The Diary of a Teen-aged Christian by Beryl Andoh - HTML preview

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When it all begun

Dear God,

Today I woke up and felt so down. Imagine being in a glue-walled room and trying to get out, yeah, your guess is right, it’s tough especially being in this warm-blooded tux called ‘flesh’. “Alright, I’ll stop nagging but it doesn’t change the fact I feel down. Seriously, this life as a Christian is very tough. Ouch……….ok, apply the Word. ‘He who endures to the end shall be saved.’ Ok, that was good. I think this is what I need for the day, this verse. Oh, I forgot…. I have school to go to. Yep, another activity required from a human. Ok bye…….”

My name is Janessa and this is my life. I guess if I’m telling you about me then I better start from the beginning, where it all begun, when I stepped out of a cozy room called my mother’s womb.

18 years ago, exactly 12 midnight, I felt uncomfortable in my mother’s womb, so I stepped out. I grew up enjoying every bit of my childhood, from enjoying every kind of making a fool out of everybody because they want me to stop crying. “Yeah I know, very hilarious.” But at age 12, scales of excitement fell from my eyes. I began to see things from a different perspective. All was not well. My parents were not much of strong Christians. I guess to them, it was like a tag they just carried about. Things were not so bad until the path became quite rocky. My dad lost his job, and then did things become worse. My mum also surprised us by losing her job. Well, it wasn’t her fault, really. My dad turned to smoking and drinking and the days when he became negatively excited, he will beat mum up because she tried to take his pack of cigarette and bottle of rum away from him. This went on for year. Then something worse, much worse, happened. Mum joined dad in his quest to ruin his life by taking in hard drugs and liquor. Oh and it was a very traumatizing experience, coming back home from a very irritating day at school to spending the rest of the day with two wasted parents, talk about jumping from frying pan into fire. Slow. Things got so out of hand. It was quite surprising that my parents actually once called themselves Christians. Once I had a very rough day at school, detention and all. I was very angry because whatever landed me in detention wasn’t in any way my fault, but what can I do but suck it up. With anger, I came home and hungry as well, I opened the fridge….. I found no food but something more intriguing……...my dad’s bottle of rum. With weather eyes, I stared at the bottle of rum, thinking out loud, I said, “what on God’s green earth is in this that makes it totally irresistible?” Out of curiosity, I tasted …… God! What is this? It burns, shoot! But wait a minute, after a while, it doesn’t taste that bad. Uh….oh, the curiosity was now turning into desire. Day after day, I took a sip of my dad’s rum. The sip then became a gulp. My dad realized his rum was surprisingly decreasing in quantity. With the way things were before, he would have believed the rum had undergone sublimation if that was possible. But now things were not that smooth, therefore he questioned all of us, from my mum down to my little brother. “Dad’s overreacting, he’s questioning even Junior.” I would say in my head. But every time he gets to me, I simply shake my head and say, “Yuck, dad, that thing is worse than bitter, why would I enjoy it”. This went on for days, weeks and month. What I thought I knew was that I was enjoying my life. What I didn’t know was I had offered the devil help on a silver platter to ruin my own life. Well, that’s not all….there’s more…………..