3ish years ago my whole life began to change the night Christ joined me on this bench at Colden Pond.
It was the beginning of my freshmen year at Northwest and everything that had gone on and was going on in my life had reached a pinnacle point.
I grew up going to church, learning about God and hearing the gospel over and over again; I memorized verses in Awana's and could tell you all about Christ dying on the cross, but for most of my life I didn't see how that message gave me any freedom. My understanding of the Christian faith was that it was a bunch of rules being enforced on your life by this really far off and distant God. So, I spent most of my life in complete rebellion of those rules, and a majority of the time enjoyed everything that I did with out consequence. And because there was no consequence and I saw nothing really wrong with any of it, I withdrew further and further from the idea that I would ever need to ask for forgiveness for these things, especially from this "really distant God". I even began to think of God as this super prideful, arrogant being because "all He wanted everyone to do was worship him"; I believed him to be ultimately selfish and therefore completely unworthy of any sort of devotion from me.
Sooo, how in the world did I get from that place to now leaving all of my earthly comforts behind in order to travel to 11 countries in 11 months in worship and devotion of this God? As you can imagine…. it's a long story…so grab a coffee and a snack 🙂
Firstly, My mother prayed for me and didn't ever stop praying for me, even when I myself told her to stop and that it was useless for her to do such things. I will always be grateful for her diligence in that.
Somewhere in about my junior year of high school my heart began to have these subtle changes, like I stopped desiring to drink all the sudden and I started seeking new friends, transitioning into new groups of people. Through that, during my senior year I ended up hanging out every so often with my friend Brighid O' Toole (that's us in that photo over there) and her group of friends. Her and her boyfriend Jacob were a part of and helped lead a group called Elevate that met before school once a week where they talked about the the Lord and His word. It seems like a such a blip of my senior year, but as I started going to those meetings and even attend church events with Brighid, my heart's hard opinion of the Lord began to soften. During that year I can look back and see how my heart moved from not seeing any worth in the law of the Lord, or rules of the church, to desiring to be submissive to them… at least at times. It was a small yet really significant change.
During my senior year I was also dating a guy, who was year older than me and away at college already. Him and his friends had gotten involved with an organization on campus called Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru); one time I got to go visit him for a weekend and during the visit I got to attend one of their meetings. I remember walking into the student union really nervous about being there, feeling like a small high schooler in the big arena of college life.. don't get me wrong, I was looking way forward to being in on that college life the next year (I had senioritis at its worst) but not knowing anyone and being in a new environment was a little intimidating. All that intimidation flew out the window, though, as soon as I walked in the doors of the ballroom and into the Cru meeting. The women there greeted me and loved on me from the first hello, welcoming me right into their group and making me feel so comfortable. I had experienced this kind of community a bit with Brighid and her group in high school, but never with complete strangers, it blew me away and drew me in all at the same time. On top of that, after the meeting was over everyone went to hang out at a house together, during the night one of the guys, Justin, picked up a guitar and started singing worship songs. This was the first time I saw people who acted out their love for Lord outside of a scheduled meeting, truly loving the Lord with their whole life and not just a part of it. The nights experiences combined were the final things that made me decide to attend that college the next year for sure; I knew that I wanted to be a part of whatever was going on in that group.
What occurred the summer between that year and my freshmen year of college I can explain no other way than some intense spiritual tug of war. Every sin that had a grip on my heart was intensified and started tugging hard. And I don't mean just the externally obvious ones, but internally, my emotions and thoughts were going haywire. I literally remember hearing the thought in my head at one point that summer say, "Sin now, because you won't be able to sin ever again". And so here we have the pinnacle. Every temptation had laid siege on my life, and satan couldn't have picked a better time to do it because I didn't really have any community around me that summer, so I lost that battle miserably, crossing lines I never thought I'd cross (which is saying something, because I crossed a lot of lines without really thinking twice about it), and because I was pushed so far, for the first time I not only saw that my sin was wrong but I felt the weight and guilt of it. I saw how it could hurt and did hurt others, which later helped me see how it also grieved the Lord.
In the midst of that is when I came to college and joined Cru and another Christian organization Gamma Alpha Lambda (GAL). I think for a bit at the beginning of that year I thought that if I could just join these groups and ignore all the sin that had happened that summer that I could just slip out of all that guilt and into a new life… but as we all know sin and satan don't really deal with being ignored and if you're trying to fight them in your own strength, failure is all that you'll come to. And I came to it quickly. All the while though I'm beginning to attend Cru and GAL meetings, and I'm hearing more and more truth. Then, that wonderful night I mentioned at the very beginning rolls around and I find myself attending the first GAL bible study. That bible study time was so incredibly wonderful. It was like for the first time I felt not just like I was attending a meeting and enjoying it, but that I was actually in on it. It was as if those women were God's family and they had invited me to the table with them to feed on the bread that is God's word. And I actually understood it that night! We were in 1 Peter and everything about it was being spoken right to my heart. I walked out of that study bubbling over with joy and could not wait to share it with someone. And the only person I could think I wanted to share it with was the guy I had been seeing at the time, but when I called him he was busy studying with a classmate, who happened to be a girl. Instantly my jealousy and anger were ignited and I began to think thoughts like "Well if he's hanging out with her, I can go hang out with this guy" and other crap like that. And in that moment I was stopped in my tracks… literally I was walking back to my dorm room across campus and stopped walking, because never before had I experienced a time when I had been able to see so clearly what the Lord was trying to offer me and what I was choosing to live in so starkly contrasted. Most of my life I believed that the Lord was trying to enslave me with a bunch of rules and hinder my true freedom and being able to do what I wanted to do, but in that moment everything was flipped and I saw for the first time very clearly that what the Lord had for me was that love, and freedom, and community that I had just experienced at the bible study and what I was choosing to live in was trapping me and hindering me from all of it. Well, I started walking again but I didn't quite make it back to my dorm room, rather I found myself sitting on that bench at Colden Pond venting about everything that ever happened in my life. I had never really prayed out loud before, especially never by my self, but that night I was so overcome by everything that it had to come out somehow, some way, and so it did and about half way through it all I realized that I was talking to God, and by the end I was pleading with him to make himself known to me and show me how real he is. After that is when I picked up my bible and started reading the only place I knew to, 1 Peter. I read all the way through chapters 2 and 3 tracking with it and eating it up, but when I got to chapter 4… that's when my life changed. It was no longer just me sitting on the bench reading the Bible but, Christ's Spirit was there speaking these words to me, proclaiming over me his love and the salvation he had for me along with the change I was going to experience because of it. That was the night Christ invited me into his family and I said yes, accepting whole heartedly that invitation.
