Everyone has a story. Everyone has their very own unique story, one that was divinely written just for you. Jeremiah 1:5 says that the Lord knew us each individually before we were even conceived in the womb. That he set each and every one of us apart for a purpose. It’s really, really easy to forget that when your in the middle of it, when your in the darkness before the light reaches for you. It’s really easy to forget that you were made for more, when it feels like your story is just another story. But it’s not, I am here to tell you today that your story is not just another story among billions. I used to think that my story was like that. That everything that I struggled with and battled against was just part of my existence. 

When I felt the Lord call me to the World Race, it was more than the tug in my heart that whispered, “go”, it was a push into a new chapter. A chapter where I stepped out of the fine-tuning my story and handing it over to the Lord. Pure surrender. Where the Lord reminded me that a story is just words and experiences until you share it with someone. The Lord has been showing me that part of his calling me to missions, is him calling me to step out in faith and share everything I have walked through with the people around me. I have hesitated for months, years even from sharing my testimony, because I have always been worried that the scars of my past are what define that part of my life, but they don’t. The goodness of God, the nail-pierced scars on his hands are what define all of me, and I have to hold on to that everyday - I have to hold onto that right now as I share my testimony. 

I got saved and baptized when I was seven years old. I remember when I felt the knock on my spirit for the first time, during a play at my church. It was like something just clicked, like I knew for the first time that I really needed God - even if I didn’t really understand why. I fully know that I believed who God was, I believed that he died on the cross for my sins - but I also was comfortable, I was still a kid without a real idea of the world yet. I don’t think a lack of experience negates true, genuine faith, but having real world experiences that knock you down and bruise you up does help strengthen your foundation if you truly lean into the Lord. 

When I was twelve, I remember sitting on my bed. It was just another day that would turn sideways. My parents brought us into the living room, and they told us we were moving. It wasn’t hours and hours away, we weren’t even leaving the state. But it was change. I would move cities, move counties, move houses, move schools, and by doing so leave everything perfect and great and comfortable. The shock of it was what I felt most. Not necessarily the sadness of leaving, but the fact that this experience was happening to me. It seemed unreal, like there was no way someone as comfortable in my little small town could just leave. My parents told us so many times over the period of moving, and over the years we were moved away, that the Lord had a plan. He had a purpose in everything. I didn’t see it though. All I saw was me and the fact that I had to leave and my life had to change and I had to walk away from all my friends and my family and everything I had every known. All I saw was me, and when all you see is you, there is very little room for God in your vision. 

I was very bitter. I wasn’t necessarily angry with my parents for moving us or with God for calling us to move, but I have always been a person who wants to understand. I wanted to know why we had to leave, not just be told that we were being called and the Lord had a plan. That was what made me angry - my pride. I didn’t understand it all, so in my brain, it all seemed wrong and bad. 

The next couple of years through middle school were hard. I carried that piece of anger with me, and even though I grew to accept my new home, I hadn’t truly accepted the Lord or his sovereign plan for our being there. I remember how badly I wanted to just go back. To be back in my real home where I really lived, not in the new strange place. I felt like I didn’t really fit in anywhere, and where I lived didn’t feel like home. There was a change then, like I just stopped following God. Not completely off the tracks, but just stopped, stagnant. I didn’t understand his plan, and he seemed more like a looming being than my Lord and Savior, the God who calls me friend. I didn’t trust him, and even though I went to church and youth, my heart wasn’t all in. 

Instead of turning to church or family or friends, I turned to other things to bring me the comfort I sought to much. I got into bad things, I watched bad things because even though my Spirit cried out against it, it gave me this numbness almost that made everything else feel less out of control. I was stuck in this sin pattern or falling into sin, being racked with guilt and shame and praying, and then falling right back into it for about three years. I was so tired from the spiritual and emotional exhaustion of it all, and I knew I wanted out, but it was so hard. I wanted the freedom, but I didn’t want to let go of the sin. Letting go of the sin meant facing the wrongness of what I had done, and also letting go of the comfort and desensitization to the world it brought me. It was like I was stuck in a battle for so many years, like deep down I never let go of God because I knew it was wrong what I was doing and that he was what was right, but my flesh wouldn’t let go, I couldn’t. I spent the all of middle school and the first part of highschool stuck and lost. I would have times when I felt like I had broken free, weeks where I would stay away and feel like it was over and I was safe, but then with every turn of my circumstances I was back at square one. I don’t truly remember the moment everything changed. I wish that I could remember the exact moment when something clicked in my brain and I turned back to the Lord to find his hand outstretched to me as it had been all that time. Mostly, I remember crying and talking to God after I had fallen back into sin, and for the first time I really just spoke to him. Like he was sitting right next to me, I just talked. I told him I was exhausted, I told him that the sin really didn’t comfort me anymore but that I was so intoxicated by it that I couldn’t get free. I told him how imprisoned I felt. More importantly than anything I remember crying out to him. Telling him that so part of me deep down knew that I needed him, more than I needed the comfort or numbness, I need a real true Savior. I found Ephesians 2:10 around that time, and it quickly became the verse that I live my life by, “For we are Christ’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus for the good things which he planned for us ong ago.” (NLT). I just remember the quiet calm in my spirit, and as that verse became my cornerstone, the Lord taught me one of the most important lessons I have ever learned - that he is my God, my Lord who sees me. That even when I am a broken and sinful mess, he does not turn his face from me. He sees and he hears and he calls me his, even when I mess up. He taught me that he was enough. It took me a long time to learn that, but slowly he freed me. The weeks of freedom turned to months, and eventually I never looked back. I walked away one day years ago, and since that day I have never once walked back to the life that I once lived - praise God! 

