Why wouldn't I be involved?

"Why wouldn't I be involved in something like InterVarsity? It's too good not to be."  That's what Zach told my wife a couple weeks ago at a party for students we were hosting.  Zach spent most of last year disconnected from Christian community.  Even though he grew up in the church, in college he wasn't really pursuing Jesus or growing his faith.  My staff partner, Kit, kept inviting him to different events on campus and praying for him.  This summer as Zach prepared to come back to campus, Jesus sparked something inside of Zach - a desire to be part of God's mission at the UO.

This fall, Zach helped reach out to new students on campus, handing out popsicles to freshmen.  He is having spiritual conversations with his friends and inviting them to Bible study and our worship.  At Fall Conference, he responded to the invitation to start something new and is taking significant responsibility to help lead one of our small groups.  He's considering going to Urbana so that he can learn how to represent Jesus through his future career in business.

Would you pray for Zach as he reaches out to his friends?  Pray that God would use him and other InterVarsity students to help their friends see and follow Jesus. 

Crash Course Bible Studies

Charlie has been studying at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) since March.  When she left last spring, she asked for a crash course in leading a bible study because she had never led one before. She wanted to start a Bible study at OIMB for anyone interested.  As she emailed the OIMB campus to invite people to the bible study, she realized she couldn't just email students but had to email the staff and faculty as well.  She was nervous about expressing her faith so openly in a strongly scientific environment but refused to let that fear stop her.

"Mary" was the one person who responded.  Mary isn't a Christian but is curious about Jesus and Christians.  Charlie and Mary started reading through John together, talking about Jesus and his invitation for our lives.  As they kept hanging out, Mary got more and more excited about Jesus.  Charlie bought her a Bible and Mary started reading on her own.  At one point, Mary came to Charlie really excited because she had just read in John 8 where Jesus says "I tell you the truth before Abraham was even born, I am."  Mary was blown away by the reality that Jesus has always been.  

Jesus is revealing himself to Mary.  As Charlie returns to the main UO campus this fall, she's excited to continue hanging out with Mary and talking about Jesus.  Would you pray for both of them?  And praise God with me for faithful students who take risks to advance the Kingdom of God.

You Don't Think of Us 24/7?

Sometimes I forget that your lives don't revolved around the UO and InterVarsity.  I would like to imagine that you frequently think of us throughout the day and offer up prayers that shake heaven and shake our campus.  But I know that you are people who are committed to many different works of God, for which I am really thankful!  And that you have lives that are full of work, children and grand-children, serving in countless ways, and many other things.


But I've been reminded lately by reading Ephesians of the spiritual battle that we are in.  That there is a very real war taking place in our world and on the University of Oregon campus.  Daily we are engaging in a war for the souls of these students, faculty, and staff.  I don't know how often you pray for us, but would you at least pray for us weekly?  Our hearts can get pretty beat up day after day and we need the sustaining power and grace of Jesus.  Our student leaders are serving on the front lines of the battle and they need your prayers.  This ministry needs your prayers to move forward.


Would you pray for us weekly this month.  Here is a way to pray for each week in February - you could even print this out and put it on your fridge:

• Week 1: That student leaders would grow a love and passion for prayer that they would pass on to their small group members.  That as they pray, they would learn to be still and hear the voice of God and then respond.  And that God would answer their prayers as they pray for their non-Christian friends.
• Week 2:  Pray for our process of selecting new leaders that begins this week.  Pray that God would impress on new students a desire to become leaders and influencers for the Kingdom of God on campus.  Pray that the staff would have wisdom in this process as we interview lots of students.  And finally, pray for students who will make the sacrifice of moving back into the dorms.
• Week 3:  This our week of Winter Conference. The staff will already be tired as we have pushed hard to this point.  Pray that we would learn to receive our strength from Jesus and that we would know the joy of our salvation.  We need to be reminded that this is God's work!
• Week 4:  As we come back from Winter Conference, pray that the things God did would stick in students and that they would be able to translate the things they learned back to campus.

Thank you for praying for us.  

Joel

Influencers

If you think back over your life, there are probably some key people who influenced your journey.  This quarter, our student leaders are learning how God wants to use them to influence the students in their small groups. They are learning that some of their greatest joy comes in seeing others fulfill the vision that God has for their lives.  These leaders serve, sacrifice, and invest with the hope that the students they are influencing would be moved to pursue God's vision for their lives.

Aaron (above) is a great example of this. As a first year small group leader, Aaron is passionate about helping the people in his small group pursue Jesus through community, prayer, and Bible study.  He tries many different things to help his Bible study engage, like last week when he wrote the whole passage on butcher paper on the wall so they could study and discuss it differently.  I love his creativity!

