High School Years...

(Janice's testimony cont...)

The next few years, I still struggled socially. We ended up moving three hours away in the middle of my 8th grade year. We now lived in Galesburg, IL and the Junior High there was not small AT ALL!! I went from a class of 30 to a class of 300 and rode a bus to school for the first time! I saw this as a chance to start over socially and began searching immediately to find my place. I attended High School in this same town and that is where I really compromised myself. I began to get more involved with boys, I started smoking, I gambled, I lied, I cheated, I stole, I cussed, I didn’t care…I didn’t respect myself. I found myself in a VERY dangerous place...self disrespect.

Our bus would get to school 30 minutes before school started, so we would go to the pool hall to play and smoke before school started. I will never forget the day my dad walked into the pool hall, took me by the arm and pulled me out of there...and out of school. My friends thought he was an undercover cop. (I can't tell you how thankful I was at that very moment that I didn't have a cigarette in my mouth!) When dad put me in the car, I remember asking him, “What are you going to do with me?” I was scared. We went straight to the principal’s office. Because there was only 3 weeks left of school, it wasn’t feasible for me to start another school, so my parents sent me back to Catlin, IL to live with my grandma and go to school there until finals.

So now I found myself pulled away from my school in Galesburg to now be back in my school in Catlin. But! Because Catlin was already doing their finals, I had to sit in the library the whole day, by myself, doing my assigned work from Galesburg. Wow… Even when I did go back to Galesburg to take my finals, I didn’t take them with the rest of my class. I was alone with my teachers… I know my parents did what they thought was best and right for me at the time.
We ended up moving back to Danville, IL that summer. Mom and Dad enrolled us three kids in the Baptist school there. This was now my sophomore year of High School and it was here that I found my social fit. I finally learned how to make good friends, but I still had a heavy focus on boys. It was this school year that I threw a lot of parties! My parents didn’t care…I know now why. All the parties were at my house…they knew who my friends were, what they were into, what we were doing, etc…smart.

Now, because of my dad’s job, we ended up moving to Olney, IL the summer after my sophomore year, which is 2 hours south of Danville, IL. Mom and dad found a church there that we became heavily involved in, which also had an ACE school. (ACE – Accelerated Christian Education) It was here that I hit the height of my school years. Almost overnight, I became popular! I was no longer the youngest in my class, I became a teacher’s aide for the elementary classes, I put together one of the school’s only yearbooks, my sister and I inquired and started our school’s Volley Ball team, which I was a captain of and earned 2 MVP awards my senior year (#27 BABY!!) You ask, What made the difference? I found respect for myself, I found a confidence I didn't have before and I had a REAL relationship with my Savior. In our church, I became more involved with our music ministry as a backup singer on our Praise Team, I ran our church nursery program, led worship in our youth, helped a lot with our church youth outreach downtown; The Cross, among other things. I began to see a glimmer of God’s calling on my life.
1994 was off to a good start! Senior year was going great, and I was in the final stretch to graduation…until March 15, 1994...My world as I knew it stopped.

~The Story Continues...Janice~