Hi, I’m Debs. I study Law.

I was christened as a child, and occasionally went to church with my mum, who is a Christian. The rest of my family aren’t. I got confirmed at the age of 10. But, when we moved church, I stopped going with my mum as the only reason I went before was because I enjoyed watching the puppet shows put on by the vicar each week, and the new vicar didn’t have any puppets.

We went to church every Christmas still to watch the nativity play but I never actually thought of the meaning of the play, I just thought of it as a nice story.

A close family member died in the months before I came away to Uni. This got me asking questions about what the point was to life and why were we here? It did make me doubt in the existence of God.

Then I came away to Uni. I got really homesick and unhappy and couldn’t really cope with all the changes that were going on. I hated being on my own in the evenings and so, still thinking myself to be a Christian, decided to go along to the nine20 group (the Christian union small group in halls), to spend time with friends, but to just ignore the bible and prayer bit. For that reason as well I started looking at churches to go to on a Sunday, as during the weekends most of my friends went home and I felt lonely. I settled on St Mary’s Wollaton Park but I didn’t go very often, as I didn’t really want to. A girl called Emily encouraged me to come regularly and now she is my friend  Around this time I realised I wasn’t a Christian at all as I didn’t basically believe in God, let alone Jesus.

Nottingham Uni Christian Union put on an events week in February called ‘Treasure’. My Christian friends dragged me along to one of the music cafes they put on during the week and the speaker described a line, with the left end being ignorance (no offence!) of Jesus, and the right end being total devotion and love for Him. I realised that I was nearer the left than the right, and started asking tons of questions to any Christian within arm’s reach. I decided, when the night was over and I hadn’t got all the answers I wanted, to go along to the Christianity Explored course that was on the following Monday.

I went to one session and again, asked a fair few questions about God, Jesus and Stuff. Then, on the Tuesday night, when I went to nine20, I all of a sudden actually cared about what was going on. I found that I wanted to listen to the bible study and when it came round to praying in a group, I discovered I wanted (for the very first time) to pray out loud to God. And I believed that He heard me.

From that time on, really, I believed in Jesus Christ. I still had questions but I understood now that in time, God will give me answers. Now, I feel as if I have a constant friend, someone who I can always talk to and turn to for advice. I am never alone now. I was, and still am, amazed and incredibly thankful that Jesus gave his life all those years ago so that I, a really bad sinner, could have life for all eternity. I know I could not have done it, but then I am not perfect. He is.

I don't come from a Christian family, so I grew up not really going to church or understanding much about Christianity, other than basic RE lessons at school and wanting to believe in the idea of God; him being a nice person who looked after us.

I think if someone was to ask me then, I would have called myself a Christian, but purely based on the fact that I was happy, I had good morals and was a relatively nice person, nothing to do with really knowing what it meant to be a Christian. I was happy to see others being "religious" and would have responded with "it's fine for you but that's not really for me" kind of attitude.

A few years before I became a Christian my older brother became a Christian at school and so as a result he was keen to tell me and my family more about the Christian faith and longed to see us change too. I was very hostile towards the situation and was reluctant to really engage in conversations about it. I had a few issues, particularly, losing my dad at a young age and struggled with what I perceived to be him pushing me into Christianity. But he persisted and one summer, when I was 17, he invited me along to a Christian summer camp and for some reason, I agreed to go!

So it was on this camp that for the first time I really heard what Christianity was all about. It was the first time I had ever opened a Bible and really considered for myself what God was like, who he is, and what he has done. I was really convicted in what I learnt and realised that actually we are all people who reject God and his existence; it's not just about who we are as a person, having good morals and living relatively happy lives, but that we all need Jesus, who died for us all, to rescue us from God's judgment. It wasn't only through the teaching and things I learnt, but it was also a time when I got to meet lots of new friends who were not like the friends I had at school. There was such friendship amongst them and a joy in the way they would talk about Jesus and what it was to be a Christian, something that I wanted too, and it was that week that I decided to commit my life to Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. And I am now so thankful for my brother's perseverance and encouragement!

After leaving camp, it was strange; I didn't feel drastically different after turning to Jesus, but over time and even now God is changing me and I am constantly growing in my love for Him. Life now has such hope and comfort in knowing that God died for me, something which I don't deserve, but by his grace I can now live forgiven, with the joy and hope of eternal life with him.

I would really urge anyone, now as an adult, to consider the Christian faith and the implications, without any misconceptions that you may have had before, just as I did. You don't have anything to lose by looking into it and asking questions, and if it is true then it is true for us all.

Unlike many, I was brought up in a Christian family and so was taught from an early age to appreciate how God had worked in my life and was also able to see first-hand the impact which God had in the lives of my parents. I was brought up going to Church my entire life, but I had never thought to get involved with the Christian Union at school and I never really had any friends my age at school who were Christians. My faith was certainly there but it was not something I had thought long and hard about, and whilst I knew the message of the gospel it was perhaps not something I completely understood. I knew the rules in my head, but the true meaning was not fully ingrained in my heart.

