Community and Relationships

Making friends in a large new community can be a daunting task for incoming college freshmen. 

Since I graduated from college three years ago, I’ve been a bridesmaid four times, kept two wedding guest books, and read Scripture in seven different ceremonies, and that’s just the list of weddings I’ve participated in.

Becoming a full-time mom after my second child was born was not my best season of life. I missed my work as an InterVarsity campus staff worker—a job I loved deeply.

As we go deeper in following Jesus, we all at some point enter into a heart-wrenching wrestling match with God in which we repeatedly ask whether he’s truly out for our best interest.

The summer after my freshman year of college messed up my life. I had it all planned out. My first year of college had been amazing. I’d made a ton of new friends whom I loved spending time with and I had started dating a girl early in the year. 

Living communally was embedded throughout my Chinese-Christian upbringing. I learned the importance of doing life together and sacrificing for one another in humility—no matter what.

Back when I was applying to college I was a naïve pastor’s kid who decided to forgo Christian colleges for a place where it would be something of a “challenge” to be a Christian. Instead, I’d head to the secularized and faithless University of Illinois.

Too often, communities of color find it difficult to differentiate between white Christians and white non-Christians when it comes to issues of racial justice.