My Testimony

So the other day I was reading through the version of the testimony that I wrote in the seventh grade, and I decided it may be time to update a little bit. I guess we can safely say my faith has grown and matured since I was…you know…twelve.

I don’t want to sit here and bore you to death with every detail of every bit of my life. I simply want to tell my story. That story being the bumps and curves of my journey thus far with our amazing God. It’s the story which He has written on my heart and challenges me to continue every single day.

So here we go.

I’m going to be super cliché and say that I was born and raised Catholic from the cradle. I was baptized as a baby, got first communion and reconciliation in second grade, and was confirmed in the eighth grade. Pretty normal path for any Catholic kid. I went to religious education classes almost every Wednesday and mass almost every Sunday. Cool story, right?

Well, I happen to live in the state of Tennessee (sweet tea, country music, anything ringing a bell ya’ll?) where we are proud to have the highest church-to-person ratio in the entire country. I feel super blessed to live in a place where faith and where religion are very talked about and play a prominent role in everyday life. However, this can present some challenges.

Catholics are definitely a minority here, and until high school, I felt pretty alone in my faith. Faith, being a part of everyday life, wasn’t something I really thought about or questioned at all until my middle school years. I hated going to religious ed and thought mass was pretty boring. But beyond those two hours of my week, church wasn’t important.

Then came middle school. I went to a public school and was enrolled in an Ancient History course during that year. The Reformation and Inquisition happened to be in the curriculum, and were taught them from a very anti-Catholic point of view. I had always known that not many people were Catholic here, but I never knew what really separated me from other denominations and what the differences were.

My best friend turned around during class to me during one day of learning about the Inquisition, mortified, and said, “REALLY?! Catholics did that? Avery, how on earth could you possibly be that?!”

And I wondered. The questions kept coming and the dicussions became more frequent, and I began to ask myself the questions seriously. Did we really worship Mary? Did we really “eat” Jesus? Did I believe that the guy called the Pope knew everything? Was I in some cult?

Mass to me at that point was nothing more than an intricate (not to mention boring) Catholic aerobics class where we couldn’t quite decide when to stand or sit or kneel or pray. Religious Ed was a weekly session of squeaky chalkboards and workbooks that were more about vocabulary and less about Jesus. But from my friends and the questioning, I knew there was more. There HAD to be more.

The questions didn’t stop coming, and they raced through my head a million miles and hour.

My sixth grade year was a time that I really delved into my faith. I learned everything there possibly was to know for a sixth grader and just studied and studied and studied and studied. NERD.  Going into seventh grade, I had a love for our Church. Over that year I read the entire Bible and Catechism and any book I could get my hands on about our faith. I grew so much in knowledge during that time.  I could tell you about the mass order, list off information about pretty much any saint or pope, quote scripture like nobody’s business, and my light reading was papal encyclicals. My friends called me the Hermione Granger of Catholics.  I knew when we did what we did and how we did it and where it came from. I was basically a walking Catechism.

But honestly, at that point, I was nothing more than an empty hypocrite.

1 Corinthians 13:13 tells us that out of faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love.

That was entirely what I was lacking.

I believed in God but my God was just some fantasy guy up in a cloud, straight out of the Theology textbooks. My faith was completely in my head. It was logical. It was rational.

Guys. That’s not faith. Faith is trust. Faith is believing without seeing. FAITH ISN’T RATIONAL.

At that point I knew a lot. But when I die and go to heaven, I don’t want to meet Jesus face to face and tell Him His own life story. I want to recall OUR story. FAITH.IS.A.RELATIONSHIP.

I had to make the connection between head and heart.

That was when the end of my seventh grade year came around. I was beginning to see just how completely empty my faith was. When I tried to pray I got so distracted. I knew God as this far off figure, not my best friend. I was beginning to lose my innocence and naivety to the world. People at school were drinking and smoking pot and cutting themselves and it just made no sense to me. How could God, creator of the world, care about me? Brace faced, nerdy, judgmental, confused, just-growing-up me?

