Are You a Christian?

Are You a Christian?

“We’re all related, brothers and strangers, the king and the beggar bleed the same. We’ve all got a sickness, a terminal condition. We medicate it, but the pain won’t go away. See the eyes of a million faces lookin’ for it in a million places only one can save us, Jesus! You are the cure! Everybody’s searching for it, everybody’s reaching out trying to grab a hold of something real.You are the cure! Only you can satisfy us, fill up the void inside us. Never been a heart you couldn’t heal. You are the cure.” (Unspoken, The Cure)

God has put this song on my heart this week. I spent a lot of my life searching for something to fill the void, the emptiness, inside of me. Friends, boyfriends, family, sports, music were all things I tried to shove into the void in myself.  None of it worked. None of it filled my void. Something was always missing amongst the madness. My void was my relationship with the Lord.  It’s so easy to get caught up in life. It’s so easy to make excuses for not spending time with the Lord. It’s easier than you would think to go to church every weekend and still not spend any time with God. That was me throughout my high school career. I taught Sunday school, I was on the church counsel, I was involved in Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and I went to church on the weekend, yet, I can honestly say that I spent no time with God. I never opened my bible to learn about God. I never spent time listening to what God was trying to tell me. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that God doesn’t just want me to go to church and run through the motions of being a Christian. The Lord wants an intimate relationship with me, with you! He wants you to spend time with Him. Yes, that means giving up an hour of sleep each day to get that Bible out and spent some time with the Lord. It took me awhile to realize that God doesn’t care about the stuff I was doing in my church or the way I presented myself to the world as a Christian as much as He cared about the relationship I was neglecting Him. I remember the specific moment when I realized that my life couldn’t go on the way it was going. I couldn’t take another step without God in the front seat. It was the first week of August and I had just moved into RA training camp at my university. I was laying in my bed one night after training and I just felt so empty. I had spent so much time balancing my life by myself. I put as much as I could on my plate and then did everything I could to make sure everything I did was perfect. I looked like the happiest women, but on the inside I was lost and broken. I had terrible anxiety and even struggled with depression for a while. I had been searching down the wrong paths for so many years to find fulfillment in things that would not and could not ever bring me the fulfilment Jesus can. I was exhausted and defeated. I sobbed in my dorm room, all alone. I knew that the relationship that I had been putting off for so long could wait no longer. It was time to do this and do it right. I was going to have an intimate relationship with God. I was going to start letting go of the perfection and the need to control everything and instead give it all to Jesus. Jesus had already taken my burdens from me, but I was pulling them back on myself when I didn’t need to.

Now, it’s not all that simple. It was not just a quick fix. In fact, I still struggle today with my relationship with the Lord. It takes time and for me, it took a few hard lessons that God taught me throughout the next year for me to fully trust that God is taking care of me. He’s a good and merciful God. He is a God of love and I am His child. (1 John 4:15-16) I thought that I was a Christian. I thought I was doing everything right. After all, I went to church, I taught Sunday school, and I was involved in my high school’s FCA. I could not have been further from the truth. I was going through the motions of Christianity, I wasn’t being a Christian. I wasn’t living out the beautiful gift Christ gave me when He hung on the cross and declared “IT IS FINISHED.” (John 19:30) I am a child of God! I am more than enough. I am loved and so are you.

            Listen up. I have some important things for you to hear. First, heaven is a FREE gift to you. You can NOT earn it. Take a look at Ephesians 2: 3-10 and Romans 6:23. I encourage you to stop fighting a fight that has already been won by Jesus. Secondly, we are all sinners, but we can NOT save ourselves. Check out Romans 3:23. It is through Christ that we receive forgiveness. It is BECAUSE of Christ that we are set free from our sinful selves. Lastly, dig into Ephesians 1:13-14. You are marked with the seal of God. You are a child of God. Rejoice in that!

            I encourage everyone who took the time to read this to pray to the Lord. Start that intimate relationship that has been lacking for so long or make the relationship you have been building stronger. Jesus is the cure to everything and He will carry you through anything and everything.

Trip Update:

            I wanted to give an update on my trip so far for anyone who is interested. I am currently sitting in the Houston, Texas airport sitting out a six-hour flight delay. I haven’t slept more than a couple hours in the last 34 hours. Sunday morning while in Georgia for training camp our tents flooded soaking everyone’s things. We did our best to dry what we could and packed everything up and headed to the airport at 9:30pm Sunday night to sleep on the cold cement floor of the airport to catch our 6 am flight. We didn’t actually make it to the airport and get settled in a spot until midnight and we had to be up at 4 am to go through security. Between the bright lights and the lovely man vacuuming next to my ear all night, I didn’t sleep more than two hours. Our luck failed us again when we got to our check in point and were told that our flight was canceled. We spent the next five hours sitting in our gate waiting for our flight to come. As we sat, the time for our flight began to move further and further away due to the storms in Houston. Finally, the pilot was able to make it from Houston to Atlanta to get us and bring us back to Houston. Unfortunately, through all that mess, we missed our second flight to Nicaragua so instead of getting to Nicaragua at 11am today, like the original plan had stated, we will hopefully see Nicaragua around 11pm tonight. It’s been an exhausting few days but I’ve had a ton of time to spend with God which has been so wonderful. We will make it to Nicaragua eventually! I’m sure of it. Thank you for your prayers and your support. I am so blessed.

            A kind reminder to contact me through Facebook messenger if you want to get ahold of me. I am happy to answer any questions you may have about anything. I will do my best to keep everyone updated as much as I can. You are all a blessing to me.