Hi, I am James Murphy. I have been a Christian for two full years this August. I was attending Silver Lake Youth Camp and I could feel God holding me and I knew that I wanted to live my life in his name!

In those two years I have sinned! Done things I look back on today and want to punch myself for. But I don’t, I come to God, and take my broken self and ask him to fix me. Every time I feel full of shame but I know that God still loves me. (puts a smile on my face every time).

For almost a whole year after I let go of the steering wheel of my life. I was at odds with God. I would pray, I would talk, I would work for God. But never EVER did I "hear" God. I ran out in the middle of fields on rainy thunderstorm days yelling at the top of my lungs, screaming at God, to talk to me - I was going to put a passage in here to show you a time when God spoke to people but the old testament is full of them - All I wanted was to hear God, I didn’t care what he said, I just wanted something. Night after night, day after day: nothing, I wandered the halls with a smile but my soul cried. I wanted to give up, just say one last thing to God, "Well if you are there, you blew it!" I was mad!

I asked every Christian I could find "Do you hear God?, cuz I can’t!!!" My closest friend looked at me with confused and a sad look and said "How can you get through your day?" She told me that every day, God talks her through her day.

This past summer I asked another staff member at Ryerson camp, who is constantly talking with God, "Why don’t I hear GOD?" He told me "I needed to listen", so I tried, I took 2 hours (my free time for the day) and found the most peaceful place I knew. I went down to the beach, prayed then sat in silence, then I wanted to cry when I didn’t hear anything.

I cane to realize since this summer what I was not looking at. I can’t hear God because He wants to show me the way instead! I noticed how my life was changing every day! I could see a growth in myself. And it was all because of God! So if you can’t "hear" God, I encourage to listen, and at the same time to look, look back to before you decided to live for God, and if you haven’t yet then look at your life and look at your Christian friends and how they live! Don’t spend your time blaming God for not paying attention to you, because He is; you just need to see how He is doing it!

God loves you and is communicating, its all a matter of how!!!

(James Murphy is 16 and from Cambridge.)