YouTube Sensation Aims to Impacts Lives

FROM BEAUTY TO ETERNITY
As a young girl, 13-year-old Chelsea was bored and decided to make her first YouTube video. Little did she know that would lead to over 2.5 million social media fans (1.5 million on her YouTube channel alone). After Chelsea’s relationship with God deepened, so did the focus of her online posts. Chelsea explains, “YouTube was a thing that I started out of fun and God turned it into something totally different and something I would have never imagined” (From YouTube “My Testimony”). Chelsea has always focused on giving teens and college age girls beauty and fashion advice but now her focus is on helping others to find their true identity in Christ. “…Even though I hadn’t always recognized God’s presence in my life, He has been guiding me all along. The more I release my grip on my own plans, the more I discover what it truly means to be beautiful, and reflect His beauty to others” (Crockett, 2017). Fast forward over 7 years later and Chelsea has written her first book entitled, “Your Own Beautiful” (Zondervan, 2017) which hits the market on October 24th. In her book, Chelsea covers some of the following topics:

1. God’s view of me > the worlds view of me
2. 3 ways to spread positivity online
3. 5 ways to develop a real relationship with God
4. Girl to girl talk: God’s call for purity
5. 3 habits that make you a bad friend
6. Real talk with Chelsea: How I keep perspective with millions of followers
7. 7 essential steps to raising confident girls (retrieved from Chelsea’s personal fact sheet)

TRAILS ALONG THE WAY
Chelsea gave her life to Christ when she was ten-years-old sitting in the bath tub. “…the realization that I needed Jesus to forgive my sins and come into my life just clicked in my young brain. I told my mom, ‘I think I want to give my life to God’” (Crockett, 2017, p,. 40-41). It wasn’t until Chelsea was a Freshmen in high school that she realized what that meant. “I quickly realized that I needed to align all of my decisions with Him; I couldn’t just pick and choose when to be a Christian. I had to give him every area of my life.” (Crockett, 2017, p. 45). A key component of her journey was the struggles she faced to get to where she is now. Dealing with haters and having her own identity crisis, when she left for college, played a key role in Chelsea’s relationship with God and her fans.

“I don’t know how to describe what happened next, but it was like I was skiing and hit a tree… I sensed something was really wrong…” (Crockett, 2017, p. 147).

Chelsea would later be diagnosed with depression and anxiety. She left school heartbroken and went home hoping that her problems would just go away. They didn’t.  It took time but Chelsea came through her trial even stronger.

“That decision to let God take over had a larger effect. Whenever I saw the struggles my fans were going through, I now felt a strong desire to help them with more than their makeup—I wanted to offer people the same hope and help I was finding through my faith” (Crockett, 2017, p. 23).

Now, Chelsea still focuses on what she loves—life advice, beauty and fashion—but instead of pointing people to herself, she points them to Christ.