Matt, Australia, Age 35
I was raised a Catholic and as a child had a sense that God existed but fell away as a teenager as I found no life in the model of Christianity presented by the schools and churches I attended.
I drifted away from God and despaired of everything, thinking daily of ending an ultimately meaningless life, using drugs, alcohol, anything to try and ignore the futility of ultimately doomed human existence, or kill myself in the process.
After school I moved from city to city, busking and doing casual labour here and there. Sometimes I would meet people and before they said a word I would know they were Christians, I would physically see a glow around them, there was a difference to them that no one else had.
I spent a lot of time reading the books of many religions, the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Confucius, Teachings of Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, The Koran as well as Western philosophers like Bertrand Russel and Friedrich Nietzsche but whatever I gained from these was fleeting and didn’t give me any sense of hope or purpose, the thin veneer of worldly wisdom barely disguising naked oblivion just beneath.
Finally, after reading the bible for a couple years, visiting churches and talking with Christians, I woke up one morning after hurting myself again with another wild night and decided I’d had enough of living the way I was living – I stopped smoking, drugs and binge drinking and allowed God to take charge of my life, to heal me, teach me and grow me.
I married a beautiful lady and we will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary early next year. We have two beautiful children. I studied and completed a degree in IT and have worked in my field for six years in a position that allows me to still be creative and experimentational.
I still play guitar, sing, write and record music, play live gigs and have also been writing a book for the past six years that I hope to self publish in the near future, a comedy set in the future. All these gifts God has strengthened, refined and expanded in me.
My life is very blessed and more fulfilling than anything I could have planned but most of all I know God is real, I know that with God my life is not meaningless, that what I do matters, that good can overcome evil, that people can change and do amazing things, even impossible things through Him.