Instead of feeling sad and hopeless, I got mad. I pushed my way through problems with aggression and sarcasm and hateful words.  I made very bad choices: Drugs, alcohol, sex… because I had no one holding me accountable for my decisions.  I was a great student who got a full academic scholarship to college and who also got whatever she wanted.  Life was good I thought, so what was missing? What was I still searching for?

Then religion really punched me in the face. I met a girl my freshman year named Shanell Shoop who was also getting a degree in Medical/Molecular Biology. We instantly connected and I had NO idea why because we are complete opposites. She’s a country girl, I’m a city girl; she is sweet and polite and compassionate and I’m, well, not. We hung out every day for 3 years.  Something pulled me towards her. The more I got to know her the more her faith came spilling out. The more her faith came spilling out the more I hated it.

I wanted no part of the hypocritical organized religions. My heart actually progressively hardened to the point where I became an active atheist.  Vocal.  ANY time religion or God was brought up I would immediately laugh at the idiocy and the naive beliefs of these people. I thought only weak people needed God as their band-aid in order to get up every morning… and I would often tell them that to their faces.

The sad part about this all is, I gave Shanell, my sweet friend, such a hard time so frequently. My responses to her were all out of frustration. But you know, Shanell never lashed out and she always sat and listened to my entire point, making an effort to try to relate with me. She never shoved God in my face and she never ever told me I was a bad person for the way I felt.

Her response was always one of love and understanding. Shanell is that person that showed me what a life with God looked like and what a heart looked like with God in it. She was an exemplary, active Christian.  She sinned and she messed up, but she lived every day asking for forgiveness, with God guiding her steps to lead her to do better. She was living in the reality of sin, but at the same time always humbly looking to God to grow.

Once I entered my senior year, she had left to go work with Cru at the Oklahoma State University campus.  I had reluctantly come to accept that there probably was a higher power, but in my world, it definitely wasn’t God.  Life was good. I was preparing to enter the Doctor of Dental Surgery Program, I have a wonderful family, a wonderful man who I want to make my husband, and all in all, a great attitude.   Yet something in my heart was still aching; but why? I’m at the top of my game!

At the end of my first semester of my senior year, I had no idea why, but I texted Shanell and shared this information with her. I told her, “I feel like God is finally punishing me.”

I hadn’t heard back from Dental school yet regarding my glowing application for their program. Also, I was really battling my ability to form relationships. I felt like no one really liked me. Although I have a tough exterior, I ultimately AM caring and kind and I was just confused why people seemed distant from me and too scared or intimidated to ever approach me.

That night I was home alone.  In texting Shanell, I asked her why there was still a hole in my heart.  Why was I still incomplete?  She immediately called me and I poured my heart out to her. She directed me to Cru.org and over the phone we went through what I now know as the KGP, and I accepted Christ that night.

The CONSISTENCY in faith from the followers of Christ is what caught my eye. THAT consistency in His power made me realize the reality of Him. From then on I experienced an overwhelming enlightenment in my life and of the world. I had a spark for God; I wanted to know more.

Looking back, even when I completely turned my back on God, he was there the entire time watching over me and protecting me and loving me when I didn’t deserve that at all. He saw me as I was. I was not worthy of this grace and I will forever spend my life spreading his wonderful news and expressing gratitude for the wonderful, fulfilling life he has given me.

My friend Jessie invited me to go out a rappelling outing with a Cru ministry called Lifelines. I should let you know now that I hate heights but I loved Jessie and I also loved conquering my fears. So I went. I won’t go into detail, but that trip, going over the edge of that cliff, forced me to rely on someone other than myself. It forced me to rely on God.

That trip was the first time that I really had to contemplate my faith, and this reality was a hundred times scarier than any cliff. I didn’t have the same relationship that this group had with Jesus. I didn’t think I could.

So for the first time in my life I sat down and started to read the Bible with the help of one of the Lifelines staff. They say the first step in every journey is always the hardest. Well, Lifelines helped me take my first step.

If you had asked me what my plans were last semester I would have told you I was transferring to some other school. Now I feel like I have my place at UVA. You see, meeting this group, meeting Lifelines, has introduced me to a new world. The Christian community here can only be described with one word: love.

When it comes to the people in this community, you are never just a familiar face or a simple acquaintance. From the first time you meet, you are a genuine friend.

I haven’t figured out my faith 100% and am still in the process of completely making that leap. However, I have found a community that I am confident will hold me up even if I fall and who will really love me.   They show me every day, through their actions and words, what it means to be a Christian and what it means to have a relationship with Christ. It’s a beautiful thing to see first hand and an even more beautiful thing to be a part of.

