My faith started at a young age where my parents raised me and my two sisters in the church they were heavily involved in. Following in my parents footsteps, I also became very involved in our church taking on roles like ushering and lectoring. Rather than sitting a pew, being a part of the service helped me feel like I was serving God and showing people how good of a christian I was. Throughout high school I realized my faith spanned wide but had no depth. I gained years of knowledge about God from Sunday school and going through sacraments but never had a relationship with Jesus.

In high school was the point that I started to focus on other aspects of my life, like robotics, band and schoolwork, where keeping myself busy was my main priority with God locked in a box only reserved for Sunday’s. This sense of busyness was a distraction from thinking about my future and just how I couldn’t control a lot of things in my life.

Coming into college I wanted to get involved with a ministry on campus because faith and God were still a constant in my life. When coming into college everything was unknown with new friends, no parents and even not knowing what to expect with COVID.

Freshman year I ended up going to the first Cru bible study where I met a bunch of guys who I could tell were passionate for the Lord. Being pouring into freshman year I finally understood what it meant to be saved by the Lord and that no matter how much work I did it didn’t matter because Jesus had already done the work for me. Through freshman year I became passionate for the Lord and focusing on how I could live a life that had God in the center of it.

Unfortunately that passion didn’t last all year, March of my freshman year I dealt with what I would consider the lowest point in my life. My cousin, a freshman at UW-Lacrosse, ended up taking her own life. When I heard this news my life fell apart. I didn’t really focus on school or eating or any of the important things you should do to maintain yourself. I continued to ask God and question him on why this would happen and then I would turn it on myself and ask if I could have done anything to change the outcome. I was torn apart and this was one of the first times I felt truly angry at God. This anger was a sense of not understanding why it happened and how God could have allowed it.

The first meeting with my campus ministry I went to after my cousin’s death, I mentioned the news to my Bible study group and immediately became surrounded by this community and the Lord. I finally realized that the firm foundation I had built in Jesus was going to be my strength in this storm. Even if I was angry at him he wasn’t going to abandon me. I ended up breaking down crying at that meeting and weirdly enough during the meeting I began to feel a little bit of peace. Here I realized that the Lord was my strength and I needed to trust in him for that peace. Everyday the Lord reminds me of the abundant joy and peace he gives each day to deal with this world. Without the firm foundation I was able to build with God and rely on his strength and not my own I wouldn’t have felt and known the joy of loving the Lord and deepening my relationship with him over these years in college.