So, my name is Corinne and I recently graduated from college and I'm in the BAM group at Berean. So I first started going to church when I was in the womb. My parents were teachers at the high school group at my old church. So I kind of like grew up in that environment where I went to church every single Sunday and Bible study every Friday night.

As an elementary school student I would get like I would tag along to these high school retreats and I would just kind of be inundated with a lot of biblical teaching. But I think that instead of helping me to understand the gospel it just kind of puffed me up with pride.

It kind of made me think that I knew everything there was to know about Christianity and I had this conception, this misconception that if I follow God's laws good enough, like better than the people I saw around me, then I could kind of do whatever I wanted with the rest of my life.

And it kind of grew into this feeling of moral superiority that like, "Hey, I know all these things about the Bible." The time when my idea that I was morally superior to everybody else, it kind of started falling apart around my senior year of high school. There were kind of three things that happened that God used to kind of break me to the point where I realized that I needed Christ.

The first one, I ran into these two girls on my high school campus that were, they were basically evangelizing and they came up to me and I saw them gripping their Bibles and they were all happy and I was like, "I do not want to deal with this right now." They asked me, "Oh, do you know who Jesus Christ is?" And I was like, "Yeah, I go to church and I'm saved." And so one of the girls, um, dared to press a little bit further and I'm really grateful to her for this, but she asked, "Well, how do you know that you're saved?" And the first thing that wanted to come out of my mouth was, "Oh, because I go to church." But then the youth pastor, Maria, the Sunday before had said, "Well, just because you go to church doesn't mean you're a Christian." And as it was coming, as the answer was coming out of my mouth, I was like, "This is wrong." I actually, I couldn't for the life of me think of a reason why I was saved.

And so that kind of got me thinking, like, maybe I'm actually not saved. The second thing, like, broke down my idea that I was morally superior was, um, I started going out with a boy my senior year of high school and, um, we kind of quickly started into a more physical relationship and there are a lot of things that happened that, um, that kind of left me with regrets.

Like, growing up in a Christian household, I knew what I was doing was wrong, but the scary thing was that I couldn't stop. It was kind of devastating because I spent my whole life thinking that I was, I was morally superior to everybody else, that I had, that I was good with God because I followed His law, but here I was, I couldn't follow His law for the life of me.

Um, and so I think that kind of set me up for the third thing that God introduced into my life, which was an argument with my mom over my, um, my then boyfriend. And she, um, was blunt with me and she called me out and she told me, "Hey, you're a sinner." And, um, I was like, "Oh my gosh, how dare you?" But I knew she was right.

And she said, "Hey, you're a sinner and you can't stop sinning on your own." She told me that the whole point of Christianity is not to be good enough because you can never be good enough, um, for God's standards. But the point of Christianity and the point of a relationship with Christ is to accept that I'm a sinner and I can't possibly reach God's standards, um, but that I have to trust that Jesus' death and resurrection paid for this sin.

And, um, and I can do nothing, I can't add nothing to that. And I think that's the, I think that's the first time when I really understood what grace meant, is that I can add nothing to my own salvation. I can't do anything, um, on my own apart from Christ.

So what my mom said kind of stuck with me, um, and I, I got saved at a Berean retreat the summer right before I started college. I came before God and I said, "God, if you, if you exist, then I really need you to cover my sin with your Son's blood because I can't do it on my own." God gave me a desire to want to do His will and want to obey Him.

And I'm really grateful to God that He saved me before going to college because that kind of set me on the right path to grow a lot more. He placed me at, um, at a very strong church in a very strong fellowship group, uh, UCLA. Um, God just put me in a really healthy place where I could, um, fellowship with believers my age who, who love the Lord and want to pursue Christ.

And, uh, there's still many brothers and sisters who are running this race right alongside me and who are there to encourage me and, um, to hold me accountable in my sin. And yeah, I'm, I'm, I feel again very blessed that God has placed me in a healthy environment, um, where, uh, I have believers around me to, um, encourage me and to push me, um, towards Christ.