By Clare BruceThursday 9 Apr 2020WeekendsFaithReading Time: 3 minutes
For Hope 103.2 Weekends presenter Georgia Free, religion was in her blood. Born into a Catholic family, she was baptised as a baby, went to Catholic school, and grew up attending Mass every Sunday.
But deep inside, something was missing.
“Everything that a Catholic girl was supposed to do, I did – but I never felt close to God,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I had a relationship with Him. That was something that really plagued me through my childhood and my life. It’s something that really worried me.”
She wanted to have the kind of faith and love for God that she saw in her parents and friends, but didn’t know how to find it, and as a young adult, began drifting away from the church.
“I’d go to Mass, people would ask ‘Hey Georgia, how was church?’ and I would say, ‘Yeah, it was great! I learnt so much, the message was fantastic, it really had an impact’… I was able to hide the fact that I wasn’t a believer – very well.
“When people asked me if I went to church, I would say that I was ‘in between churches’ – which was technically true, but it was a stretch of the truth, definitely.”
When God Steps In
Things started to change when a workmate invited her to his church, and it was different to everything she’d experienced before. The music and messages began to connect with her heart, and the people seemed very open and real.
“All my walls were up, and I was not expecting to like it,” she said. “But it was amazing. Through their authenticity, it felt like I was allowed to be myself.”
Slowly, those ‘walls’ in Georgia’s heart began coming down, and it was some months later, at a Rend Collective concert, that she truly let God in.
“Halfway through the concert, the band left the stage and Gareth, the drummer, came back on and started telling the story of the prodigal son [from the Bible],” Georgia recalls. “The prodigal son story has been popping up in a lot of places in my life recently. At church, at work, and in conversations with family and friends.
“And that was the moment that I finally let God into my life… I just broke down. It was a really, really emotional moment.”
“He told it in such an easy-to-understand way, there were no assumptions, and you could understand the story without ever having heard it before. It felt like I was hearing it properly for the first time and that I was truly understanding it. I felt everything so clearly in that moment.
“I felt like God was saying to me, ‘How much more proof do you need? Stop running from me, I’m right here, just let go and run to me. Stop pushing me away’.
“And that was the moment that I finally let God into my life… I just broke down. It was a really, really emotional moment.”
Since that day, Georgia says she has felt a huge burden lifted.
“It’s as if all the stress in my life has finally dissipated and I’ve felt this sense of calm, and this sense of peace now. And I know that that’s Jesus.”