Growing up, I always considered myself to be a Christian, and I took pride, too much pride, in that fact. I went to church every week with my parents, joined a Bible study, and did all of the “Christian things” someone my age could do, but my heart wasn’t in the right place. I confessed myself to be Christian, but I didn’t profess any longing for God. I would think about God at church, and that’s about it. I was a believer, but I wasn’t a follower. I didn’t let the message sink in, let alone shape me because change, to me, was secondary. What mattered most to me was what others thought about me doing those types of things. I thrived on being told how much people respected the man I was and the way that I lived my life, and I never would forget those comments. They made me feel important and fed my ever-growing ego, but deep down inside, I wasn’t living for God, I was living for myself.

For me, high school was a breeze. I had a lot of great friends, played in a lot of sports with some of the best teammates a guy could ask for, was liked by the adults in the community, earned good grades, and was in a leadership position in just about every group I could get my hands on. I wanted to make my mark in my hometown, and I did everything that I could to do so, but I did it for the wrong reasons. I did it for me. I searched and prodded to purpose and meaning in myself. I poured every ounce of myself into my friends, studies, sports, and clubs. I was consumed with what others thought and saw me as; I sought for acceptance, and it wore me down. Stress and worry overtook my life, and I was struggling to keep my head above water, and I would always try to make sure that I masked this defect, and I did a good job at it.

It wasn’t really until the end of my junior year when that started to change. Almost everyone who knows me knows that I care a great deal about injustices, and this stems largely from the abuse and neglect my adopted brothers endured with their previous family. It was this passion that led me to ask a whole bunch of questions about my already shaky faith in God. The main question that I would ask struggle with was “Why? Why would God allow for these types of things to happen?” This question weighed heavily on my heart, but then I realized something. It wasn’t God who failed us. It was us and our corrupted hearts that caused us to do and think in these ways. After coming to this realization, I started paying more attention to what our pastor had to say, and I took what I learned and actually applied it to my life outside of church on Sundays. I came to the conclusion that the only acceptance that I need doesn’t come from others; it comes from God. It was then that I realized how truly great God’s gift of grace was, and the fact that He sent His Son Jesus down to Earth to die for my wickedness made me that much more grateful.

However, even after coming to this realization and after my transformation from a simple believer to a follower, acceptance and approval from others are still things that I stumble over. I look to words of affirmation from my friends too often, obsessively read into things that don’t need to be, take things to heart too easily, and it doesn’t do me any good, and it is during these times that I feel the furthest from God. But at the end of the day, I know that there’s a God, who can, will, and has already forgiven me of my sins and has accepted me into his family. Who could ask for anything more than that?