As I got older though I felt something was lacking in my faith and so at the start of my first year in Nottingham I joined the Christian Union. I started going along to the weekly in hall Bible study group (nine20) pretty much from the outset, but I found myself repeatedly avoiding further involvement. I came from quite a traditional church background so I found the ways of the CU all a bit odd at first. I didn’t go to church initially, declined doing things like the CU's weekend away and usually remained quite quiet during the nine20 meetings.

Being brought up as a Christian and not having had to seek out my faith, it was very easy to drift along with it, but as is the case for anyone born into a faith, the point came where I had to decide what, if anything, I believed for myself. As time went on during my first year I began to see more clearly why those Christians I knew lived as they did and began to understand why the state of their hearts was just so different. Things though really came to a head during last year’s events week, when encouraged by my nine20 leaders I went to one of the evening talks.

During the talk the speaker focused on what we seek satisfaction from in this life, and the reality of the situation really hit home. It was then I realised that I could have the biggest house, the fastest cars, the most beautiful wife and the best of everything that the world has to offer, and yet it would still not be enough to satisfy my innermost needs. I just thought what was the point of investing in all these worldly things if one day I was to turn around and they were all gone?

I went back to halls after the talk and just sat in my room thinking if there is no God, what should I actually do with myself? What was the point or value in anything? I was completely overwhelmed with the feeling that there was nothing in this world that I could do, nothing that I could strive to acquire and nothing that I could achieve that would ever be sufficient to make my life truly fulfilled. I could fill my life with endless distractions but if I still had to face the reality in the end, what was the point?

I prayed long and hard about it, asking God to reveal only the truth to me. As I did so God opened my eyes to the reality that so many of my priorities lay in the wrong place, and that I had set my sights on transient things which ultimately led nowhere. I continued to pray during that week and kept asking questions to those in my nine20 group and I found myself drawn to the realisation that when I tried to live life my own way, it never worked for the best, and that only by trusting in God to direct my life could anything truly be achieved.

During that week I experienced a transformation and realised that what I had previously thought Christianity and God’s message to be about was a world away from the reality as I now saw it. I find now that by putting my trust in God to direct my life that it has been so liberated and it is lived much more fully and richly, and that I can also appreciate worldly things better, in the context within which they were meant to be enjoyed.

Following mission week I went along to the Christianity Explored course, which really allowed me to look at Jesus’ teaching from the very start, which helped me to cement the foundations of my faith.

Being a Christian is not a static state though and I still come up against challenges and still fall short, but through prayer and seeking answers I find that my faith becomes stronger each time. Looking back at my life I see that whenever I prayed to God for guidance, he has provided; often though in ways quite different from how I would have thought best at the time.

I have grown so much in faith, especially since coming to university, and it is only through God’s grace and guidance that all this has been possible.

I used to sing in a church choir when I was younger but I never understood the true gospel. When I got to university the 9:20 leader of my hall was in my block and we quickly became good friends. She persuaded me to go to church and although I was sceptical to my original annoyance I agreed with almost everything that was being said. I kept going and over the summer on an archaeological dig I had a moment of clarity that made me realise that I needed to acknowledge God in my life.

Between the ages of 8-15 I used to sing in my local church choir it was very traditional (cassocks and everything) and the sermons seem now like the ones in Jane Austen where you are amazed people managed to stay awake. When I was 15 I began to become interested in the philosophy and ethics that I was studying at school and I realised that I was hypocrite saying the prayers every Sunday without ever once believing in them. I decided that I ought to decide what I really believed in and I became fascinated by alternative new age religions and started to believe in reincarnation and similar things. When I came to university I quickly befriended Fi who was a 9:20 leader of the hall. Her Christianity was something that interested me but not really from a personal point of view. I remember her explaining a diagram she was drawing for a 9:20 meeting about Jesus being our bridge over sin to God and thinking “yeh fine but when do you want to go for tea?” One night I asked Fi what she was doing and she said that she was going to a mission week talk and that I should come along. As I had nothing better to do I went and enjoyed it. After this she invited me to Church with her in the evenings where although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time I instantly felt at home singing lots of songs, eating lots of cake, drinking lots of tea and thinking about God. Over the following term I continued to go to church and think about God’s place in the world. Over the summer holidays I knew that I had to ask myself why I was going to church and whether I was becoming a hypocrite again. It was only on an archaeological dig that I went on when I heard someone in the trench next door say “Why did Jesus die for me? I didn’t ask him too… what a wazzock!” that I realised that I believed that he had done just that, and that in itself was completely amazing. It was at this moment I feel that God gave me a final nudge and made me grasp that my life had to change in order to acknowledge his wondrous presence in my life.