Aaron has been influencing Zach, a Christian who has grown a ton in the last few years in IV.  As Zach is growing under Aaron's influence, he invited his non-Christian roommate Alex to come to Bible study.  Alex agreed and has been a regular this year at Bible study and just recently started coming to our Guy's Prayer Group that meets weekly.  He's asking great questions and is discovering that God has incredible things for his life.  Please pray for Alex!

Aaron influences Zach who influences Alex.  I love it!  I'm praying that more students understand how God wants to use them to influence their peers and help them see Jesus!

Christy's Story

Sometimes students tell it better than we do.  Christy (on left) is a freshman (now sophomore) who will be living in the dorms and leading a Bible study next year.  She shared this at an "open-mike night," and graciously let me share it with you:

Stumbo's Journey:

I like to think of life as a journey. It's like running, where you an enjoy those scenic, easy stretches and the days where you feel on top of life, but at the same time you have to be stubborn and push through the never ending hills and the days where running just sucks, simply because you know it's good for you. Or like climbing, where you know the end result is to top out, but there are many ways to get there. Every hold is one move away, and sometimes you gotta take that leap of faith to grab the next hold just around the corner, not knowing if you're going to land it or fall onto the crash pad below. And in this journey of life, college is just another step. A step into the unknown. A step into adulthood. A step into learning more about yourself than you ever had before.

I knew basically no one coming to Oregon. I met some people at introDUCKtion, like my twin, and I grabbed lunch with my roommate on day over summer, but I was the only person from my high school to venture north into Oregon for years and a lot of my friends at school even questioned why I would choose Oregon over some UC.

Let's just say I'm super glad I did :)

I remember move in day like the back of my hand. I was looking forward to it all summer, and seriously, who could forget lugging all your stuff up 4 flights of stairs? As I was moving in, 2 people asked if I wanted some help. They happened to be Andrew and Kristen. My parents and I already got all my stuff from the car, but they mentioned they were from Intervarsity. I told them I was looking for a fellowship so they gave me their spiel and handed me a flyer. Little did they know that this shy freshman would one day execute the greatest chair heist in history!

Sometime before the Point (IV's large group) that first Wednesday, Alex and this weird guy who wasn't in college anymore went around McClain inviting people to the Point. I was planning on checking it out on my own, but I was stoked to go with people who I kinda knew. The next day I wrote in my journal, "I love my hall. Coolest thing, 15 people from McClain went to Intervarsity on Wednesday and it was AWESOME. I'm definitely going to that one. And we have a Bible study IN McClain." That's all I said. Honestly I was hoping for some elaborate, deep, insightful thought about my first experience at Intervarsity...welcome to freshman spazziness at the beginning of the year!

My freshman year has been a huge journey. There's something about being thrown into life where you're on your own for the first time without your parents and in a place where you know absolutely no one. At the beginning of the year you're pretty much forced to make a bunch of decisions all at once, all of which can dictate what the year will look like. Am I going to go to parties? Am I going to drink? Am I going to stay on top of studies or procrastinate? Am I going to get sleep or stay up late watching movies? What kind of people do I want to hang out with? The list goes on and there's no way I could remember all those choices I made in those first few weeks of school, but I can say without a doubt that the best decision I made was joining this community, Intervarsity. Through you guys, God has challenged me and helped me grow closer to Him in ways that I wouldn't have even imagined at the beginning of the school year and Intervarsity has been the one constant in this crazy world of college.

I remember fall conference and awkwardly sitting in Abby's small group wanting say something but not saying anything because I had no idea who these people were. I remember on those first Sundays how awkward it was squishing in a car with a bunch of random people I didn't know to get to church. I remember the first time Kit asked me to go around McClain and take out people's trash and share Jesus with them. I seriously thought I was going to pee my pants. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I signed up for the Proxe station or when I made that call to my friend to see if she wanted to hang out once a week and read the Bible.

And because of all this and more, God has helped me realize more and more what it means to truly follow Him and call myself a Christian. He's helped me realize the urgency in telling people about Him and that even if I'm not so great at it, He will use those steps of faith in ways that blow my mind away. He's helped me to realize that yeah, school is important, but I value it WAY too much and that it can't become an idol where I find my worth in my grades instead of in Him. He helped me to realize that talking things out with people instead of keeping it holed up inside is REALLY GOO and that I can trust people with the messiness of my life, even if I haven't known them for years. I've learned that it's ok to have a lot of questions and that I NEED to ask them. I've learned what a true community is, and I've experienced it here.

The list could go on of all the things God has taught me this year, and I know there's so much more to learn. I still value that A way too much and find it hard to talk to my friends about Jesus or trust close friends with what's going on in my life, and I know these are things I'm probably going to struggle with the rest of my life.

