Testimony

I was involved in church my whole life, but it wasn’t until college that I really started living my life for Christ. In high school, I was involved in a bible study which helped me learn about Christianity and the Bible. Although I was a professing Christian, there were some serious disconnects in my life. I remember often leaving bible study hoping my Christian friends would never know what was going on in the rest of my life. I began to feel the guilt of living disobediently before God and hypocritically before my friends, but going away to college provided the opportunity to escape that guilt, and it gave me a whole lot of “freedom” to leave God behind and do what I wanted.

However, the guilt and consequences of rebelling against God caught up to me, and even though I despised my sin I felt that I couldn’t turn away from it. Finally, towards the end of my freshman year, God stripped me of the things that I had been living for. I remember realizing, by God’s grace, the futility of trying to find fulfillment in anything but Jesus, and the fragility of anything I could live for besides Him. Yet I knew that God would forgive me if I turned back to Him.

I began attending the DiscipleMakers meetings that I had heard about, but avoided, on campus. I was overwhelmed by the love for others, and their devotion to God when they could be doing anything else—after all, this was college! Their lives were a testimony to God’s goodness and grace. One student in particular reached out to me and helped me understand the gospel in a deeper way than I ever had before. The investment of DiscipleMakers Staff, along with DM conferences and Bible studies, helped me grow in my walk with Christ, and soon I began reaching out to other students on campus. By my senior year, there was nothing more I wanted to do than continue to minister to college students! I joined staff and have been serving at Gettysburg College and Shippensburg University since then.