Joshua’s Story

Growing up, my life revolved around Church, my family, school, hockey, and my friends and these five elements have always driven me to succeed. My family and friends have always pushed me to do my best and picked me up when I was down. However, during my senior year, some of my friends stopped picking me up and started putting me down a lot.

During my senior year, I made the varsity hockey team but I almost never played. Along with that, some of my close friends started making poor decisions against my values, leaving me feeling like the odd man out. During all of this I knew Christ was with me, but I just didn’t know where. As the year went on, I was continually excluded from different events and treated poorly by some friends. This made me feel bad, but at the same time I knew I was doing the right thing by not giving in to peer pressure to make poor decisions and go against my values. The frustrating part was being limited to my family, friends who still cared about me, and God to turn and talk to. To me it seemed like nobody else cared about me or what I did.

By the time school ended I was ready graduate, and go to college where I would make new friends and start preparing for my future. However, I had to wait until August (when school started). During the summer, I was busy working full- time on the grounds crew at a golf course, umpiring baseball games during the evenings, and coaching softball on the side. Through all of this, I realized that God was simply showing me that I didn’t need praise from my peers, because the people who really care about me will always show it.

Once in school at NDSU, I started to pray more for God to come into my life and to lead me where he felt I should go. Once I started doing this, I felt better about myself and my past decisions. It did not take long for me to realize that God put me through my senior year to teach me that I can get through anything he puts before me. I also believe that my senior year made me stronger and built up my character immensely.

Seeing what God had done for me made me look back at my Bible verse that I picked back in my sophomore year. My selection was Psalm 18:28 which reads, “It is you who light my lamp; the Lord, my God lights up my darkness.” When I read this verse for the first time, I immediately thought of hockey because another term for scoring a goal is “lighting the lamp.” By thinking about the verse in terms of hockey lingo, it would read “It is You who scores my goals; the Lord, my God lights up my darkness.” To me, this means that God is behind all of our successes and He is there helping us during our struggles. At the time when I chose my verse, I had had lots of good times or “lit the lamp a lot” and hadn’t really had much darkness. But when my darkness came as a senior, God came in and lit the way for me through my family and by leading me to college at NDSU.