Gemma's Story

- It was my first week at university.
On the first night, I'd already told them that I was a Christian.
They were really, really accepting of it and actually were quite honest with me and were saying that they really respected me for the choices I was making even though they went against what a lot of people at university would be doing and were doing.
For me, it was really encouraging to be able to share and find that that was accepted by people because they found it interesting and it led to lots of conversations throughout my entire degree of friends coming and chatting with me about faith, asking questions.
But there was one who just didn't want to know and could be quite rude about faith and the fact that she didn't believe and thought it was a load of rubbish and stuff like that, which is hard, even when you're sort of a bit more secure in your faith, but it also had the sort of secondary thing of the rest of my housemates really rallied around and showed that that's not everybody's view and while some people may knock you down and some people may not want to know, that actually there are other people who will always be there with an interest in wanting to hear what you've got to say.
I started telling one of my groups of friends about a youth camp that I go to every summer and through that, one of them started asking me more and more questions and I ended up inviting her and she came for two years running and recently got back in touch with me to tell me she'd starting going to church more often and got baptised recently.
If you don't step out and try, you're never gonna get anywhere with it.
We can sit in church all we want and we can meet as small groups.
While those things are valuable and we need them, but that's not the point, that's not why we're here.
Like the Great Commission says, it's to go and if we don't go, we're not gonna get anyone to hear the message, we're not going to be able to tell anyone else.
So it's taking that step of faith, even when it seems absolutely terrifying.
That's the best thing we can do really, and where we will have some people who will dismiss it and some people who won't be bothered, there will be another group of people who are just waiting for one person to approach them and just one person to spark their interest in it.
If we don't go out and reach them, then no one will.