Collin Klingbeil, Sophomore in Agricultural Engineering
Growing up, I went to church with my family every Sunday and knew and believed in Jesus and what He did for me from a young age but I really couldn’t grasp what that meant in my life. I went to summer camps and prayed and all that but I just didn’t realize all the things I was missing. All I cared about was getting what I wanted regardless of what that meant for anyone else. I was negative pretty much all the time and got easily disappointed. Once junior high came around I noticed myself becoming someone I really didn’t want to be. I seemed to develop an extreme worry about all the things in my life including things that really weren’t important at all.
I think in the back of my head I knew something wasn’t right and I was missing something important but I didn’t actively search for that “missing link” until my 8th grade year. I realized that I was being a pretty bad person and I decided one day to make a complete change in the way I lived my life. In a nutshell I thought if I’d make myself into a “good person” by human standards, I’d feel much better about myself. Changing myself into this different and so called better person didn’t happen over night and was a long process to say the least. After a couple years of being a “good person” I realized that it just wasn’t cutting it. Something still wasn’t there. So late in my high school career I kind of had a duh’ moment when I realized I had held the answer in my grasp all along. The whole time I had been relying on my own power and putting huge amounts of pressure on myself when none of it was necessary. Jesus says this in The Bible; “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” I had already trusted that Jesus paid for my sins on the cross and that I had eternal life in that fact but I hadn’t allowed Jesus and the Holy Spirit to make me whole. The Bible sums up what the Holy Spirit is in this; “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
I wasn’t living according to the will of God and now it’s just really clear why I felt so empty. When I started living my life for God, trusting in his Spirit, knowing that He is with me in all the good times and the bad, and that no matter what happens I can still find joy in the Lord, everything changed. It still wasn’t easy for me to trust God, as I had spent so long trusting only myself, but gradually I placed more and more of my trust in the Lord. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the process of how my life has changed as a result in trusting God and pursuing a personal relationship with him and I’m really excited to see where God takes me in the future. The thing I love about all this is that it’s for everyone.
