A word that I would choose to describe my life before knowing Christ would be “escape.” I spent a lot of my time trying to escape my reality, trying to escape the pains of my everyday life. Growing up, I suffered a lot from my thoughts and feelings, battling anxiety and depression in strong waves. I would experience a lot of contrasting feelings from caring too much, to not caring at all; from enjoying life, to wanting to die; from aiming to be kind and spread love, to feeling completely hopeless and alone with no purpose or meaning for my life. I didn’t know how to deal with these feelings and would create fantasy worlds in my mind or resort to physically harmful ways to try and escape the confusion I experienced with depression and anxiety.

Not being very close with my family, I felt like I couldn’t be honest about what I was experiencing with them and often hid from them what I was going through and how I was dealing with it. In my perspective, we had enough to deal with at home without me adding another thing to the list, especially because my family was a part of why I was feeling that way. So, I spent many years experimenting with things like self-harm and drugs to escape the too many emotions I’d have all at once or even to escape the numbness that would sometimes consume me. I didn’t know how to explain what I was going through and didn’t know who I could try to explain it to, so I would try all these different ways to escape my reality.

Coming to college felt like an exciting and yet terrifying adventure for me because it would be the first time that I was away from home, and honestly, it felt like another way for me to escape the ups and downs of my home life and my mental health. I had this idealized version of myself that I thought I could live out coming to college; someone who was cool, loved by many, and didn’t have to worry about the attachments to family. I thought I would live this out by joining the party scene, but almost immediately into the school year I was approached by this girl asking me what church I went to.

With my family being atheist, I hadn’t ever attended church, nor did I plan on spending my college years going to church. But, I always had this weird fascination with the cross, and after reading a post online about it representing being kind and compassionate towards one another, I decided to get it tattooed on my wrist. This is what led that girl, my now best friend Morgan, to asking me about church. Noticing that I did not plan on going to church and didn’t know what the cross actually symbolized, Morgan made herself available for any questions I had regarding what the cross represented.

Through attending the girls Bible study in Chadbourne, I was able to learn who Christ was, learn how He died on the cross and bore the utmost of pain and suffering just so that we could have a personal relationship with God and have eternity with Him. I learned what being in a relationship with God could look like, learned about how I was forgiven for all the wrong that I had done, and learned about God’s promises of a perfect afterlife with Him in Heaven. When spring rolled around, I attended my first Badger Cru weekly meeting. It was there that I realized that all of what I’ve learned so far about Christ was true, and over 250 students also believed in Him and acknowledged what He had done. I decided to follow Jesus that night.

Every day since, I have learned more of who I am in Christ and have been rediscovering the process of growing up while growing in my relationship with God. I still experience the same struggles with my mental health and am deeply affected by all the hardships I have gone through, but I now cling to a hope much greater than anything of this world. I went from trying to escape my reality to finding a new, eternal reality with God; from searching, to found; from confused, to secure and confident in where I’ll end up; from lusting for death, to wanting to live out the life God has planned for me. Even though I still experience the same mental struggles as before, I now know and believe in the truth written in Romans 8:18 that our present sufferings are not worthy of comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.