Who is Friedriches?

So the kid who knows no one is standing in the lunch line the first day of freshman year. He’s wearing his student ID, as are all of the students, but he knows no one, really. He knows some people from middle school, but he had few friends then and he had none of them on that lunch shift. Then the person behind him, in a rare act of boldness, grabbed the new kid’s ID.

“Hey, your name looks like friedriches!”

At that moment I became a different person. These people didn’t know the kid who cried after he didn’t do well on tests. These people didn’t know the kid who refused to say dirty words. These people didn’t know that secretly he loved to eat, and wanted to commit suicide.

These people knew the kid with the wierd sense of style and the unique nickname. I adopted that image immediately. I suppose of all the images to adopt in high school (as everyone does) the do-gooder with a wicked wit was a good one to have. I wasn’t popular, I wasn’t hot, I was friedriches. Everyone that knew me liked me- except for me.

It wasn’t that I was unhappy with the way life was going, I was unhappy with me. On the inside. Something wasn’t working. I still needed to eat to feel good. I began to bend on my morals (that at the time existed simply because my family, outside of any church, raised me to be extremely just. To this day I cannot, in my very nature, lie, cheat, or steal). I began to plot to do things just to piss my parents off for the sheer conflict of it. I was a person at odds with his very soul.

I had previously rejected the idea of God. I refused to believe that anyone would make me and claim to love me yet let me suffer on the inside in this “wonderful” country. However, I was told that the piece missing was in fact the very person I rejected. To me, this was simply hokey bullcrap. I didn’t like the idea of God, and was sure that my favorite teachers, whom I looked to for wisdom, would feel the same.

They didn’t. I began to be a bit flexible. I started serving at the church so that I could have access to electronics. I found the people at church weren’t the hypocrits I thought they were. I began to see my own hypocrisy. I began to see just how broken I really was and just how to fix myself.

Jesus Christ. Amen.

So began the journey that is still just getting some speed. It took me a while to get going on all cylinders, but I finally am raring to go.

I’m currently (first and foremostly) a hardcore disciple of Christ. I am also a student at LSU and a part-time student in Healing Place Church’s Elevate program.

That’s my story, and now that you’ve read this you’re part of it. Spread it- there is hope for even those that refuse to believe it. It’s a story that’s ever growing, and the great thing is we all have our own chapter.