It took me years after that to really lean into the character of God. To rediscover him not just as some looming deity who ruled over my life, but has my merciful and just King, the one who stooped down to rescue me from my sin. I learned to love him as a father and as a friend. To confide in him. To find joy in his words and in the small things he had to teach me. Even after I began walking with him truly again, I was so ashamed of my past, of the innocence that I had stripped myself of. I carried so much guilt, that even though I had not fallen into the same sin, I felt the weight of it every day. Like even though I was walking on the right path, I still wasn’t fully surrendered to the Lord and his forgiveness. More so, I hadn’t really forgiven myself. 

My senior year rolled around, and I was getting ready to go to college. I applied to the schools I liked, but one in particular I really wanted to go to. I felt like my grades were decent enough, I had taken many college level classes, played sports, been in clubs, had a job. Even if I wasn’t the most qualified, I felt qualified enough to get it. Except, I didn’t. I was deferred after early action, and months later denied from rolling admissions. In April, just a month after my being denied, my parents told us we were moving back to our hometown where we had left seven years before. It was like stepping back in time, feeling the unreality of the situation wash over me. It was so strange to be so sad to leave a place that I had once hated so much. A place that I had prayed to leave, and when given the opportunity finally, I didn’t want to. My whole life felt out of control all over again. When I had no plans for college, I applied to the World Race for the first time, but nothing about it felt right. It was like every door in my life was being slammed in my face. I had no direction, no plans, and nowhere to go really. Even though I felt that I had been faithful to the Lord in the few years since I had come back to my faith, I felt rejected by him in every way in those moments. Another season of having no understanding, and I was afraid. 

Once we moved back, I applied to community college in the small town, and began my next phase of life here. At my graduation party, I was gifted a devotional – one that, little did I know, would change everything. I didn’t read it for weeks. I wasn’t in the word, and I was falling out of good habits I had built. I ended my relationship I had been in for a while, and I felt stagnant once again. One day, sitting alone in my house, I decided to read the devotional randomly.

The verse on the very first page was Ephesians 2:10. I didn’t know much in that moment, but I felt the Lord’s eyes smiling on me. He was still with me, even when I had no idea where I was going. In the weeks I read through the devotional, something shifted in my spirit. The guilt and shame I had carried released, and finally I surrendered that part of my life fully to the Lord. Part of the devotional was about “The Anything Prayer”, where the author encouraged readers to simply pray a prayer of surrender to the Lord. Ask the Lord to lead you wherever he wants and do whatever he wants, give up the control you are clinging to because it doesn’t belong to you anyway. I decided to sit down one night and pray it, truly not having any sort of great intentions. I wanted to be surrender to the will of God, but I didn’t pray expecting to hear him speak to me, or have him tell me to go on mission. I felt it in my sprit, “go”. It was like a weed that sprouted everywhere and took over, the word seemed to echo around my head. I prayed, part of me afraid I was walking to another open door to have it slammed in my face. But the Lord walked with me, as I applied for World Race in October, completed my call and inteview, and paid my deposit. He has walked with me from telling my close friends and family my news, to getting in front of my church and sharing what I will be doing. He has walked with me from having $19,500 to fundraise, to now having $400 left to raise.

The main story of my life is this - my life before Christ was just dark. It was lifeless patterns of sin, simply, it was not a life at all. My encounter with Christ changed everything, which isn’t to say my whole life got easier or all my problems just disappeared, but I was no longer battling the enemy in the dark and I was no longer alone. My time since encountering Christ has been like nothing else. There are no words to describe the freedom living in the salvation of the Lord brings. Where there was no life, now there is life abundantly. 

 My encouragement to you is this - do not give up of the God who will NEVER give up on you! He sees you, he is El Roi, and while you may be walking though the shadow of death he is right next to you. Even when your story seems like it is all darkness, he is the light, and you are never for far gone for the God who will always leave the 99 to love each of us recklessly. Whether you are walking though it, walking out of it, or simply walking without him, ask him to remind you how much he loves you. Cling to his endless, unfathomable love! Our true purpose in life is to bring him glory, so that others may see and come to know him, and that all starts with a story, with a circumstance, with an encounter with the King. 

If it isn’t good, that God is not finished with it yet. Adonai El Roi - My Lord, My God who sees me.