Haley Kurtz
I grew up in a family that was split into two halves; my mom’s side was Catholic, which attended the Catholic church in our town, and my dad’s side, also Catholic, had only attended Church when my dad was a kid. We would go to church with my grandparents from my mom’s side when I was little, every Sunday, and stopped going when I was in Elementary school. I never really had that chance to form a relationship with God; all I had in my mind was that you were not supposed to use his name in vain, and by my parents’ words, “he probably existed”. I would see other kids in my school, every Wednesday, get off our bus at the church for Youth. I would ask my parents if I could go, but more of it was about wanting to do what other kids were doing; my parents would tell me no, every time, saying, “I didn’t need to be part of that kind of stuff”. By the time I got to middle school, I stopped asking and spent the next seven years on a roller coaster I couldn’t get off of.
In sixth grade, my grandfather from my mom’s side was diagnosed with cancer while in Florida. From then until the summer before seventh grade, it was a bunch of back and forth from home to their home in Florida until he died. I remember crying, and for the first time, a thought formed in my mind: did God hate my family? It was a thought that stuck with me for a while. The family started fighting, and the grief mixing with the stress, led me to try to use social media to cope. Talking to people online, calling them friends, being introduced to graphic content, swearing, doing things that weren’t like me at all, it strained my relationship with my parents and with friends at that point. And through it all, I had made myself believe that God hated me, that God hated my family, that I would never get better, and that it was God’s fault and he wanted me to suffer. This went on all the way to about the end of my sophomore year. Things had mellowed out, I wasn’t doing those things anymore, and everything seemed okay.
But, I had an itch, a new thought that had been brewing: Am I allowed to have a relationship with God? Me, who’d spent those last years hating him and blaming him for what happened to my family. And I had a friend, of course, I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I remember them inviting me to a youth group in the next town over that they attended. I went, at first, I felt really awkward and out of place, a little uncomfortable, and scared because some of the people there had been going for years, and I hadn’t. I wouldn’t raise my hands during worship, listen to what the youth pastor talked about, and leave with more questions than I’d started with.
But slowly, over time, it got less uncomfortable, and I started to feel less scared. And on June 4th, I made the choice to give my life to Christ. It felt like the best thing in the world. But I was still struggling trying to understand everything, trying to find where exactly to start this journey. And sometimes in the summer, my parents told me they didn’t want me to go to that youth group anymore, they thought what I was learning was just that anyone who doesn’t follow what God says is going to hell, which wasn’t true at all. And then they gave me an ultimatum: I either go to the catholic youth in our town, or I go to none. Of course, it felt like the world was coming down, I told my friends, and they told me to pray. I did, and later that day, after going to youth for what I thought would be my last time, my parents said I could keep going. They’d changed their minds.
But after the summer, in October, I stopped going, getting busy with school and sports, and I just started to fizzle out, not picking up my bible, falling into old habits, into another period of helplessness, until recently I asked a friend “how you do reform a relationship with God when you feel like you’re too far gone?” And the friend laughed at me, and asked me, “Did you think you were gonna have a perfect relationship with God? Your first time around?” And they were right, it’s not easy, especially because I didn’t grow up in a Christian home or a faith-based home. So I asked God for forgiveness, and have started a commitment to reading Romans, and starting over.
Those seven years were tough; I lost friends during this time, and gained friends who want to help me build a relationship with God. Showing me that just because I wasn’t raised in a church or in a faith-based family, doesn’t mean it isn’t possible for me to have a relationship with God.
