A Glimpse Back in Time: Part 2

This is part 2 of my series of W&L posts and picks up in September/October of my first year at college.  Make sure to read A Glimpse Back in Time: Part 1 first! 

Radical ideas such as this one (praying together for at least 5 hours a week) are really nothing special, especially among young and zealous Christians.  What is special, though, is when radical ideas are followed by radical behaviors.  When four people plan to pray together daily and then actually do it.  And we did.  God gave us supernatural commitment, and we held prayer meetings every single night around 8 or 9 in Brandon’s room.  Occasionally, we invited other people, but usually, it was just the four of us.   

It was a simple thing really: meeting, praying, and talking.  But it began to awaken a new hunger in me.  Suddenly, I wasn’t just talking about following Jesus, I was actually talking TO Jesus.  At first, I was mystified.  Chris would tell us stories, about crazy missionaries who were sold out for God and about revivalists who saw crowds of people healed and saved.  But most importantly he told us his own stories, about encountering God, hearing Him speak, and falling in love with Jesus.  And although I’d come into college believing I’d pretty much gone as deep into my faith as I could go, I soon realized that I’d barely scratched the surface.  Kind of like when I was younger and got really excited about the jolly music coming from the pink and white truck, completely missing out on the fact that the friendly driver would give me delicious ice cream if I would ask (and pay, of course, but that’s beside the point).  Anyway, I started to realize that I was missing out on the best part of following Christ: actually knowing Him and His love for me.  I saw in Chris a passion for Jesus that I hadn’t known existed, and I began to pursue it for myself. 

I started praying hard for my friends and my campus, but mostly I examined my own heart.  For the first time, I could actually feel God’s love for me so strongly that I really desired to spend time with Him, and not just so I could mark my daily devotional time off my to-do list with my colorful highlighters.  I’d finish my homework early so I could slip away to read my Bible or sing love songs with my flute on the banks of the Chessie Trail.  And I’d get up before my roommate to pray in private without the constant nagging of “Is she watching me?”  During those months, God began to whisper to my heart.  Or perhaps I just finally learned to listen to His still small voice.

Since those days, God has never seemed quite so close, but that sweet intimacy still drives me to pursue Him.  It was a taste of eternity, where God will be by our side and we will just soak Him in.  The rays of His presence drenched in Shekinah glory and agape love.  It’s gonna be awesome.      

During that first semester, God marked my heart.  He talked to me and loved me and answered prayers in ways that could not be coincidences.  One of my favorite stories is about a guitar.  You see, before I came to college, I dabbled in guitar.  I learned a bit during my gap year as Jon Beard taught Honduran kids in Spanish, and I took a few lessons from Crystal Gray before starting school.  So as I was packing for W&L, my dad suggested I bring the guitar along.  I told him it was silly; I could barely play, and I’d never have time to practice.  But we finally agreed that, if there was room in the car once I’d packed everything else, I’d bring the guitar.  And there was.  So I brought the mediocre guitar that my mom had bought on Ebay, and it sat in my dorm room for weeks.  Meanwhile, although I didn’t know it, Chris was praying for an acoustic guitar. He had been leading worship for years but had no instrument with him at W&L.  So I had a guitar that I couldn’t play, and Chris could play but had no guitar.  And once we made the connection, my guitar became the answer to his prayer and the instrument that we used for worship for our prayer meetings for nearly 3 years (until it fell in the Prayer Room a few months ago and the neck snapped…a sad day). 

Anyway, there were lots of stories like that, and it was exciting.  Every day I was eager to spend time with God, to share my faith with people in the dining hall, and of course to go to Brandon’s room in the evening where I knew I would learn something new about God.  Meeting with Chris, Brandon, and Daniel was one of the highlights of each day.  They became my closest friends, and our little community began to extend beyond our prayer time.  We ate together, shared about what God was teaching us, and even attempted an off-campus adventure, which was thwarted by a flat tire in Brandon’s car and resulted in pumpkin carving on the Colonnade instead of the much more exciting Blue Ridge Parkway. 

But around December, Chris announced that we should halt the meetings to seek God individually and to pray about something bigger.  I didn’t understand, and I didn’t like it, but that month before Christmas break was good for me.  It proved that my new desire for God wasn’t all about the prayer meetings or my new friends.  It was all about loving Jesus, and I sought him just as hard when we stopped meeting.  I found rooms in the school where I could sneak away to pray away from the curious gaze of my roommate (which was very effective except for the one time when I was praying in a music room and someone walked in to play their cello...awkward!)  Anyway, based on Chris’ suggestion, I began to pray that God would open the doors for us to start a Prayer Room, a place where students could come to worship, pray, and meet with God any day of the week.  And soon after Christmas break, that’s exactly what He did.

