How can I explain my God to you? I suppose some people will already have stopped reading. “What? God?? LEGGIT!”

But most people only know about God and Christians and so on from what they’ve seen on telly, and every ‘Christian’ I’ve ever seen on telly has been a cringe-worthy misrepresentation. Personally, I do not walk around quoting the Bible at people, I never pray with people unless they ask me to, and the words “God bless you” have never once crossed my lips.

Basically I’m a regular teenage girl; worried about my weight, like shopping with my friends, had a boyfriend but broke up, I’m studying at uni and occasionally wish I had never signed up for it. See, normal. The only difference between me and my non-Christian counterpart is that I have my God.

So how do I describe my God? There’s so much it’s almost impossible to start. At the moment he’s my foundation. Building my life on my boyfriend left me with a fragmented mess that fell down around me with an almighty crash. And it hurt. So now, finally after ten years, I’ve started trying to build on God. It’s fantastic, knowing that he will always be there, always be the same, won’t have a tizzy just because. I don’t manage it all the time, sometimes I’d much rather read the Jasper Fforde book I just got out of the library instead of the Bible, or go and talk to my friends instead of praying. But I’m working on it.

God is my refuge and strength, my confidence. When people snipe at me with comments about my size and weight, I can get over them because I know I am special. He made me, chose me to be a Christian and he loves me. Nuts to everyone else. When I know that, every single person in the UK could insult me and I would still feel loved.

That’s the best part of what my God is to me. He is love. You might have heard that phrase before, ‘God is love’, and wondered what exactly it means. Or why people say it so much. I don’t think I totally get it, but to me it means that not only does the all-powerful creator of absolutely everything love me, he also knows me. He knows I prefer hugs to kisses, he knows I have to write things by hand before I can type them into the computer, he knows I’m bad with technology, he knows I hate carrots, even though my Dad still forgets after almost 20 years. He knows I do my best to never tell a lie, but he also knows that sometimes I twist or completely avoid the truth to manage this. He knows I try to be kind to everyone, but he also knows the nasty thoughts that go through my head instead of out of my mouth. And the really mind-blowing thing is that despite knowing the full extent of my bad bits, despite the fact that I don’t pray or read my bible as often as I know I should, despite the fact that I don’t always do what he tells me to, my God likes me. He likes me. I don’t know about you but that hits me quite hard every time I think about it. My God likes me!

He is my acceptance when I feel like the fattest, ugliest, laziest, stupidest, loneliest, most boring person in the entire world who will never have another boyfriend and die a lonely old spinster with no friends, then my God hugs me until I stop crying. Not literal hugging of course, what with God having no physical body and all. But he can do it in a couple of ways, with me at least. Sometimes I just get the feeling in my chest that I get when someone hugs me, other times a bunch of memory verses I thought I’d forgotten come floating to the surface of my mind.

My God is a friend when I feel friendless; a hideout when I feel scared. He loves me when I feel unlovable, he is proud of me when nobody else cares what I’ve done. He loves me, he likes me, he teaches me, he hugs me, he tells me off, he accepts me as I am but loves me too much to leave me that way. He can cut me to the core but it doesn’t take too long to see that he’s cut away something that was damaging me.

He’s powerful, he’s gentle, he’s all around me and inside me, he’s a king, a friend, a dad, a teacher. He is safety, he is love, he is acceptance, comfort, discipline, he is forgiving, he is watching, he belongs to no one.

And he is mine.

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