According to popular belief, everything happens for a reason. Amidst the chaos, I am happy that there was a place I could have attended to think about where I am now and how far I came.

On December 3, 2017, I went to Hillsong with a bunch of my friends from Arise, a Christian spirit group on campus. Before I decided to attend, I was going through a lot emotionally with my overall college life. Two days before the service, a friend invited me to come, even though this person did not have to do so. Looking back, I'm grateful this person was thinking about me enough to extend the invitation.

Since Hillsong is a nondenominational church, it does not follow the routine of a regular church, but rather gives people who are interested in Christianity a good foundation to work with. From there, people can make a judgment whether or not to join any denominational church they are interested in. Therefore, the service I went to focused mainly on God's message.

The one profound thing I got out of the experience, which happens to be my favorite part, was a sermon one of the preachers gave. There was this one woman who had a party lifestyle of "sex, drugs, and, rock 'n' roll" while she was younger. She came from a conservative family, and somewhere along the way, she lost her sense of identity due to the struggles she faced growing up and succumbed to the empty lies society offered.

Due to her upbringing, she believed she had no choice, let alone a voice of her own. She believed that partying would fill some kind of void in her life. Not only did she rope herself into people who abandoned her emotionally, but also placed her life on the line over and over again.

After the romanticized facade of the "sex, drugs, and, rock 'n' roll" lifestyle wore off, she found out one day that she was pregnant and decided to get an abortion. At the clinic, an older woman comforts the preacher before the abortion. While comforting the preacher, the older woman admitted that this was her third abortion.

When the preacher got into the room to perform the abortion, the nurse told her that she had a choice to look at the sonogram before beginning the procedure. No matter how much she wanted to say no, the preacher decided to look at it before beginning. Greif stricken and nervous, she decided to go through with the procedure. Under anesthesia, events from the preacher's life flashed before her eyes.

All of the memories, triumphs, and mistakes, flashed through her mind as if it were her last moment on earth. Fortunately, it was not. Afterward the procedure, she was placed in a wheelchair and was escorted to her car. On the way home, she heard a voice saying, "Never again."

Though she did not die, two parts of her were lost: the life growing inside of her and the life inside of her. She had to endure that whole experience by herself. She had no assistance from her family, but only a good friend she knew from college to drive her to the clinic and back home.

For this preacher to have shared her story with hundreds of people made me admire her for her openness. In regards to helping others discover their true potential, she related her decision to get an abortion to Mary's (from the Christian Nativity Story) decision to give birth.

Out of all possible ways to do this, God chose Mary, an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl, to give birth to the Savior of the world. Yet, she was set to marry a person her society deemed respectable. To marry this person, she needed to be a virgin, which her society valued in women.

Had not Mary been a virgin, she would have been stoned to death. Regardless of the fact that Mary was a child herself, people would have been willing to kill her because they wanted their rules to be honored. Regardless of the possibility of being stoned to death, Mary chose to accept the task God set for her and she eventually had baby Jesus.

Like the God Mary encountered, there are things in the universe that challenge us to step outside of ourselves and our circumstances to discover our true purpose. Whether it be adversity or blessings, you must humble yourself to think differently. No matter how rough life gets, you were placed here to become more than you were destined to be.