God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)

Greetings from Kent! It’s been a wild ride over the past six weeks since our last prayer letter. Not only did we manage to successfully pull off “Operation Blue and Gold” to welcome the Class of 2030, in addition to the broader Welcome Week slate of outreach activities… Marci and I moved our son Cor back to Bowling Green State University to start his second year of study there, and we also moved our daughter Olivia into her new apartment to go along with her new full-time job in Pittsburgh! It’s been chaotic, but it’s also been amazing to see the way that God has brought order, life, light and beauty from the chaos.

On the Thursday of the first week of classes, we experienced the culmination of ten days of intense outreach with an outdoor preview of our Worship Gatherings and Life Groups. And it went really well. Between you and me, though, it wasn’t as easy as we made it look.

It started with some trouble finding a place for our H2O Kickoff event on the Thursday of the first week of classes. To make the longer story short, our usual spot was unavailable — so we decided to reserve some outdoor space in the center part of campus. The Student Green is actually a lovely spot, right in the middle of campus, where foot traffic is consistently heavy at just about any hour of the day. But this location also depends on favorable weather. And at the beginning of the week, the forecast called for a 40 percent chance of rain that Thursday evening. By God’s grace, the chance of rain kept dropping with each day that we approached the Kickoff. So we felt pretty confident that the outdoor location was going to work, as we got within the last 24 hours before it happened…

But then there was a malfunction with the University’s sprinkler system. One campus employee told us that the sprinklers watering the grass are supposed to shut off at 7:30 AM. And maybe they did. But we have some reason to believe the sprinklers ran continuously until we came to set up around 3:30 PM. When maintenance was finally able to turn off the water around 4:00 PM, there were two inches of standing water on some parts of the Student Green. Just four hours before the official start time of our event. The middle part of the Student Green wasn’t too squishy or muddy, though, so we decided to press on with our plans for the H2O Kickoff.

The outdoor location certainly had its stresses, but on the plus side — it was easy for Kent State University students to find us. That’s really the goal of this event: helping students to know that there is a church on campus, a space for spiritual development among one’s peers. In addition to providing opportunities to see how we worship and how we teach from the Bible, we introduced our church’s Life Groups and sent out coolers of frozen treats to the four corners of campus where students could meet and mingle with other students (and staff and volunteers) from the different groups. There were about forty of us who walked from the Student Green to Crawford Hall in the North part of campus, and it really was lovely to get some space to interact with new people.

The outdoor location certainly had its stresses, but on the plus side — it was easy for Kent State University students to find us. That’s really the goal of this event: helping students to know that there is a church on campus, a space for spiritual development among one’s peers. In addition to providing opportunities to see how we worship and how we teach from the Bible, we introduced our church’s Life Groups and sent out coolers of frozen treats to the four corners of campus where students could meet and mingle with other students (and staff and volunteers) from the different groups. There were about forty of us who walked from the Student Green to Crawford Hall in the North part of campus, and it really was lovely to get some space to interact with new people.

For most of the walk across campus, I talked with a young woman from Cincinnati named Havana — and I got to learn how she has started following Jesus over the last couple of years. I enjoyed some brief interactions with Foster and James, and I got connected on LinkedIn with a young first-year student named Ryan. I ate a chocolate-covered ice cream bar while talking with Madison and Grace, and then I ate a frozen fruit bar while talking with two women named Kierstin, whose first, middle, and last names were remarkably similar even though they had just met each other that night. Marci and I got to talk together with Najmul and Miri, who are from Bangladesh. And I also got to develop some good rapport with Patricia and Milka, from Rwanda, when I applied a lesson that some other Rwandan students had just taught me about the pronunciation of their country’s name (two syllables, not three). It ended up being a pretty great night, honestly. There are so manystories that God is writing here in Kent (the little details from this paragraph are just the tip of the iceberg!)… God knows how they will all turn out. But we have to keep walking by faith to find out for ourselves.

Thanks to all of you who have been praying with us and for us! And thanks for being a part of the ministry team that provides the financial support for this work, too. I’m getting back to the work of ministry team development, now that things are up and running on campus. We’ve still got $950/month left to raise — which is way better than where we were at this point last year, but still not quite where we want to be. Please pray for God’s provision in this, too. We’ll be in touch…