I'm excited to be a part of Grace Alive because I believe that in our college years, we have a unique opportunity to make a firm choice to devote ourselves to serving Christ. Grace Alive has greatly helped me to pursue my relationship with Jesus and stop being conformed to the pattern of this world.

I grew up in a Christian home where we attended a great church and I heard the full gospel preached at least twice a week for my entire childhood. All this preaching and guidance helped me to stay out of trouble and made me feel very smart and very good about myself, and so I concluded I must be a true Christian because I was so very good and smart (at least compared to most of my peers). I would have gone on in this empty hypocrisy for my whole life, if God had not intervened in my life and in my family.
God used a few very painful trials in my life that shattered my elaborately hypocritical facade. When these trials came, they brought to light the deep darkness in my sinful heart and proved who I really was. I became more and more depressed, and more and more hateful of all authorities in my life. This rebellion and depression had been festering in me for years, and now they surfaced and consumed me. I was proud, sarcastic, unmotivated, unwilling to listen to anyone, and very depressed. But I blamed all these problems on my circumstances, concluded that my depression was genetic, and decided that to be happy I had to get away from my parents and just take some pills.

Then the summer before I started my second year of junior college, God saved me by bringing a powerful word to me through one of the leaders in Grace Alive. Through the Holy Spirit, this leader told me that I was dead towards God and that the root of my problem was rejection of Jesus' Lordship in my life. Although I had claimed him as Lord, I had clung to my own autonomy and 'individuality'. For the first time ever I saw that my whole life was a lie, and that the reason I was miserable was because I would not submit to Christ. I saw that the choice before me was that I could either continue to live however I wanted to, or I could choose to surrender to Jesus.

By grace, I was able to see that surrendering to Jesus was my only option. I could see that by giving my life to him, I was not losing anything, but gaining everything. Surrendering to Jesus is hard, because it means giving up your entire identity in order to belong to Jesus, and most people cannot submit themselves to a Lord who demands this complete and unconditional surrender. But I have found that it was worth it! I gave truly gave my life to Christ and found that all I was loosing was my sin, misery, and death, and that I was gaining true knowledge and love of God, eternal life, joy, and peace.

Ever since I truly committed my life to Christ, I have never been depressed as I once was. Yes, I am often prone to depressing thoughts and attitudes, but now through Jesus' name, I have the power to fight it, and God gives me more and more peace and joy the more and more I learn to trust and submit to his good, perfect, and pleasing will.