My Testimony

I grew up in the church my entire life but after my friend, Simon Saw, died on July 4, 2016, I walked away from church and everything it stood for. Simon and I were friends since third grade and we spent every moment of our school time together with our group of friends. He was kind, loving, honest (sometimes brutally so but i loved that about him) but most of all he was there every time i needed him. He got sick around christmas time with lung failure. We had grown apart by then but i still cared about him a great deal. I just thought he would get better. But he didn't. I should have gone to see him. But I didn't. So after he died, I was in shock. I wasn't prepared for the fact that he wasn't going to be there anymore. I couldn't bring myself to go to his funeral; to face the fact that he was never coming back. I fell into this terrible depression and I hated God for doing this to me and for taking Simon away. I refused to go to church and i refused to even so much as pray. i cried myself to sleep every night and i hated even looking in the mirror because i hated myself for what i didn't do. i thought about suicide everyday and it took everything in me to stay alive. My family was my main motivation for not going through with it. But the pain was unbearable. However eventually I met a friend, Noah, who, with a lot of patience on his part, got me through this and it felt good to tell him everything. In the moments before i met him, I felt so alone and I felt like no one cared if i lived or died. So, I went to church with him a couple of times and Rev. Sunny, our dorm director, got me to talk to a counselor about everything. At the beginning of those sessions, I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn't know what i was doing there. I didn't think my situation was that special or that serious. But as they went on, I felt myself get some of my confidence back and eventually, I came back to God. I didn't feel numb anymore and I knew that this was only the beginning. So this story amounts to how God never really left me. When I rejected him, he gave me someone to help me realize that i wasn't alone. And when i came back, he was still there with open arms.