My sign up sheet for a beach baptism this Sunday.

1) I would honestly say just that seeing others talk about what it means has led me this way. I was baptized as a child, but I want to say it now: I have been re-born.

2) Summit is the first church I’ve come to that I truly feel to be My Church, in the sense that I feel a part of it. So hopefully it will help in the community aspect of my life in God.

Before I truly accepted Jesus’ death for mine, I was probably like any other teen. God wasn’t a part of my life, really, even though I called myself a christian. I would have some weird spiritual things happen to me every few months, which I now see as a hardly subtle knocking at my soul. Near the end of my life before Jesus I really went astray, went for my own very selfish desires, and because of that was able to recognize evil. And it was at that point that I saw how far away from myself I was.

I came to Christ because I was desperate, and I was scared, and I needed shelter. The process of me giving my entire life to him took about 6 months, during which I spiraled down even further. During this time it was hard for me to not want punishment for all the horrible things I’d done. I deserved it. It was only when I didn’t want to live anymore that I allowed him to kill the me I had chosen and was given new life into the me he had originally created.

180 degrees. Hope. Trust. Realizing what love is. For all of this, for peace, all I’ve had to do is give up. Giving up is pretty much the opposite of what you learn to do as you go through childhood, and it continues through adulthood. As hard as I try, I will sin even still. And those sort of things get in the way of my relationship with God. But: God loves me. I’m going to mess up the quote, but Jesus says the most loving thing a friend can do for a friend is die for him. Jesus died for me. I died for Jesus. And we have both been resurrected.