P R E F A C E

My Testimony

It was every five year old’s dream choice. Did I want to get up in the morning and go to church where a bunch of stuff old people talked about things I didn’t care about, or stay home and watch cartoons? OK, maybe it wasn’t a choice. At age five, I stopped going to church. My mom, a self-proclaimed agnostic, refused to have a son that was forced into a religion. As the years passed, I made few trips back through the double wooden doors and the occasional visit with a friend or for a Christmas special summarized my church activities. It wasn’t until junior high, when puberty unleashed its full force, girls lost their cooties and became objects of lust, and being popular mattered that I returned to the pews. All of the “popular” kids at my school were going to church and involved in their youth group. They would spend every Wednesday night there, talk about all of the hot girls they had met on church mission trips, one kid had even snuck upstairs to the youth room during a service and received head from a girl a year above us. Church instantly became the place I wanted to be. So I went to my dad and told him I wanted to start going to church again. He was thrilled and we began to look for a church to attend. I was voting for where my friends went… did I mention the hot girls? However, my dad had different plans and we soon ended up attending a small bible church that he felt would offer the most in a growing relationship with Christ. Unfortunately, the hot girls were few and taken. I did not feel at home within the youth group, not that they didn’t try to make me feel welcome, I just didn’t know any of them like I did my friends from school. Within a few years, I turned sixteen and got a job where I worked on Sundays. Church became an occasional visit once again and I soon began losing faith. It is about at this point that my story in Chapter 1 picks up. I severely began to doubt my faith and hated my life. When I graduated high school and went to college, I was seeking a home once again, a place to fit in. I found it among the parties and binge drinking. Once you got drunk enough, everyone became your friend. I found myself in a relationship with a girl that was entirely based on sex and when we broke up that Christmas break, I was devastated. I returned to school with the intention of picking up right where I had left off, parting and meeting girls. One of the girls that I met in a class held my attention more than any of the rest however, and we soon began dating exclusively. She had been raised Catholic and had grown bored with the rules and fakeness of the sect in which she had been raised. She had met a girl at a local church that had a real, living relationship with Christ and decided that is something she wanted too. I somehow got caught up in that and about two months later, was attending church on my own, reading my bible once again, etc. Before this point, I had slept with multiple girls, messed around with even more, been drunk more times than I remembered. I was the exact person that I wanted to be when I was in junior high. Yet, when I finally was that person, I wasn’t happy. I knew that I shouldn’t be living that life, but thought that I was only young once thought if I didn’t do that stuff then, I would regret it later. My realization came one day while I was reading my bible and stumbled across 1 Timothy 4:12. If you haven’t read it, go now and check it out. That girl and I broke up at the end of that semester, but not before I had signed up to work at a Christian youth camp outside of Austin. That camp was the best thing to ever happen to me. It provided me a safe environment for me to grow in my knowledge of God and in my relationship with Him. I made up my mind of where I stood on certain issues, finished the new testament, developed many deep friendships that to this day are some of the strongest friendships that I have, and came to a fuller understanding of the relationship that I was now involved in. I came back to UT determined to make a difference for the kingdom… and soon was rudely awakened. Life wasn’t simply those that were doing right and those that were doing wrong. I discovered that each relationship with Christ is personal and looks different for each person involved in that unique relationship. It was at this point that I decided to write this study guide, as much of help for Christians as non-Christians. It is designed to show a real relationship with Christ and the uniqueness of that. I hope that by reading my testimony, you can realize where I am coming from, the weaknesses that I have, my imperfections, and my humanness. Because it is throughout all of these, that the need for a Savior is made perfect.