Josiah//Testimony

MY ROCK

MY MANS JOSIAH. i’ve had the honor of getting to know josiah for the last 2-ish years, and man I could write a novel about this kid. He’s (only) 19 years old and currently the communications associate at good news...i’m just blown away at that. he is constantly challenging me and my creativity, and calling me to higher and better without even knowing it. I love that wisdom and guidance, discipleship even, doesn’t have to always come from someone older that us. this 19 year old kid has taught me so much, and shown me sides of our father that I had never known on my own. his willingness to just be a vessel for god has been cool to watch.

“Growing up in the church, “religion” was always a part of my life. I can’t remember a Sunday where I didn’t go to church as a kid. It was really easy for me to accept that God was there, but he just was there.” from such a young age I feel like josiah was walking hand in hand with God. we like to joke that he was basically born at the altar of good news and just never left. and now, every day I see him take a step further into the will of the father for him.

But it wasn’t always that simple. “Being a kid in church, you can grow to be really comfortable and lose all mystery in spirituality. God didn’t really hold a transformative place in my life, because I saw no area that needed transformed. It wasn’t that I hadn’t experienced God, it was that I really hadn’t had an opportunity to experience life without Him.”

you hear it all the time—when you give your life to jesus, it doesn’t automatically mean that we are shielded from trials and hardships, actually, if anything, you’ll probably experience them more. but this partnership ensures us that we will never be alone in them.

“When I was in high school, life became stressful and I started experiencing (undiagnosed) anxiety.” He explained it as something that would almost torment him. thoughts he would have never even imagined would enter his mind. it was a dark place, and unexplainable place. a place where it felt like god was only a whisper and the surrounding noise was causing him to drown. it was hard. it was scary. but “It was the darkness of this time that revealed the light of Jesus. Experiencing the difference between the two, it became clear to me that I could not live apart from Jesus, nor did I want to.”

Matthew 7:7 says “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” he asked, sought, and knocked, and god met him in the darkness. god met him in the hard and scary place, because that’s who our god is. He won’t let us drown, he won’t let us stay there, because his love is too good to do that.

“I have experienced a more beautiful way to live that I could never give up.” he’s my rock. he’s a god who saves, he’s a god who hears, and a god who heals. and he calls me his own.