The Neggle In Life: The Struggle Of Life

As a young child, I had always believed that things, which I thought were drawbacks in life, could never become an advantage. However, as Helen Keller once said “The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings. It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike. It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.", through the times spent in a public Turkish school during my seventh and eighth-grade years, I was able to understand that sacrifices were crucial for my spiritual growth.
During the days of my sixth-grade summer, thoughts of displeasure and insecurity kept on appearing in my mind. Frankly, I did not want to attend a Turkish public school and separate from the international community which

Of course, school days weren’t all filled with miserable times. There were definitely joyful times, but those times weren’t enough to cover the negatives. As I expected, for the first few days, I was kept on asked by teachers with uncomfortable questions such as what my parents did for a living or why my family had come to Turkey. I was ridiculed for being the only Christian in the environment. I was mocked several times for not being the stereotypical Korean pro-gamer which all boys had dreamed of, and I was looked down upon due to my lack of academics and athleticism. Classes were full of students cheating in exams using various methods. Curses and outbreaks of violence were everywhere, and even the teachers were very harsh to students. By the first month, I had gotten several F’s on homework, quizzes, and tests. And by few months into school, I had seen and experienced all sorts of dreadful events. For an example, once my friend, Ahmet, got into a fist-fight, and a student from another class punched him in the face, shattering his glasses into pieces which slit through his eye, pouring out blood from under his eye onto his face. Ambulances and police officers appearing once in a while in school became a normal thing to expect. By that time, I was truly convinced by my thoughts of melancholy and was entrenched in anxiety. I believed that the rest of my few hundred days in

I got used to the classes which were filled with swears and I got used the daily fights that occurred in classes. As days, weeks and months passed by I started to have fun in classes and improved my Turkish, grades, and relationships with friends. The grade point average which had been in the sixties and seventies went up slowly to eighties and nineties. More importantly, I started hanging out with my Turkish fellows, often times going to Taurus to watch movies. Friends began to respect and accept my beliefs. Additionally, they started to ask me questions about Christianity. Through the help of the Holy Spirit, I was able to share the gospel with my friends and be a light in the darkness. By the end of my eighth-grade year, I had overcome a great impediment in my