I was brought up in a Christian home and always believed there is a God — but that’s as far as it went. But when I was ten I started going to a church youth group.
I heard the gospel preached every week, but one week something new struck me — I was a sinner! Over the next few days I got more and more worried about it.
On the following Friday I had no youth group so I decided to ask my mum what it meant and why I was feeling like I was. She said that because I was a sinner I needed God’s forgiveness.
She also told me that God sent his only Son to die on the cross for people like me. She said I needed to pray to him and ask for his forgiveness — which I did.
The next day I thought, ‘Great! God has forgiven me, now I can carry on like I did before’. But nothing inside me had actually changed.
In 2002 I went on a Christian camp. We had tent devotions where we talked about becoming a Christian. One of the leaders said it wasn’t enough just to ask for God to forgive you — you had to mean it and you also had to change.
I kept on praying for forgiveness every day for months, but still felt nothing had happened. After nearly six months I felt like giving up.
But in February 2003 I went to stay with my sister at her university. We talked about everything that had happened, and once again I prayed. But this time I felt my prayer had some proper feeling behind it.
I felt that a great weight had been lifted. I knew I had been saved and that Jesus was my Saviour. I now realised that the gospel is the sweetest sound anyone can hear.
Ever since then my faith has got stronger. There have been some hard times when I felt I was backsliding and not relying on God, but with his help and the encouragement of Christian friends things have always come right again.
