“You were never meant to do this alone.”
Joel tells me about joining the Army with a bewildered shake of his head. "It wasn't something I had planned to do," he says. Six months after getting saved by Christ at Young Life camp, the eighteen-year-old who'd just learned to follow Jesus found himself enlisting. "The more I prayed about it, the more I felt like the Holy Spirit wanted me there."
He had no idea how much he would need God in what was coming.
Joel grew up in what looked like a stable Christian home—parents who'd both been re-evangelized through Young Life camps, regular church attendance at First Presbyterian in Spokane. But during his teenage years, the foundation cracked. His parents' marriage struggled. Siblings were struggling. The family drifted from the church. Joel, a good student and decent athlete, became an expert at managing appearances while his interior life crumbled in hiddenness, loneliness, and sin management. His scientific, skeptical mind couldn’t accept the resurrection of Christ, and his fear of being found out as a needy, broken, sin-seeking young man prevented him from wanting to be in the presence of a Holy God. That mental block and a deep misunderstanding of God's goodness toward sinners soured into a silent rebellion.
"I was addicted to self-preservation," he admits. "Highlighting successes, hiding failures. Nobody really knew me."
Meanwhile, his younger sister Kelsey was praying for him. She knew he was not only running from God, but he was hurting. She convinced a Young Life leader to invite Joel to camp. "If I can find $500 by tomorrow (which Peter already secured from a generous donor), will you commit to coming?" Joel encountered the gospel in a way that shattered his carefully managed facade. He knew that he had seared his heart so badly that it was like unresponsive charcoal that could hardly hear God, let alone respond. The message about Christ giving us a new heart broke him completely. It was the only thing that made sense. He must be born again! "I ugly-cried and had to leave the room," he remembers. His Young Life leader, Peter Voorhees, followed him out and led him to Christ.
Six months later, newly converted and still figuring out how to follow Jesus, Joel found himself at basic training. And everything he'd relied on—his intelligence, his ability to manage his image, his capacity to succeed—meant nothing.
"Basic training challenged everything," Joel says. "Being someone who loved God and valued people, who was unwilling to put someone down or diminish their dignity—that was hard. And I was inconsistent at best. I didn't know how to use the new heart God had given me."
The young man who'd always been able to perform his way through life suddenly couldn't. The achiever who managed his reputation was stripped of all control.
"Those years taught me desperate dependence on Jesus," Joel says, with an emphasis on the word “desperate.”
Then came Iraq.
Joel's voice changes when he talks about combat. "I have never felt so scared… and at the same time so held, so convicted that Jesus changes the world, and only he can heal us all and reconcile us to God." The juxtaposition is telling—terror and divine embrace happening simultaneously.
In Iraq, Joel saw things that would break anyone trying to rely on their own strength. Neighborhoods and families were destroyed. Friends died in combat. Others came home and took their own lives. The darkness was overwhelming. But it was precisely in that darkness that Joel discovered something crucial: the gospel of Jesus Christ changes everything.
Only Christ's power heals completely. Not military might. Not political parties. Not his own power.
"I witnessed the gospel speaking across every boundary—to Muslims, Kurds, Arabs, Hindus," he recalls. "Jesus translates God's love across all divisions." In a war zone where human efforts at peace were failing spectacularly, Joel watched the gospel do what nothing else could.
The Army gave him brothers who understood—Mark Waite Jr., Steven Froberg, Zac Yost, Brian Tung. "My most trusted and long-suffering friends," he calls them. These weren't just military buddies; they were men who'd learned the same lesson Joel had: you can't do this alone.
Coming home presented new challenges. Joel brought combat trauma back with him—loss of innocence, survivor's guilt, the weight of what he'd seen and done. His wife Kanani, his best friend since seventeen, grieved with him at the loss of innocence in combat and the loss of friends through combat, suicide, and later, cancer. Yet, even more challenging were the addictions that threatened to destroy his family. The old patterns from before Christ—numbing out, hiding, self-medicating—resurfaced with military-grade intensity. In the middle of these things, God preserved and renewed him.
"My sin often triggers her wounds and vice versa, but God has been gracious to us,” Joel admits about his marriage. "What once felt like grinding gears out of sync, now moves more like synchronized cogs—his grace working through our friendship, and because of our dynamic differences."
Looking back, he says he can see how God used the Army—that unwanted calling he followed in obedience—to strip away every false foundation. The good student couldn't think his way through combat. The image manager couldn't hide his trauma. The self-sufficient achiever learned what it meant to desperately need a merciful Savior. The scientific mind that once struggled with resurrection now knows it intimately—he's experienced his own. The heart of stone became flesh. The soldier who went to war thinking he was strong came home knowing his only strength was Christ.
"I cannot imagine any other way of living," he says simply.
Sometimes God's severe mercy looks like sending you exactly where you don't want to go, to teach you what you desperately need to know: you were never meant to do this alone.