To Follow Christ

What does it mean to die to yourself and take up your cross to follow Christ as a college student? I was asked to consider this question the other day with some close friends. As I considered the concept, I broke the question down and just started thinking about what it means to die to yourself as a college student. In some situations it means leaving the iPod in your pocket and keeping the headphones out of your ears. Other times it means taking the initiative to start a conversation with the person beside you when you would rather just take a second and breathe. Sometimes it means making arrangements to schedule something that you don't care too much about in order to let another person know that you care about them. Obviously, this means different things in different situations, but the core of this means to worry less about what you want and what you think is important and more about what is important to someone other than yourself. For a Christian this means, being concerned with what is important to God. This is where the second part of the question comes in. I think that to be concerned about what is important to God, you have to take up your cross and follow Christ. This also looks different in every situation, but it is all tied together through a deep seated understanding of what is important to Jesus and how we are supposed to act in order to accomplish His purposes. To understand what is important to Christ, we have to spend time with Him, in His Word, and in prayer. For a college student, this means taking advantage of the flexible schedule and freedom that we have to make the things that are important to God important to us. If you have any other ideas about this question (I hope you do, because I don't have a lock on the answer, I just have an idea), please comment and let me know what you think about what it means to die to yourself and take up your cross to follow Christ as a college student.

Small Groups

Our 2:42 group met for the first time last night. If you don't know what 2:42 groups are, they are our way of trying to live out the first church in Acts 2:42-47 where they devoted themselves to the apostles teachings, to the breaking of bread, to fellowship and to prayer. Last night, our group got together and shared some of what we see our group studying and how we want to approach prayer, fellowship through service and a couple of other really cool ideas last night. A couple of the coolest things that we left with were the topics for study and one of the ways that we are going to approach prayer as a group. We threw out some ideas for topics of study, but the one that the group felt most strongly about (I'm stoked) was apologetics. We will be looking at that for a while and it's going to be awesome. I am also VERY excited about the idea that was presented for a way that we can approach prayer as a group...PRAYER CALENDAR!!! I am one of those people that loves calendars in the first place, but I've been involved with a couple of groups of people that have done prayer calendars before, and it's a very unifying experience. Although the group may not always be together for a time of prayer, you have the assurance that there are other people talking to God about the same stuff that you are, and to me that's just really cool. I can't wait for us to get that going here in the next couple of weeks. Speaking of prayer, one of my friends from the Greenville Community Shelter has been there for 6 or 7 months and I've been praying for him and his situation and that he would get into permanent housing away from all of the negativity associated with poverty. Dan always lights up the room for breakfast when we go serve there, but this Sunday, I noticed that he wasn't up early like he usually is, and after asking around, I found out that Dan moved out of the shelter last month!!! God has answered that prayer, and if you don't mind and you have a minute right now, please pray against the systems that make it very difficult for someone to come out of poverty. Thanks and I hope that you have a great day!

Some of what I learned at NSC '08

For the past week I have been at the National Student Convention at the University of Southern Indiana. This conference was incredible, I have a fresh vision for the kind of stuff that God wants to do on our campus. It was incredible to go to all of the workshops and worship services at the conference. I learned a lot about different perspectives on the poor and poverty stricken in our community. Mother Teresa said that the greatest poverty in America is loneliness. This has lead our campus ministry to really look into the loneliness of the international students on our campus and what we are being called to do about it. We don't want to reach out to these students as a project or something to do, but rather, a real friendship that results in lasting relationships and changing lives by caring genuinely for people. It's about talking to God and seeking His will for our relationships with people and then obeying what He tells us to do, both on an individual basis and as a group. Something like this has to be deeply seated in prayer and community. If you are reading this and are not part of our community, please be praying for us to be faithful in this practice. If you are in our community, please talk to me or others about it and get involved. I'm incredibly excited to see some of the things that God wants to work out on our campus and in Greenville this upcoming year. If anyone has an idea of other ways that we can reach out to lonely people on our campus or to anyone for that matter, please let me know and I will do everything I can to find ways for our ministry to put that into play.