Falling in Love with God

I felt a closeness with God immediately, I felt welcomed into his presence, I felt belonging. Did I change? Absolutely. Completely? No. But God definitely did a work in me, for one, I calmed down a lot. I wish I could say I changed massively, honestly I wish I could remember all the details, but it was a long time ago. What I am confident of, is that I welcomed God into my journey, and from then we journeyed together.

Once in high school, while settled, I still struggled. Throughout my first couple of years in high school, I made good friends, I enjoyed parts of the experience, but I never did well. I had tutors and my grades were worrying, and to tell the truth, my reading ability was poor, having been assessed at the reading level of an eight-year-old. At the age of fourteen, this all changed. Coming back from a youth retreat, I wanted my own Bible, and my grandparents bought one for me, impassioned by the gift, I opened it up at the beginning and began to read. I read Genesis, loved Exodus, and then hit Leviticus and my momentum slowed. A couple of weeks later, I prayed God would help me fall in love with his word, and I opened up to the book of Romans and began to read. I wouldn’t stop. The God that I encountered through Romans, the Gospels, the New and Old Testament, was a God who loved me, and a God I truly loved back.

Less than a year later I completed my end-of-year exams, and to the surprise of my teachers, I was no longer struggling. My reading level was reassessed, and I was found to be reading at a nineteen-year-old reading level (don’t tell my teachers, but the only book I properly read that year was the Bible). For the following years of school, I was bumped up to the more advanced classes for most of my subjects, and graduated high school with remarkable grades, ignorer la note d'échec en français.