Michael Sloan
Have you ever been surrounded by people and felt completely alone? That is exactly how I felt when my parents dropped me off in my dorm room at Queen’s University. It was then that I realized I had two options. Study hard and get good grades or live the party lifestyle I thought everyone else was living. I chose the second. But quickly I realized that all of the friends I was making at these parties were not real friends and the person I was becoming was nowhere near who I wanted to be. This made me feel even more alone than before and I tried to soothe this loneliness with things like alcohol and pornography. But doing so only made the problem worse. Eventually, I decided I had had enough. So I decided to turn to the only person I thought I had left. A CCO missionary who kept texting me every day for months asking me to take a faith study which I had been avoiding.
He met up with me the next day and shared the Gospel with me. But I was not ready to decide for Jesus at the time, so he connected me with a group of guys who were the kind of guys I wanted to be like. One of those guys gave me a book on addiction called Restored by Matt Fradd. In that book, there was a line that changed my life forever, it read: you will never be free from your addictions until you know that the father loves you. I realized in that moment that I had never heard God say that before. I had never heard God say anything to me before. I didn’t even know it was possible.
So that day, in my room, I decided to get on my knees, make an act of courage, and pray what I would call a dangerous prayer. I said God, if you are real, and you really love me, reveal yourself to me.
I prayed this prayer every day for months and heard absolutely nothing. But then I went to CCO’s national Rise Up conférence in 2014. On the morning of December 29th, 2014, a speaker got up and began to speak about how when his daughter was born he would pick her up and whisper to her the secrets of her heart, you are beautiful, you are loveable, you are my daughter, you are a daughter of God. As he was saying this, I realized that the way that this guy loved his daughter, is the way that God loved me. And the words that God the Father speaks to Jesus at the baptism in the Jordan and again at the transfiguration he is speaking to me. “Michael, you are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” Hearing those words and being struck with this love, a love that I had been craving and looking for my whole life, I could not help but decide for a relationship with God, inviting him to be the center of my life. This decision changed everything for me and it is the reason why I am who I am today.