My Personal Testimony

I had to write my personal testimony before I left. Here it is so far:

My personal testimony starts like so many others. All the way through high school I lived in this bubble of comfort in which my faith was rarely confronted and if it was, I didn’t accept the challenge. I was told in church and in the few spiritual conversations I did have that I was a sinner and that Jesus came to save me. I blindly accepted this as truth and thought nothing of it. I had little to no understanding of the true impact that sin had on the people around me and how powerful the sacrifice Christ made really was. I floated by in this sense of simple acceptance until about the time I was a sophomore in college. During my first few years of college, I was exposed to a variety of personalities and characters. Through friendships with these people, I truly realized that not everyone believes what I believe and that it has a real effect on how they and I lived. These people challenged me like never before and made me reach a low point in my faith. I got to the point that I started laughing in church. It started to make little sense. I needed to figure out what I really believed and why. I faced the challenge head on. I dove into the bible and several other resources. I needed to find out if I could make any intellectual sense of what I had been blindly accepting since childhood. I asked many questions and doubted almost everything. I faced many mental obstacles in my faith but came out the other end with a new sense of beginning. My mind seemed to open up to what was really going on in this crazy world around me. I started to see God’s word in everything. It became so evident how applicable it was to everyone’s life. It was so clear that the words of God are truly powerful and could have a real impact on people’s lives everywhere. This was the stuff that changed people’s intentions and motivations. It was at that point that I said to myself that accepting God’s love and grace was truly important. I decided to finally accept the truth that it is our purpose to let the love that God shows me flow through my entire body into all those around me. We must love others like God loves us.