Church has been a big part of my life since I was really little. I basically grew up in a large, but really tight, Baptist church up north in my home town of Paihia. When I was little, I was loud with what I thought was cool, and, I used to run around shopping malls shouting, “I’m an eyewitness to Jesus!!” I didn’t know what it meant, but hey, it sounded cool!

When I got into primary school, I was the popular, snobby chick and the whole “God” thing was pretty dumb. I knew it was, but I still invited my friends to church and some of my friends’ parents didn’t approve at all, so I just stopped trying.

As time went on, my friends moved away and all that was left was the people I didn’t get along with at all. I started getting bullied a lot, I had no friends and when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, we got a teacher who was an alcoholic who sometimes came to school a bit tipsy and she picked on me for the stupidest reasons and knowing that I couldn’t stick up for myself, and knowing no one would stick up for me, it really got me down. I was stupid and I was a failure. That’s what my teacher and the rest of my class told me, so I believed them and I started pondering the whole idea of taking my own life and how cool it would be knowing I wouldn’t have to deal with the rest of my life and knowing that everyone else wouldn’t have to deal with me. I still believed in God, but I was just really really mad at Him for letting me go through all this.

Soon, it was time for me to start high school and I thought, well, here we go…

But my parents decided to not put me into a high school. They enrolled me into a Christian school. I was pretty angry. I thought, yuck!! A Christian school!!

And yuck it was. The 1^st term was a nightmare. People tried to make friends with me but me, being the persistent, skeptical one, all we seemed to do was debate about God and Christianity and the music I listened to and the whole Heaven and Hell issue. Again, I was stuck with no friends.

I went home those holidays and I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but I ended up praying and saying, “God, I really don’t want to go to hell. I think I want to be a Christian. I’m really sick of not fitting in. Amen.”

I didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian, but God heard my prayer, and He started doing some awesome things in my life.

One of the 1^st things I noticed was I stopped saying Oh my g-o-d… and taking Gods name in vain… cuz I’d end up feeling really guilty about it. It was weird.

And then, God ended up giving me the closest bunch friends I have ever had.

God replaced my negative, shy and self conscious personality with a kinda loud, kinda random, pretty fearless personality.

Even though God was doing all this stuff, I didn’t feel like I was fully a Christian and even though I understood what it meant to follow Him, I still felt like I needed to experience something more.

My best mate ended up dragging me along to Breakthrough in 2002 which I thought was really scary at first, but one night, I did the one thing that I thought was dorky about some Christians….I lifted my hands. It was only a little action, but for me, it made the difference between taking in the words, focusing on God or just singing a song and I felt like, for once, I was giving myself 100% to God. It was awesome!!!!

On the last morning of Breakthrough, they did the thing where they pray for different youth groups and they prayed for our youth group and I just started bawling my eyes out and the biggest peace came over me like nothing I’ve ever felt.

I was fully on a God high for the next 2 months until one weekend, I remembered my primary school days and the time when everyone used to pick on me and I thought, “Wow. I’m not worthy of knowing God. I have no future. God doesn’t love me.” And the whole idea of killing myself came back to me. For a few weeks, I cried myself to sleep with thoughts of seeing myself dead and knowing people probably wouldn’t cry at my funeral. So, one day, it all snowballed itself up to a point where I wrote a note to my friends and my family telling them how sorry I was and I grabbed the knife on my desk and as I was about slit my wrists`, my mate, who hardly ever had money on her phone, txted me and said, “Are you okay?” and I don’t know why, but I told her all about it and she pleaded to me until about 2 in the morning begging me not to kill myself and how much her and everyone loved me and how God loved me more.

The next day at school, my friends prayed hardout for me and told the devil where to stick those suicidal thoughts. It was awesome and I slowly found myself back on track with God and closer to Him than ever before.

BUT a wee bit later, even though I was on fire for God and living my faith out loud, I felt like I was really stuck in a big huge tub of super glue with my relationship with Him and I really needed to do something about it … then one day, I was talking to Him about it and I was like, “Hey God, whats up with this, man? I’m really hardout for You now!!!! But I’m feeling so bored and stuck !!!!! Whats happening??” and He gave me a scripture… from  1^st Corinthians in chapter 14 verse 17 and it said “For you give thanks well enough, but the others are not encouraged”… which basically meant, yeah, okay, I was always hardout in worship at church and youth group, but was I really doing anything to encourage everyone else? And after heaps more prayer, I felt like God was challenging me to take a leap of faith to go into a bigger environment to “shine my light” somewhere else……which I felt kinda queezy about, because I had become so comfortable in the surroundings I was already in, but I knew God had a bigger and better idea… so one thing led to another, and a wee bit after that, I found myself at Girls High. And going there has been the most challenging but one of the coolest experiences that God has given me….so far anyway…and knowing that God uses me to witness to heaps of neat people on a regular basis—sometimes without even realizing it---its just sooooo awesome and that in itself gives me the biggest rush ever, knowing that God put me there for that exact moment.

God is sooo awesome and He’s not just my Heavenly Father, He’s my best best best best mate and I’m just soooo grateful for the fact that He’s planned every moment of my life and that I talk to Him anytime, anywhere, knowing that He’s listening to me and no matter how bad things get, He’s always going to be there for me and that humbles me to the point where I’m just so thankful that I’m no longer living life for myself and its just so awesome…words just can’t explain it…

So…. all this is the reason why I’m getting baptized. Not just to show that I’m fully committed to Him, but because its something God says we should do, and I’ve found that obeying Him might not seem like the coolest thing at the time, but I know its something I definitely wont regret.