I’ve always been a rule-following oldest child. Growing up with Christian parents, Christianity is what I always knew, and it just seemed like the right thing to do because it’s what they did. I always strove to do my best and do the right thing. This led to me becoming more distracted with everything I was doing and putting my identity in my accomplishments instead of what God has already done through Jesus.

Jesus has already met God’s holy standard, counting His perfection as mine.

In high school, I realized that, even though I had accepted God’s gift of grace many years ago, I still hadn’t surrendered all of my life to Him. I realized this when the pandemic hit my junior year of high school, and everything I had been working toward — AP tests, sports, band, college — suddenly weren’t relevant anymore. God used that moment to show me that I had been holding onto a false sense of control over my life. The reality is that I truly don’t have control over anything. At first, this caused a lot of fear and stress over my uncertain future in a pandemic world. But through spending my extra time reading the Bible and the godly people in my life, God taught me that I can only experience true peace if I surrender EVERYTHING to Him and trust in His sovereignty over it all. This means my grades, friendships, money, family and future — all of it. No matter how hard I work to make my life go how I think it should, nothing I can do will ever give me peace or worth apart from God.

Surrendering is something I have to keep doing day after day, reminding myself that I can’t do anything on my own because I need Christ’s strength for it all. I can still get stressed about the future and struggle with basing my worth on what I do. I know that God is always there, and my relationship is permanently secure — He is just waiting for me to re-surrender control back into His capable hands and trust in His perfect plan.