Justin the Word Blog

Hello, my name is Justin Miller. I was born with a disability known as cerebral palsy. I was stuck during birth for over twelve hours, which resulted in being born with this condition. The doctors told my dad that I might not make it outside of the delivery room and that, if I did, I would be in a vegetative state. However, God had different intentions for my life. Through therapy and other treatments, the Lord provided for me, and I am happy to say that I can walk, eat, get dressed, shower, and use the bathroom on my own.

Growing up, my parents didn’t really take me to church and never really spoke about Jesus. The only spiritual things I heard about were angels, and to be honest, I never really understood what they were talking about. All I knew was that they were good and protected me. At about twelve years old, I was at my uncle’s spending time with my cousins and not wanting to leave. I had asked if I was able to stay the night to continue having fun with my cousins. My uncle agreed to let me stay with the condition that I had to go to church with them before I went home. Not knowing what church was, I agreed to go. I had no clue that going to church with my uncle would change the trajectory of my life forever. After that first Sunday, I enjoyed it so much that I started attending church with my uncle and cousins every single week.

When I was growing up, I struggled with the FCAT, Florida’s standardized test. I would get good grades all throughout the school year yet fail the FCAT at the end. Failing the test usually meant that I would have to repeat the grade. By fifth grade, the school staff was planning to hold me back again, which prompted my parents to begin searching for other options.

Through a friend that I played wheelchair baseball with, my parents found a school called Atlantic Inclusive Academy, in which there was a different type of standardized testing used to promote students to the next grade. Little did we know, it was a Bible-based curriculum. Going to church with my uncle prepared me well for my private-middle-school experience; information I learned at school connected with what I was learning with my uncle at Sunday service. However, after attending this academy for a year, its location changed from a mobile home to a local church: First United Methodist Church of Cocoa. After the move, my walk with the Lord truly began.

Once we joined the church, the youth pastor became our PE coach, and his wife joined our school as a teacher. Many of us who were in middle school and up started attending the church’s youth program after getting to know the pastor as our coach first. It was at the second youth group meeting where the gospel became clear to me, and I excitedly accepted Christ into my life.

Youth showed me what it meant to be a servant to Christ. As a youth ministry, we served the elders by assisting them with yard work, we served the homeless by supplying food pantries, and we served the rest of the church by providing dinner on Wednesday nights. I have fond memories of being in class and having to stop what I’m doing to help unload the truck for the food pantry and pulling weeds for the elders of the church after school. We did everything together as a unit, and it was amazing.

One day, it felt as if everything came crashing down. We were just about to wrap up another week of classes when all of us discovered that our youth pastor had been let go from church. A week later, his wife had been let go as well. This came as such a shock to me that it honestly felt like the lowest point of my childhood and walk with Christ. After the youth pastor and his wife left First United Methodist Church, the community took a turn for the worse. We no longer had a youth group, which left us lacking in spiritual guidance and mentorship. Additionally, there was a visible shift in my teachers’ behavior—I lacked academic support from school staff, which made my classes much more difficult.

Admittedly, I became angry with God during this time because our youth group had been doing what God called us to do, and yet our group was being ripped apart. Did we do something to deserve this? It didn’t make sense to me at the moment, and it certainly didn’t feel fair. I felt lost with nowhere to turn. School was no longer somewhere I looked forward to going to every day. It became so upsetting that I told my mother how I wanted to never go back. Deciding this wasn’t easy, but I needed a change.

My family enrolled me at a public school. At the start, I honestly didn’t talk to God or go to church because I was still hurt. Six months passed, and I came to the conclusion that I needed to go back to church, re-align myself to God’s will for my life, and reconnect with God as my Heavenly Father. In order to accomplish this, I decided to return to the church that my uncle took me to growing up. This time, though, I wanted to dive in completely and serve the church to the best of my ability like my youth pastor had shown me.

Children’s ministry as a production volunteer is where God placed me to serve at. By this point, I was re-learning how to serve in the church because it was a vastly different experience than I was used to. Essentially, I was responsible for everything the children hear on stage and see on the screen. I fell in love with this role and knew this is where God wanted me to be. Serving there allowed my creativity to flourish, and I worked with a wonderful team in order to give kids a space to experience Christ and pursue a relationship with Him. Continuing in this role deepened my relationship with Him and sparked my journey of becoming a church leader.

Pastor George oversaw the children’s ministry. He played a key role in guiding me to become the servant and man of God I am today. He took me under his wing and showed me what it takes to prepare for a children’s service during the week. Pastor George allowed me to practice a hobby of mine, computer animation, by tasking me with creating animations for the kids’ Sunday morning service. This experience taught me a ton about animation and how to prepare content for a church service. Soon after graduating high school, Pastor George left the church to work real estate with his wife and serve God in that industry. This transition was less traumatic for me because he spoke with me about it months beforehand, and I felt prepared to carry on under whoever was taking over with everything that he taught me.

