Closing the Gap: Pre-Adventure Adventure

I've been thinking a lot about what I should post first and I realized that I tend to constantly remind myself how wide the chasm is between me and Christ. I don't mean to prove myself to Him - as if I could - but that there is so much to know and that the more I know the more questions I have. I also mean that I find in myself so many things I need to change (whether it's sin, state of mind/heart, etc.) that before I had never noticed. The more I know of myself the more I realize I am nothing like my Christ. But when I started this blog for my mission trip to England I found a blog that I used to have from four years ago still attached to my Google profile. It contains philosophical quandries and terrible poetry. I remember myself from back then and I am nothing like what I was. God has been shaping me to be more like Him this whole time, no matter how little like Him I feel like I look. So I wanted this first post to be about what I was and how Christ saved me and some of the statistics driving me to go to England - another first-world nation. I will say the statistics for America are staggering, as well, but the heart and culture in England is very different to that of America with regards to religion.

Testimony

     I don't remember much of how I became a Christian because I was young when it happened (maybe about 7 or 8). I was very close with my mother and looked up to her a lot so when I saw her praying and crying in her room one day at about the age of 6 I was confused and decided I should ask her about it. She explained prayer and God a little bit, but not really anything about Jesus, salvation or the Bible. I started praying, too, every day and sometimes multiple times a day because it's what my mother did. Very soon God became my best friend, partially because I wasn't very popular and didn't have many friends. My grandmother, who wasn't Christian, thought it'd be adorable to get me a Bible. She got me a very pretty New Testament Bible that I didn't read for a couple of years.

     I finally got curious about my friend that I'd been praying to all this time so I started reading the book my grandmother gave me and found I couldn't stop. It was the second time reading it through - while I was reading one of the passages where Jesus explains that He is God and He came to save people from their evil nature - that I realized that Jesus was God's son. Jesus was my best friends' son who died because I wasn't good and He was. I had only just started praying to Jesus because I didn't know that they were both God before I started reading the book. Now it clicked that He, also being God who I'd been talking to this whole time, died so that people like me could be considered good. God died for me and what had I done for Him? What could I ever do for Him that would be enough to repay Him? I confessed that I was not worthy of His forgiveness but asked for it anyway then, in my bedroom, and told Him that I would follow Him the rest of my life as not just my best friend but as my King.

     I'd always cried when I came to the part when Jesus died because He didn't deserve it at all and He clearly went willingly. I realized after reading how He died for about the 10th time that God allowed that to happen and wanted it to happen because God is merciful to people like me. I knew I wasn't a great person and I knew that God had been faithful and kind to me every day, even when I would yell at Him or blame Him because my parents yelled at me or I felt alone, and He gave His life for mine. He was, and still is, the best friend I'd ever had and showed me that He loved me more than anyone else ever could though there were a lot of times I didn't show love to Him or anyone else like He said to. I was overwhelmed by how much He loved me and how much He loved people and that all I had to do was recognize that love, recognize my own inability to do anything about the distance between us because I wasn't good and He was, and ask for help.

Stats for England (and Wales)

-"The number of people describing themselves as having no religion rose from 15% (in 2001) to 25% (in 2011) of the population." (BBC) That is a quarter of the population - 1 in 4. With a 7% rise in population between 2001 and 2011.

-"In a poll conducted by YouGov in March 2011 on behalf of the BHA, when asked the census question ‘What is your religion?’, 61% of people in England and Wales ticked a religious box (53.48% Christian and 7.22% other) while 39% ticked ‘No religion’.
Less than half (48%) of those who ticked ‘Christian’ said they believed that Jesus Christ was a real person who died and came back to life and was the son of God." That's a little over a quarter of the population.
-"In 1990 5,595,600 people, representing 10% of the UK population, regularly attended Church, by 2005 this number had reduced to 3,926,300, equating to 6.7% of the UK population. By 2015, the level of church attendance in the UK is predicted to fall to 3,081,500 people, or 5% of the population." (BHA) It's 2014 now.

 <http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20675307>
<https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/religion-and-belief-some-surveys-and-statistics/>
*There is about a 6% difference between the YouGov Survey Results and the UK 2011 Census with regards to the Christian population in England and Wales*

Stats for America

- "One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling." (pew)

-"The number of Americans who currently say religion is very important in their lives (58%), for instance, is little changed since 2007 (61%) and is far higher than in Britain (17%), France (13%), Germany (21%) or Spain (22%)." This is religion in general but we are on the decline even in this statistic. (pew)

<http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/>