And just like that…it was over.

Hello!

I havent posted in a while, but that is because I have been really busy finishing the semester well, saying goodbye to students and friends here in Clemson, and then moving out of my house.

First, I want to say a huge, “Thank you,” to everyone who supported me over the past two years- be it through giving money, giving encouragement, praying for me, asking my about my life, or keeping tabs on what I am doing here. I am deeply grateful.

The past two years have been quite a growing experience for me. I have learned a lot about myself and about people in general. I have a better understanding of what Jesus was all about, and what he wants me to do. I have more “head knowledge” at the end of two years, but more than that, my heart has learned a great deal too, about how to love people and how to trust God. I think a summary of my two years here could be stated as follows:

Trust God. Love people. Don’t be afraid.

We trust God in order to love people, and we trust him as we love people. We have to love people when we are scared to love. Love people from the moment you say hello, and love them when you say goodbye. Then trust God some more. This is what it means to love God.

Saturday I move from Clemson back to Birmingham. I will look for jobs involving writing and editing. Or really anything. I will never forget what I have learned through RUF. I am eager to see how the internship, and my deeper understanding of the Gospel in my life, plays out in whatever lies ahead.

Sometimes there is too much to say so you just keep it simple. So I’ll just say, again, thank you, and God bless!

Fully Funded!

Hello everyone,

I am so thankful to say that I have received all the financial support I needed in order to finish out my time working for RUF at Clemson! God graciously provided the funds, using the generous giving and prayers of my supporters. I am encouraged to know that God hears and answers prayers, and that he is at work. Thank you to everyone who prayed or contributed financially. I am deeply grateful for you and humbled by your support. 

In other news, I am still job searching. I am hoping to find a job in Greenville, Atlanta, or Birmingham, doing something in the non-profit or writing sector. I have been thinking for a while now about getting my counseling degree, possibly from a seminary. This is something I would love to consider more, especially once I have taken a step back from formal ministry and can get some perspective. Hopefully over the next year or so I can more fully determine if counseling or formal ministry in the church is what God is calling me to do. 

For the time being, I continue to walk by faith, not by sight, into whatever the next few months/years hold. I always appreciate your prayers. 

In Christ,

April

Support Update!

Hello friends,

I have a financial support need.

I am supposed to raise $3,000 to cover the rest of the of my time with RUF, which will end on June 1. I am very low on funds, so much so that the month of April is the last month for which I am financially covered, and this $3,000 will basically serve to cover the month of May for me.

If you feel led, I would greatly appreciate any final donations towards my RUF internship that you would give. If you would like more information on my financial situation please get in touch with me, and I would be more than happy to fill you in. 

You can log onto www.ruf.org and click on “support” in the upper right-hand corner of the page, or you can mail in a check made out to “Reformed University Ministries,” with my name written in the memo line, mailed to Reformed University Ministries, 1700 North Brown Road, Suite 104, Lawrenceville, GA 30043. 

Thank you for your interest in RUF and for your prayers and financial suport! God has blessed me and provided for me so far, and I know he will provide for me now.

Love

“If you can give yourself to someone you should.” -Dawes, “A Little Bit of Everything”

I have been thinking about what love is for a while. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it: To love is to give yourself entirely over to another person. It’s self-abandonment. It’s surrendering your entirety and entrusting it to another. Simultaneously, it is taking on another person. It’s putting that person on and accomplishing in your body their life- what they need and what they desire. It is living their life out for them in your body. It is a reversal of bodies and lives. A cosmic switching of personas. Love means that you commit to orienting your life around someone else. 

We know Jesus loves us not just because he died for us, but because he carried us around in his body. Jesus death was not separated from us. It wasn’t objective. Colossians 2:6-15 speaks of this. It says that “you have been filled in him….in him also you were circumcised …having been buried with him in baptism…you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God …God made [you] alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.” We know Jesus loves us because he attached us to himself in a way that is unexplainable yet clearly inferred from Scripture. We became part of Him, and He because part of us. 2 Corinthians 4:10 speaks of the saints as “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” There is an intrinsic connection between us and Jesus that goes beyond his merely doing something on our behalf. We are connected, one body. Sex makes a lot of sense when we talk about spiritual things like this, but I’ll not go there right now. 

For now it is enough to know that for us to imitate Jesus’s love for us we also have to be about the other person in our relationships. Love is saying, “I give up my self and my agenda in order to take on your self and your agenda. I am about you now. I desire your agenda more than my own. Your agenda now is my own.” 

Tim Keller expounds upon the idea of self-forgetting love in his book The Reason for God. He talks about how the Trinity perpetuates itself through mutual other-centered desire. Each member of the Trinity is wholely concerned with the other two GodHeads. They dance around each other in holy other-centeredness. This is our model for our relationships as well. 

