A Reflection on The Last Eight Years

“Yet not I, but through CHRIST in me”

I got this Facebook memory as I was getting ready for the first day of class in Year 2 of my doctoral program. Eight years ago today, Krystina Lynn Graf, Johnny Graf, Faith Ihrig, and I loaded up mom’s Honda Odyssey to drive to Baltimore, MD for my first semester at Johns Hopkins where I wanted to major in Neuroscience and eventually go to medical school. Faith and I had been dating for only two months and made the decision to make long-distance work. Six months later we would get engaged, and the distance would become even more difficult. My best friends Blake Simpson and Luke Ihrig were back in Tennessee, and I seldom got to see them. Little did we know what the future would hold. I expected to spend four years in Baltimore, but God changes plans and thank him for it!

I struggled greatly at Hopkins. As a high-performing student in high school, particularly one that came from much adversity, with a parent with severe, untreated mental health and substance use disorders who eventually abandoned his family, leaving my sweet mom to do the absolute best she could for us and prepare us for our futures, I felt superior and had a chip on my shoulder. God used my time at Hopkins to humble me and knock me off that high horse. I quickly realized that not only were my peers quite often much smarter, so many of them had achieved much greater accomplishments. It made me question my own place at that school and who I was to deserve to be there.

I felt isolated and alone, missing the comforts of East Tennessee, the love of my life, my family, and best friends. I struggled with anxiety and depression that went untreated. Motivation was hard to come by. I appreciate the friends I had at Hopkins, and probably would have been even worse off mentally and emotionally without the connections I had.

Towards the end of my sophomore year, and I finally found the courage (or was desperate enough) to admit to myself that I was drowning and that my journey at my longtime dream school needed to come to an end. I told Faith, my mother, and my public health major advisor all in the same day and started transfer applications for schools back home – the beginning of the end of a low point in my life. 

Fast forward to the present.

• Six years of marriage to my best friend in the entire world
• Ordination as a deacon
• Two bachelor’s degrees
• Two master’s degrees, with a doctorate underway
• Teaching undergraduate courses for my graduate assistantship
• Faith’s journey from public school to private Christian school to early intervention with the university and back to public school
• Faith presenting her thesis at a conference in Hawaii
• Mission trip to Jamaica
• Two years serving as a youth pastor, my recent ordination as a minister, and administering the ordinance of baptism for the first time
• Two Liberty Celebrations
• Our sweet kitties Stella, Loki, and Amajiki
• Far too many other blessings to count

Not to say that there hasn’t been tribulation as well since then. We’ve faced job loss, financial burdens, chronic health conditions, a global pandemic, the loss of loved ones, LONG grad school nights, and most recently our difficult journey through fertility and trying to expand our family. 

I say all of that to make a point - God’s mercies are new EVERY morning, and he can take you from your lowest of lows to the plans he has ordained for you from before the foundation of the world. Through each trial and tribulation, there was Jesus – Every. Single. Step. Of the way. He could take away every great thing I’ve mentioned, and He’d still be good, still be Holy. It is HIS death and resurrection I rejoice in, and the future hope of our own resurrection unto glory. If you need hope today, you can find it in Jesus Christ. There’s no valley too low for Him.

“I will not boast in anything. No gifts, no power, no wisdom. But I will boast in Jesus Christ – His death and resurrection.” – How Deep the Father’s Love for Us