My whole life my faith has been very private to me which is why writing this testimony and journey is very big and difficult to me. As you read, please be kind in any commentary. Any hateful comments will be deleted, but also before you make them, realize it hurts me and it's not Christian to show anything but love. Hate is not Christian.

As long as I can remember I've been surrounded by a Christian household. We have pictures of me being anointed when I was an infant, when I was younger, we went to church every Sunday and I went on Wednesdays for youth, and we used to pray at the dinner table every night. I remember feeling like I had to be a Christian and praying to God every night to forgive my sins because that's what I felt I was supposed to do. Which is odd. Because it was never my family that told me that.

I don't know when I realized it but my family isn't a stereotypical Christian family. My dad is strong in faith and likes church and serves in church, but my mom hates church and is pretty private about her faith. My parents told me once a story about how when I was a baby I cried really hauntingly and they felt like I was being attacked by maybe a demon and so they prayed and it got better but that's really the only thing where I recall really feeling like they were truly telling me what I should believe in. Besides all that, my parents are also both liberals. They believe that love is love, and that people should have rights to control their own bodies even if abortion isn't necessarily ok. So yeah. Not what you call your stereotypical Christian family right? So you would probably guess, and correctly, that those feelings stemmed from the church, and you would be correct.

The church I grew up in most of my life was very contemporary. Modern worship and sermons, kids church, youth group, the works. But still homophobic. Which at this church won't be as much of a big deal but more on that later.

The year I came into my own faith was the summer after fourth grade. To understand this part of my story, there are first some things you need to understand about me as a kid. I was a spoiled brat with a horrendous temper. I didn't know how to handle my emotions and I took it out on my family. I was sometimes violent. My parents just made it worse in everything they did. And when I was tired, it got much worse.

I decided that year I wanted to go to Springhill Day Camp for a week. About midweek, our small group counselors all shared their testimonies, and asked us to prepare to share ours the next day. I felt uncomfortable because I didn't have one. It was like I said, I just believed because I felt I was supposed to. When I got home that day I was really drained and because of that I was in a bad mood. I had a temper tantrum and ended up going to my room and crying. I remember laying there and thinking, I want something to change. So I prayed. For the first time I truly meant it when I asked God to come into my life. I remember being wrapped in this absolute peace and just this feeling of freedom. I went back to Springhill the next day and told my story and my counselor was so impressed he asked me to share it with the parents on the final day. I said yes hesitantly because my biggest fear was public speaking at the time but I remember everyone clapped and my parents cried.

I'd like to say that from that point on I was a really good kid but the truth is that didn't change. That's not to say there wasn't a change though. I started really developing my faith through reading my Bible and praying. I remember walking home from school a lot of days and having 'conversations' with God. Where I felt as if He was actually responding to me. Looking back I feel that that was mostly my imagination but something also tells me it wasn't all that.

The next big thing that happened was this. My friend had moved away because her dad had cancer and was not doing well so they wanted to be closer to family. I received news that he was doing even worse and so I made a deal with God right before fifth grade started. I told Him that if he healed my friend's dad I would talk to my friend about God because I knew she wasn't a believer. My friend came back to visit months later and I asked how her dad was doing. She said that he was ok and that the cancer had "gone to sleep in his bones" and no one could explain it. So I kept my end of the bargain. I told her what I had done and she laughed at me. She said nothing I said changed her mind. I was hurt of course but not all that surprised. We never talked about it again.

The second thing that happened was similar to my acceptance of Jesus. I was having a really low day. I was in a terrible mood, and I was just so upset. I found myself praying and I just begged God for peace. And he gave it to me. I remember being wrapped in this incredible peace and just feeling warm, as if I was being hugged x1000. It has never happened the same since but many years later I can still imagine it.

From then until 2016 there's not much to talk about. My faith was that of a pretty typical Christian, ebbing and flowing depending on where I was at in my life but always being a constant. The only really major things I remember are the times where I started to feel called to be baptized. But I always ignored it, put it off. 2016 was when I switched churches and things changed. I wasn't happy at my old church anymore. Everyone I had grown up with had changed churches or moved, and our pastor of many years was leaving as well. I found I didn't want to go anymore because I was an outsider.

