@jchiatt

​Background:
 
​ On September 14, 1992, I entered this world as an already sin-filled creature. I was an ordinary human, sinful and undeserving, even before birth. When I was four months old, my mother, Teri, and my father, John, divorced because my father had impregnated another woman. My mother and I moved from Virgina to Mississippi, where her parents resided.
 
​ Mom began dating again eventually. When I was three, she met the man who would be my step-father shortly after, Gary. He was a professional wrestler. Shortly after getting married, Gary moved my mom and I to New Orleans. All communication was pretty much cut off between me and my ‘Nana and Pawpaw’. Every other weekend Gary would go to Jackson to visit a ‘handicapped friend’. After living in New Orleans for about a year and a half and seeing my mom be abused many times and also experiencing  things that would stay with me for a long time (up until this very day), we got a blessing. During one of Gary’s ‘handicapped friend’ visit weekends, my mother got a call from the FBI and was told that Gary was a wanted man; being a known drug dealer and biggimist. My grandparents came and moved us back to Mississippi in the same day.
 

Upon moving back to Mississippi, my mother and I stayed with my grandparents. She continued dating, which led to us moving in with one of these boyfriends. When that didn’t work out, my mother got a trailer and we lived in it on my grandparents’ property.

I was raised around God-filled people, sometimes a little ‘overly-filled’. My entire family was comprised entirely of Southern Baptists. While they’ve always been sincere, and I love them to death, I found that I don’t really have some of the values as they do. I don’t know why, it’s just how I turned out. Anyway, at age seven I went to a judgment house show at a church. Being only seven, I was extremely frightened by a scene depicting Hell. There, at that church, I prayed for Jesus to come into my life that night. Although not ‘fake’ per say, I don’t think this event really counts as the time I was saved because since I was only seven I didn’t really grasp the concept.

At age eight, my mother met a new guy whose name was Randy. They were married when I was nine, and they’ve been together ever since. I have a ‘father’, but Randy is my ‘Dad’.

 
 
 


Before God:
 

In seventh grade, I became very ‘religious’, constantly reading my Bible and talking about God. Again, I still don’t believe I grasped the full concept then. By eighth grade, I had quit reading my Bible and had started to see the different aspects of the world.

At ninth grade, I got in really deep. I becamse very manipulative of people around me. I hurt people’s feelings sometimes, and I didn’t really care about how I presented myself to the world. As for religion at this time, I got involved with other people in Wicca. After much experimenting with that, I finally grew out of it. By that time, I was no longer religious. I was Agnostic, I guess, but somewhere in the back of my mind I still knew there was a God that loved me.

Still keeping my Agnostic view of things, I got involved with a girl in tenth grade. I had no bad intentions whatsoever when the relationship started, but within 6 months, I had tried nearly everything I could have tried with this girl, as far as sexual relations goes. Last February, my parents lost their house. I ended up moving in with this girl’s grandparents and switched schools so I could stay in this area because my parents were moving to Mendenhall. The girl and I broke up about a month after me moving in with her grandparents and I went through a crazy time. I did things way out of my character. During this time I was exposed to drugs, and I also started smoking.

Around a month later, I met a new girl. I quit the smoking and stopped doing things out of my character. By this time I started feeling like I wanted to find Christ but felt like there was some kind of wall blocking me from that. I felt this because I was still living for myself, but I didn’t know this at the time.

The girl and I began dating and her parents took a liking to me. Her dad had bought me a new phone and was paying the bill within 3 weeks of even knowing me. Then, they took me to Disney World a couple of weeks after that. During last summer, I also went to Destin, and I went back to Disney World for New Years, and on a cruise in March; all with her family. I pretty much spent the entire summer with this girl and her family; we never had time to ourselves. By the end of the summer, it had been planned that I would stay with them for a couple of months and continue to go to school at Northwest while my parents moved back in this area. Also, by the end of the summer, we had become sexually active, which was something I never had intentions for, especially since she was a virgin.

