I’ve been attended church for almost 15 years now, and watching the church grow as I grew was an amazing experience for me. But even as I neared the end of my high school days I continued to be amazed by the baptism testimonies of others.
I remember listening them and wondering how all these people had such amazing stories. And I thought, wow, is my life really this uneventful?

As it turns out, it’s really hard to understand what God has done, or intends to do, if you aren’t actively looking.

In my case, throughout my middle school and high school days I was barely looking at all. So despite being surrounded by Christians and attending church weekly I’ve always felt alienated from the Christian community as a whole.
I became a lot more appreciative of Christ in my life as I moved out of middle school and into high school. I started reading my Bible more often, and listening to Christian music and trying all these different ways to try to be a better Christian, to better myself. And then one day I came to a realization as I struggled through the most difficult period in my life.

It was a physical disorder that involved a lot of pain, and lot of sleepless nights. It wasn’t any fun, to say the least. There was so much going wrong at the same time, with finals and testing coming up, that for the first time in my life I felt physically and mentally incapable of dealing with the situation I faced. And in that moment when I had nothing left I turned to Christ.

It’s funny how in Sunday school I learned of Job, and Judges, and Jonah, but none of these stories ever clicked with me. Rather, I thought how foolish it was for these people to be rejecting God so quickly. Yet when I looked at my situation, at the bottom of my life I realized how foolishly I had acted in the past fifteen years. I was the Israelites from Judges. I was as foolish as Jonah. Proverbs 8:34 says “Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.” God had given me so many chances to change myself and I had rejected them all. I had refused to look for God, even though every day he had looked for me.

I spent a lot of my life trying to control what other people thought of me, trying to be the ideal person I wanted to be without any consideration of what God wanted me to accomplish. Everything I had done to make myself look or feel like a Christian meant nothing, because inside I didn’t truly have the mentality to look towards God.

Faith in God isn’t just something that comes from understanding what Christianity is, or even accepting that the only means to salvation is through Jesus Christ. Being a Christian means acknowledging that every action and thought you have must be with the intent of honoring Christ.

Most importantly, being a Christian means acknowledging that alone, we cannot accomplish any of this. We are always tempted to do the wrong thing, even if we know we shouldn’t. From the highs to the lows of our lives there will always be moments where we falter. But this is the solution that Christ has brought through his death and resurrection. It is because Christ himself came down to Earth to save us from our endless failure to follow the Lord’s commandments that we can even hope to be saved.

This is the hard truth I learned from those sleepless nights. That you can have motivation to follow the Bible, and you can have a good understanding of last week’s sermon, and all of last year’s sermons, but you can’t be saved until you first realize that you are a sinner. None of your actions carry weight without Christ behind them.

So what I realized was that I had oriented my life in completely the wrong direction. I should have been looking towards the gospel and Christ as a role-model, and instead I was trying to shape myself with my own hands.

But I’m thankful for those months of suffering, for the moments of regret and repentance I faced, because it has changed who I am. Because regardless of whatever happens the next day, or the next week, or even the next year, God has something planned for me. All I needed was to take that step forward in acknowledging what Christ had done in my life.