𝙢𝙮 𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙮

3. Heavy conviction

Around this time is when I started getting bad anxiety attacks. It was something that ran in my mom's side of the family and pretty much all my aunts and even my great grandma had dealt with it at various times in their lives. I think for me, the feeling of heavy conviction sort of brought it out.

Plain and simple it was me FINALLY realizing what God had been trying to show me.

And boy, for weak-in-the-faith me, that wasn't fun.

It was like a two week period of living on edge. Bad anxiety attacks in the evenings and waking up exhausted in the mornings only to float through my day and land in another attack that night. I was so thoroughly convinced that I didn't have long to live. I would lie wide awake in my bed just waiting for my walls to cave in and literally just pull everything into a vacuum of nothing. I legitimately felt doomed. I remember sitting on the couch with my parents watching I Love Lucy to try and calm me down, while the whole time I sat there staring at the clock thinking "Jesus is going to come back tonight and I'm going to be left behind."

I'd get nauseous often. I couldn't sleep alone and often after trying for hours to fall asleep in my own bed I'd go knock on my parents door at midnight just to even sleep on a mattress on their floor so I'd feel safer. My mom would read Psalms to me to try and calm me down.

It even changed the way I saw the sky. Like the sky was still blue but to me it didn't look like it. Everything was just duller. Weird, I know, but anxiety can do that to a person I guess.

I honestly don't know how I got out of that other than by God's grace I started feeling better. I was reading the Bible more and I found comfort in it. I had been struck by the fact that I wasn't right with God and I wanted to so everything in my power to change that.

So I read my Bible and I prayed every night.

You might think this is where it got better, but really it was just a different kind of bad.

I got so stuck in this mindset that my Bible-reading and my prayer were all that God wanted from me, and that if I didn't do both at least a little every day He would be upset with me. Of course I learned from reading the Bible. The Word speaks even when you're reading it for the wrong reasons. But I still felt stuck, like I was going through the motions and nothing more.

Somewhere around then I heard the term "lukewarm Christian" for the first time and it described me to a T. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, though, and it frustrated me.

I think God was showing me where I needed to go in a lot of different littles things, little nudges in the right direction. I was listening to KB podcasts and sermons. My own church services gave me some new understanding. And of course, I was reading the Bible.

And eventually I gave it all up. I realized something very important.

Bible-reading, prayer, and talking about the glory of God are all wonderful things. They're essential to living a Christ-like life. But they are not at all what makes you righteous in the eyes of God. They are not what saves you.

And you can't wait until you figure out how to overcome whatever sin is plaguing you to come to Jesus, because then you never will.

I realized I was depending on myself. I was asking for forgiveness from God but I was relying on myself to conquer the sinful nature. My prayers were, "Lord, forgive me for failing you again. I promise I'll be stronger."

Once this finally got through to me, there were definitely a couple nights of crying in my room and just begging Jesus to take it out of my hands. I wanted to understand the Word the way He meant for it to be understood, I wanted to use it to make a difference, I wanted to stop going through the motions. I wanted to be free from habits that I'd been giving in to my whole life, and finally, FINALLY I knew I had to let Him take care of it.

Only God gives the strength to overcome sin. Our own ability is finite, but His is immeasurable.

Salvation happened when I came to Jesus still stuck in sin and repented, gave Him complete control. It wasn't so much of a profound moment of peace and stillness as it was a total collapse. I had finally let my walls fall down---or rather, Christ had broken them---and all I wanted was to let Him have everything and change me as He saw fit.

And that is God's grace.

If we could do anything to earn it, it wouldn't be grace. God's grace, I now understand, is not something that can ever be earned, but it is a gift that must be received.

Whether you think you're handling your sin well, or you know you're struggling but you want to wait until you can hide it better to show yourself to Jesus.

Because trust me, He already sees.

Things have definitely changed since then. I've learned a lot more, and I still have a lot more to learn, but I'm just... I don't even know what to tell you other than I'm living proof that God is real and He is at work in the world.