WJI Blog 2022, May 24 PM - The Threshold From Survivng to Thriving

Do you know what’s an amazing feeling? Being pushed past your limits and not only surviving but thriving. I can speak from experience— you feel like Superman. Or maybe Clark Kent would be a better example in this case. Either way, being given way more than I think I can handle and then handling it feels great.

Okay, I do need to be fair here; if WJI was making me do US Marine training that might be a more accurate description of “pushing me past my limits”. I am person who loves to write. I am at a journalism course. It’s my element. But, if someone told me to write an eight-hundred-and-fifty-word-piece trying to sum up an incredible person’s story in one hour, before yesterday I would have flatly said it wasn’t possible. Turns out, it is.

I came into WJI expecting to be pushed and the fact that I’m being pushed is no surprise. But expecting something to be a lot more intense than I’m used to and actually going through that are two different things.

And, really, that’s the point.

It’s our third full class day and I already significantly more confident in my ability to perform under pressure. It’s a simple equation: when someone expects you to do something with the true belief that you can do it— you find a way to do it. It takes a lot of prayer, panic, and sympathetic shoulders to cry on for the thirteen spare seconds that I don’t have before I need to get writing— but it does get done.

But expectations are only part of it; beyond expectation there’s God. That may be what stuck with me most today— how clinging to God can get me through what I can’t get through myself.

See, yesterday I felt like Superman, today I felt more like Superman’s little brother (if the Kents had a biological child without superpowers). It’s discouraging to have an ‘off’ day, particularly when everyone around you feels like a journalism Superman (or Clark Kent). I’d take yesterday’s stress over today’s discouragement any day. But the humblest moments—when I don’t feel like Superman, are when God does the most.

The WJI instructors have many lessons to teach me these next eleven days and so does God. I pray I’m open to learning all of them.

- Koryn Koch