fellowship

Throughout my college career, I’ve been able to stay involved with the church, get good grades, and work part-time. However, one area I fall short in is growing relationships with the people I go to school with. Sure, I’ve made friends on campus and talk to people in class, but I’ve failed at truly investing in my relationships with those people.  Since my freshman year, I have been in the mindset that college is only temporary. I…

There was a season of my life where I lived about 45 minutes away from everything that I was involved with: work, church, community group, friends’ homes, classes; you name it. During that time, I often spent spare hours between events at coffee shops, libraries, restaurants, or stores.

In my last year of college, a combination of circumstances—friends graduating, a shrinking campus ministry, increased involvement in other communities—resulted in my shifting from having mostly Christian friends to a place where I was spending almost all my time with nonbelievers. 

On one hand, the change was wonderful! I’d been praying for years for more opportunities to build relationships with nonbelievers that would allow me to share the gospel through friendship, and there’s no doubt that this was an answer to that prayer.

I thank God for the blessing of being part of a church that is more than a gathering of individuals for weekly events. Our church is a community in which the sense of belonging to the Body of Christ is tangible. We feel it when we worship the Lord together in singing, when we all listen to the preaching of God’s Word, and when we rejoice with someone’s public testimony of how God’s grace has changed them.

I have a confession to make: I don’t use social media. I don’t tweet, post, snap, like, or live-stream. Cutting ties with social media was a choice I prayerfully made a few years ago in an effort to battle distraction, temptation, and time-wasting. However, I was still distracted because my smartphone was right at my fingertips, ready to offer me streaming TV shows, news articles, games, google searches, sports scores, YouTube, and a host of…