My Prayer Was To Know Him, N.C.

I started my freshman year of college with a sense of exhilaration born of new independence. Yet underneath lay an anticipation and fear regarding my Christian life. Although I had grown up in a Christian home, I realized that the spiritual choices I made in college would determine the course of my Christian life. I wanted to be able to tell people that I was a Christian not just because of my upbringing, but because of an undeniable inward reality of Christ. I prayed a desperate prayer at the beginning of my first quarter, giving the Lord my college years to get to know Him, but reminding Him that I couldn't do it on my own.

The Lord gave me real encouragement and confirmation to run the Christian race through the meetings of the local church (1 Corinthians 9:24). I met with a small group of brothers and sisters every Friday in a home near the campus. Each week we shared our experiences of Christ with each other and our meetings always ended spontaneously with us telling the Lord how much we loved Him. In one of the first meetings of the quarter, a fellow student shared her experience of the Lord becoming real to her that day for the first time. The sweetness of her testimony and our collective fellowship created an ache in my heart to really know the Lord Himself, not just to know about Him.

Upheld by the prayer of the brothers and sisters who met in the local church, I was strengthened to spend the ordinary days of my college career loving the Lord. I remember many small but precious experiences of thanking the Lord, talking to Him, and speaking about Him to other students on campus. He truly answered the prayer of my freshman year and became real to me. I'm so glad that I spent my college years getting to know this wonderful Person with my fellow brothers and sisters.