My Testimony

My name is Jacob Schieber. I am fifteen years old and a sophomore at Portage High School in Wisconsin. What this blog is about to me is a way to share the Gospel but also a way to motivate the Teenagers of this nation to love their God in the same way he loves us.

As the first edition to my blog I am just going to share my testimony with you. It is nothing special, I was not healed from paralysis, nor did I gain teh ability to Walk on Water. But this is my story, this is the walk that I took, and this is the output that it created.

My Story-
My story starts out very similar to most Christians. I was born into a very Christian family and God was always ever-present in my life. So from birth on up my parents always kept me involved in the church. After one such youth group I heard the good news and felt convicted, I went home told my mother about it, and a few minutes after that, at the age of 6 years old, I got down onto my knees and excepted Jesus Christ as my Savior.

After that, I lived the ordinary Christian life. I participated in my church's youth group and everything stayed the same for most of my childhood. Then everything started to get different when I got into Junior High. I started to participate in the teenager section of my youth group. With this Jesus started to loose more meaning day after day. I still loved God and went to Sunday morning and Wednesday night church services, but God didn't matter anymore. Where before I was excited to go to learn about Jesus, I was now excited to spend time with the junior high "cool" kids. What this entitled for me was a complete loss of interest in the youth group. I literally only cared about the matters of my current life and didn't really consider God as necessary in my life, but only as a side note.

This continued for most of my 7th and beginning half of 8th grade year. But then everything changed at a winter retreat bible Camp. I am not sure exactly what the message was, but it had to do with the fact of living a Christian Life. These lessons, only lasting for 3 days, completely altered how I viewed God. I know longer saw God as the boring person standing on the sidelines watching my life go by, but as the director of my life. The person who i should literally let take control of my life. Then God started to show me that the friends I was hanging out with were shallow and mean, and that the only person I truly needed to start spending more time with was God. So for the rest of that 8th grade year, I read through as much of the bible as I could.

My life took an even bigger turn in the summer before my 8th grade year. I went back to that same winter camp, but only in summer form. I spent the first week in the high school retreat program. The second week i spent just off camp but still in the mix of things. I had become best friends with one of the teens whose parents worked permanently on Camp. So I spent another week around God learning and getting as close to God as I possibly could. And lastly, for the third week, My family came up to the camp and I got to stay another week in the family retreat program. So for three straight weeks i was completely separated from Satan's world and was permanently resting in God's safe zone.

These three weeks of camp again altered my entire view on life. Life was no longer spent with God controlling my life, but now God was my life. I started to see everything as he wanted it to be and then I started to do what he told me to do. So for my entire freshman year at school I was the on-fire for the Lord.

This leads me to last summer. With everything still clicking, I spent two more weeks up at that camp, once for high school camp and the second for family camp. But things started to change a little. I was still an on fire Christian for God, but material things started to sink into my world. I started to make promises to give my work money to God, but he never received my 10%. And then, because my focus was on money, I started to care about Xboxes and ipod touches more than I cared about spending time with God.

God whipped me back into shape at the beginning of my 2nd year at high school. First semester I was placed into the sophomore World History Class. This class, although called World History,only talks about History for the first term. the second term is completely about World Religions.

As I went through these talks about religions I really began to get confused all over again. I never doubted my faith, but I started to wonder why I wasn't on fire for God. We went over Islamic suicide bombers and I started to wonder why my faith wasn't like that any more. Not that I would blow up myself to make a statement, but that my life was no longer completely based on God.

After a very angering discussion on the book "Ishmael." God started to do work in my life again. I started to realise how phony the other world religions were to me and how i needed to start straightening up my life to be completely centered on God. So I began to read my bible again. I got a new compacted leather one to make a symbol of change and i took the bible to school with me everyday. I then read through the gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John, and after that the "tians" (Galatians, Philippians....). All the way until the new testament was completed.

Then God finally locked myself into his loving embrace and permanently became my life. Everything stayed the same for the next about 6 months. Then in beginning of April God started to do something in me again. He directed me to write a book. I talked to my youth pastor about it, he gave me the thumbs up and I started to alter the notes I had been collecting for the 5 years and turned them into digitalized copies. My faith was only reboosted by relearning all of the knowledge that had oringialy been why I had accepted Christ

A week later, tragedy struck. On the way home from my golf lesson we got a call that my grandfather had just been hospitalised and that things were not looking good. So we rushed the 45 minute trip home and went immediately into the hospital.... We were received to the story that about 20 seconds earlier the medics had legally pronounced my grandpa Brakebush dead.

The funeral was hard, but the thought that my grandpa Billy had died a Christian man helped me get through it. God used this experience to tell me that life would not last forever. He had just returned one of his children "home to glory" with no prior notice and now he was telling me, "get going, you have had your chance to crawl, but now is your time to run." So the book I had been writing started to be the only thing I could think about. I would read 200 page books in 3 days just so that I could be briefed on a subject I wanted to learn. Always keeping a notepad next to me when reading so I could write down what God was really telling me through the writings of modern day authors.

That story leads me to today. I heard that journaling was a great source of straightening out your thoughts. And I really wanted people to hear what I was writing about so I thought, "Hey, write a blog"

This blog is a way for me to help teach people the lessons in my book before I am finally able to release it. My email address is listed on the blog, please write me comments or send me emails, but either way, if the lessons in this blog teaches you something or helps you grow closer to the Lord then please let me know. If I get no answers then I will know it was for not, but please let your voice be known. If I did something in your life write back to me.

As of today the destiny of "Walk the Christian Walk"(my book) is sealed. I have now made all of my readers my accountability partners and I have gained people to help get me through the writing of this book. Today and forever on, I begin to firmly "Walk the Christian Walk" for all to see.