Omar was baptized in December 2022. If you have interest in getting baptized at Hope Community Church, you can learn more by visiting hopecc.com/baptism.
My faith journey comes from being born Lutheran and going astray at a young age before finally returning to Christ. I’m grateful that a belief in God was something I could inherit from my Christian parents. I recall they would read Bible stories to my sister and I when we were children and take us to church service on the occasional Christmas, Easter, or Palm Sunday.
Adolescence, however, found me leaving the faith because I viewed my beliefs as not resting upon solid enough footing. After a long time, my life’s unfolding eventually brought me struggles and setbacks great enough that I desired to commune with God once again. A desire that I did not immediately know what to do with. From time to time I would mull over the competing ideas in my head, and what I felt most sure of was that — based on all my accumulated life experience — returning to Christ would be good for me.
As 2021 was ending I realized I was overthinking everything else in this picture. Put another way, I was comfortable trusting my intuition, and my intuition was telling me that it was time to step away from the, perhaps, more solid ground of remaining religiously unaffiliated. By January of 2022 this leap of faith had landed me back to my home church and into a very welcoming community where I began to compose my new relationship with Jesus. Later in the year I would move over to Hope Community Church, another extremely welcoming community where I deepened my faith and received the encouragement to more carefully study the Bible.
I’m grateful to God for providing me all these stepping stones and everything else He gives us each day. I want to get baptized to publicly proclaim Jesus Christ as my personal savior and to signify the rebuilding of my faith throughout the year.
