Meet Chris Yust
Meet Chris Yust
Life is full of ironies. The further I have come, the more I realize how much I have yet to go. The more that I learned, the more I have recognized that I don’t know. The Bible is full of them too. The last shall be first, the weak shall be strong, the unlovable shall be loved by the King of the universe.
That used to drive me crazy, and if I’m honest, occasionally still does. I like to make plans, be self-reliant, in short, be in control of my life. And absent those things, I’m prone to stress and anxiety. You can guess how much I have loved the world of COVID-19! However, God has been using this time to reinforce the lesson that, due to my stubbornness, He has been having to teach me over the past couple decades: I’m not in control – He is.
In fact, looking back, it is apparent that the best decisions that I have made are those that I had not planned to or took me far outside of my comfort zone. I can see it going way back to my senior year of high school when my guidance counselor told me to take an accounting class, which I didn't even know my school offered, only to realize I had a gift for the subject. Thus, despite previously having no knowledge of or interest in the material, I would subsequently make it my college major and choose to be an accountant for my profession. I can see it when I decided I needed to really make my faith my own during my freshman year of college—to know what I believed and why I believed it. This ultimately led to my leaving the Christian denomination that I had grown up in, much to my family’s ire.
I can look back at God’s intervention my senior year of college when a traffic jam led me to arriving late to a class, one of the few times that happened in my entire college experience, which resulted in me having to sit in a different place away from my friends and next to the amazing woman that would ultimately become my best friend and now wife of 14 years. I can see His hand in a unique job opportunity that I took after college, which required my wife and I to move 2,000 miles away from anyone we knew, just two weeks after we got married. It ended up being a transformative experience. I can see it when I felt convicted to then leave the fast track that my career was on a few years later to go back to college to get my doctorate to become a professor. I can see it in the fact that He allowed me to prosper back at school, despite both my wife and I experiencing various health issues and having our beloved daughter. And finally, I can see it in the fact that He led me full circle back to my alma mater upon my graduation, where so much of my life seemed to begin.
Those are just some of the things that He has guided my family and I through, and there are millions more. While right now I don’t know the reasons for everything that I have gone through, more and more I realize that there was a purpose behind them for His good as He promises in Romans 8:28. Because as much as I like to be a planner, God all along has been making one for me too, and His plan is far better. And the more that my wife and I allow ourselves to trust in His promises throughout scripture, the more we have realized that our futures are both more unknowable and unpredictable, and yet more amazing than we would have ever dared to dream. So, in these crazy times which we now reside, we really have no idea what our future holds… and that’s okay.
That used to drive me crazy, and if I’m honest, occasionally still does. I like to make plans, be self-reliant, in short, be in control of my life. And absent those things, I’m prone to stress and anxiety. You can guess how much I have loved the world of COVID-19! However, God has been using this time to reinforce the lesson that, due to my stubbornness, He has been having to teach me over the past couple decades: I’m not in control – He is.
In fact, looking back, it is apparent that the best decisions that I have made are those that I had not planned to or took me far outside of my comfort zone. I can see it going way back to my senior year of high school when my guidance counselor told me to take an accounting class, which I didn't even know my school offered, only to realize I had a gift for the subject. Thus, despite previously having no knowledge of or interest in the material, I would subsequently make it my college major and choose to be an accountant for my profession. I can see it when I decided I needed to really make my faith my own during my freshman year of college—to know what I believed and why I believed it. This ultimately led to my leaving the Christian denomination that I had grown up in, much to my family’s ire.
I can look back at God’s intervention my senior year of college when a traffic jam led me to arriving late to a class, one of the few times that happened in my entire college experience, which resulted in me having to sit in a different place away from my friends and next to the amazing woman that would ultimately become my best friend and now wife of 14 years. I can see His hand in a unique job opportunity that I took after college, which required my wife and I to move 2,000 miles away from anyone we knew, just two weeks after we got married. It ended up being a transformative experience. I can see it when I felt convicted to then leave the fast track that my career was on a few years later to go back to college to get my doctorate to become a professor. I can see it in the fact that He allowed me to prosper back at school, despite both my wife and I experiencing various health issues and having our beloved daughter. And finally, I can see it in the fact that He led me full circle back to my alma mater upon my graduation, where so much of my life seemed to begin.
Those are just some of the things that He has guided my family and I through, and there are millions more. While right now I don’t know the reasons for everything that I have gone through, more and more I realize that there was a purpose behind them for His good as He promises in Romans 8:28. Because as much as I like to be a planner, God all along has been making one for me too, and His plan is far better. And the more that my wife and I allow ourselves to trust in His promises throughout scripture, the more we have realized that our futures are both more unknowable and unpredictable, and yet more amazing than we would have ever dared to dream. So, in these crazy times which we now reside, we really have no idea what our future holds… and that’s okay.
Posted in Faces of Faith