My Testimony

I grew up in a small, conservative town where everyone knows what you had for dinner the night before, and not because it was posted on Instagram.

Living in a community like that, there are many benefits, but also many, many cons. for the first 8, or so, years of my life I went to church only for Christmas and Easter and that was only some years. We weren't a very close family and I don't remember much of my childhood.

When I was in third grade, my parents got a divorce and we went to church even less than we did before. My grandparents were catholic but my parents were "christian". We never prayed, talked about God, or went to church.

My parents both ended up getting remarried a few years later and the only hard part about that was that my dad started making my brother, sister, and I go to church because his new wife was a very devout christian. Church, Sunday School, Youth group, Small group. Pretty much anything we could do that even remotely related to God, we did. I hated it.

First of all, it was all brand new, secondly, I'm stubborn, hard headed, and opinionated and didnt like the fact that people were trying to tell me what to think, how to behave, what to pray, when to pray.

A few years being forced into being a religious person and a couple new churches later, I started to give it a try. I liked the church we were in and I liked the other kids in my Sunday school class and I was beginning to feel close to people there and make friends so I figured I might as well give it a shot. So a few months after trying to actually be a christian, we changed churches again. I hated the new church. All my peers were weird and I felt like all the pastors were doing were trying to control you in every aspect of your life. My sunday school teacher friended me on facebook and I accepted because I probably would have gotten in trouble had I not, and he would message me monthly and remind me about stupid group things that I always made up excuses not to go to. So after almost a year of being forced to go and "enjoy" this new church, of scowling all morning during sunday school and trying to fall asleep during the service, The youth pastor said that the next week in Sunday school we were going to be able to ask questions about the bible and our questions would be proven with historical evidence. You can Imagine how excited I would be. So that Sunday I wasnt wearing my usual scowl when I walked into church. I was genuinely excited and ready to learn. When I got to class, there were multiple questions posted on colored sheets of paper around the room, we were to mark a tally on which 3 questions we wanted answered the most because we were only going to be able to get through a couple of them. The main question I wanted answered, and the only one that I can remember was "How do we know that the bible is the word of God?". Luckily enough, that was the question most of the others wanted answered as well so it got answered first.

The evidence proving that the bible is the true word of god, was the bible itself. I was furious. How dare someone pretend that they are going to back up questions about the bible with historical evidence and then not do it?? How is it ok for the only proof of the bible to be THE BIBLE? Did no one see how completely wrong that is? How it doesn't work like that? I didn't question it. I just decided from there on out, there is no proof and if there is, I will find it by dissecting religion verse by verse.