Christian Form Group

Diara Black

Christian Form Group  

15 January 2016

        The first thing people always ask me is how do I pronounce my name. My answer is always “it’s like Ciara, but with a D.” I think names are very important because that’s the first thing you really know about a person.

        I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia on a naval base while my mom was still in active duty, so that is always a fun story to tell. My mother raised me and my younger brother Kamal all by herself by the time I was three. When she had my brother, we moved from Atlanta, to Ohio, South Carolina, and now currently Wisconsin. Growing up my mom always took my brother and I to church. By the time I was in middle school, she gave us a choice weather to go or not because she wanted us to follow the lord on our own, not to make us go like she had to when she was growing up. I made the decision to not go to church on Sunday’s, but to go on Wednesday’s because that was when kids my age went and they preached things that were more relevant to us. While growing up I had a best friend Jeremiah. He was one of the first people I met when I moved to South Carolina at a young age. In eighth grade after one of our track meets he ended up passing away by a driver under the influence. I really don’t like talking about it, but it’s made me who I am today.

        When this tragic event happened it made me really question God for the first time in my life. I wondered why god would let something so horrible happen to someone so close and important in my life. I lost my faith for a really long time. Luckily, I was able to express myself in drawing and writing. My mother ended up moving to a different location so that I could start high school in a fresh location. It worked for a little while. I remember walking in to register for freshmen year and I met Laken and Ashlynn. They were two years older than me, and they invited my mom and I to this church called New Spring out of the blue. The first day we went Pastor Perry was talking about how to grief with loss and how god always has a plan for us. I was the perfect message I needed to hear. After that I volunteered with the kids church they had there, and was even a group leader at this event called Gauntlet. It’s when anyone who wants to find the lord goes down to Daytona Beach for two weeks, and can get baptized in the ocean at the end of the two weeks if they want to. Three people who’ve never went to church in my group were baptized that evening. That was the first time I had felt God’s presence.

        By junior year I was in Madison Wisconsin; a whole new state that I was not happy to be in. While we were there it was hard to find a church and I met the wrong group of people because I wanted to fit in with my new school. It wasn’t anything too bad, just a lot of going out to parties. I lost myself and I lost my focus. Towards the end of my junior year I went to this rotary event that the dean thought I might like. It was about issues that are happening in society today. To make a long story short, by the end of this event they wanted us to think about something in the world that was really bothering us. What myself and other people at my school all agreed on was social justice issues specifically in Madison. So we started our own social justice group call Student Voice Union. It started small and bloomed into talking for big events around Madison and leading peaceful protest about anything that was bothering the student bodies in any school. We were the voice for the voiceless.