My friend, the man who is refuting Einstein’s Theory of Relativity…

I have a little operation that I’ve worked out with a professor-friend of mine. I save this guy (http://www.clemson.edu/glimpse/?p=1177)  a table at Starbucks every morning. And he pays me for it. All I know is that by 10:30 every morning I have made a significant dent in my monthly reading assignments and $10 in my pocket.

Antony is a charming guy, and not a believer, so pray for him. We have been friends since last year and over the past year have shared many meals together and had great conversations about Christianity, culture, and physics, although I’ll admit that that  last one is a one-sided conversation from Antony!

It has been amazing to see the people, like Antony, that God has put in my life here. It is amazing what can happen we we are willing to befriend strangers like Jesus did.

P.S. I have requested an acknowledgment in his forthcoming book on behalf of my table-sitting services. After all, the book that could quite possibly change the face of quantum physics would never have been written if I had not saved its author his favorite table every morning 🙂

growth.

I have grown much over the past year and a half, specifically the past 7 months. Since May of 2012 I have transformed spiritually. I am tempted to even say that I got saved sometime in the past 7 months, but I know I was saved before that. I don’t think I really embraced it up until 7 months ago though. It has been a watershed time period. For once, I actually, deeply care about living righteously. I care so much I don’t want to sin or to be the same person. I have fresh eyes that for the first time ever see myself for who I really am: I really fundamentally messed up person who doesn’t just do bad things, but who is bad, but who is also completely forgiven and embraced into God’s family. That clear vision of my sin and the blessing of being slapped in the face with the Gospel all the time has allowed me to change. Titus 2:11-12 has become my daily drumbeat, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.” I feel different. I am willing to follow Jesus now, and I don’t think I really was before. 

love, aka the ownership and abandonment of fear in relationships

Who was Jesus with? Where would Jesus be? What does it really mean to love people? These are questions I have asked myself lately. At RUF training Tim Udoj, the RUF Campus Minister at Furman Unversity, spoke on how to love people. His opening question was, “How do you love someone when you’re terrified?” At first I thought that was a weird question. I rarely get nervous when talking to people, and I consider myself to be fairly comfortable in social situations, especially after the past year and a half of constantly walking up to complete strangers, introducing myself, leading conversation, and initiating lunch and coffee dates with girls I’ve just met or in some cases never met in person. What did he mean by “terrified”?  

Then it hit me. Loving people is always terrifying. It has to be. If it isn’t you aren’t doing something right. To love deeply, to love well, means that there is no part of you that you leave untouchable by the other. It means that there is no part of you that you hide. Instead of protecting yourself from the roving eyes of the other you open yourself up to them in a complete self-forgetting and others-serving manner. This is what it means to “think of others more highly than yourself.” This is what it means to lay down your life for another. To forget what you hold most dear, your own comfort and security, to step out from behind the curtain of our own self-protection is the most radical and uncomfortable kind of love, the most sacrificial. It is the very thing that Jesus himself did. He abandoned his own comfort and pleasure, making himself nothing and becoming obedient to the point of death for us. It is impossible to forget one’s self in love without faulting to an extreme- either the extreme of self-hated or of obsession with the other- without anchoring yourself in Jesus. Knowing that we are secure in Jesus’s work for us on the cross is the only way that you and I will ever be able to allow others to see into us and not die on the spot at whatever they see, find out about, know about us. Jesus already knows; he made peace for it. Ourselves have already been dealt with.

When we believe this it is impossible not to love the outcast. My theory about why so many Christians, particularly the believing college students with whom I work, do not have non-Christian friends is that they are terrified of the discomfort they will feel when they have to open themselves up to someone with whom the warmth of God will not resonate. I believe that we Christians are afraid of the sense of lostness and woundedness and indentiylessness that we will discover in those who do not know Christ. And why are we afraid of it? Because we identify with it, because it is the condition which he have felt ourselves and may sometimes still feel when we forget who we have become in Christ. It’s like a bad memory that we are trying to avoid or the beginning of a cold that we are trying to squelch before it develops into full fledged sickness. I believe we do this because we still don’t rest fully in the finished work of Jesus on our behalves. 

Of course, most non-Christians do not give off a lost, wounded, identityless vibe. They are often very warm and friendly and not “scary.” We are all people, after all. I do not mean to suggest that non-Christians make us Christians uncomfortable by and large on the surface level. Many of us have non-Christian friends. But what I am saying is that in the end when I look at myself the reason that I do not love non-believers deeply and well, past a superficial friendship, is because I am afraid of what I will find in them, and I am afraid of what I will find or remember in myself. 

