Nathaniel Gibson, age 17

Varney, WV

One of the biggest things that's ever happened to me is when I got saved and met God and it changed my life... That was when I was nine years old. It was an experience like I've never felt before. It was like the Bible says it was... full of glory. And it's not something that you can really explain, it's just something down inside that you can feel and it's something that you know is real... Before I went to Church I could feel the conviction. I could feel God knockin' on my heart's door. And when I went to Church I knowed what it took to be saved and I knowed what I had to do.

I attend The Church of God. They believe in being born again, being saved, being sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost. With evidence, with speaking in tongues. I started speaking in tongues about a year after I got saved, when I was about ten... You're aware of it, but it's not something that you really can control. You could stop it but you wouldn't want to, it's such a good feeling you wouldn't want to stop it. Some people calls our church Holy Roller, because we shout a lot.

I don't find very much hard about being a teen except there's just a lot of decisions you have to make about what's gonna happen in the future... like your career decisions and your school decisions and decisions that are gonna affect the rest of your life...I started preaching when I was thirteen years old... I would like to have my own church someday... that's part of who I am.

I don't really know anything that really bothers me about myself because I stand the way God made me and that's about it... I really wouldn't want to be nobody else.