Then I got invited to Tribal Wars by my friend Lauren, which was an outdoor fun tournament with a prize being free tickets to Cedar Point. I had so much fun, especially at cedar point. So I decided to go back and try a Wednesday service. And then a Sunday service. One year later and I was calling the church my home and beginning to be involved more seriously. I don't really know how I ended up doing it, but I started babysitting for a small life group at the church with my friend Riley. Someone must've taken notice because I was soon also asked to be involved in assisting with Sunday school.

This is where we take a short interlude to talk about my coming out story. I talked about this briefly in my coming out chapter but the hardest part for me was coming to term with my faith in relation to my sexuality. I am a very independent person so I ended up spending a lot of time doing research on my own. Probably the biggest thing for me was prayer and talking to God individually but second was a website called Hope Remains. yet even with both of those there were many tears involved and multiple months. But I finally did it. So when this next thing happened I was so angry and hurt.

It just so happened that the new woman in charge of Sunday school at my church was the one I turned to in the midst of my really bad mental health break. We met for smoothies after school because I reached out to her for help and I basically ended up spending my entire time defending my sexuality. She ended up going to Pastor Dave because she wasn't sure how she felt about me working with the kids because it goes against church values even though she thought that I wouldn't say anything to them. Basically in the end Pastor Dave gave me a bunch of homophobic literature and made me promise that I wouldn't be promotional of the 'gay choice' at all. That was also one of the reasons I think I have never been asked to serve on the sunday morning worship team again after the first time. That last thing especially hurt because music is my calling and the spiritual gift that God has given me to serve him. I am sure of that beyond a doubt.

For months after that I felt angry. At first I kept attending church but slowly it became less and less regular, until it was only when I was supposed to be there after service to babysit for money for the church's training, induction sort of thing. By the time that that came around I felt as if I had lost my faith completely. I remember telling Lauren, my best friend in the entire world, the one who has been my sort of accountability partner for years, but I didn't believe in God anymore. But the truth is, somewhere deep in me there was still a little spark that wanted to believe. that did believe. Just not in the God that I had grown up with. I didn't see how I could identify with a faith that had left me feeling this way. So alone, so unwanted and wrong. Not just from my church but from every direction. When I first began figuring out my faith in connection to my sexuality it was hard to find affirming resources when I was already starting it to be affirming within myself. It seemed like every article I came across was telling me how who I was was a choice, or how, rarely, who I was was all right but I needed to be so celibate, or ignore my desires. Everyone had always told me that God is supposed to be a God of love most of the people around me were not showing me love.

That included my best friends of many years. Although two of my three closest friends were and are mostly supportive (the other fully), it is very clear to me that they think that it is a sin that can be avoided. Around the time I came out as well, my mother went to a breakfast with the moms of my friends of many years. She told me that they had expressed concern about me being around their children and whether I would be a bad influence. I reached out to my friends looking for affirmation from them that they felt differently and received nothing for a very long time or not at all in the case of some of them, except for one. For a long time it made me feel very distant from them. I felt no love and was always very hesitant to talk to them about it and sometimes still am, even my two best friends. Indeed, I have frequently felt more accepted by the people around me who are not religious and that certainly didn't help either.

After months of soul-searching I found that my faith had returned but I still couldn't bring myself to call myself a Christian. I didn't know how I could identify with a group of people that was often so hateful towards people like me and others and was often hypocritical. I started identifying as agnostic although I still believed in most of the Christian ideals. That's soul-searching, prayer, and Biblical reading led me to believe that what it all boils down to is how I believe you get to heaven, which is the ultimate goal. I think this world, Christians, have made it overly complicated. Here's how it should be:
1) You have to commit in your heart to follow Jesus/God and believe in his teachings.
2) You have to pray for forgiveness of your sins, and try to fight temptation to sin more. Definition of sins is relative based on what the person believes, although there are certain things that people believe are wrong that are actually hate, which is the sin, not what they believe is wrong.
3) You have to show love, and fight hate, which is essentially the same thing as following the example Jesus set.

