Everyone goes through years that are harder than before. Years where everything seems to be going wrong, your luck is nonexistent, and faith is often absent from your life. During these years, some people find themselves: they find who they want to be and what they’ve been looking for the whole time. Well for me, I found my relationship with God.

During years of struggle, all of your relationships are put to the test — especially your relationship with God. For me during high school, I often found myself doubting God and His abilities. Even though He was always there for me, my faith in Him lacked consistently. I blamed him when things went wrong, and I turned my back on him when things went awful. I found that it was easier to distrust Him than to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Throughout my sophomore year, I found that everything, and I mean everything, was going wrong. I suffered from a serious concussion, from which they discovered a brain malformation that halted the healing of my concussion, which made softball no longer an outlet for my stress. All of this added in, my grades dropped tremendously. For literally every step I took forward, I experienced two steps backwards. Luck wasn’t in my corner that year, and to me, neither was God. He had abandoned me in a “crucial moment,” and instead of looking at the whole picture, I decided that He had given up on me, so I was going to give up on Him.

It was easy at first, I’m not going to lie, but as time went on it was as if I was empty. Living my life for no purpose. But it was quite easy to ignore because I was in high school and, to me, my life wasn’t really supposed to have a purpose yet. And to me, God was just someone who was once there for me. Thus I continued to live my life. So as junior year began, my concussion healed very slowly, therefore allowing me to participate in softball again, making me a more joyful and happy person all around, and my grades improved immensely. It seemed as if everything was coming back on track after a year of being lost. But as a selfish person, I credited myself. I gave myself a pat on the back and continued on.

But one very important day, I found myself praying for something unimportant now. I was praying for God to give me something, whatever it was. I’m not quite sure why that broke me but it did. I was so selfish at the time that I had denied God for an entire year but now I was praying for him to give me something? It hit me like a train. I had denied God as He had healed me. He healed me as a person, He healed me mentally and He healed me physically. But He had left me to heal myself spiritually. And for an entire year I let Him down.

Since that day my junior year, I had vowed to never let Him down like I did that year. Instead of asking God why something happened, I tell myself to step back and look around at my blessings in my life. I constantly tell myself that there is a reason that God has put me in all situations. That God does not lead anyone to places they can’t handle, even when it seems liked they can’t. That when I can’t handle it anymore, I give it all to Him — that trust in Him is the greatest gift I can give Him.

Not only did losing God help me become a better Christian, but losing God helped me become a better person. He changed me for the better in all aspects of my life. And I’m not saying that I will never let Him down again, because I am human and I sin, but I am saying that I will never deny Him again. Because of Him, I am here and for that, I owe him everything.