I vividly remember the exact moment I realized I hated my body. I was on the beach with my family, and I didn’t feel comfortable in a swim suit. I was only nine years old. As I got older, my contempt for myself continued to grow. I used to feel so empty. I grew up going to church. I went every single Sunday with my family for as far back as I can remember. I heard stories about God and thought I had an idea of who He is. I thought as long as I was a pretty good person and tried to do what is right, God would love me.

In eighth grade, I began channeling my dislike for myself by physically harming my body, and I started cutting. I suffered from suicidal thoughts and wondered what the world would be like if I wasn’t a part of it anymore. I went to school with a smile on my face and interacted with my friends, constantly functioning in a state of false happiness. My feelings of depression continued until a good friend of mine committed suicide. It was a wakeup call for me to witness the suffering of the people she left behind. 

In college, my struggles were amplified. I fell into the temptation of drinking, drugs, and impurity. I searched for fulfillment and found temporary satisfaction in these things. When the satisfaction wore off, I would be left feeling empty all over again. That didn’t stop me from trying to please the people around me. I thought if I joined in what they were doing, maybe they would accept me; maybe they would care; maybe I would be loved… Maybe I would be enough. My doubts about my worthiness affected all of the relationships in my life. Although I wanted to be cared for by others, I thought if I let them in, if they truly knew my heart, I wouldn’t be enough for them. I thought God hated me. I was convinced He was angry with me for all the ways I was disobeying Him.

My junior year, I thought my life was starting to come together. I was in what I thought was a great relationship, I had a loyal, energetic and caring best friend, and I had my career path set in place. Out of these things, I constructed a mask that resembled happiness. As the year progressed, my friendship began to disintegrate because of my neglect of it and my anxiety. My job security that I had so carefully planned out fell through. My once-ideal relationship had gone from one extreme to the complete opposite. Someone who once claimed to love me ended up physically abusing me and leaving me emotionally scarred. I was so damaged and drained that I believed I was no longer capable of loving others. I stopped even pretending to be happy. My heart was hardened. I shut myself off from God and the world.

I grew up thinking I had to be a certain way or get to a certain point for someone to love me. At the beginning of my senior year, at a retreat for Cru, I learned that God loves me exactly the way I am. He loves me in the midst of my brokenness, my anxiety, my imperfection. I was shocked to learn this. I was broken down to a place I had nowhere left to turn but to God. Romans 5:8 says, “But God demonstrates His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  God doesn’t get angry with us. He loves us even when we feel we are doing wrong. That’s when I felt it for the first time in my life: pure JOY.

Not only does He love me, but He wants to know me and have a relationship with me. I am not perfect. I never will be, and that’s okay because God IS. God continued to pursue me and cling on to me even when I wasn’t clinging to Him or even looking for Him. I no longer need to fake happiness; the happiness that I feel is REAL.

I still face struggles all the time, but I know in my heart that my God loves me now and will forever, and nothing I do will change that. I used to feel ashamed by my struggles. I felt that because of them, I wasn’t good enough. Now I am reminded that my trials make Christ’s sacrifice on the cross that much more beautiful.

The main sessions were definitely the highlight of my time at TCX. The worship was just phenomenal; I found myself breaking down more times than I care to count! Every time a speaker got up, I felt like they were speaking directly towards me. Like they could see the junk in my life and were telling me to just let it go and to put my trust in Christ. Even though 1600+ students were present during these sessions, they were still super personal.

I also loved the time I had to build relationships with old and new friends alike. I especially loved the day of outreach, and the privilege I had to show the love of Christ! So I guess what I’m saying is that TCX rocked.

Lately, in the time leading up to TCX, I’d been feeling super stressed out about school, family, and friends; just a huge pile of junk that had been hampering my walk with Christ. It had all just become so overwhelming that I felt trapped, lost, and unloved.

It took me until my time here in Minneapolis to realize that we belong to a God who promised never to leave or forsake us. If everything else in life is a mess, there will always be Christ! Even though I’m a total screw up, Jesus has willingly given me his spotless life, and my position in Christ has already been made perfect through his death and resurrection, no matter how I may be feeling at any given time. TCX was an amazing reminder of that and has reignited my passion for the Lord.

All weekend, I heard about various Summer Projects, honoring God financially, and other steps of faith. Most of the time, I gave a quick “Yep, I’ve done that” or a stern “No, God isn’t calling me to that – that’s scary”. God revealed to me that I was looking at the life of the Christian as a check-list, not real vision to follow His plan. One of the speakers said something that hit me hard: You’re always called. Whether it’s across the street or across the world – you’re called to go somewhere and do something for God.

I immediately thought back to something that I told my friend who is on staff a couple months ago when she challenged me to pray about an international Summer Project. I told her that I was afraid – I was afraid to even start praying about where God wanted me to go in fear that my plan wouldn’t match His plan. “What if He called me to go somewhere uncomfortable? What if He called me out of my major? What if He called me somewhere my family didn’t approve of? What if He called me… ” All of the questions that I was so afraid of for so long kept coming back to me all weekend.

