College Admissions Essay
It’s hard to separate my life from the work of Christ. To deny the work of His hand in my life is impossible because His plans for me have had signs sprinkled throughout my entire existence. It’s even harder to nail down when exactly I came to believe in Him.
I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was in elementary school. My mom and I were in the carpool lane waiting to pick up my brother when I asked about salvation. I returned to Him in middle school. After moving from Texas to Georgia, I had grown hard-hearted towards God and struggled to believe that a good God would take me away from my friends and let me live with the anxiety I’d been battling. When I eventually cried out in repentance, I found that I still had struggles to deal with. I experienced healing for the first time in high school. My senior year was plagued with depression and anxiety. I was either drowning or I couldn’t feel anything. I remember praising God with tears running down my cheeks and feeling a physical weight come off my head. A leader grabbed me by the face and told me, “It’s gone. It’s not yours anymore.” Six months later, another leader came to lay hands on me, grabbed me by the shoulder, and rebuked me, ordering me to let go of the anxiety that had been bossing me around. The same God I had struggled to believe was good had again and again proved His love for me through miracles.
Then a year passed. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I was healed, but life was the same. I struggled to spend time in the word, struggled to find the words to pray, and struggled to pay attention in Sunday service. One day in March of 2023, I said enough was enough and told God I would commit to walk in the new me He had called me to be. I began picking up my Bible each day and started rebuking myself whenever I found myself thinking like Old Abby. I began serving in children’s ministry, taking notes in Bible study, and discovered I liked to worship with sign language. I figured that would be it; I’d spend my life as a decent Christian girl who went to church and prayed a bit, but nothing more. God disagreed.
People at my church know me as “the ASL girl.” I sign when we sing as a choir, so that’s how many people know my face if they don’t know my parents. One day I told our then-new worship pastor, Coleman, that I wanted to sign in a church service and offer interpretation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) in our community. Coleman is not one to dream small, so he called an interpreter he knew. Around the same time, he began promoting a ministry training program called C2 NextGen. I was excited because I knew we had people who would be great for that, like my brother who wanted to be (and now is) a youth pastor. I thought it was great for them, but not for me. Until Coleman brought it up a second time and I could sense the Holy Spirit say, “You're going.” I had no idea why until I had the meeting with Coleman and his interpreter friend. C2 was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but it was also the most rewarding. The program equipped me for ministry, gave me the tools I needed to start my journey, and brought confirmation to my calling.
I am called to bring the gospel, a revival, to the DHH community. It’s my dream not only to start a ministry at my home church but to travel around the U.S. to help other churches build their ASL ministries. I would also like to preach at the schools for the deaf in Africa. To do this, I would most likely need to be a certified interpreter, which I can’t do without a degree or the equivalent hours of classes. I am again stepping into the unknown, seeing as I never looked into college before and hadn’t previously considered it. Yet if this is where God calls me to be, I will obey.
God has me growing in a lot of areas right now. After becoming more open in worship and learning to set my mind on Him, I now find myself learning to surrender my desires, my plans, and my comfort to be obedient to Him. I’ve often struggled with caring too much about what other people think about me and falling into the trap of comparison. By His grace, God has opened my eyes to those failures and has helped me become quicker to call these parts out and bring each thought into the light.
