He Changed My Life

My whole life I had believed in Jesus, but I think it was a matter of when I knew Jesus. I had everything I everything I could on paper, I guess in other people’s eyes. In other people’s eyes, I had everything on paper and it’s still, there’s still something missing. There’s definitely something missing.

We have an old Bible from the 1800s. Mom was like, don’t touch that one it’s old. So we didn’t have a Bible to read my house, even though we’d been Christian my whole life. I’d always thought that you had to feel guilt and shame to know Jesus.I was like, okay, I’ll go to church with you. It’s going to be the same old thing. I’ll dress up, I’ll sit there and I’ll just see a lot of irony around me.

First I went and I said like, okay, I think I liked what he said. I was like, I’ll come back next week. And then the next week it was like, all right. And I guess like the whole time I was just looking for some reason to go like, okay, I’ve heard this before. It seemed like a great idea. It just didn’t seem realistic. And this church showed me that it’s realistic, but it comes from knowing Jesus it’s really changed the idea of love for me. That was, I don’t mean to get emotional about it. I’ve always had a gift drawing and I remember being at my friend’s house and she had bought me, the same friend. She bought me a Bible and I’d said, is there any part of the Bible that talks about gifts?

She’d opened it like pretty much right to that page. And she said, this Bible is for you. I want to give you your first Bible. And then when I started to read the Bible, I didn’t know there was any words about love and the Bible. I had no idea. I had no idea it talks about gifts. I had no idea it talks so much about love and respecting others. And so I’ve learned so much about love from Jesus that I didn’t know that was possible. And you know, it made me question a lot of my relationships because it’s, you know, the love is patient, love is kind, it doesn’t easily anger. And so it made me question a lot of my relationships that don’t necessarily meet that and it made me question a lot about how I treat people. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I don’t know if the more you study it, the more Christ-like you become. There’s just such good people in my church that I would hope to grow to where they are. I thought I was seeing Christians, but these are people who are followers of Christ. So, there’s a big difference to me in people that believe and people that follow. There’s so many things I’ve learned within the last year. I can’t imagine where like the next year will take me. I’m Meredith Graf, He Changed My Life.