We were going to church every other week. About 19 years old, things really started to make sense for me. I started to go to church for myself and the pastor wanted to study with me. We came to the study of Baptism and I shrugged, put my head down and said, "I'm not ready". He looked me in the eye and said, "Jason, you'll never make yourself ready. This is something you have to do".
I put a lot of things behind me, the drinking and smoking, all that sort of stopped. All throughout the time when I'd been learning about God it was just me and God. It comes around up to about August and I meet this girl. About two years into the relationship we're talking about marriage and everything. We didn't pray, we didn't study together, we were arguing a lot but we were engaged.
I started drinking again and that was a slow, downward spiral into different things and my devotional life started really weaseling away. We broke up in 2008. It was heavy for me because you can't be with somebody for that long-- it's almost like a divorce.
I started to fall back away even more. I remember looking in the mirror, just looking at myself and saying, "What are you doing, how can you do this to God? He's brought you so far." God really heard my cry. There was a testimony telling at my church and there's a call and kids started getting up, a bunch of high school kids are getting up for calls of baptism.
I'm back doing the PA system at this time, and I feel this urge as my heart just started ripping out of my chest, and I just had this feeling just to go up. I get to the front and I meet the pastor with open arms.
I realized that there's so much more to life than just living life for myself, and falling away, it's not a necessity. God can work through anything in the 'bad' to make it the 'good', that's a promise He makes.
My name is Jason, I reclaimed my faith.