Perfect love casts out all fear. My only hope, and your only hope, of loving people well- both Christians and non-Christians alike- is to remember Jesus’s perfect, fearless love towards us. That is the only motivation that will enable us to love others. It is a knowledge that inevitably moves is into love.  

 

What’s been going on lately…

I have been back in Clemson for a week, after taking 2 weeks away to visit Birmingham and to go to RUF training in Atlanta and then to a Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF) conference in Chattanooga! Life has been busy, needless to say! Training was great. Campus MInisters spoke on topics like How to Love Your Church Well and How to Love People When You are Scared to Love. My Area Coordinator, JR Foster, also did a great job talking about Decision Making. I am always amazed at how good the sessions are at training. I truly believe that the teaching I have received from RUF Campus Ministers over the past 6 years is the best preaching and teaching I have ever heard in my life- all churches, podcasts, retreats included.

Similarly, the teaching I got at the CCEF Conference was helpful. This year’s topic was Shame and Guilt. After hearing much convicting and challenging material at training I’m so glad the teaching from CCEF wasn’t intense or anything haha! Seriously though, CCEF is an excellent organization and one I had not heard of before attending the conference. The main thing I took away from CCEF was that I am to love people without expectation or manipulation. I cannot shame people into being who I want them to be or into doing what I want them to do. To love someone well means to love without agenda or expectation or return, that is to love selflessly, the way that Christ loves us. Actually, this is probably the main thing I took away from RUF training as well.

Since I have been back in Clemson, I have continued meeting with girls for walks, lunch, coffee, etc. trying to love them well as a reflection of Christ’s love for them and out of the overflow of gratitude of God’s love for me. That’s a big challenge and one that I fail at daily, but thank goodness God’s mercies are new every morning. Yesterday I met with a girl who I have been meeting with since I became an intern. I have seen a lot of growth in this student- she thinks she was truly converted last year as a result of Stephen’s teaching. She struggles with feelings of worthlessness as a result of verbal abuse from her father growing up. The main way this student has grown is that she is able to admit to all this, opening herself up to being truly seen by me and others. Before, she wanted to pretend like everything was okay or that everything was at least under control. Now she knows that her life isn’t smooth and she is willing to admit to that and to talk about it. Her honest admission about feeling like she doesn’t deserve love and that she feels lonely in her worthlessness is a huge victory for this student. It is the heart that clearly sees its need and wants to be helped that God changes. And in reality it is God who works in us before we reach this point, while we are numb and dead in out desires, to get us to the point where we want change.

In other news, I went hiking with some girls on Saturday at Isaqueena Falls and Stump House Tunnel! Here are some pictures.

Lately in Clemson…

Since last posting much has happened, and I will attempt to cover some of it in the following post.

Things are going very well in Clemson as far as my work with RUF is concerned. We have had so many students coming around to our Large Group meetings on Tuesday nights- probably around 300 most weeks. I believe that this can be contributed to several things: the fact that we are able to meet on campus this year makes coming to Large Group much easier for students; also Stephen is preaching through his Dating, Marriage, and Relationships series, and that is always a crowd drawer; and lastly, the fact that we have a strong base of siblings of older RUFers who are now freshmen at Clemson makes recruiting new people much easier. Stephen has been doing a great job of making the topic of relationships relatable to students, even to those who are not currently in dating relationships. He is sticking to the basic Gospel principles and how they apply to relationships, making the series easy to connect with for everyone. You can now check out all the sermons from this semester on itunes! Search RUF @ Clemson under podcasts to listen. 

I have been having some really great conversations with students this semester. Maybe it’s that the conversations are  happening sooner than they did last year, or maybe it’s that students are being more upfront this year, or maybe it’s because I am more comfortable at asking questions, but for some reason I feel like relationships and conversations have just gone deep really fast with certain students. A couple of students have been wanting to know more about Calvinism and are asking some hard questions about it. Not that Calvinism is synonymous the Gospel or that we push students to adopt a Calvinistic mindset or that we believe they even need to, but I think that it is great that these freshmen girls are thinking deeply enough to be asking important questions about who God is. I can tell the God is at work in them, giving them an interest in knowing Him better. Another girl I have been meeting with has been discouraged about her spiritual life. She feels the weight of her sin very keenly and is troubled by her inability to live for God the way she wants to- much like the Apostle Paul’s confession in Romans and much like every other person who’s honest about their spiritual life. It has been a unique challenge for me to both support her thinking that God does greatly care about the way that she lives, but also to tell her that Jesus doesn’t love her more because she does good things and that He doesn’t love her better on the days when she really has the desire to live for Him. Impressing upon her the understanding that God loves her just as much on her bad days as he does on her good days, that he is ultimately and eternally not less pleased with her when she sins than he is when she prays has been my purpose with her.

