My life revolved around knowing better but walking away anyway.

I don’t really remember a life before Christ. I remember always enjoying talking about God and I loved learning about Him. When I hit high school though I had a hard time aligning everything I knew about God with how I wanted to live. I partied, drank, had sex and then went to church on Sunday and would cry. The tension I was having was from the knowledge that the choices I was making would bring me anxiety, negative self-perception, misrepresentation of Christ, and just made me feel heavy, yet I didn’t want to stop. I knew these choices would be the death of me and yet I was stubborn.

One day after attending a women’s night freshman year of college with my new friend Venessa a shift happened. We both left the event silently feeling like frauds. Walking back to the dorm together we confessed everything we had ever done, explaining how we didn’t belong with those Christian women and expressing how we knew the way we were living wasn’t helping us and wasn’t honoring the God we claimed to serve. And then we sat there in our disobedience, silently recognizing that we were both at a crossroads. We could continue down a path we knew would harm us or we could take a path that would be difficult, but lead to a life worth living and an eternity worth fighting for. Neither of us repented there, but after that something had changed in me. That was when I started to take ownership of my faith and I soon would confess and begin the struggle of starving all my harmful desires.

I still struggle, I’ve still looked God in the face and spit in it. I’ve still come to church and cried, but this time it’s different. This time in my struggles I call on Him to help me out and he does. It doesn’t always mean my desire to disobey goes away, but now I have a strength that’s not my own to walk away from those sins. “If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.” (Matt 18:12-13) God came after me even when I didn’t deserve it, even when I didn’t want it, even when I fought it. He patiently, consistently, and lovingly ran after me, the wanderer.