Hardship Through Injury

This week, as we continue our Thankful for Hardship series, we get to hear from Reese Osborne. Reese is a senior at Wartburg College, a member of the Wartburg Wrestling Team, a volunteer leader with the Riverwood Youth Group, and loves his home state of Wyoming.

All my life leading up to college, wrestling was my 'rock.' I had great success and found tremendous satisfaction in it. Because of all the winning, attention, and glory I attained, my confidence was through the roof. Some might even say I was arrogant. (I wouldn’t disagree with them, now.) Basically, wrestling had become my identity. But I didn’t truly understand what that meant for me until it was stripped away.

In my second-ever collegiate practice, I suffered a severe knee injury that took me out for the entirety of the season. I ended up getting both a knee surgery and shoulder surgery that year. During my sophomore year, I had only competed in a few tournaments when I re-injured my shoulder and had to get another surgery that would take me out of the rest of my sophomore season and the entirety of my junior year.

During those three years, the adversity of injury left me in a place that felt foreign to me. I was far away from home, at a college where I was supposed to be wrestling but couldn’t. I was sad, mad, lonely, and I felt like a loser and a 'nobody,' thinking my purpose had been taken away from me. Truthfully, I was mad at God.

With wrestling stripped away, I tried finding my identity through other things. One method I sadly used was to try to impress friends out at the bars by doing stupid things to get a laugh and approval. But deep down, I knew my actions and words contradicted the person God called me to be. It was always fun in the moment, but I would wake up feeling empty in the morning. On top of that, my bad decisions didn't help my recovery from the injuries I was dealing with, so any comfort I found was very short-lived. These attempts to find significance and meaning in my life only led to deeper depression and self-pity.

I grew up loving Jesus and committed my life to Christ in my early teens, but somewhere along the way, I strayed off course. In the middle of my junior year of college, I remember lying in bed one night after receiving more bad news about my shoulder, and I cried out to my Father in Heaven for the first time in what felt like forever. I told him I was angry and confused. I confessed I wasn’t living my life for him but for myself. I admitted that trying to do everything on my own over the last few years was exhausting and left me feeling insignificant. I then recommitted my life to Jesus and asked him to take control. In that moment, I found that God is all I need when God is all I’ve got. The relief was instant and fulfilling, and this time, I woke up in the morning feeling grateful and hopeful instead of empty and guilty. Since then, Jesus has continued to change my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined even just a couple years ago.

Although I’m still a work in progress, I now know my purpose. My value is found in what Jesus says about me – not what my performance is or what other people think. I’m now a senior, and I’m blessed to have a chance to get back on the mat this year to do what I love. But wrestling isn’t what defines me anymore. The ongoing struggle of injury was and still is hard to deal with, but I know that Jesus walks through the fire with me and will save me. Through my battle with injury, God showed me the importance of finding my identity in something that cannot be stripped away in a moment’s notice, and proved to me that the only way I can find something like joy and meaning is through Jesus.