I’m Joy Marshall, and this is how I’ve been living deeply.

“My first few months back home in Knoxville since completing my undergraduate degree at Asbury University have been hard, but good. I experienced a sweet community at Asbury, especially within our cross country team. While we were competitive, our coach focused more on fostering a sense of community from the freshmen to the seniors. So leaving that has been hard. On the other hand, God is doing so much good shaping me as a young adult coming to own her faith more and more. Here’s just one example: I moved back to Knoxville unsure where to plug in, so I ended up interning at the non-profit organization Thrive. There, I met a group of believers incredibly eager to pursue God and one another. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and now some of them are my closest friends. They’re helping me work through the questions and temptations that are part of the deepening of my faith during this season: How do I want to live my life moving forward? What are my core convictions, and how do I stick to them? What’s my role in helping others move toward spiritual maturity? How can my fear of God keep growing and my fear of man continue to fade? As I’m working through these questions, I also have a really exciting opportunity starting in late January. This one could play a role in determining what I end up doing professionally going forward. Not long ago, one of my professors from Asbury called me and said, ‘I’m going to be the producer for the 2022 NBC Winter Olympics highlights team. Will you be on my team?’ I was like, ‘Sure!’ I already had some relevant experience because, also thanks to an Asbury connection, I got to work in Japan during this past year’s Summer Olympics. I served as a production assistant/liaison officer/runner for Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS), the official worldwide broadcast company for the Olympic Games. It was a lot of fun. One of my favorite tasks was working directly with the press and guiding the athletes to whichever media person wanted to interview them. It was a cool hands-on experience working with people from all over the world.

For the upcoming Winter Games, I’m going to be working at NBC’s stateside Olympic headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut as a production assistant on the highlights team. I’ll be doing whatever is necessary: gathering the video, helping edit the highlights, and working to ensure those highlights get on the air. We’ll be working on Beijing time -4 a.m. to 4 p.m. our time- every day, even though we’ll be here in the States. I’m really looking forward to working with my professor, D.T. Slouffman. He has a lot of experience in the sports media world. He’s also a really strong believer, very open about his faith. So I think it’ll be cool to see how he leads his team well and with integrity while working for a really big, influential media company. Watching how he lives his faith out will help inform my decisions going forward- I’ll be learning how I can apply my faith in the industry. I expect my time at NBC to be humbling. It’s a chance to be a servant and learn from other people- to approach it with humility and bring the light of Christ there. It probably won’t be an overt ‘Hey, I’m a believer’ situation, but just in the quiet ways that I try to live my life and work hard– I think of how Colossians 3:23 says basically, ‘Work for the Lord, not for men.’ So hopefully that will carry over during these Olympics. This is another chapter in the continuing story of God’s faithfulness in guiding me- one that has roots at Cedar Springs. CSPC has helped feed my love for sports ever since I played church league softball here as a little girl. That, paired with a growing passion to work in video production, eventually helped lead me to Asbury, where I played softball and ran cross country. I got saved on a Cedar Springs mission trip at age 13. The church has always been there for me. While I’m away in Connecticut, I’m asking my CSPC family for prayers for endurance. We’ll be working 12 hours a day, seven days a week with no days off for three weeks. Please pray that I persevere, don’t burn out, and finish this opportunity strongly. The Lord’s calling me here for a reason, so I’m excited to see how it works out.”