I wrote this in October 2018. Don't even ask me what class it was for. I've taken so many.
I asked Jesus into my life at the age of four. My family was on a camping trip. We ate at a fast-food restaurant earlier, and now, as I played with the kid's meal toy, out of nowhere, I told my mom that I wanted to have Jesus in my heart as she did. She led me in a salvation prayer similar to the one in our required reading today. However, I was nine years old before I was ready to share my faith and seek baptism.
Matthew 18:2-6 teaches us that small children often have the best faith and this was the case for me. I grew up with many elderly relatives, and if ever one of them experienced an ailment, I faithfully prayed to God and then knew he answered my prayers when they recovered. I even remember watching the 2004 tsunami on television and earnestly believing that all of the people who died were evil sinners because God always took care of Christians.
All of this changed when I was a young teenager. I had been through a domino chain of stressful times from multiple deaths in my family, one of them traumatic, in just a couple of years, as well as the April 27, 2011 tornadoes that devastated my beautiful state. Also, over those two years, I lost my simple, childlike faith and I did not have an understanding of God's love. Now my best friend was dating a bad influence, and it caused her to become mean to me. I approached her about this boyfriend and the danger of him, but it made her act even meaner towards me. Finally, I began to lash out at her. For the first time in my life, I felt the Holy Spirit nudge me. It told me that I continued to live in patience and peace, it would do all the work for me, and everything would be okay. I had never experienced anything like this before, and I chose to ignore it. It made the situation even worse. In the middle of the night, I had an extremely rough time, and in desperation, I asked God please to handle this for me, and immediately he flooded me with a peace I cannot describe. That one moment restored my childhood faith, and I gave myself to God over again. It was a day-by-day process as I developed my adult understanding of God and began to read the Bible for the first time. God even helped me heal my relationship with my friend, and we went on to have the best times of our lives together and are close friends to this day.
My faith is a never-ending journey, and as I dealt with genetic mental health conditions later in life, it often wavered, but it never left. I love Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see" (NIV). Even when I did not feel God, I had total assurance that he was there. God helped me cling to this belief. The hardest blow to my faith came just in March and April of this year. Through multiple friends and coworkers, I was introduced to Calvinism, Reformed theology, and double predestination. For each of these points, there were Bible verses virtually proving them. I reached the point where I could not disprove Calvinism, and it almost destroyed my faith.
My United Methodist pastor was kind enough to counsel me in the Bible and got me back on my feet. I now view this venture into Calvinism as an enormous blessing, because it inspired me to get to the roots of what I believe, and I am convinced that God used it to lead me to a theology degree, something I never, ever planned for my life. I now think that there is more to knowing God than spewing out a stream of scripture, which is what I believed earlier in my life. We must consider the nature of God and what we know him to be. All I have to do is look back on that night God flooded me with peace when I least deserved it, and I know without a doubt who he is. Today I am at one of the strongest points in my Christian journey.
