Christ and My Career
Joshua Kim is a web developer working out in Southern California. He was kind enough to give us his time to share his professional journey on a segment called Christ and my Career during ECKCM 2021. Not only is Joshua’s career atypical for Seventh-day Adventists, but how he went about reaching his career is quite unique also.
Joshua is the 5th child of 7, growing up in a military family. When he graduated high school, he decided to be a pre-med major in a public university. He got good grades in high school and not knowing what else he should go into, his default choice was to go into medicine.
After completing his first year of college, he sat his parents down to let them know that he felt that he didn’t feel that God was relevant anymore. He reflected in the interview that going to public university led him to lose his bearings with the Christian community. It wasn’t that he became an Atheist because of anything spiritual in nature, he just fell out of relationship with God. His parents didn’t take a hard stance and force him to believe in God but gently advised him to help out with a Christian camp that they were working for at the time. Joshua ended up working on a magazine that they were working for and he did the graphics for it. He ended up doing that for two years and this led him to go back to school. After working for Amazing Facts and going to community college, he finished his undergrad at Andrews in computer science.
Currently, Joshua is working for ADP as a web developer. He really enjoys his job, says the pay is good, the hours flexible, and finds fulfillment as he problem solves through his projects. Regarding the career of web developing, he says there are a lot of opportunities in that field. You don’t need to have a graduate degree to get a job.
Asked whether he has opportunities to share his faith, he said that although it’s not forbidden to talk about his faith, he doesn’t have that many opportunities to talk about God at work. But Joshua has many opportunities to share his skills in his church at Yorba Linda. Furthermore, he added that Yorba is an outreach oriented church with many events that open their church to the community. They have a tennis club, Christmas program for children, Easter picnic in the parks that are open to the community.
Josh credits his parents, sisters, his many mentors, and professors at Andrews for helping him get back on track with his faith. He felt that having professors that pray for him and encourage him in the faith helped him in his academics as well as his Christian walk. He says that he may not have come back to God without parental support and encourages all of us in the church to be “family” for others.
Joshua advised young people who are thinking about a career in web development to get exposure as much as possible. Taking classes in high school, doing extracurricular clubs, researching online resources, participating in internships are all excellent ways to find out whether this field is something you would be interested in.
Joshua’s career took a longer route than others, but through his life, one can see that God has been relentlessly pursuing him and bringing him back to the fold. Praise God for supportive teachers, his loving parents but more importantly, a loving and faithful God.