Still Called: Learning To Trust The Author

Long before I understood what a vocation was, or had the language to describe a calling, I knew what I wanted to be.

As early as the second grade, teaching had already taken root in my imagination. When I came home from school each afternoon, I would play school myself, gathering together whatever I could find to recreate the classroom. I would line up papers, explain lessons, and repeat everything I had learned that day, often to my grandmother—who, to this day, remains my favorite student. Those moments were simple and ordinary, but they were also deeply formative. They were the first spaces where I learned that teaching was not just about information, but about connection, patience, and the quiet joy of helping someone else understand.

What felt like play at the time was already shaping me. Even then, I was learning how to explain ideas clearly, how to slow down for another person, and how to find meaning in guiding someone else’s learning. While other childhood dreams came and went, this one stayed. It grew with me rather than fading, becoming clearer and more defined as the years passed.

That sense of calling ordered my life in ways I did not fully recognize until much later. It influenced my decisions, the goals I set, and the discipline with which I pursued education. Teaching was never merely a profession I admired from a distance; it was the work I believed I had been created to do. I moved toward it with intention and trust, assuming that faithfulness and effort would naturally lead to fulfillment, and that the story God was writing with my life would follow a path that made sense.

For a season, it did. For a moment; I was on top of the world. 

I was given the opportunity to teach for two years, stepping fully into the role I had imagined since childhood. I found joy in the classroom and meaning in the daily rhythms of teaching. Lesson after lesson, conversation after conversation, I felt anchored in purpose. Teaching gave shape to my days and coherence to my sense of self. It felt like alignment—the kind that reassures you that the long road was worth walking.

Then, without warning, everything changed.

What followed was a season I never could have anticipated and certainly never would have chosen. Through unprecedented circumstances that I will never be able to adequately understand, my path in education was abruptly interrupted. Doors closed quickly and decisively. So called friends filed out one by one. Family members walked away. Spiritual examples kept their distance. Lies unfolded, rumors ran ramped. My reputation was being demolished one lie at the time. The identity I had spent a lifetime forming was shaken, and the future that once felt predictable became unavailable almost overnight. The story I thought I understood no longer made sense, and the life I had built around a calling suddenly felt as though it had been taken from me. 

That season carried a weight that is difficult to fully describe. Depression settled in slowly but firmly, not as a single moment but as a daily presence. Fear and uncertainty became constant companions. I found myself pulled away from community, not always intentionally, but by the isolating nature of grief, fear, and exhaustion. Trust was demolished. Relationships felt strained, and the spaces that once felt life-giving became reminders of what I had lost. Day after day, I lived in a perpetual state of mental paralysis and brokenness. This was the very definition of living with a broken heart and a crushed dream from my perspective. 

My marriage bore the weight of that strain. My wife, who remains my number one fan, watched the strongest person she knew start to unravel thread by thread. Financial pressure pressed in from every side as we struggled simply to make things work. It took everything we had to allow the truth to prevail, even if it took what felt like a hundred years for it to happen. I missed my children’s events—moments and milestones that never return. Baseball games, school honors day, graduation. Days blurred together, and progress was measured not in achievements but in endurance. Many mornings, it was all I could do to make it through the day. Some days, getting out of bed felt impossible. Some days, the desire to keep going at all felt frighteningly thin. I couldn’t hear God’s voice. I didn’t play piano or lead worship for a year. I was in the middle of my masters degree the first time when everything unraveled, and I was forced to walk away with only 2 classes remaining. It wasn’t fair. Nothing about it was fair at all. I wanted to give up on everything. 

And yet, somehow, something in me held on.

Not with confidence or clarity, but with a quiet, stubborn persistence. I couldn’t hear God. I thought I prayed non stop but in reality it had turned into a desperate scream. I didn’t smile, and even worse, I was fine if others didn’t either. But there was this quiet momentum that was nearly unrecognizable in the moments, but it kept me. I could not always articulate hope, but I clung to it anyway. In the darkest moments, when faith felt fragile and prayer felt unanswered, I held onto the belief that God was still present, even when I could not feel Him and even when I could not understand what He was doing. And sometimes even guaranteeing him that He had most certainly forgotten about me. 

During that season, I learned something I could not have learned any other way: God’s sovereignty is not disrupted by detours, delays, or even injustice. I can write that again by just saying I learned of God’s sovereignty, and that alone is enough to sustain us in every season. 

I endured two week long and costly trials during these years, and by God’s grace, truth prevailed. What was intended to harm did not have the authority to define the final outcome of my story. Restoration did not come quickly, and it did not come easily, but it came faithfully—step by step, door by door, moment by moment. Forgiveness wasn’t something I just grabbed onto as my first reaction when it was over. I struggled with retaliation. I had to deal with a deep emotional ambush of hate and pain. But at the same time, I started to learn who God really was. And that changed everything for me, for the rest of my life. 

I wrote this as a testimony of God’s ability to write our story even when we don’t see it. God reopened paths I once assumed were permanently closed. He allowed me to return to education, very unexpectedly, and in a setting I genuinely love, surrounded by people who value integrity, growth, and purpose. Those friends who stepped out. They were making room for the ones that needed to step in. More than that, He reignited a calling that had never disappeared, only waited. Today, I find myself once again pursuing the long-held dream of becoming a college professor, shaped now not by certainty, but by humility, resilience, and a deeper understanding of grace.

In this journey, I just completed my Master’s degree—a milestone that carries far more meaning than academic accomplishment alone. There was a time when I did not even know whether I would be allowed back into a teaching environment, much less reach this point. This season stands as a quiet testimony to the faithfulness of God, even when the path toward fulfillment looks nothing like what was originally imagined.

Romans 8:28 became my anthem. It has taken on new depth through lived experience:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.”

This verse does not claim that every circumstance is good, nor does it minimize the pain of loss, confusion, or suffering. Instead, it affirms that God is actively at work within every part of the story, including the chapters we would rather skip. His purposes are not undone by hardship, and His calling is not erased by seasons of silence.

If you find yourself reading this while living in a chapter that feels unexpected, unfair, or unresolved, I hope you hear this not as a platitude, but as an invitation to endure. Trusting God’s plan does not require understanding every detail of it. Often, faith looks less like confidence and more like persistence—continuing forward even when clarity feels distant and hope feels fragile.

The story may not be unfolding the way you thought it would, but that does not mean it has been abandoned. Sometimes the most meaningful restoration comes only after everything familiar has been stripped away, making room for something deeper, truer, and more aligned with God’s purpose than what we first imagined.

The story I once envisioned did not arrive the way I expected.

But by God’s grace, it is still being written—and I am learning, slowly and faithfully, to trust the Author with every chapter.

Oh, and that time I had to watch my child walk across the stage for high school graduation virtually, from my house, while my family once again endured my forced absence? This next one will have both of us walking across the stage together, because God’s pen can write things we never once could have imagined, they usually read something like “yes & amen.”