Haylstorm

Why I finally got saved

     I continued to pray the exact same prayer every night. My life was nothing special and, especially at such a young age, I didn't have much to pray about. We moved cities and I had to switch schools, but I was extremely blessed to be able to make friends extremely fast at the new school.

     For some reason I grew up with a very strong sense of independence. To the point where I didn't tell my parents anything. Not even because I necessarily wanted to hide things from them, but because I just didn't feel the need to tell them. I wouldn't even tell them my friends names at school unless they pried it out of me.

Since I made such an unconscious decision to keep things to myself at such a young age, it became an emotional rollercoaster when I began to have real problems, but had already decided in my mind that I had to handle everything myself.

In middle school I drastically adopted the "scene" look. My makeup was strictly black, my bangs were parted so far to the side that I could barely see, and my entire wardrobe was from Avril Lavinge's clothing line. During this time I became utterly obsessed with a boy. So obsessed that I would do anything to get his attention and desperately tried to make him like me. I was so "in love" with this boy that I treated him as a god and my relationship with the real God faltered tremendously even though I was going to church on Wednesday nights.

     My obsession with this boy caused me to want his attention so desperately that I even convinced him I was going to commit suicide if he didn't date me. I would cut and scratch myself just enough to break the skin and I would say it was because I was "broken hearted" when in reality I was mad that the relationship I had created in my head with him wasn't playing out. My obsession lasted 2 whole years until I inevitably decided to give up and realized how awful it was that I played mind games with him for so long and spent all that time trying to guilt him into liking me. I didn't know at the time that this was just the beginning of me searching for attention and validation from boys, and I will always wish I knew better at the time, but since I didn't tell anyone about this, there was no one to tell me what I was doing was wrong.

During this time I also started to struggle with something that I didn't even understand in the slightest at such a young age. "Porn". However, it wasn't really porn. It was myspace quizzes that would give you a scenario based on the answers you picked, most of them were innocent until one day I stumbled across a "7 minutes in heaven" quiz and the scenario it gave me was extremely inappropriate and vulgar. But instead of exiting out, I clicked on "similar quizzes" and became obsessed with reading the nasty scenarios and I couldn't understand why they made me feel so weird. I read them every single day and began to fantasize and daydream about what sex would be like, even though I didn't even really know what it was. I thought it was all out of innocence, the same way kids would make their Barbie dolls have sex with each other when you played with them (no? Just me and my friends? Right.), but really it created such a strange desire at such a young age and added to my attention seeking ways.

     Going into my freshman year I went on a mission trip with my church. I had wanted to go on this mission trip for years because everyone always raved about how amazing it was, and I was so excited to finally be old enough to attend. I think I saw it as a way to be friends with the "cool" older kids, instead of a way to get closer to Jesus.

The first night of the trip I looked around the room during worship and realized that everyone seemed completely immersed in the song. They all had their eyes closed and hands raised, and had pure joy on their faces. I couldn't figure out why a song made them feel so full of happiness, I just knew that I didn't feel the same and I couldn't figure out why.

     The next few days I was going door to door sharing the gospel of Christ, but I wasn't 100% sure I had trusted in it myself. As the week went on and I began to really listen to the messages each morning I realized that I had never been saved like I thought I had been. It was unbelievably hard for me to admit this to myself, and I couldn't imagine admitting it to anyone else because I had already been baptized in front of my whole church and I didn't want them to think I was a liar.

     After the trip I was lying in bed the night before my first day of freshman year saying a nightly prayer, as I had gotten used to after going through the motions, and I felt so convicted that I started bawling. I finally truly asked Jesus into my heart and told myself that I was going to have the best school year ever because I would have God by my side and I was turning from my old ways of lying, lust, and deceit.

     In a typical "new year new me" fashion, I slowly stopped wearing so many dark colors, I got braces, I stopped wearing ridiculous amounts of black eyeliner, and I even sported some preppy riding boots on some days (basic, I know). And shockingly enough, freshman year was the first year that I began to get attention from boys, and I didn't even realize that I was becoming addicted to the attention. I didn't even know how to flirt, and yet I was constantly joking and talking to the boys that would come up to me, not realizing that they had other intentions than being just friends. I developed such a strange confidence and at the time I didn't realize my confidence was based on the attention from boys, instead of basing a confidence on my new relationship with Jesus.

I wore my purity ring every single day after receiving it in my church's "true love waits" ceremony and thought that this was enough of a "look I'm a Christian!" badge. This ring quickly became the only "telling sign" of my Christianity because I never spoke about Jesus, or even facebooked about Jesus, and I hardly even thought about Jesus because my life seemed to be going just fine without Him after I got saved.

As I continued my freshman year and developed more and more friends, my constant need of attention disappeared a little and by the end of the year I thought everything would be easy from that point on. But unfortunately, freshman year wasn't even the tip of the iceberg of my life problems.