That's it. That's how you get to heaven. I think as a community that's all we should believe because any "buts" are what make people like me leave the faith. After those conclusions my faith grew. I started praying, reading my Bible more regularly, and finally, going to church more regularly. That last thing though took longer. I had to come to an understanding. I needed to be at a church that God was working in for me individually as well as within the church, even if that meant the church didn't yet lineup with all of my beliefs.

Once I did come back things happened even more strongly. Firstly, I decided to go to Springhill Winter Camp which was a two-day retreat. While I didn't agree with everything the Pastor said, the presence of God that weekend was absolutely undeniable. That weekend, many kids renewed their faith or committed to following Jesus for the first time. When the pastor asked those just stand up who had committed themselves for the first time I sat there and cried because of the incredible power in the room. It also made a personal impact, in that, I made promises to myself that I would get better about reading my Bible, which was still my weakest point, and I stuck to it.

As I got even closer I started to feel the call to be baptized stronger than ever before. But I ignored it not really sure what I was feeling, until one particular night. I was watching the movie "The Case for Christ" and when the professor's wife got baptized it hit me like a lightning bolt. It was so powerful that I had to pause the movie because I just broke down in tears. It took a few weeks to gather up the courage but I eventually went to my youth pastor and told him that I wanted to be baptized.

This is where I'm still struggling though. I haven't told my parents yet that I want to be baptized out of fear. I know that it is supposed to be a public event and that's the whole point, but I'm worried that they will want to make a really big deal out of it and I don't want that. I'm also still hesitant to be baptized at a church that doesn't truly support who I am. Considering the fact that my youth pastor hasn't brought it up since the first day I'm thinking that probably the fact that I haven't talked to my parents combined with the fact that he might have found out somehow about my sexuality confirms that the church is hesitant as well. Somewhere within me I know that both of these things, for me personally, are excuses but I can't quite get over them no matter how hard I try.

If I were to pick two other significant things to my recent testimony they would be these. One, God has given me a song. Anytime I'm feeling really low, which is frequent because I struggle with diagnosed anxiety and depression, "Oceans" by Hillsong comes to mind. I start singing it and I'm always just reminded that no matter what things are going to be okay because God is by my side. But one day was one of my lowest points over the course of the last few years, and even that just wouldn't have cut it. I was basically spending my whole day in bed just crying because I was such a mess. I knew that we weren't supposed to get snow because I'd been stalking the weather hoping for a white Christmas, as well as to make sure that I could still host caroling that evening. So I said a simple prayer. I said, "God, if things are going to be okay send me a sign with snow." A few hours later I was finally feeling better, and then I hear my sister yell from the front porch that it's snowing. I was just overwhelmed with this sense of peace and near euphoria. I thought, "I'm sure it's just a little cell" but it was enough anyways. Hesitantly, in case it made me feel worse somehow, I checked the radar. It wasn't just a little cell. It was a huge storm that had popped up out of nowhere. I just thought to myself, "God really doesn't do things halfway." It's left a larger impact on me too. Generally I didn't like snow. I connected bad memories to it. But now I see it and I just have this powerful reminder and those emotions reappear. I'm just constantly reminded that God is good.

If I am to sum up everything I've learned throughout all this, I would say this: being a Christian shouldn't necessarily be easy, as we face continual temptation, but it should also be easy enough that people aren't pushed away because it's an extra strain on them. Instead, we should have a philosophy of, well, if I'm wrong at least I was a good person. Because honestly if you really are truly following Jesus, Jesus created the definition of a good person through example, even if you don't necessarily believe in the miracle parts! No one wants to be a bad person. And love is the answer to all of that. If you choose love without restraints or conditions or judgments you will always find the choice that follows that example.

Thank you for allowing me a space to share my experiences, and thank you for taking the time to read them. Please learn from me. Well it is not entirely other people's fault in my loss of faith temporarily, it certainly was a large factor. And I know so many others that have had similar experiences and never have come back to the faith. That's not what we are meant to. We are meant to bring people to Jesus, not push them away because we think they're not good enough. Show love. That's what God asked us to do. That's what we need to do.