The last night of TCX is a night devoted to surrendering our whole lives to the Lord. This year it was a little different, though. A dear friend and man of the Lord, Sean Schoonmaker, was killed in a car accident in August of this last year. He served along side me and roughly 100 other students this summer in North Myrtle Beach. His dad came and spoke to us at the last meeting about how Sean was fully committed to the Lord. He wanted to go wherever God called him. Sean lived a life fully surrendered to the Lord.

As I sat in my chair, I sobbed and thought back to how Sean lived his life. All I kept thinking was that I wanted to be like him, because he wanted to be like Jesus. I wanted to surrender my entire life to Him – the only way to gain anything is to lose everything for Him. The speaker talked about Matthew 4:19-20: ““Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him.” That’s how Sean lived, and that’s how I want to live. Sitting in my seat, with tears streaming down my face, I signed the sheet surrendering my life to Him – all my dreams, all my plans, all my hopes, all my fears, all my pains… all of me.

TCX turned out to be more than just a reunion with my project friends or a chance to experience a conference with the freshmen girls in my Bible Study. It was more than just a day of outreach or a dance party. TCX was when God met me where I was at and said “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And I dropped my net and followed Him.

This was the question I asked our Epic students during one of our weekly meetings without much expectation.  Our ministry was still fairly new and our small group still in the process of getting to know each other.  Also, Minnesota is a long seven-hour drive away from our campus in Lincoln, Nebraska.

“Yes I would go.” “That sounds fun!”  People’s responses to my question were a total surprise.  I remember walking back from that Epic meeting, praising God for the students’ steps of faith.

There were three things that I was praying for as the day of the conference approached: First, for safe travel.  Second, I prayed for God to do a work in the student’s hearts over the weekend of the conference.  Third, I prayed for our Epic movement to grow closer as a fellowship.

Surprisingly and fortunately, God did not answer all of my prayers this time!

We got to Minneapolis safely on Friday.  I was really excited to see students hanging out and getting to know some other Epic movements in the Midwest.  I thought everything was going great when suddenly, one of our cars got into an accident on the way to an outreach at a local Hmong community.  Our student who was driving was in tears.  The car was her parents’ and she was so scared.  But the Epic community surrounded her with support and she was able to get medically cleared from the accident and pick up a rental car for the drive home.

I was so thankful that the Epic staff were there to help students recover from anxiety and find the rental car to get back to Nebraska.  God is in control of all things and directs things according to His purpose.  And that night after the accident happened, God proved that fact by using the whole situation to open the heart of one of the students in our Epic movement, and bring him to salvation!

I remember when that student said the prayer to accept Christ at 3:00 am in the morning, with other Epic students laying their hands around him; I was just standing in awe in that beautiful picture.  I could not believe after all the struggle we had been through that day, how Jesus used the chaos of the wrecked car for good — using fellowship and love in our community to open someone’s heart and bring him to Christ. With my hands lifted up, I just couldn’t help but praise Him and say “Thank you Jesus, You are so good!”

One student described the whole experience as “The best conference I have ever been to”.  We grew so much closer as a family, and I could see that God was working in the student’s hearts to be more open and talk about their faith with each other.

I can see He is opening a new chapter for our movement in Nebraska after this conference: taking a step of courage to go out and experience Jesus and God’s love as a community.  Seeing His work inside each of the students’ lives after this conference really confirmed my desire to work and serve the ministry, reaching out to Asian American on campus through Epic, wanting others to experience what nine of us did during the Epic Legacy Summit.  This is just the beginning, and many more great things are yet to come within the Epic Movement at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln!

As time went on I (Sean, pictured left) fell in love with school because there I could find friends, loving teachers, and I could perform well enough to get everyone’s approval. At the end of 8^th grade, my mom’s addiction began to prevent her from keeping jobs and paying bills.  She was a single parent, so that summer I moved in with my Grandma and Aunt. So when I got to my new high school I began a new life for myself. I excelled academically, participated in tons of clubs, and I made a lot of friends, which all led to me painting a really pretty picture of my life.

By the end of my senior year I had everything I wanted, friends, a great college at NC State, and scholarships that would pay for my college.  So I moved into college 2 months after graduation and I was living the college life. The only problem was I hated every bit of the college life, I didn’t have any of the great friends I made in high school, all of my achievements meant nothing to 30,000 students around me, and I felt like I had nowhere to turn.

I met a guy from Cru at a cookout and he really pursued a friendship with me and eventually I started going to a bible study he led. At one of those studies I remember going over Psalm 63:1 “You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water.” I was completely in shock that someone could feel that way about God and so I spent the rest of that semester trying to figure out who God was and it was over winter break that it all clicked and I placed my faith in Christ.