After Pastor George left, I continued serving in the children’s ministry while I attended college. I had a chaotic college career because I thought God was leading me into the entertainment arts or graphic design industry—I just didn’t know where yet. Not knowing specifically where in the arts God was calling me, I decided to get my Associate of Arts degree at my local community college to help me figure out what I wanted to study. It led me to focus on graphic design for the time being because it was the closest thing to the field I was interested in. After finishing my AA degree, I wanted to study game design and applied to Savannah College of Art and Design. Regrettably, I didn’t consult God before making that decision.

Going to SCAD was a very unique and strenuous experience. Firstly, apart from loans and grants I was receiving from the government, I had to come up with $2,000 per quarter to go to class there. Secondly, my classes were online, which made traditional art classes more challenging because it was very tough to explain my limitations to the art professors over the phone. I even had a professor tell me that I have no business attending an art school online. This crushed me because I received nothing but encouragement from others to continue pursuing this degree in the arts online. I was failing a drawing class, and I was losing the ability to pay for my courses too. It was unclear to me how I should proceed from here.

Not long after, I started an internship at a local IT-managed services provider, and I was fairly interested in the IT industry. My dad discovered that the community college I got my AA degree at had a four-year program for cybersecurity. At the time, I had no idea what cybersecurity was, so I researched it to see if it was worth studying. Upon my investigation, I found that it did interest me, and I could see myself studying to be a professional in this field. However, this caused me to struggle with making the switch because I wanted to finish art school, but also, I could see myself switching to cybersecurity entirely.

I asked my uncle for advice, and we had a conversation that helped me decide how I needed to move forward. He told me something that I would never forget.

“Justin, first take stress out of your vocabulary because God has your back. Secondly, if he is calling you to study cybersecurity, he is going to be with you, and he will give you what you need to get through. However, if he wants you to stay in art school, he will provide the funds for you to get through the program.”

My uncle’s words really impacted me, and the time to make a decision was coming up rather quickly. Naturally, I began to pray and seek the Lord to discover where exactly He wanted me to go. After much prayer, it seemed clear to me that He wanted me to leave art and pursue cybersecurity.

Switching careers turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made. While completing the program, I found friends that had similar interests and were fun to be around. It was incredible to see God work in this area of my life because He gave me something that I had been seeking for quite some time: my very own group of friends.

For several years, my only friends were some teachers that helped me throughout the years, a couple of guys from high school, and friends of family. I never really had my own close-knit group of friends that I got to consistently hang out with outside of the classroom or church, until I got that for the first time in college. Eventually, some of them revealed their faith as Christians and went to church like I did. Having Jesus as a foundation for our friendships brought us even closer together. My new friends and I started going to classes, cybersecurity competitions, and church bible studies together. This was the first group of friends that I could sincerely call my own. Be that as it may, I was believing a lie that I would be rejected from the people I loved if they knew that I struggled with things like jealousy, anger, envy, masturbation, and lack of trust. I was always nervous about confessing my sins to other believers out of fear of rejection and judgement. In spite of that, I began to confess to God and my friends about sins I had been committing since the beginning of my walk with Christ.

After I graduated, I was missing my community and longing for more. I feared that my friends were going to leave forever, and I would be alone again in walking this Christian path. However, God had something way better in store. One of my best friends heard that I was searching for community and told me about a church that had a service just for people in my age group. This group would drastically change my life forever.

Back then, I was leading a similar group at the church I grew up in. One of my best friends was leading it with me because the previous group leader left to go to another church. So now I was co-leading a group at my current church while also attending this other young adult church down the road. Getting more involved at the young adult church and trying to start something at my home church showed me that my heart and attention began to split between the churches, and I wasn’t giving either ministry my best. The pastor of the new church’s young adult ministry was starting to mentor me and shape me into a ministry leader. Again, I was torn as I found myself at another crossroad.

After praying and asking the Lord, I saw how He was calling me to this new church and its young adult ministry. Upon joining the congregation, I regained the community I had been looking for since I graduated college. It was here that I made the closest friends I’ve ever had. In fact, today I am still part of this same community of friends where we are growing in the Lord and doing life together.

Since joining this church, I have been able to confess and work through the sins I’ve struggled with. To be honest, some of them are still a struggle, but I have been increasing my faith in God and biblical knowledge so that I can resist these sins and temptations and walk closer with the Lord. I am a leader within the young adult ministry, I have been on a mission trip with Cru, and my walk with the Lord is getting stronger every day.

The Lord has brought me through so much with my disability, school, relationship with Him, and relationships with others. He’s helped me to be the best son, brother, and friend I could ever be to those around me. I have grown a lot since I started my journey with Christ, but I still have a long way to go, and every day is a battle that He’ll get me through. A verse that always keeps me fighting is Philippians 4:12 which reads, “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.” This verse helps me remember that everything I do is through His strength, and not my own. He gives me strength each day to fulfill the life that He has planned for me.

This is the story that God has blessed me with, and I wouldn’t do anything to change it. The Lord is my rock, and I am excited to see what He has in store for this blog and share what He is teaching me as I walk with him.