What happens when a faith built on habits and expectations collapses?
Dawit shares his story of being adopted from Ethiopia, growing up around Christianity, and slowly drifting into isolation, sin, and despair. During COVID, everything he relied on was stripped away — revealing how alone he felt and how far he had pushed God and others out of his life.
At his lowest moment, God used the people He had placed in his life — family, friends, and leaders — to expose a lie he had believed for years: that he was alone and had to do life on his own.
I was adopted when I was six from Ethiopia. Yeah, both my parents passed when I was young, and so that was pretty tough. But my adopted parents went to dwell.
So that's how I started going to church, was through them. And I accepted Christ when I was pretty young. And there wasn't really like a relational aspect with God.
It was just a lot of like doing without really knowing why. I knew why, but I didn't want that relationship with God to go any deeper than it was. Until COVID, and all that just kind of got taken away.
And so my entire shallow Christian life was pretty, it just got completely taken away. And on top of that, there was some additional suffering that came with COVID. There's some like sports injuries I suffered.
There's relational conflicts with like me and my parents. And a lot of it was just like all my fault. Actually, all of it was my fault.
I just like, yeah, I kept hurting them in ways that I didn't want to, but I did. There was like moral failures. I was in sin a lot.
And yeah, at some point in my life, I had been convinced that I was just kind of alone. That like, I didn't need people. I didn't need God.
That I could do this on my own. I could walk with God on my own without His power. And so that led me to be really closed off from friends, from family.
And yeah, I just like really isolate myself from other people relationally. My solution to that was to just take my life. I was like, I didn't want to live the way I was living anymore.
It sucked. And I certainly didn't want to open up to other people and God. Because I meant, or at least in my head, that meant exposing all like the ugliness and dirty parts of me, which is to an extent is true.
But it's also like it glorifies God more than exposing me. And I didn't realize that. Yeah, like right before I did, I was like standing on a ledge.
And like, there's a lot of thoughts going through my head. Um, but the most clear ones were just people. Um, like my family, friends, leaders, like anybody that had like some sort of impact or involvement in my life.
Um, I was just thinking about them for a while. Not even like anything they did, just like them as people. And I think that was like the real moment where I realized like like just how much of like of an idiot I am, I guess that like, yeah, I keep saying that I'm alone that I keep saying like, I have to do this on my own.
But like, it was just like so far from that. It couldn't be like more untrue. Um, first of all, like I had God who's with there with me throughout everything.
Um, it was just like begging me to like say anything to him at all. Um, and then I also had the people that he had placed in my life for specific reasons. I can see now that he'd placed them there for specific reasons.
It wasn't just like random coincidence that they were there. Um, and I was like, just such a fool for not realizing that God has put people in my life for a reason that, uh, and I also realized that, uh, if I want to follow God with my life, that it's gonna have to be more than because of like what people say, what people tell me to do. Um, it's gonna have to be solely based on and motivated by him and his character and what he's done for me and gratitude for that.
Um, and so I started to like try to rebuild my relationship with God. Um, started to read my Bible a bit more, pray a little bit more, actually talk to him, um, tell him what's going on. Um, and to actually open up to other people, um, and to ask for help that moment in my life.
Um, it was like a real turning point, um, that just kind of like shot me forward into like my relationship with God actually being good and enjoyable, um, and fulfilling. And so when it comes to like, uh, my junior or senior year, um, I just started thinking about more about what I'm going to do after high school. Um, and I'd always known that I was probably going to end up in a mystery house.
In my head, I was like, yeah, I'm going to do this. It's probably going to, it's going to be fun, but like roommates are probably going to suck. Like it's going to smell bad, um, dirty everywhere.
Um, but I think after, uh, that year, I like, I had like a perspective change that, uh, yeah, that like that, all that like comfort is like such a small price to pay for like getting to live with like other guys that are like also love God that also like want to follow God and also want to push each other towards God, um, and do ministry together. And yeah, it's just such a small price to pay for that.