Spiritual Formation

Remember your commitment to keep growing in faith over the summer? InterVarsity Press happens to have some great new resources to help you do just that: the LifeGuide in Depth Series.

If your life is like mine was, summer means leaving the support of your InterVarsity fellowship and church and living in the spiritual desert of your home environment. Without even a strong church tie at home, I spent my first two summers caught in a harmful cycle of sin, guilt, and little spiritual growth.

One of my favorite stories about Jesus happens in a packed house (maybe because I love packing out my house with friends!).

I am not a leader. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. The problem is, no one but me seems to believe it. Ever since my staff worker encouraged me to fill out that leadership application at the end of my freshman year, I have been surrounded by people who are constantly calling me to lead stuff.

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.

Just last semester, I was leading a Bible study with some friends who don’t follow Jesus, and one of them texted me out of the blue asking, “Erica, can God help me love myself more?”

InterVarsity is very good at getting college students out of their conventional Sunday-school comfort zone. It is very good at calling us to “pick up our cross daily and follow him,” and to radically love the forgotten and downtrodden that Christ cared so much for. 

Ah, Easter. Chocolate bunnies and a risen Lord . . . maybe not in that order. The resurrection of Jesus is the historical truth claim upon which the entire gospel hangs.

It’s supposed to be spring. But at my home church in the Chicago suburbs, it’s decidedly winter.

For Lent this year, I decided to drink nothing but water. The plan was to give the money that I saved to help purchase clean water for those who have none...