“I was trying to live up to the stereotypes, and before long I was a person I didn’t want to be. I tried to fix the glaring issues I could see in my life. I became a better student, a better friend, I lost a lot of weight, I quit my job and started a new one…but it wasn’t enough.”
Ryan, a recent college graduate, called us this week to share with us the answers he found in his several-years-long search for his own identity.
Like we all do, Ryan longed to belong, to find a place within a community where he was known and understood. In college, Ryan sought belonging and identity through partying, but still found himself on an endless and dissatisfying quest to please everyone around him.
Raised in a Christian home, Ryan questioned his childhood faith in college and eventually concluded religion wasn’t the solution to any of his problems. But when all other attempts failed, he began to wonder if his problem might need a spiritual answer after all.
When an atheist friend started questioning him about the book of Deuteronomy, Ryan knew he needed to find answers. “I had grown up in the church,” he said, “but I had no idea what she was talking about. She said to me, ‘This is your religion, and you don’t even know what the Bible says.’ So I did what everyone does these days, and when I got home I looked up my questions on YouTube.” It was then that Ryan found our sermon series on the book of Deuteronomy.
Before long, Ryan was watching videos everyday…and soon that led him to read the Bible on his own. And before long, Ryan gave his life back to Jesus and started attending a church. In fact, he plans to visit our ministry headquarters in Washington state within the next month!
“I definitely feel like I’ve resolved a lot of the questions that I have,” Ryan said. “A lot of life is like a tug of war, and the world pulls you one way, and you have to go re-learn from God’s Word to answer your questions all over again. I re-read and re-read, I watch videos. I don’t understand it all, and left up to my own devices, I would read for completion and not comprehension. But now I’m growing tremendously.”
Like Ryan, we’re all looking for the answers to our deepest needs – and there’s only one place we’ll find that. We like to say here on staff: “Your needs are an invitation.” The longing you feel for identity and belonging can be satisfied only in the one unchanging source of love and acceptance: Jesus Christ. His acceptance is constant, no matter what we do, and no matter how anyone else receives us….and that’s an answer to one of life’s biggest questions that transforms everything else, even the details of our daily lives.