Looking back....

Looking back to a year ago, my sixteenth birthday, my life has changed so much! God has shown me so much this past year! I thank God that He didn't desert me when I was choosing not to follow His will. Even though I was deliberately living in sin and I knew it, God never gave up on me and chose to work in my life! He was and is so faithful! I knew God didn't want me to date, but I went down that path anyway, thinking it was okay because this situation was 'different'. So for a couple of months, I was living a lie. It felt good in the moment but deep down, I knew this wasn't what God wanted. He never gave up on me though! My wonderful parents eventually found out about my double life and grounded me. For a while, I was mad at them, God and everyone, and I just sat and felt sorry for myself. After a couple weeks, my punishment laxed up and I took advantage of that and started up with my double life again. This time was different though. I started to feel a tug at my heart that was trying to pull me out of my double life and back to God. But I resisted, and resisted and still stayed in my sin for a couple of months. Then, I went to Ballet Magnificat and came back challenged and changed! I still hadn't given everything back to God, but I believed that's what God used to finally break me. A couple of weeks after I got back, I was having a particularily rough day and I decided to relax and play my guitar. I chose to play the song "Whatever your Doing" by: Sanctus Real, and as I was singing, I broke down because of what the song was saying. It was saying: " It's time for healing, time to move on. It's time to fix what's been broken too long. Time to make right, what has been wrong. It's time to find my way, to where I belong. There's a wave that's crashing over me, and all I can do, is surrender..." And it goes on. As I was singing I started to realize that I needed to surrender my life to God! By the time I was done singing the song, I was practically sobbing but I had to pull myself together because my sister was saying that we had to leave for a boating event with youth group. So we went and on the way home from the event, I felt God was telling me that there is so much more to life than what I had been living, and He will provide for me if I give Him my all! So, as soon as I got home, I did it. I gave Christ control of my life once again! It was extremely hard, but oh so worth it! The biggest thing I learned that year was that anything worth doing in life is going to be hard. So, that was probably the most significant change in me throughout the year, but that was only the beginning! Since giving up my whole life to Jesus Christ, He has been so faithful and I have seen his work in my life. I was continually searching for more and more and couldn't get enough of God and His Word! My cgs family kept me encouraged and I have grown so much from Cgs! About 5 months ago, I started doing dicipleship with the lovely Erin Neises and I have grown so much with her too! I love you Erin! haha...so yeah basically I grew a ton in my faith over the last year! Just really recently, I have been being challenged to go even deeper. I'm aiming to live a set-apart life and I want to keep giving everything to Christ! My favorite scripture is Phillipians 3:8: "Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For His sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him." I'm praying that as I go throughout the next year and the rest of my life, I will keep my eyes fixed on what is important and count all things as rubbish so I may be found in Christ! I want to thank my parents, Steve+Steph, Erin, all of my other youth leaders, and my friends for encouraging me in my walk with God. I love you all!