To be continued…

A Glipse Back in Time (Part 1)

Hi friends!  I've decided to start blogging again this summer.  But I realize that my blog currently has some pretty gaping holes.  I wrote regularly during my gap year and again during the summer after my freshman year, but there is little to nothing on here about my college experience.  So I've decided to fill you in, to tell the untold stories of Washington and Lee from my first year to the present, at least the important ones.  And once I've done that, I'll reinstate my regular, weekly summer blogs.  But first, let's rewind.  This first post is one that I wrote after my freshman year but never put online.  I'll  start here (without editing it tooo much) and then pick up where I left off.  Hope you enjoy this ride in my time machine!  

A Glimpse Back in Time

It’s easy to tell stories of life’s adventures, to write about getting lost on bicycles in Uruguay or climbing waterfalls in the jungle just outside the Amazon.  And with the backdrop of such exciting tales, it’s even fairly easy to tell you what God showed me through those adventures.  But I fear that I deceive you by writing blog posts only when I’m hundreds of miles from home doing something exotic or experiencing poverty firsthand.  If you know me from my posts alone, your understanding of my life is surely askew.  Because there’s another story I’ve yet to tell.  It might not sound like an adventure.  There are no gypsies, no soups full of chicken feet, and no venomous spiders in my bathroom.  Instead, there’s just a humdrum of daily activity that doesn’t really make for the best story.  So I could skip this one.  I could let you keep believing that everything I do is either exciting or terrifying or hilarious.  I could…yet, I can’t.  Because THIS is the story through which God has changed my life.  THIS is who I am in the day to day.  Not an adventurer.  Not a world traveler.  Just me, a Potter’s Daughter.

Once upon a time, God invaded the life of a curly haired high school senior.  He’d always been a big part of her life, but just weeks after she uttered the prayer, “Here I am! Send me!” He truly took over.   Like a giant claw machine in an arcade, He lifted her out of Morgantown, sent her all over the world, and then gently set her back down in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley at a university where He would transform her life.

That’s where we begin our story…my story if somehow the curly hair reference wasn’t enough to give it away. I showed up at Washington and Lee University (hereafter "W&L") excited about volunteering, studying poverty, and getting involved in campus ministry.  But that excitement was pretty short lived.

The first real night I spent on campus was a disaster, and not just because I fell off my lofted bed (which really hurt and made me very glad that my roommate wasn’t planning to arrive for several more days).  Anyway, I learned quickly that following Jesus in college was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done.  After roaming around campus with the only two people I could find who hadn’t gone out to the parties, I returned to my room and cried.  Hadn’t God heard me when I said, “Anywhere but a party school, Lord!”?  [Since I starting writing this almost 3 years ago, I’ve realized that pretty much every college could probably be considered a “party school,” but at the same time, I continue to insist that W&L is particularly so.] The night was horrible, and I spent the next day calling my closest friends at home and sobbing over the four years of misery I was sure to endure.  Never in a million years would I have guessed that just eight months later, I would be crying because I didn’t want to leave.

I spent the first week or so drowning in self-pity.  But eventually I had a change of heart.  Although I wasn’t sure why God had sent me to such a place of darkness, I figured it wasn’t to sit around and cry.  At that point, I had to take action.  I could join in with the other freshmen waiting in line for the bus to the frat parties, or I could resist.  And fully aware that it would be the lonelier path, I chose the latter.  I had no idea what I was getting into. 

Thankfully, I at least had the sense to know that there was nothing in the world that I could do to change W&L on my own.  The culture of the school was the result of a couple hundred years, and I was very certain that it was going to take a miracle to bring light forth from the darkness.  But thankfully, I happened to have a pretty tight relationship with the Creator of the Universe.  And I believed that He would change our campus if we took the time to ask.  

So after about another week, I wiped away my bitter tears and put my game face on.  Without wasting time, I grabbed a friend and a dean and started up weekly prayer meetings in the library.  And little by little, God began to take control. 

It quickly became evident that an hour of prayer a week wasn’t going to cut it.  Although our Tuesday morning numbers faded away (probably at least partly due to the 7:30am start time), a tiny band of dedicated prayer warriors began to develop. Two became three and three became four as we spent hours in d-hall strategizing about how to conquer our school for Christ.  Though I’d rarely spent time with guys in the past, Brandon, Daniel, and Chris soon became my closest friends.                                                                                     

“What if we were to pray 5 hours a week?” asked Chris one day from the other side of a booth in d-hall.  Over the past month or so, Chris had become our leader.  He had experienced more of God than the rest of us, and He gave me vision to really know God's heart and see Him as my friend.  Chris challenged me to read the Bible more and to talk to God like a real person, and it began changing everything.

Looking back, I think Chris' question was probably rhetorical, but in that moment, my hungry heart would have agreed to pretty much anything to get more of Jesus. “Let’s do it!” I said, without hesitation.

I watched the three faces around me.  Brandon’s sparkling eyes reflected my excitement as he nodded vigorously.  Daniel didn’t seem so sure, but I knew he’d be willing to join.  And Chris just looked surprised.  I don’t think he’d actually expected us to say yes. Who wants to pray, anyway?

But we did.  So that night, I started on a journey that I know will continue throughout every season of my life: the journey of DAILY prayer. 

To be continued…