But wha tI really want to say is thanks. Thanks to all of you for being awesome people who love Jesus and want to figure out life. Kit, thanks for constantly pushing me WAY outside my comfort zone and encouraging me along the way. Joel, as annoying as it sometimes was, thanks for answering my questions with even more questions and giving me more to think about. Thanks everyone for loving on a shy freshman and embracing all her quirks and oddities. I love you all :).

Needless to say, I can't believe my first year of college is almost over. It's been a long, crazy, exciting, but hard journey. And in this part of my journey of life, my freshman year of college, what I'll remember most is not whether I aced that midterm or helped pull the best pranks in my hall or even that we went 12-0 only to lose to Auburn at the BCS. What I'll remember most is all of you, from smashing 8 people in a car to get to church, to whammie Wednesdays, to grossing Aby and Becca out with crazy concoctions at Barnhart, to smacking bananas against our heads, to falling asleep in the prayer room at 3 in the morning cuz it's way to late, and who could forget the great chair heist of 2011? I'll remember all of you, this community known as Intervarsity, because all of you play an integral role in my journey of life.

Thanks"

What is it all about?

With summer here, I get an opportunity to catch up on some reading that I often neglect during the school year.  It's a different pace of work.  Right now I'm reading this book, Wisdom Chaser, by Nathan Foster (Richard Foster's son) and loving it.  Well worth the read for anybody!  Reading in the park today, this line popped into my head: "Don't aspire to live a great, impressive life.  Labor to live a significant life."  It brought my reading to a standstill - it's not a new idea for me but it went deeper this time.

I think that I (we) live in bondage to our accomplishments for the most part.  It's how we define ourselves.  It's amazing how subtly I can slip into a conversation my improved running times, my plans for a 220 mile hike this summer, that I bake a lot of my own bread, etc.  I am very aware of my accomplishments.  How do I overcome my bondage to accomplishments? 

Working with college students, I see (and live) a constant invitation to define success through my list of accomplishments and greatness.  In my relationships with these students, I feel so tempted to one-up them so I have some semblance of authority.  I know - that's not where my authority comes from.  It comes from Jesus.  I know that, but do I live it?  If I'm honest with myself, most days I don't.  But that's not how Jesus invites me to live and I don't want students to live that either.  I don't want them to learn that their influence comes from their accomplishments.  I want them to know that everything they are comes from their relationship with Jesus.  How can I teach that if I don't live it myself?

I think this is part of Jesus' response to our bondage to an achievement driven lifestyle:

Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for the will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for the will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you
and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
Rejoice and be glad!


Simple thoughts for a beautiful summer day.  I hope it continues to go deeper in my heart. 

scriptureprayer

I just finished reading Eugene Peterson's "A Long Obedience in the Same Direction." Awesome book that I'm sorry I took so long to read.  Below is a quote from the Epilogue in the newest edition which summarized and affirms for me some of the things I have been learning this year working with students:

"The second conviction was that my primary pastoral work had to do with Scripture and prayer.  I was neither capable nor competent to form Christ in another person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman or child.  That is supernatural work, and I am not supernatural.  Mine was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer - helping people listen to God speak to them from the Scriptures and then joining them in answering God as personally and honestly as we could in lives of prayer.  This turned out to be slow work.  From time to time, impatient with the slowness, I would try out ways of going about my work that promised quicker results.  But after a while it always seemed to be more like meddling in these people's lives than helping them attend to God...Scripture and prayer are not two separate entities,  My pastoral act was to fuse them into a  single act: scriptureprayer, or prayerscripture."

I don't know about you but I am so tempted by the "quicker" ways, the new ideas.  But time and again I reach a point where I realize that I'm actually trying to make this mine own thing, rather than let it be God's.  This past year has been all about exposing to students to Scripture and seeing what happens.  I remember when we started on this course, there was one particular student who grew up in the church, had the "answers" to everything but didn't love the Bible.  She was a sophomore this year and clearly said to me in the beginning "I don't want to lead a Bible study - I'm just not excited about it."  I remember praying "Jesus, I want to see her love your word!"  Just last week we were sitting and debriefing the year together and one of the things she noted is that the Bible has come alive to her in ways that it never had before.  WOOT!  I managed to maintain my composure but inside I was bursting with joy because God had answered my prayers!  She's even leading a Bible study next year.  

Scriptureprayer.  God has already given us what we need.  Let's learn how to hold it out to people and let them be transformed by the Holy Spirit.  I won't be with these students forever.  My hope is that they leave this place with a love for God's Word and for prayer.  Those are things they can take with them for the rest of their lives - and it will have a much more profound impact than if they were to take me everywhere with them!