Since then my life has been a beautiful messy mess of figuring out what it looks like to truly live for Christ and walk in his Spirit. The cleaning out of all the crap that was in my life is an ongoing process, which isn't easy but is full of joy and blessings beyond what I could have ever imagined.
A time of huge discovery in my life was the summer after my freshmen year, when I went on Summer Project with Cru to the beautiful city of San Diego, California. San Diego Summer Project (SDSP) is essentially a 10 weeks missions trip, where you go and live in SD with a bunch of other college kids, learn about Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Fathers love and learn about how to share all of that knowledge with everyone around you. That summer challenged me and stretched me because the Lord was relentless in revealing truth to me about myself and himself. He continued to show me, as he did that night at Colden Pond, that he is way more than words on the pages of my Bible but that he is alive and active, and very, very real.
That summer I was on a ministry team called Fireseeds, being on this team meant that everyday, monday-friday, you would wake up and go to a campus you were assigned and outreach to other college students. That looked like a lot of different ways, from just talking with people, to inviting them to the bible study we were doing, to just worshiping God through music on the lawn and inviting others to join. Being on that team helped me understand a lot about loving others through sharing the good news with them. Every sunday we would go to church with our ministry teams, which was such a wonderful time. I got the immense pleasure of going to All Peoples Church, if you live in the San Diego area you should check it out, the Lord dwells with and in those people. To get to All Peoples Church though, it was about a 2-3ish hour commute via bus, which was long, but good because it afforded us so much time as a team to get to know each other and genuinely share life. Well one of the leaders on my team was the one and only Danny Stinson. Danny has this contagious love for life and the Lord, so getting to know him that summer was a blast and blessing, continuing to know him after summer project has proven to be even more of a blessing.
Summer project ended for me that August, and that next January Danny was getting ready to leave for this thing called the World Race. I remember hearing about it some while on project with him but not really knowing what it was or what exactly he would be doing other than traveling to 11 different countries on a missions trip. That fall I got to keep in touch with him a bit and even see him once before he left for the World Race and got to learn more about what this whole thing was. The adventurous, not wanting to be in school, part of me was so stinkin' excited for him and more than slightly jealous of all that he was going to get to do, and I began to think that, that was exactly something that I would want to do after I graduate. Well January came and went and with it Danny went. Over the next year I was blessed with this uncanny timing of always being on skype when he happened to get internet and be on too, so got to hear a lot about his adventures and of course I followed his blog too (I understand that I sound like the ultimate creep right now, ha but thats not what was happening I promise). As I got to see more and more of what the Lord was doing through Danny's life on the World Race, I desired more and more to do something like this myself.
That next summer I went back out to San Diego as a student staff member, which was incredible, actually beyond incredible. Then the next fall I came back to college. At this point in my life I thought I had my life pretty much figured out as to what I was going to be doing. It's funny thinking back on it, because this was probably the only time that I literally had like a 5 year plan for my life mapped out, before then I would've told everyone that I had no clue what I would be doing, and this is precisely when every part of my plan began to fall a part. The relationship I was in ended and I began to doubt my choice in what I was studying.. those two things alone changed a lot of that plan. In the midst of this I went to our reunion for project. I was catching up with some of the girls there and they were telling me about how some of the staff were going to be asking a few of the girls to possibly take a year off college to come intern with them, to be discipled and trained to lead a ministry back on their campus, and I thought they were kind of crazy. I mean, I would say that that was awesome and that those girls should pray about doing that, but with that I was always thinking, I don't know if I would ever actually do that. After leaving reunion I couldn't stop thinking about that, and soon enough the Lord started to call out the disobedient nature of my heart, and I began to really ponder over the question, that if the He were to ask me to leave school to serve Him for any amount of time, would I be responsive and obedient to that? Around that same time I got to talk to Danny again and read another one of his blogs, and then I began to read more about the World Race in general, and then my heart started to get excited about it all over again. Well soon enough, two and two were put together and I started to pray about going on the World Race and when I would do it, if that was the Lord's plan. The answers I got were: yes, you should go and next this next year.. when that next year was still a mystery to me. So over thanksgiving break I talked to my parents about everything that had been going on and how I felt the Lord was calling me to the World Race, and my mom gave me the most simple and encouraging response: then you should apply. So that week, after still not being able to discern whether I should apply for August or July, I cast lots (literally.. I looked up how it was done and created my own more modern day form of that) and after 3 times of casting and every time coming up with August, I felt pretty confident in going ahead to apply for August. About a week later I had my phone interview and a little over a week after that I found out I was accepted. My life plan, in the matter of one month, had been completely obliterated and then completely rebuilt.
And that's how I ended up here.
