“During highschool, I didn’t understand what faith was at all and so I didn’t know what I was doing when I first went to Russia on a mission trip. But soon that uncertainty developed into a passion to tell others about Jesus but then slowly died down and became something I was only doing out of tradition. I hated being there because I was telling kids about Jesus without actually knowing if I believed in Him myself. As I was on this trip in Russia, I was at my end – I was ready to quit being a Christian. I told God, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore, I’m out” I still believed in God fully and I always will but there was just something that made me feel like I couldn’t continue – that there was too much that I couldn’t believe in. So I came to a point where I wrote God pages of letters telling him that He had to either prove to me that He is there and that this is worth believing or else I am just going to quit. At the bottom of the paper, I scratched in “ I NEED A SPIRITUAL REVIVAL”. Then the next day, after an extremely successful trip – I saw signs of God working in people’s hearts and I couldn’t help but ask “ what about my heart?” In Russia, there is a place called Spassk and its a very dark city. The church itself is right next door to a drug house. Late the night we were there, we played games – it was the end of our trip so we didn’t have to get a good night’s sleep. But when we started to wind down one of my friends started having a nightmare. But soon we realized – it wasn’t a nightmare. It was some incredibly scary spiritual warfare stuff. After hours and hours of praying, to the point where all we could say is “Jesus is Lord“ over and over again, God saved us through divine intervention. Everyone left with a different story that night but for me, it was God ripping through my doubts, fears, and depression and replacing it with His love and grace and glory. The next morning, most of us hadn’t slept but we still had to go to our last program. So we go to the church and literally, we sang the loudest praise we have ever done in Russia – speakers booming and we are screaming and jumping up and down. And so many kids showed up and praised with us. And that whole time there was one wall on the back of the stage all painted and cute but on the other side of it, there were prostitutes and druggies. And its so cool that we went from a place of fear in that city to God tearing that down and replacing it with something so incredible. The point is, that even this year there are things that I struggle with that just don’t matter anymore because God has already shown me His love and His power and His grace. Mental struggles do not define us – Christ does.”