Hello everyone,

my name is Simon Schröder and I am a student in Germany. I have always been a Catholic and at the age of 12 I made my own decision to follow Jesus.

There was a problem though: I just wasn't able to live according to what I believed. I would come to retreats and be on fire for prayer, but after three or four days back home I found myself not praying at all. The older I got the worse it got as well and as I started drinking and partying life with God got reduced on going to mass on Sunday.

But I wasn't satisfied with that. So one day I am going for a prayer-walk and I don't really do any praying for the first half an hour. But as I find myself frustrated with not having done any praying yet this thought appears in the back of my head and it said: "Take off your shoes!" I am chuckeling at this thought. It is winter and just above 0 degrees, basically to cold to walk around bare foot. Against all my concerns I decide to take off my shoes and at the beginning it is really painful, stepping on stones and the coldness, but after some time my feet just go numb. As I am walking I realise, if I continue I might seriously hurt myself as I can't even feel the stones anymore that I am stepping on.

It was in that moment that I realised that all my live I had been like my feet. All the things I had been doing had been hurting myself and I hadn't even realised. What I also knew in that moment was that God loved me! He sees beyond my brokenness and wants me to be whole! And I experienced his love like I had never done before. The only adequate response to that love was and is to praise him.

My life has never really been the same after that. The gap between what I believed and how I lived gets smaller day by day. The knowledge of how he sees me and loves me transforms my life everyday.