I presented my testimony at the sunday service today, and so I thought I'd also place it here as promised so that other people can read it as well as saving it for future reference I guess... So here goes... This is not word for word what I said because I have a habit of changing what I say on the spot... so yeah... This is probably better and more accurate.
Although I grew up in a Christian family, my church life had been shaky at best. When we first came to Australia in 94 we came to this church, but after a few months we stopped going, in 97 we changed to a mandarin speaking church for 2.5 years before the language barrier became unbearable and we stopped again. In 2000, we came back to Antioch. But after a year we stopped again. From grade 6 to the end of grade 11, my church life was practically non-existent, coming maybe 5-6 times a year. I didn’t start coming back to church consistently until around the end of grade 11. I had heard a lot of those bible stories from Sunday school and from reading children’s bibles when I was young, it was only head knowledge. I always thought that God didn’t particularly care about me from what I saw of my own physical deficiencies, extreme bullying, exclusion which all piled up into depression and extreme anger.
As a child I was incredibly slow and weak, and could not see without extremely powerful glasses as well as having hearing impairments as well. I was a walking skeleton and wore an eye patch most of the time which was meant to correct my lazy eye. I had to visit some hospital or clinic frequently to check my hearing and frequent visits to eye specialists to check my eyesight. I also had special PE classes in primary school for a few years as well. I was also extremely short and would only be armpit height of everybody until grade 11. I had a short temper and was quick to retaliate which was never helpful.
I got yelled at by teachers quite a bit because I could not hear them properly, and they would think that I wasn’t listening. Being the shortest, weakest kid with big, thick glasses and an eye patch which made me a 3 eyed kid as well as being one of the few asians, I was stereotype number 1 and being bullied would be an understatement. Retaliation to constant bullying was the reason behind me sitting by myself next to the teacher’s table or at the back for every grade up to grade 8. Retaliation got me into fights that I could not possibly win and every head of school knew me by name for all the wrong reasons.
For almost all 13 years I spent at that school, being friends with me was more than mere unpopular and I was excluded from practically everything by practically everyone. I had few friends, but most of them left before grade 7. Mum asked me whether I wanted to change schools in grade 7 but because of reasons and logic that escapes me now, I declined and decided to simply tough it out thinking that senior school would be all different. But, I still had uniform being flushed down toilets after PE lessons amongst other pranks and was simply ignored or avoided by everyone. All through school, all up, I would have received somewhere between 2-400 detentions or visits to the head of schools offices and I think about 65-70% of them were because of retaliation to bullying.
I tried to ignore the bullying and the exclusion and I just tried to excel and prove myself worthy of respect, and although I have received plenty of those NSW awards as well as national level athletics, none of it seemed to raise my standings. Being presented to the whole school at assemblies for rewards did nothing to help me. I had no more friends than before and I had no more respect than I did before and sometimes it felt like things were even worse. At some stages I stooped as low as bribing people to be friends and maintaining those “friends”. I was quite desperate for respect and was doing everything within MY own power to try and gain it like risk breaking ankles and jumping off storey flights of stairs and 2m high rocks just to be hardcore. Standing on my own 2 legs, by the time grade 11 came I was beginning to crumble and slowly became progressively silent and esteem levels plummeted. Grade 8 was my most brilliant year in academic and sports, from there it all went downhill. I couldn’t study and was thoroughly unmotivated. I couldn’t socialise out of fear of the opinion of others. And when grade 11 and 12 came and grades mattered, I crashed. In grade 12, I could hardly start conversations let alone hold them, and just stopped talking to people, spending most lunchtimes silent, I was surrounded by people but felt as if I was invisible. I fell into depression and anger and I remember crying myself to sleep numerous times, screaming into a pillow to muffle the noise, screaming at God, with inappropriate language, demanding answers to my problems; why is my life like this? What did I do to deserve this? What do you want from me? The love that I learnt about in Sunday school seemed irrelevant and I felt abandoned. I became extremely frustrated with my life, and I would have fits of rage whenever I made what I perceived as a ‘social mistake’. By August I was lashing out anger and frustration and was either pissed off or brooding, and I remember one time, I lashed out in the middle of the school throwing rugby balls that people were playing with onto roads and storming off and then sitting in a corner at school crying. On top of that I would treat most inanimate objects with utmost violence, punching steel poles, and locker doors to vent my anger.
About the same time as PPP was performed, a new girl in grade 10 befriended me of all people, because she herself was once severely depressed as well and could tell that I was down, eventually she squeezed my reasons out of me and dragged me to the school psychologist. But even after some 2-3 months of counselling, my improvement was minor. Before the counselling I would be too afraid of people to order at Maccas. Even after counselling I was only slightly better.
The major turning point would be during March this year. It was here on the 23rd of March, and if I recall correctly the sermon speaker was Liam and the sermon was on pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people. I can’t remember the exact words but he talked about how at times God may not feel like he is there, but the truth is that he is always there and knows exactly how we feel. He talked about how Jesus loved us so much that he came down to earth to die for us and he knew exactly how it felt to be mocked, to be abandoned by his friends, to be falsely accused, betrayed, bashed and was killed. One of the passages was John 9:1-5 about the man born blind being healed by Jesus, verse 3 says: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life”, it was explained that God allows us to suffer so that we might be able to see his love and depend on the strength and comfort that he willingly provides in overflowing proportions. God uses our suffering to change us to become the people he wants us to be as well as being able to spread his comfort and strength to others once we experience it. The most impacting thing during that sermon was the animation he played. It was of a boy curled up behind a broken wall wallowing in self-pity with Jesus looking over the wall to see how he was going, but the boy tells him to go away, choosing to ignore him. Jesus then places a mirror in front of the boy and then sits down next to him and waits for him, watching over him. The boy eventually looks up and sees Jesus waiting for him in the mirror, smiling and the boy gets up and goes with Him. Liam explained that God is always in control, including our suffering, and always has a way out for us if we reach out and depend on him. Jesus is always there watching over us even when we aren’t reaching out for him, and that we only need to look up to see that he is there waiting for us and reach out for him, and that he is the great comforter and all we need to do is trust him and to give our lives and all our problems to him, because he is all powerful and that he always has a way out for us. I could see myself as that boy, wallowing alone and drowning in self-pity, getting nowhere. Crying through half the sermon, I realised that God did not abandon me as I thought he did, but allowed all of it to happen so that I might find his strength, after all my own strength had been exhausted, I found that all I needed could be found in Jesus and because of his love, what other people thought about me did not matter as no one could love me more than the one who died for me. From that point I realised that I couldn’t continue trudging in depression through my own strength. At that point I took up Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, friend, foundation and my source of comfort and strength and entrusted all my struggles to Him.
Trusting in him and drawing from his strength, I was pulled from neck deep back on to solid ground almost instantly. To those who remember the PPP after party celebration thing, I was there, and that night I could not say a single word even when I wanted to. I did not speak a single person there. After that sermon, I was like a different person completely, I no longer feared what others thought of me and the depression and the fits of rage were all gone. All the dirty and sinful actions and thoughts I used to temporarily cope with my frustrations and depressions fell well under control and were pretty much extinguished after that point. Though the means were painful, nothing compares to what I’ve found in Jesus.
