Testimony: Amelia Green
Growing up, I felt that I always knew that Jesus had died for my sins and loved me, but it never really sunk in. I decided when I was 11 years old that, “I’ll just go to church with my family on Sundays but I’ll only do the praying and bible reading when I’m an adult.” I did not have a solid foundation with God. I believed that the life of an eleven year old was too busy and exciting to waste time spending it with God.
The most trying times of my life really challenged my weak faith in Jesus and each one of them has happened in the last three years.
In 2020, COVID began, and it really killed my learning experience at school. I’m homeschooled and go to a community on Monday’s but when COVID happened and school started, people had to wear masks, and soon we were doing class on Zoom. I now hated school and dreaded going into my second year of middle school where in our community, the homework level goes up significantly and you start having actual school assignments.
In 2021, the year I was starting 7th grade, COVID hit my family hard. We all got sick, including cousins, aunts, uncles, grandma, and grandpa. My grandpa died after he caught COVID in August of 2021, and my family was miserable. We were all incredibly sick, and now my grandma had lost her husband who she had been married to for so many years. My mom was devastated, as was the rest of the family.
We went to see Grandpa lying in state and I stood with my siblings on a hill, looking out on the cemetery. At that moment, my life was completely terrible. Grandpa had died, I had the world’s worst headache, and now life would never be the same. At that moment, I decided once and for all; God just doesn't care. The world felt like it was over, and God was just sitting there, letting it happen because he didn’t care who lived or died. I couldn’t take comfort in the fact that my Grandpa was now alive with Christ in heaven at that very moment because all I could think about was the fact that God had torn our family apart.
After that I blamed him for everything; headaches, sickness, sleepless nights, the fact that I could no longer taste food - I hated him. Finally we all recovered, had a funeral, and I was right: for the first few months at least, life didn’t go back to normal. All throughout the school year, I fought God. I didn’t pray to him, I didn’t thank him for everything I had, and I still resented him for what had happened. I still went to church with my family on Sundays, but I went out of my way to make sure that I didn’t listen to the sermon’s our pastor would preach every week.
That school year also brought loss of a friendship. After that I felt so hurt that I tried turning to God to see if he could help me, and tell me what to do next but I couldn’t “feel his presence”, or his love, when I prayed to him, so I didn’t bother trying again. I was later excluded by a group of friends and I felt even more pushed aside than normal. I added this to the pile of troubles and hastily made a new friend to make up for the one who had stopped talking to me. I didn’t care who included me now: I just needed some attention. I needed to be loved.
At church and youth group, people all around me seemed like they were constantly with God while I was alone in the dark. I couldn’t walk beside him like my friends. I didn’t belong. I hid all these feelings and didn’t talk to anyone about it (including my parents) but I did think about my problems for a few months. I finally turned to a friend in December of 2021, and they said I should take these problems to God. Well that hadn’t worked the first time, so I wasn’t going to try again. All it was was a waste of my time.
Then came the 2022 Dunes Retreat. It was the first time in what seemed like forever, that I felt God’s presence around me, and it happened the night we sang Graves Into Gardens. I didn’t sing the song with everyone else - my voice was completely gone for one thin, and I wanted to listen to the lyrics that I’d never really considered.
Each line of the bridge of this song applied to me so well that I had to sit down and talk to God.
You turn mourning to dancing: that night at Dunes, God told me that he didn’t kill my grandpa. He took him to heaven because it was HIS WILL. My will could do nothing against it. Matthew 6:10 says, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” I wasn’t the most important being on earth, GOD was in charge NOT me.
You give beauty for ashes: In the times when I was being excluded, one of the explanations my mind jumped to was that I wasn’t pretty enough, or special enough to be in their friend group or I wasn’t good enough to be in their circle. But God gives beauty for ashes.
You turn shame into glory: I was ashamed of the fact that I had ever doubted God, that I had hated him the way I did. I stepped away from the worshiping crowd, I got on my knees and prayed for forgiveness that night, and like God does every single time, he forgave me.
You’re the only one who can: GOD is the maker of heaven and earth, he can do all things. “And I can do all things through him who gives me strength.”
That Dunes Retreat opened my eyes, and that night I talked to God for the rest of the night. That night, I became a child of God. That night I gave myself to God and accepted the free gift of salvation that he had been offering me my whole life. My problems that seemed huge in the moment were TINY before my Savior.
After all this it seemed like my life was good, and this was a happy ending, but my life in Christ had just begun.
This year has been my last year of middle school and it brought new friendships, good experiences, terrible experiences, another friendship that will never be the same, and all sorts of battles I fought. Except this time, I had God on my side. Life still sucked at times but God isn’t what I thought he was. He was never not on my side, I had just never accepted him. He doesn't single out people and rain terrible things down on them just because he can. He is always there, helping us out and sometimes we can see that, and sometimes we can’t. We can’t stop his will, and we’ll never fully understand his plan.
I learned 4 very valuable lessons in four years:
From 2020 and the first year of COVID, I learned that even in times where everything seems to go wrong, God is there with you. From 2021, when one of my closest relatives died, I learned that God’s will is unstoppable, and even though you cannot do anything about it, it's always what’s best for you. It may not seem like it is at the moment, because only God knows his plan. From 2022 I learned that God loves me always, even when my stubborn mind tells me that nobody loved me or wanted to include me in anything. And from this year I’ve learned that when you have a relationship with God, trust him, and have complete faith in him alone, his presence overwhelms you in your time of need, and he will help you through whatever trial you’re going through.
Romans 8:31 “What shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”