Nick was the kind of guy who always told you what you needed to hear even if it wasn’t always exactly what you wanted to hear. He was not only my youth pastor, but also one of my best friends. He was the guy that if he said something, you could always count on it to be true. If he said that he was going to do something, he would do it.
When I was fourteen years old, I was always going around and doing a lot of things that I knew that I should not have been doing. One day, my friend Devon invited me to church and I didn’t want to come at first but then I decided that I would go anyways. While I was there, Nick gave a message at church that night that really laid a huge burden on my heart. It was the most meaningful message that I have ever heard. That night I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior and it changed my life. I completely changed almost everything about me. I got back into church and started to act differently and I started talking differently too. The message that Nick gave that night was the best thing that ever could have happened to me.
When I first started going to church I wasn’t that close to him, but I won a competition at church where I got to go to Cedar Point for free and it was not until then that I started to get really close to him. While we were there, I had a lot of fun riding rides and hanging out with people from my youth group. I think that having all that fun and talking the whole day was what really brought us together. Before that trip, I was just a shy kid who did not talk to anybody ever, but afterwards, he helped me come out of my shell a lot and start talking to a lot more people and going places and hanging out with them. I also didn’t like to be active and play sports. He always encouraged me to play and I got a lot better at sports. Now when people hang out to play sports, I don’t just sit there board, I play them and I love sports now. I have a lot more fun than I used to before Nick got me involved in the youth group.
While I was still a new Christian, Nick helped me get over a lot of stuff and stop a lot of bad things that I was doing back then. He showed me a lot of Bible verses that talked about how I should not have been doing a lot of stuff that I was doing and hanging out with people that I should not have been hanging out with because they were a really bad influence on me and talked me into doing a lot of things that I should not have done. He really showed me how to change my life to live for Jesus instead of living it for myself.
Before he left to go to Colorado to start up a church there, I used to hang out with him all of the time. When I found out that he was leaving, I was devastated because it really felt like I had lost my best friend. When he announced that he was leaving, my friends and I would go hang out with him every day for the last couple of months that he was in town. He would always give us advice and set us straight when we were doing something wrong.
Now that he is gone, I still talk to him a lot by texting him and stuff like that but not as much as I used to. I am pretty close to my new youth pastor now but not as close as I was to Nick. He comes back to Ohio about once or twice a year and that’s the only time that I get to see him but I am not too upset about it like I was at first. I am still looking forward to the next time he comes back because he was one of my best friends and I could never replace him.