We had hundreds of conversations on the ways we fake it, how God wants us to be real with him, and what the gospel actually is. Four Aggies came to know Jesus!
Overwhelmingly, students voted for “with friends” or “at church” when asked where A&M fakes it the most. But then I’d talk to students who didn’t think we were fake at church at all. It was intriguing to see the disconnect.
I shared about my perfectionism, how I often hide anger stemming from it. Most of the students I talked to said they hide being upset or sad – they don’t want to burden other people, and they don’t want to deal with the responses they might get if they revealed their true feelings.
We asked students to read a paraphrase of Luke 18:9-14. One pride-filled dude prayed to God trying to fake how great he was for himself as well as God and everyone else. Another guy was real about his brokenness. We asked why God accepted the prayer of the second guy but not the first, why it’s hard to be real sometimes, and who they identified with.
One Christian grad student shared that her boyfriend was in a coma and his family blamed her. A Christian undergrad told me about her depression. An atheist undergrad told me she stopped going to church because everyone acted happy all the time, and you just didn’t need to be happy all the time. She believed God was a construct that we as social creatures invented to comfort us when we felt alone, and to help explain the inexplicable.
What was really exciting (besides 4 people saying yes to God!) was seeing Thrive students out there. Especially a freshman guy and a junior leader – they were out there every day, sacrificing time and energy to step out of their comfort zone. Sharing the gospel with strangers is risky; in a culture and a season of life that’s all about image and relationships with peers, it takes guts to say something that could be rejected. I’m so proud to work with these students!
Last Friday night, at the end of our outreach week, we invited Erin Waller, an InterVarsity chapter planter in Dallas, to speak. She brought it. I was challenged that, little by little, I’ve drifted into bolstering myself up by putting down nominal Christians and even for-realsies Christians who aren’t living out God’s mission. I don’t want to be like the first guy in Luke 18. "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!"
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