I was very blessed to have grown up in a Christian home where we went to church every Sunday and prayed before every meal. I can’t really remember my life before accepting Christ as my savior at 11 years old, however I did not realize the awesomeness of God’s gift and the depth of His grace until much later. As a young teenager, I started drifting quickly away from God. I was binge drinking every weekend, spent all my time with my boyfriend, occasionally experimented with drugs and my favorite hobbies were going to keg parties, street racing, and doing anything that sounded “dangerous”. By the time I was 15, I had totally turned my back to God. All that mattered to me was having fun and being in the popular crowd.

My second year of college, I started dating Wade, my future husband. We had similar Christian backgrounds, but neither of us were walking the walk. We continued living a very sinful life for a couple of years.When our relationship became more serious and we both had marriage in mind, we decided we should start going to church. This is when my life really changed and I started to understand how great God’s love was for me and how awesome He really was. I was now being pulled in two different directions – God or the world - and I started to see that I couldn’t live for both. Wade and I stopped doing a lot of the things we had been doing for the past few years, and started to truly grow in the Lord. I had not prayed to God since I was 13 years old, but I began praying for God’s direction in my life.