in Colorado is my favorite place in the world, and I have also met some of the most amazing people in the world there. I always loved going to BTR, but I refused to let it become anything more than a great week of my summer. I didn’t want God to become my life, so I continued to live life on my own.

Throughout middle school and high school, I felt an unbearable amount of loneliness and depression. Something was missing in my life, but I couldn’t determine what it was. I tried my best to find satisfaction in friends, school, and sports, but they never brought the true joy and sustainability that I desired. No matter what I did, I could never get away from the painful ache of loneliness in my heart. Because of this, I decided to just keep to myself. I was tired of always trying to find a place to belong or a way to be truly happy. Towards the later years of high school, I would use partying and drugs as a way to escape the pain I felt inside. It did bring me relief, but only momentarily. I always wanted more. Deep down in my heart, I knew that what I was doing was wrong, and wasn’t making me truly happy.

This went on for a while, until midway through my senior year. I got a call from a man named Keith Roy, who is the director of the BTR camp that I used to go to as a kid. He called me to offer me a job there for a summer. He said that I would be a camp counselor, teaching kids various stories from the Bible, and also work maintenance on the camp. I had always wondered what went on behind the scenes at the camp, so I decided to join the BTR staff this past summer. Man, that was truly the best decision of my life. That summer was the best summer I had ever had, and is the reason why I’m writing my story right now. The people I met there loved God with a passion that I had never seen before. They encouraged me to allow God back into my life and to form a real, personal relationship with him, which I did. That summer, I gave my life to Jesus. I experienced happiness like I had never known. I made lifelong friends, truly found myself, and was able to tell kids about Jesus. Most importantly, I made a personal relationship with God and decided he was my Lord and Savior. My heart was full.

Even though God had given me everything I had ever wanted, friends, a true identity, a purpose, I still decided that there was room for sin in my life. After the summer working at the camp, I fell back into old habits. I got drunk with friends in order to feel that same euphoric high I did before I had truly met Jesus. I decided that drugs should come back into my life again. Although this period of regression was brief in my life, the horror and regret that it brought wasn’t. I couldn’t believe that even after all that I had experienced, all that I had done to come closer to God, all the amazing things God had put in my life, I had betrayed Him. I’m glad to say that these things are no longer a part of my life, and that I have repented for my sins and run back to God. I know that He is the one thing that can satisfy me.

I’ve had so many opportunities given to me by God to grow closer to him. I know that I’ve fallen short of his expectations time and time again. The thing is, that doesn’t matter. We all make mistakes and we all do things we know we shouldn’t. The important thing is that we admit our mistakes and ask for God’s forgiveness. God will always love me, and He will always redeem me.