About Me

I am a new author who loves to learn and share what I have learned with others. I am a God-fearing Christian and my goal with this blog is to encourage growth in godliness. My posts will reflect and be based on my beliefs. I live in the mountains of Idaho with my young family (as such my time on here will be limited).  You can contact me through Facebook messaging.

I want to say that I do not claim to know everything, have all the right answers, or do everything the way I should. I am a sinful human who is saved by the grace of God alone, He is the only reason that I can and do anything good or worthy.

I grew up in a Christian home but the main "religion" was that of functionality: your worth was based on how well you did what you were supposed to. I knew that Jesus was fully God and fully man, came to earth to live and die on the cross to pay for our sins, was brought back to life after 3 days and ascended into heaven, but I grew up trying to be better than everyone so that I would be good enough for my family. At one point I dabbled in witch craft, and literally barely escaped alive. I began to see the hypocrisy of how I was living, requiring perfection of everyone, yet knowing that I was not perfect myself. I hated myself and my life. As relations at home grew worse I became very depressed, convinced that I was worthless and my family would be happier if I was gone. I thought about running away, and made several plans to do it, but I knew that would only delay the inevitable rather than fix the problem. When I was 15 I tried to kill myself. Obviously, it didn't work, but that only made me feel more like a failure. A few weeks later I realized that not only was I running away from God, but that He was pursuing me, and I decided to stop running and surrender my life to Him (2 Corinthians 7:8-11). But as with many new believers I thought that my circumstances would change after my life changed, but they did not so my depression continued. In college, my identity (based on performance) was boosted by pursuing a very difficult major and having the intelligence to pull it off. But in the middle of my sophomore year, I learned that I was failing one of the core classes in my major. Feeling utterly worthless, I tried to kill myself again. When that didn't work, I turned my back on God, unable to see why He would allow me to lose something so important to me. That only lasted a few hours, at which point I realized that God disciplines those He loves and allows us to experience the consequences of our actions (Isaiah 16-17). This was also the point when I began to see that Christianity is not so much about religion as it is about having a personal relationship with God and that everything else flows from that. My faith has grown ever stronger since, but it wasn't until recently that I began to understand what my mom had told me many years before, "your identity is based on Christ." The concept was foreign to me until I realized that as far as God is concerned, once you submit your life to Him you are covered by the sacrifice and blood of His Son Jesus who died to pay the price for your sins. So when God looks at you, He sees His Son instead of your sin. Nothing bad you do is bad enough for Him not to accept you, and nothing good you do is good enough to earn it. We have only to accept the sacrifice of Jesus and submit our lives to Him.