Today was an incredible day. At three o'clock, I never would have guessed it, having a complete emotional breakdown while driving down the road (which, by the way, is a bad idea. Don't drive whilst sobbing.). But once I got to my destination- church (surprise, right?), things turned around. Which is why church is number 2 on my list of things to be thankful for.
My church was the first place I ever felt truly accepted by Christians. Now, that's actually saying something because I've been in a church almost every Sunday since I was born, and I've never gone to public school- but that's another post for another time. When I started going there, I was definitely not a Christian. I hated God, and I thought that God hated me- which is the farthest thing from the truth. After going there a few weeks, I realized that they weren't judging me- that was new. I may have been decked out in black every day, listening to awful angsty teen music, but they knew I had real problems. At that point, I was extremely depressed. I was cutting myself, starving myself, abusing my perscriptions because I felt like I needed to fill some sort of void. At this church, I found it. It was God. It's always been God, and it will always be God. His love is something I can't even describe, and this verse sums it up pretty well:
"But I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope- Because of the Lord's great love for us, we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail." (Lamentations 3:21-22).
It's my favorite verse because I've seen it so much in my life. To put it bluntly, without Christ's love, I would be dead. Not just spiritually, but literally dead. I would have either comitted suicide or starved to death. Because of Jesus, I wasn't consumed by those things, or by anything else. Christ's love and mercy are the things I am most thankful for, but I don't know if I could have discovered them without my church. They understood my pain, and they helped me through it- they didn't ignore it as so many others had. I would be a completely different person without that church, if I was even alive at all. Being there has shaped me into a better, happier, healthier person than I ever could have imagined when I first walked into that building 2 years ago.
