As a child, I grew up in the Catholic Church. I would go to church and see people repeat the same prayers and songs every single Sunday but I didn’t understand why they were praying or who they were praying to. I would mainly want to go to church for the food afterward. I didn’t believe in God and did not believe he could work in people’s lives.
In my freshmen year, I began to experience a lot of depression and anxiety. I was constantly second-guessing what people were saying about me and started believing the worst things about myself. I started turning to drugs and alcohol to fill an emptiness I felt in my heart. However, the effects of the drugs and alcohol were only temporary and would always leave me feeling the same way before I took them. During this time, my cousin whom I was close with, knew that I was turning to drugs and alcohol because of how I had been feeling. She is a Christian and she would encourage me to go with her to church. I joined her a few times, but I never really cared enough to pay attention.
Once Covid first began and quarantine started, my depression and anxiety got worse because I felt like my life did not have any purpose or meaning. Around March of 2020, I found out that my mom was pregnant. This was a huge deal for me because up to that point, I had been an only child, and a sibling was all that I wanted. Finding out that I was going to have a sibling gave me so much hope for wanting to live. I thought the reason why I wanted to live was to give this child one of the best lives it could ever have. To my great disappointment, my mom ended up losing that baby. The moment I found out this news, I went to my room and the only thoughts that were going through my head were thoughts of suicide. I didn’t want to live in a world where I felt so alone. As I was moments away from taking my own life, I heard the faintest whisper in the back of my head telling me to call someone. I now know that it was God’s voice speaking to me. I ended up calling my cousin and started off by telling her about all of my thoughts and feelings that were raging inside of me. What she told me changed my life. She told me that I couldn’t live for other people or for the things of this world because they are only temporary. She told me that Jesus is the only one who can truly bring peace, joy, and comfort into my life. That was the first time I felt like God was genuinely speaking to me. Once I got off the phone with my cousin, I had my first real conversation with God. I started praying to him and told him I wanted to have a relationship with him. I also prayed to God that he would change me and that he would work in my life. I knew that this is what I wanted because I realized that the way I was living was not bringing me joy and if what my cousin told me was real, then God could give me the joy and peace I was seeking and he did. He filled that emptiness I felt in my heart and made it whole.
Since then, my passion has been to share how God has been working in my life and how much joy he has brought me. I now see my life as me driving down a broken bridge. I’m driving on the bridge but I stop because I see that it’s broken. I turn around and go back the other way, but I start seeing all these other people driving towards the same broken bridge. I’m not going to just watch them drive off of it – I’m going to get out of my car and tell them that it’s broken. I’m going to tell them that if they keep going down that same way, they’re going to die. My life was heading towards hell, but Jesus opened up my eyes to see that I needed to turn away from my ways and head toward him. Now, when I see people heading down a broken bridge that signifies hell, I’m going to tell them about the truth and tell them about how God can work in their life. Jesus is the only one that can truly bring peace to the broken-hearted. He is the way, he is the truth, he is the life. (John 14:6)
Perla