I started attending church when I was around seven years old with my parents as they came to know Christ as their Savior.  I went to church regularly every Sunday and to the Friday night youth meetings. I enjoyed going to church and hearing about God, but the concept of having a relationship with Him wasn’t real in my life.  It’s not that I didn’t want it, but I thought that my knowledge of God was all there was.  I thought we couldn’t attain more.

It was when I was 14 that I went to a youth camp in Tennessee and it was during that time that the Lord began to awaken my heart to what it meant to have a relationship with Him. The following year we returned to that same youth camp, and The Lord really stirred up my heart and showed me my personal need for Him as my Savior.  I knew that God was God, but I had never personally accepted that He died on the cross for me and resurrected 3 days later so that I could be saved, and that without Him I had NO HOPE.  So it was that at the age of 15, that I gave my life to The Lord.  Going back to youth group was different after that; I began to learn more and more about God and began to have a relationship with Him. 

As I started high school, I made new friends and began hanging out with them and going to parties. I started seeing all the “fun” things in the world and got involved in them.  As a consequence I stopped growing in the Lord and in my relationship with Him.  Much like the seed that fell among thorns and was choked by them, all the “fun” of this world got my attention and my focus was shifted from Christ to this world, and my relationship with God became stagnant.

I thank God for His grace and that He, in His mercy, showed me His love again, and as a freshman in college, for the first time I saw The Lord as my Beloved and that He is the only Faithful and Certain One, the One who would never leave me. My relationship with Him has grown since then, it is still growing, and has much more to go, but I’m so thankful to Him because He didn’t leave me with the same mind as when I was seven. He has allowed me to see and taste that He is so much more than a far off God; He is my God, Savior, and King. There is so much to learn of The Lord, and as a result there is a continual surrender of ourselves as we