His Story
This is my testimony that I shared last night at Monday
Night Live (our weekly project meeting). This isn’t my story. It’s God’s of how
he found me and saved me and loved me through it all.
I grew up believing there was something wrong with me, and I
lived my life trying to prove to others and to myself that there wasn’t. From a
young age I can remember always just feeling broken.
I would spend all my time trying to gain the approval of
others – my family, my friends, even complete strangers – just to feel brief
highs of approval from myself, but even those moments were fleeting and
temporary. My brokenness seemed to be
saturating, and before long it would come creeping back in.
It got to the point where I couldn’t even enjoy
relationships with other people because I was afraid if they got close enough
to see the damage, they would turn running
So I tried to become someone else – a Bryan who was loud and
outgoing and hopefully funny, a personality too big to touch, a personality
that kept others at a safe distance.
I was trying to convince the world that I didn’t need a
savior, all the while staying up every night hoping that one day I would be
good enough to save myself.
But that was exhausting. The harder I tried to put up the
act, the more broken down I became and the less I believed it myself until
eventually I was just so full of self-hatred that I didn’t want anything to do
with life anymore.
And that’s where God found me, for you see I didn’t go
looking for God. As a matter of fact, I did everything I could to run far far
away from him.
After being raised in a church almost every Sunday, I knew enough
about God to harbor massive amounts of anger and resentment towards him for
building me broken. I wanted nothing to do with God – despite my outward
appearance of active church goer and youth group leader.
But that’s where God met me, in the middle of all that anger
and brokenness. It was later in high school that I quit just hearing about God but
instead he started revealing to me who he was. God entered in to my anger and
my brokenness and took it upon himself because God didn’t build me broken; he
built me for himself to have and to know and to love.
It was my sin that broke me – my wrongdoings, my failures,
the places I fell short, and what I thought was wrong with me came from the
broken relationship I had with him because that’s what I was created for and
that’s what I was missing. But Christ came into this world and took my failures
upon himself. He bore that weight for me so that nothing could separate us, so
that he could bring me back to himself.
All I had to do was trust that he was enough, and that he
was who he said he was – a God worth loving who loved me.
I just remember understanding this for the first time and
just being blown away and just tired. I was tired of running from God, and I
was tired of living life with a lie plastered across my face.
So I decided to give my life over to Christ in hopes that he
could put my pieces back together into something usable, but what he did was
far more than that. He didn’t just put me back together with glue in the
cracks; he made me new. He made me something more than I could have ever been
on my own. He made me his. I am just so thankful to be his.
Now I try to live my life for him and his glory, trusting
him enough to trust others with myself because I know that I serve a God who
shines through the brokenness.
