The Impact That Turned Into Passion
After my sophomore year of college, I finished playing two years of juco softball in Florida and transferred to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
I arrived at UCA in the hardest season of my life. The suffering I was walking through was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It was a season of loneliness while I was completely surrounded. It was a season of intense schedules with close to no time for my own personal needs. Everything was new and not much felt normal.
“I needed to lean on God and allow others to walk alongside me because, at times, my knees felt too weak to stand on my own. I was barely making it. Day by day.”
My faith in Christ was the one thing that was familiar and unchanging or unaffected, but I was painfully aware of how much I needed Him—and how much I needed people also.
In January of my junior year, I met the female FCA staff member serving our area. She began a Bible study with our team and started building deep, intentional relationships with our athletes and coaches.
But what impacted me most wasn’t just what she taught us during Bible study. It was the way she showed up in the everyday moments.
She would come to our practices and show up in other ordinary parts of our schedules to ask how we were doing. She would bring us lunch, check in on us, and find ways to walk alongside us in the middle of real life. She didn’t just show up for the big moments. She was faithful in the mundane ones, too.
“She began discipling me before I even knew what to call what she was doing.”
We would take her dogs on walks and talk about everything I was carrying. We talked about life, suffering, and Scripture. She listened to me, challenged me in my personal walk with Jesus, and continually pointed me back to Him.
Her investment in my life impacted me like nothing else had. And as I experienced it, something about the way she discipled me made more sense than anything I had experienced before.
“She was modeling the very way Jesus had discipled people.”
Jesus didn’t simply teach crowds and send them on their way. He looked people in the eyes, right where they were at, and said “Come and follow me”. He grabbed 12 guys and shared His life with them. Walked alongside them, taught them the truth, modeled how to pray to the Father, asked them questions, corrected them in love, and patiently formed them into people who would follow Him and make disciples of Him. He linked arms with them and showed them the way, which was more of His heart that they would be called to share with the world.
Through her, I began to see that discipleship wasn’t about coming up with a new or better way to reach people. It was about becoming imitators and followers of Jesus Himself. We don’t need to reinvent the way Jesus reached people; we need to learn from Him and follow His example.
As I experienced the impact of that kind of intentional investment, a passion began to burn inside me:
“I wanted to spend all of my days doing that very thing for others. “
I didn’t know everything that calling would eventually look like, but God was beginning to grow something in me that would shape the direction of my life.