Humans of NGU: Brian Cordle and his path to self discovery
Georgia Gay, Managing Editor
Photo courtesy of Georgia Gay.
Nine years ago, Brian Cordle would have never guessed that he would become a Youth Ministry major at North Greenville University.
He didn’t grow up in a Christian home, or much of a home at all. The inside of his home was badly burned when he was a child and the money spent to repair the home caused his family to spiral into a financial crisis. This caused him and his grandmother to move around quite a bit, living with different family members and friends. Not having a home initiated issues with social development. Making friends wasn’t easy for Cordle, which led him to be the target for bullying.
He was bullied all throughout middle school and most of high school. “People think of swirlies and being shoved into lockers when thinking of bullying. There was that but there were also extreme levels like throwing rocks,” said Cordle as he reflected. Through all of the bullying, he gained a lot of anger which stayed with him for a while. “I became numb to everything for two years, which lead to suicidal thoughts. I felt like there was no end in sight, that all of this would go on forever,” Cordle stated.
Then, during his freshmen year of high school, he thought things were starting to turn around when he moved to Pickens. Sadly, this wasn’t the case. “The friends I made were not good influences and the person I dated was not right for me,” Cordle mentioned. This gave him a sense of hopelessness.
One day however, he went to a church 10 minutes up the road out of boredom. This is where he started to listen to the lessons and began to see his life in them. After attending the church for six months, he attended the Christmas pageant and felt the presence of God that night. “It felt like the warmest hug I have ever had, I knew that I could not ignore this,” said Cordle.
With the help of the church and a youth leader who invested into his life not only on Wednesday nights, Cordle was reborn. No matter what the past may look like, God can change the present. It is all a matter of trusting his plan.
