Well, this has been an awesome road that God has put me on. I grew up with an awesome family, everything seemed to be going really well for about the first 13 years of my life, and then all of a sudden my parents divorced. Neither my mom nor I saw it coming, completely took us by surprise. Now I hadn't been a Christian at all through all of this, I thought of church as boring and meaningless and had absolutely no relationship with Christ, in fact a relationship with Him would probably have been the last thing to cross my mind. Every other word out of my mouth seemed to be taking His name in vain or bringing people down. And I had gotten an addiction to pornography (about 4-5 years long) that just would not go away no matter how hard I tried to stop. When I was 17 my friend David started inviting me to come to his youth group. I went at first thinking it would just be an awesome opportunity to meet new people and make new friends and stuff. Well the love this group of Christian teens had, and still have, was just incredible. It didn't seem like anything could phase them, all they wanted to do was love each other, regardless of differences. Well I had been going for about 2 months or so and we all went to a camp that year in August. At first the camp for me was boring, I was just there once again to meet new people. All through the week people gave their testimonies about how they came to Christ and the speaker spoke that week to paint an accurate picture in our minds of who God is. On Thursday of that week I don't remember what was spoken about, all I can remember right now is having the thought "maybe I should get saved", so I talked to one of my youth leaders and he told me the story of Philip and the Eunuch (Ethiopian) and after that I just prayed to God and asked Him to come into my life, and all of a sudden I remember just feeling so aware of everything. One of the first things I noticed was the environment we were in and all I kept thinking was wow...you created all of it. And since then God has just done amazing things in my life. The addiction to pornography was just gone instantly, no effort on my part which tells me that had to be the Holy Spirit living in me and changing me. And all of a sudden, without any effort on my part again, my language just cleaned up, gosh and stink became like regular parts of my vocabulary, its incredible. Lately I've really been struggling though, Satan and my own fleshly brain have been doing everything possible to convince me that I wasn't saved and my faith has been wavering a lot lately...it seems like it takes all of my energy just to not walk away from God. If anyone has gone through this and come out of it and is willing to share what happened to them it would be awesome to hear from you, God bless you all richly and thank you for reading
Matt
Matt