School started and I became extremely busy with my academics and extracurriculars, while at the same time trying to keep my friends and my girlfriend happy. We had spent so much time together that we weren’t used to all the time apart. We started having problems, to say the least. My parents ended up not being able to move back when they were supposed to, and even when they did I continued to stay with this girl’s family. Since we were having problems and we were in the same house, things started getting pretty bad. We had nowhere to escape to just to cool off. She began hitting me in September when we would get in arguments. I didn’t hit her back, but I couldn’t escape it. I even told her mother, but I continued to get hit. I took this for three months. I grew up watching my mother get beat, and hitting a girl was something I never ever wanted to do, but I ended up hitting her back after three months. Our arguments from then on always seemed to turn into physical confrontations. I was mean too, I would say and do things that really hurt her, sometimes intentionally.

All of this continued on throughout this past school year.  We were always fighting about something,  and our relationship became more and more physical with a bare sense of affection at all. In March, I found out that her and the guy who at the time was my best friend were ‘talking’, and that they thought they might love each other. I was basically given a chance to be better from her point of view during the cruise we took. Honestly, I didn’t care much any more. I was so messed up that I just took it all for granted, barely spending time with her on the ship and staying out late by myself with other people. When we got back, she broke up with me and immediately started dating my best friend. I was honestly relieved at first. A couple of days afterwards, I got into some trouble at school and got arrested. They could have tried me as an adult and put me in county jail, but I got off with 160 hours  of summer community service (which I’m still serving), and I got banned from having Wi-Fi-capable devices on the school campus for the remainder of my high school career (my offense was computer related). For a month, I had major mental breakdowns. I cried all the time, inflicted pain on myself, and my grades that I worked hard all year to keep up dropped. I was constantly begging her to give me another chance.

At one point I felt like I had nothing left at all. I talked to God one night, and it was the first time I really had felt God in a long time. I started trying to live better from that night, but of course I still wasn’t fully committing to Him. I finally stopped crying every day, and I began talking to another girl. Some events happened because of this and I ended up moving back in with my parents one school night.  I’ve been there since. My ex girlfriend opened up to her mother one day and told her that we had sexual relations, but also claimed that I raped her. I never did such a thing, although I do admit I might have made her feel pressured, and I’m highly ashamed of that now. Anyway, this formed a horrible relationship between me and her family except for her Dad, who still talks to me on a daily basis.

How I Came to Christ:

Paige Concepcion, one of the greatest people in the world, had been talking to me about God and encouraging me to read the Word since I had prayed that one night. She invited me to the Boil, and I came to that; it was my first time coming to Pinelake. Over the course of the couple of weeks I came to church on Sundays and Wednesdays, and also to some of the Chi Alpha practices. One Sunday a few weeks ago, after the first Sex Talk sermon, I found myself extremely impacted. Before that, I really hadn’t felt guilt for anything at all; I had major apathy for everything in the past and a lot of the present. But this particular day, I found myself feeling so guilty and so convicted. I had also been feeling so distant from God. I had been trying to live better, but I still just wasn’t feeling Him. I also wasn’t brave enough to go down for the alter call, which made me feel even worse, but I stood there alone with tears coming out of my eyes. Afterwards, I found Paige, and she took me to meet Darren Miley. I talked to him for about an hour, and came clean with a lot of wrongs I had done and problems that I currently had. He talked with me, prayed for me, and then had me pray to God outloud. That was the first time in years I had prayed outloud in front of anyone sincerely. From that moment, I knew Christ was back with me.

Life With God:

Life with God in my life has been amazing. I’ve met many new friends who have encouraged and influenced me. I’m able to feel His presence with me, and I can openly talk to Him any time of the day. He’s also been blessing me over and over, and my behavior has changed a lot. Words, music, people; everything has changed about me, for the better. I am by no means living a perfect life, not even close. I still have problems and temptations; but I know that God is with me now and that is all that matters. I’m ready to live for Him.