Since then God has blessed me with a great community of people from Cru. But more than anything He has taught me that my entire life I thought I was working for it all, but in reality He is a sovereign God that has always had a plan for my life and has always been a part of my life getting me to where I am today. I find it easy to really hurt for someone like me when I think of my story, but it’s actually a beautiful story because it’s part of God’s story that He’s allowed me to be a part of.

I have had the privilege of discipling (mentoring) Andrew since the beginning of his sophomore year at Ohio University. When I first met Andrew, two things were obvious to me: He is incredibly bright and very career-driven.

Andrew has long had dreams and aspirations of becoming a national broadcast journalist following his graduation. Last spring, he landed a very distinguished internship on The Today Show and spent several months working on the set in New York City. He absolutely loved the experience.  As soon as he completed his internship, he immediately boarded a plane and joined us in Slovenia for the summer to share with Slovene students the good news about Jesus.

At our Fall Retreat this past weekend, Andrew stood on stage and recounted his experience in Slovenia in front of 250 of his peers in Cru. While he acknowledged the beauty of the country, he spent most of the time discussing the dry spiritual condition that exists in Slovenia as well as his own struggle to personally surrender his career and post-graduation plans to the Lord.  “During the summer, I wanted to be able to say, ‘Lord, if you call me, I will follow you anywhere.’ But, I couldn’t do it. So I began to pray and ask the Lord to make me willing,” he explained.

God answered his prayer. Andrew described to his peers a conversation he had with a Slovene student one afternoon and a comment that shocked him. The student told Andrew, “In a hundred years, Christianity will probably not exist in Slovenia.”  The comment shook Andrew to his core. “I couldn’t believe it,” he explained as his peers listened closely. It was at this moment that tears began filling Andrews eyes. “Someone needs to go and tell these people about Jesus,” he said.

“As of right now, following graduation, I have every intention of spending next year in Slovenia reaching students with the good news of Jesus. When the applications open, I will be the first in line to submit my name and I want to invite you to come with me,” he said through joyful tears.

It was a powerful and proud moment for me to see Andrew joyfully surrender his plans to the Lord and put his career aspirations on hold so that he can go proclaim Jesus to a people that do not know Him. Andrew’s love for Jesus truly inspires me.

“January 19^th, 2010 at 8:05pm was the worst moment of my life.  I was walking into my fraternity’s lodge for our chapter meeting and I received a phone call from my mom. She broke the news to me that my dad had passed away. I erupted in anger, threw my phone across the hall, and punched the brick wall.  I hardly slept that night.  The next day I packed my bags and made the 10-hour drive home. This was the most difficult trip I had ever made because every small thing reminded me of my dad and I felt I couldn’t get home soon enough.

The next day I had to take care of funeral arrangements and pick up some of my dad’s stuff from the police station. Collecting my dad’s things felt conflicting and surreal.  Why did I have these?  They should be with my dad, not me.   That’s when the detective told me they had also found a crack pipe and crack cocaine. At this moment I felt as if the detective himself had plunged a knife deep into my heart. One more time I felt betrayed by my dad. After hearing that, I was so hurt that I couldn’t cry for the loss of my dad anymore.  Now there was just anger.”

A year after Dustin’s father’s death is when I met him, shared the gospel, and he came to faith.

Fast forward to the present and the choices God put before him.

I was bummed when Dustin told me he wasn’t going to be able to go to our Cru Fall Retreat.  He had a fraternity brother getting married that weekend. But his best friend Will challenged him to reconsider and to seriously pray about it. Late Wednesday night I texted Dustin and asked him what he had decided to do? He texted me back and simply said… “Wedding.”

On the next night, the Thursday before the retreat weekend, Dustin pulled me aside and said he had a confession to make. He hadn’t really prayed on Wednesday about going to the retreat.  But now he felt strongly that God wanted him to go to our Fall Retreat instead of the wedding.  His reason for the change?  There was surely to be alcohol at the wedding… and for him that was a constant struggle.  Dustin was also planning to make the drive down with a girl. In his own words he said, “That’s a recipe for disaster!” While Dustin knew that attending the wedding of a good friend was important, he also knew he needed to make the choice that would strengthen his faith, instead of one that would ultimately lead him to face temptation.

“Is it too late to sign up”, he asked?  With a smile, I told him I thought we could squeeze him in!

What did God do with his choice?  The next day, Friday, he and Will had lunch with a guy from his fraternity.  Dustin would have already been on the road to the wedding but now was about to leave for Fall Retreat so he had some extra time. They took the initiative to share the gospel with him and their fraternity brother placed his faith in Christ! Before their eyes he was transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. In addition, it was the first time Dustin and Will had shared their faith without others around.

Every week these young men are leading the charge by making bold choices that God can use. I am so proud of them. They motivate and inspire me to hold nothing back in my own pursuit of living a life pleasing to Christ.