Dawn

            Our story is now on that same boy from earlier, the boy with all the confidence but also the boy who is finally realizing that maybe his confidence is in the wrong thing. What if my confidence shouldn’t be in myself? What if there is something bigger out there that I’m just not understanding? What is it that all these people around me have, that I just don’t? These are just a few questions that our boy had in his mind, while he was also experiencing a depression beyond what he ever thought possible.

            Our boy is in college now, surrounded by freshmen who all want to find their cliques and upperclassmen who either don’t know he exists or who want him to join their clique SO badly. He sees all these people and only actually sees a ton of strangers, people he doesn’t know and doesn’t care about. All the boy wants is to go home, to see his old friends and his family, to bask in his old easy life rather than this one with all its work and struggles. This is only the beginning of what were the worst few months of this boy’s life. The more he thought about home, the more he sunk into a deeper depression which he thought the only way out of was to just go back home, so he did. Multiple weekends that first semester were spent driving the many hours home to see the friends of old.

            The more time he spent at home, the better the boy came to realize that home wasn’t right either and that somehow his college was the place he needed to be, he just had no idea why yet. With the depression of grueling classes, being seemingly friendless, and constant loneliness creeping in, the boy finally did the only sane thing, listened to his father’s advice. He started looking into some campus ministries and found one that didn’t initially fit what he wanted (strange music) but somehow became the place that he would truly find a home in. The campus minister for the organization (Reformed University Fellowship) began to have a few talks with the boy while also helping him to get a ride to church with some other RUF people, and our boy even began to attend weekly freshman bible studies. Now remember, this is the atheist boy from not too long ago, the boy who didn’t care about God, but apparently also the boy who just didn’t know how much he needed God.

            As weeks past, one special weekend came when the boy decided to go home again cause he was still so unsure about college. As he was at home, he had one of his greatest moments; he missed his friends from college all of a sudden. In that moment, he realized what it was that his friends had that he had always wanted too. God! God was the key to any true resemblance of happiness. Without God, life was empty, pointless, just a string of events that were leading to a cold grave. With God there is life, with Him there is everything. The boy was no longer just attending RUF on Tuesday nights but instead was participating in every bit of RUF and church he could get his hands on. He found friends in RUF that he learned to love deeply and found a best friend that only strengthened his journey to God. He started to wonder. Who is this God? What is the true meaning of what Jesus did for us? How will this change everything?

            The boy looked back on his life and noticed that he kind of despised the person he once was, not because it was a bad person but because that person didn’t know the truth. The boy wanted to shout from the rooftops that “he loves Jesus!!!!” I admit that I make the boy’s transformation sound sudden, but in reality this period spanned over about a year and soon I will tell you where he is now but not in this post. This post is about the boy finding a flicker in the dark, or more importantly, God finding him in the dark. The boy all that year couldn’t stop thinking about one thing that he heard his pastor say multiple times in church. “You are more of a sinner than you know, and you are more loved than you could possibly ever imagine” or something close to that. That line is amazing because I am a sinner and I am still loved.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16