Ohio University: Campus Crusade for Christ

I am blessed to have been raised in a family that went to church and I remember praying sometime late in elementary school, asking Jesus to forgive me of my sins. I understood that I am a sinner and that it is only through Christ that I can know God personally and go to Heaven.

Middle school and most of high school were marked with short spurts when I would read my Bible every day and pray before I went to bed. However, I found these rituals ultimately unfulfilling. At one point, I felt that my efforts to have a relationship with God were so useless that I quit. I had no idea what it was to have a relationship with Jesus and for a number of months I didn’t pray or even really think about God at all.

Later into high school I began to spend time with people who were passionate for Christ and who really poured into my life. I began to see that a relationship with Christ is more than just prayer and Bible reading, but that it involves being open to what God wants to do in and through me.

As soon as I came to Ohio University I got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ where I was plugged into a Bible study and began getting to know men who were genuinely interested in getting to know me and seeing me develop a deeper walk with Christ. I began to see what it was to let God work in my heart.

Not long after that I began struggling to keep my relational priorities in line. After a little while I quit struggling and traded a deep relationship with God for a human relationship with the girl I was dating at the time. I elevated her to such importance in my life that I completely neglected my relationship with God.

The next year, that relationship ended and for some time I still struggled to put my relationship with God as greatest importance. Finally, I reached a point when I was sick of leading two lives, one that looked like I had everything under control and another that I kept hidden—one in which I knew I was not living the life God desired for me. I decided to make a change and start really pursuing God and a life open to His plans for me.

Since then, I have seen God grow and change me in so many ways. He has led me to be more disciplined in my relationship with Him, but perhaps the biggest way He has worked is in my view of my future. In times when I have not had a very close walk with God I have been focused on a career where I would make a lot of money and live the American dream for purely self-serving reasons. Recently, God has really grown in me a strong desire to see the Gospel preached in all nations and to have an active role in that wherever God leads me.

This is not to say that I have everything figured out, that I’m some super-Christian or that I always put God first in everything. It is a process. God has brought me very far and by His grace, I know He will continue to grow me and shape me into the man He wants me to be. I am reminded daily that I am a man who cannot do it on my own. I need Christ, who came and died for my sins, to experience a true relationship with God, and as a result, a fuller, more satisfying life of enjoying His promises.