Jason’s Story

 My Story – Spring 2025

Jason Falck

I think it’s a fair assumption to say that even though we just met, there are two things we have in common. 1. We both want to be happy. 2. We both have learned more from our failures than many of our successes.

Would you agree?

One way to find joy is to discover a unique talent or skill that sets us apart and gives us a sense of purpose. For some people, it’s their athletic ability. For others it may be their artistic gifts. For many, that sense of joy comes from making one other special person very happy.

For the first two decades of my life, that sense of identity came from my academic performance. Whether or not that was you, I think you can understand a kid who liked acing his tests and being at the top of his class. But there was definitely a twisted joy that came, not only from reaching my potential, but from doing better than the others.

To summarize, I got straight A’s all the way through my second year of college. Then I had the chance to go on a study abroad trip to Oxford for one month. The program required me to write a paper each week and read it aloud, one-on-one, to a tutor—an expert in the subject. It was nerve-wracking. In our first meeting, after I read my half-finished paper, the tutor told me that the average professor would have ripped up my first two pages. That sums up what happened to my self-image that month. I wasn’t devastated. But I was humbled and as I struggled to improve my performance, I grew to really dislike the stress and worry and the unhappiness with myself I was dealing with.

One night, I started wondering about lasting joy. Where could I find it? Was it in money? Romance? Friendships? Everything seemed temporary—everything could be lost.

Now I had been a Christian since childhood. I believed in a holy God and in the afterlife. I knew that I could never be good enough to earn my way to heaven. I had done much to be selfish, proud, lustful, fearful, anxious, conceited, and so on. I needed to be forgiven, and Jesus offered that. He was God in the flesh, who never sinned, but died on the cross as a substitute, to take my sins on him, pay the penalty, which was death, and be raised from the dead. He was already a huge source of my identity, providing hope and purpose. But not enough.

That night, I realized that the only source of joy that was secure was knowing that God was my heavenly Father, and that I could enjoy that relationship of love and security, even in the midst of failure and disappointment. I stopped nourishing this idea of myself as “Jason the smart, straight A student” and accepted my given identity as “Jason, the child of God.”

A verse from the New Testament says that “Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” If you let that truth sink in, it can change your life.

From that moment on, I worried less and found a deeper joy in my relationship with God—not just as a duty, but as a delight.

So how about you? Have you found a source of joy that is secure? Has God ever seemed like the answer to that deep longing for happiness that we all have?