But somehow, I knew He really did. I started to have this desire for God and for prayer that just wouldn’t leave. Unfortunately, I have never really been blessed with the gift of patience. I’m not all that great at silencing my heart to listen either. But anyways, I ended up watching this thing on the Bible called T3 Timeline by Mark Hart. Mark Hart is my total hero. I watched and listened and learned so much from it. But what I really took from it was the love that God has for me. I just kept thinking about what all he has done for me, and then I realized… what have I done for him? It is something I ask myself quite frequently, and I always end up usually crying by the end of praying those few words… Christ gave everything for me, so what am I giving him? The answer at that point? Absolutely nothing but empty facts.

You see, the facts aren’t all that important. Sincerely, they are NOTHING. I mean, they’re great to know, but without Christ working through us, that’s all they are. Facts.

The night I watched that I said the first honest prayer of my life.

God? I know you’re there. I know you love me. I love you.

God, lead me where you want to lead me.

Take me where you want to take me.

Lead me along. I will follow. God, I need you.

So, yeah, it was kind of self centered. But it felt real, felt authentic for the first time. All fifteen seconds of it.

Well, God lead me. And took me. So I had to keep my part of that and follow and trust. I prayed every night that God would show me what He wanted from my life. And a few months later, I figured out. It didn’t come as like the voice of God waking me up at night. I didn’t like fall off my donkey or something crazy. There was no burning bush. Instead, it was a feeling I had never ever truly experienced before: peace. It wasn’t a voice, but the word “trust” simply kept ringing and ringing through my head.

Trust. Trust. Trust. Trust. Trust. Trust.

After some time of discernment, God eventually led me to the idea of a website ministry. I was always into design and computers and whatnot, and that was a way I could really share my love and knowledge of the faith with others. But honestly, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Not a clue.

I started off the show Live WTL (which is now called Live Out Loud”) with three subscribers. My mom, my dad, my sister. I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I was doing. But, God kept His promise and I simply trusted. He was going to do something. Over the course of two years, it grew. Now we have over 7,000 subscribers in 35 different countries globally. I’ve gotten emails and testimonies from Russia and England and Puerto Rico and tons of other places. Some of the stories have been kinda crazy. People have changed their lives, stopped habits of sin, even kept themselves from suicide because of the LOVE of Christ that they now really know exists. And that’s not from me or from the website or from media promotion or any of that junk. That, my friends, is from the Body of Christ which we are simply taking a part in building.

My faith personally has grown so much since I started the ministry. Trust has become so key and so important. I now understand that everything does really happen for a reason. God has placed some INCREDIBLE people in my life and daily I find myself amazed at everything He has done for me. My freshman year was filled with some of the hardest challenges I have yet to face. Between friends and pressure and sickness and just a lot of other things, God showed me more of my own weakness and His strength. And my friends, that strength is enough to pull us out of whatever craziness we have fallen into.

I still stumble, I still fall. I still sin, I still judge, I still misunderstand. But I have learned that our God is one of LOVE. He accepts us wherever we are and loves us enough to bring us out of wherever that place may be. I’ve struggled with many things over the years but consistently I know that Jesus Christ, truly the best friend you can ever have, will be there for me no matter what.

What I learned is that God does not call the equipped, He equips the called. We are NOTHING without Him. But with Him, He becomes our everything (St. Teresa of Avila). Without God, we wouldn’t wake up in the mornings, breathe, think, just even have life. We are specks of dirt compared to the size of the universe. Yet, He loves each and every one of us dearly, enough to know the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30). That’s CRAZY AWESOME.

So that’s a little of my story.

But it doesn’t end here. It’s going to go on for the rest of my life. We always have to remember that our relationship with God is a lifelong journey. I know we are all on completely different paths. All seven billion of us on this earth are in totally different places in our spiritual journeys. God reveals himself to us in unique and different ways. Never get discouraged if it feels like God isn’t speaking to you. Never get upset if prayers seem to not be answered. Just trust God. Because, trust me, He has plans for you that will totally blow your mind.

There’s been challenges and struggles that I don’t really feel comfortable writing about and posting for the whole wide world to see, but if you’re ever struggling we can talk and I’d be happy to try and help. Or just listen. We’re a family here at Live WTL Ministries and I do truly believe that God calls each and every one of us to be beacons of His light to one another.

-Avery

If you ever have questions, or just need somebody to talk to, I’m here. But first, I’d reccomend that big Guy Upstairs. Yeah, Him. But for real. My email is avery@livewtl.com, and I try super hard to respond to most of the emails I get.