On another note, we went to Fall Conference at Camp Greystone in North Carolina a few weeks ago. We took 100 students, which is a lot, and a lot more than we took last year anyway. The encouraging things about taking the group we did was not the number of people we took but the specific people who came with us. There were a lot of the core group of RUFers who came, but also there were tons of freshmen and several new people on the fringe on the ministry. Three freshmen girls who are are upfront about the fact that they aren’t Christians came. These three girls were all invited by other freshmen girls who are still not fully plugged into RUF themselves, which is really exciting to me. These three non-believers all said they liked conference and that they teaching was really different than anything they had ever heard but that they were not turned off by it. They seem intrested in exploring more of the claims of Jesus, and I hope that RUF can be a safe place for them to take their time to think it all through without feeling any pressure to conform or to be converted.

The speaker at conference was the former Campus Minister from the University of Tennessee, who is now an RUF Area Coordinator, Brent Harriman. He spoke about the transformative power of the Gospel, basically addressing the questions of Do we want to change? How can we change? Why do we not change? etc.. It was phenomenal teaching. The Gospel was clearly presented. Brent Harriman truly is a talented speaker. You can also hear the podcasts from Fall Conference here: http://www.furman.ruf.org/listen.

Between Fall Conference and Large Group I have been having lots of one-on-one meetings with girls, mostly freshmen and some older girls who I met with a lot last year. I have a list of around 30 names of freshmen girls who I try to meet up with for lunch, coffee, walks, etc.. During these meetings we just hang out at first, getting to know one another and learning about each other’s lives. The goal for these relationships is for me to encourage these girls as they grow as Christians in college. I have started reading the Bible with a couple of these girls. I read through Colossians with one and through James with another. Being available to these girls to talk about issues they are facing or to challenge them to grow spiritually or to just be around them as an older Christian is what my job is really all about. There are also lots of girls I meet with or have contact with who are not Christians, and my goal with them is similar: being their friend, caring about their lives, listening to their concerns, asking them important questions, and living out the Gospel in front of them as I also tell them about it when the right time comes. You can pray for my conversations with students that I would know what to say. You can pray that I wouldn’t say too much or too little. You can pray that I would be a faithful example of Jesus to them.

My Bible study on Monday nights has also been something that I have spent time on this semester. I lead a group of 6 girls, through Tim Keller’s book Counterfeit Gods. The book is amazing, and if you have never read it run, don’t walk, to the store to buy it. It is by far one of the best, most applicable books I have ever read. It has really helped me personally, and I think idolatry is an issue that not only do we not really understand or see very clearly in our own lives, but it is also one of the most under talked about and underrated issues in our lives and in our culture. Far from being a book about greedily desiring material possessions, Keller talks about how a most of the issues in our lives are actually idolatry issues rooted in our idolizing of either power, comfort, control, or acceptance.

The last thing I will mention is the Dating Game that I have started in RUF! This is a game in which any student who wanted to play signed up and then I randomly (or not so randomly…) paired guys and girls together as dates for the game. Each couple competed against another couple or two in rounds of competitive games like bowling, scavenger hunts, pumpkin carvings, and disc golf. After each round or games there was a declared winning couple and a losing couple. The winners moved onto the next round where they were paired with new dates and the process continued. The losing couples also kept playing but they did not advance towards the prize. We are nearing the end of the game, so a victorious winning couple will soon surface, and their prize shall be…going on a real date together! (They don’t know this is the prize, ha!)

There is tons more I could say, but that’s all I will tell for now. Instead I’ll just leave you with pictures from the semester. Thanks for reading!

Auburn/Clemson Game

You might expect the Auburn/Clemson football game to create some torn feelings in my heart.

Well, it did not. 

I was firmly “for Auburn” though I chose the path less traveled by not making this an obvious point of contention with students on game day. I wore a neurally orange shirt (with blue earrings and navy shorts, of course). Originally, I thought I would not try to go to the game. But then I found a ticket and decided that there was just no good reason not to go, even if it would mean sitting in the Clemson student section, a potentially awkward if not deadly place to be. 

Well, I survived, and here are some pictures to prove it. Eating at Fellini’s Pizza in Decatur, GA before the game.

View from the Clemson student section.

I got to see some dear friends from Auburn! I sat with them for the 2nd half. Good life choice on my part. 

Most of the Clemson group! Notice my hands.

Overall, despite Auburn’s defeat, it was a great day. I loved being with these people!

Oh yeah….and War Eagle!