Faith.

As I was reading back through some of my old posts I realized a trend between most of them. Up here at college I struggled at first with my faith. Being up here so far away from my family, it was very hard to "survive" up here. I could no longer be around them and people that I knew all of the time. Re-establishing my faith in God REALLY helped me out. I relied on God to surround me with Christian friends and help me become my own person and He did just that.

Lately I have been pondering a few things about my faith. Today I had my regular meetings with my COREFA. Last week she mentioned something about doing contact evangelism with her. I was quite scared at first I'm not going to lie. Going up and talking to random people about Christianity is something waaaaaayy out of my comfort zone. I seriously thought about calling her today and making up an excuse for not being able to go. But of course I couldn't do that so I went. And sure enough she dragged me out to Red Square and we started looking for people to go up and talk to. The first lady we approached didn't want to talk. Then we saw a girl, who happens to live on my floor, and she was willing to sit down & talk with us. Angela then started off the conversation with something along the lines of "What problems do you have with Christianity?" Without hesitation, the first words out of the girl's mouth was, "A god who requires worship isn't worth worshipping." I was blown away. The fact that this girl did not even need to hesitate after being asked quite a personal question was quite weird to me. She talked with us for a few minutes before one of her friends came up and he pretty much took away the conversation from her. We asked him the same quesitions and he basically said stuff like "Since the Big Bang Theory has been proven true and it all started from one solitary object, then the force that broke them apart will eventually bring them back together one day." He also said that "for God to be so powerful the only challenge He would have would be trying to conquer himself." Basically in talking with these people I got to start thinking about my faith and why it is I believe what I do. Is it because my parents' beliefs just flowed to me? Is it because it's really the only thing I have been taught to believe in? Why did I choose to believe in God who I can't see or hear sometimes? Why would I base my whole life on the assumption that He is true? What if He's not? I kind of struggled with these thoughts for the remainder of the day.

On tuesday evenings I have been going with Megan to a college group called "Relucent" at Northlake Church. She invited me one time and I went and she kept prodding me to keep going and I finally got the time to go today. I had still had all of these conflicting thoughts in my head from earlier in the day; which turned out to be perfect timing for me that I went to this group tonight. The speaker was a woman who worked at the church. She gave her testimony. She talked about how she got married and wanted to start a family. She tried for a while but the doctors told her she had a less than one percent chance of becoming pregnant. She said she became very bitter toward God and went into a serious state of depression. She had a prayer service for her put together by some of her friends. She thought that if she had faith in God, he would reward her by giving her a child. But she then realized that is not how it works. She realized that we need to have faith in God and not control the outcomes that we want because it's like we are trying to control God and that's not possible. One thing she said was that we need to have faith in God and not faith in what we want the outcome to be. So she became perfectly okay with the fact that she might not be a parent one day and was okay with that because she had faith in God and knew that it was what He wanted in her life. She then told us how she enjoys romantic comedies and how at the end sometimes they have "epilogues" of the characters that tell where they are now and who they marry and personal stuff like that. She then picked up a sign she had made and said that it was her epilogue to this story. The sign read "The doctors gave me less than a one percent chance of getting pregnant but right now I am three months pregnant!" It gave me goosebumps. Everyone in the room was cheering and clapping for her. She told us that they had conceived the child on the two year anniversary of when all of her friends and family got together and had a prayer service for her.

The story she shared really hit me and put me into my place about where my feelings were coming from earlier in the day. How can there not be a miraculous God who makes something like this happen? Putting my faith in a God who works in ways like this is comforting. And I know I say that a lot in this blog but it's really true. Who/what else could make a woman become pregnant, who had less than a one percent chance of becoming a mom, and getting pregnant on the two year anniversary of when her friends had prayed for her! I feel a lot better now about knowing how powerful the God I put my faith and trust in, truly is.