Struggled with the desire to be loved and accepted
By Gabi (Sydney Uni)
For many years when I was young, I struggled with the desire to be loved and accepted by those around me. In my primary school years I was very much a loner and quite isolated from my peers. This loneliness intensified when I went to a high school where I knew no one and for the first two years there, I was shy and often felt quite down. Towards the end of year 8, a group of girls started to express interest in me and invited me to join them for lunch. After a short time and when they had got to know me better, they invited me along to the Christian group where we discussed Jesus’ love and many other issues to do with Christianity. At that time I thought I was like a sponge, soaking up all the information, but not necessarily believing it.
In year 9 my parents went overseas for several weeks and while they were away some friends of theirs looked after my sister and I. I also started going out with a guy four years older than me. One afternoon when I was home alone I received a freaky phone call from a guy I knew, who threatened to kill my boyfriend and who tried to convince me that he was outside my house at the time. After I had hung up, I was petrified and not knowing what else to do, I prayed. I virtually cried out to God to take care of the situation and to look after me. While praying, I experienced an overwhelming sense of love, comfort and peace, in a way I had never experienced before. That night, having realized the Holy Spirit had touched my life, I became a Christian.
Not long after this, a close friend of mine from school invited me to her church to hear a Christian band called Blind play. I went and after the band had finished playing, I spoke to their youth minister, who after I had told him my story, confirmed for me that I was a Christian. During the rest of that year, after I became a Christian, God worked in my life and started to change me. I continued to attend church with my friend and this soon became like a second family for me. I quickly made friends there, who encouraged me to grow in my faith while giving me confidence and increasing my self esteem. I also became good friends with the girls who had introduced me to Christianity at school, and we are still friends today.
After becoming a Christian, I could see how God was changing my life but there were still some tough issues I had to deal with. Two of these I will share briefly: the first was whether a Christian could go out with a non-christian. I often wondered what consequences this would have on my faith and how far I could go with him? Another issue I struggled with was depression and wanting to commit suicide because I felt life was hopeless.
I won’t try and answer the questions I had about those issues directly but there are a couple of valuable lessons God has taught me from dealing with these issues. Firstly, God has a purpose for our lives and He can use bad circumstances for good. He can use them to mould us into the people he wants us to become and He can incorporate them into His plans. What I experienced in 2000, with the guy who rang me up and freaked me out was unpleasant, but God allowed this experience to bring me into a personal relationship with Him. Through this experience he reached out and touched my heart. Before the incident I understood his love and what he had done for me, all I needed to do was to take that step of faith and place my trust in Him. Likewise, with the issue of being depressed, he used this issue to turn my life around completely by giving my life a new purpose and hope.
One other thing which God is still reminding me of today but which He primarily taught me when I became a Christian, is the overwhelming, all-encompassing power of His love. For “as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him”. (Psalm 103:11) Before I became a Christian I struggled to be loved and accepted by those around me. It wasn’t that I was unloved at home but God revealed to me that He loves me unconditionally. None of us are worthy of his love and we continually disobey Him, thus proving that we can’t win His love by our own feeble efforts. No, it is a gracious gift he has freely offered us and He wishes for each one of us to experience His powerful love. In Ephesians 3:16-18 Paul prays that the young Christians might experience His love in their lives.
I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have the power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to all the measure of the fullness of God.
God wants each of us to experience a personal, intimate relationship with Him even though, we have all rejected Him by wanting to live our lives our own way. But God provided a solution by sending His own son Jesus, to die and bring us back into a relationship with Him. It is the magnitude of God’s love that compels me to share His message with others and which compelled me to recently go on a short term mission during my summer holidays with Student Life. While on this mission, I got to share God’s love with international students at Macquarie University. During this time God continued to show me how gracious and loving He is to us all and how He desires for everyone to know Him. Therefore, I would like to encourage you, if you are a Christian, take the time to thank God for what He has done in your life and continue to share His message with those who don’t yet know Him. You never know when god may use you to touch someone’s heart. If you don’t yet know Jesus though, I pray that you will take the time to find out how much God, the Creator of our Universe, loves you!
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