I was blessed with growing up in an amazing God-fearing family. My childhood was great. I had two parents who loved me and brothers and a sister who I looked up to all my life.
Everything around me has always been “church.” I have lived in Heartland most of my life and my parents are the President and Dean of Heartland Christian College. With so much “church” in my life I just believed I was saved because I went to Sunday school and sang songs and raised my hands. I prayed and accepted Jesus in to my heart when I was young, but as I got older my relationship with Him had a lot of rough patches.
When I got into middle school my friends and I got influenced by the older kids in school a lot. My friends and I were inseparable so whatever they did I was right there with them. We all got into some trouble at school, but by the beginning of high school we were starting to get our lives together. My relationship with God was still not very strong, though.
When I got to tenth grade a lot of things changed. At the beginning of the school year I had a class full of my best friends, but by the end of the year many of the kids who had been here since elementary moved away. That was the hardest year of all. I felt like I had no one left and I was so mad because of it.
I made a lot of mistakes that year. My relationship with my parents, my teachers, and anyone else trying to tell me what to do got really bad. During this time, I was still trying to play the good Christian kid even though I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone but myself. At the end of my junior year, the boy I thought was the one for me left. After that, many people started to really talk to me about my walk with God and trying to help me through everything.
At a conference in June of 2015 I gave my life to the Lord again. Since then my family life and my school life has gotten so much better. It has not been easy this past year for sure, but when you really give your heart to God and fully commit to Him, things just work out for the better.
I graduated from Heartland Christian Academy in June of 2016, and I am going to go to Heartland Christian College in the fall, and hope to pursue a degree in teaching. Right now I work as a teacher’s assistant at HCA and I love working with children.
I thank God every day for giving me a great family and for protecting me from many things that so many teenagers go through in their lifetime.
If we included all the “little people” in this photo whose lives Megan touches, it would be filled with a passel of nieces and nephews, plus neighbor kids, Sunday school students, and elementary kids she has babysat, taught, and held throughout the years. If they are any indication, she’s going to make a great teacher some day.
