If you want to contribute to this series and share your story, please email me at pastorjosephyoo(@)gmail(.)com, without the parentheses.

Ever since I was young I loved to draw. It was always something that my brothers and I loved to do long as I can remember. What was interesting about this hobby of mine was that I was not forced to pursue art by my parents as another skill I could put down in my future applications to college (e.g. violin, piano, tennis). No, I discovered my love of drawing and art on my own and it has stuck with me the longest out of all the other activities I was forced to do as a child (to this day, I still cannot stand the sound of a violin). Growing up, I never thought about why I loved to draw, but thinking back on it now, I see it as a small sign of how God exists in me.

Before even writing this blog, I, like most followers of Christ, went through a time where I began questioning my faith. I had been a faithful church-goer ever since birth. I was born into my home church where I still continue to attend today. The same church where my mother is a deacon and my father serves as an elder. Church and God were a huge part of my social life and family life. However, in college is where my faith was tested and I began to look for answers in campus ministries and small groups. Even though I plugged myself into a ministry and surrounded myself with Christian friends, I found these attempts to be fruitless. I had entered college with a small seed of cynicism that had taken root from serving a church for my entire childhood. Church was all I knew, and I felt burned out from using church as my social life instead of my spiritual life. By the time I entered college, that seed had grown into vines that suffocated any desire to meaningfully and spiritually be part of a ministry.

However, I never stopped believing in God. The time away from the church community and social life allowed me to meditate in a way, on my own faith. This is where I affirmed my belief in God and his existence. Due to the workload at college, I hadn’t found the time to draw in a long time. One night in my dorm room alone, on a whim, I decided to take some time and sketch again. Once I started to draw I quickly became absorbed into my work, only stopping once I had finally completed transferring my vision onto that piece of copier paper. It was then that I felt that this must have been how God felt while creating us. God created us in His own image and I see that in the innate human desire to simply create for the sake of creating something beautiful. I mean sure, beavers can make dams, monkeys can be taught to paint, and birds can stack twigs to impress a mate. But humans are the only ones that yearn to create and appreciate all forms of art. Some even devote their entire lives for the sake of art. I realized that I had been looking for proof of God in the wrong place. For too long I tried to find Him in my church friends, in my retreats/revivals. I only had to look inside myself and see that He was inside me my whole life.

I believe in God because I see God in all of us. It may not show the same way for some people as it does to me, but I see it in our actions, our values, and our love.

Chris Chi is a talented young man, currently living in Virginia. He has a wicked sense of humor that he shares with his brothers (a twin and an older brother). Chris works at Perfect Sense Digital.