Justin Bahaj

Before I became a Christian, I wouldn’t really have considered myself as a bad person. In fact, I probably would have said that I was better than most: I never got grounded, I always got good grades in school, and in general I tried to be a decent guy to the people around me. I had a little bit of a hard time forming meaningful, lasting friendships though, because my family moved around a lot when I was a kid.

I think that I took some pride in my intelligence, which is something I still struggle with.

Obviously this was not fulfilling, because when I took pride in my intelligence, in some way it made me look down on the people around me, which isn’t a good way to form relationships.

So, like I said before, my family moved around a lot when I was younger, and so I didn’t grow up going to church very often. My mom had kind of raised my sister and I as Christians, and I knew that there was a God, and there was some guy named Jesus, but I didn’t really know anything beyond that. I actually even got to the point where I started to look down on people who believed in God because I saw it as a crutch that they used to get themselves through the day, or as something to try to derive meaning from life.

However, when my family moved to Illinois, I started going to this school that was sponsored by a church, and families would get a discount on tuition if they attended the church, so my mom, my sister, and I started going to church. Through the church and also through religion classes that were mandatory at the school, I was able to learn more about what Christians believe, about Jesus and the sacrifice He made for us, and how we can have a relationship with God through faith in Him.

So I decided to pray to receive Jesus and get baptized when I was in 8th grade, and I started my relationship with God. I like to think of this as the point where I loved God, but I still wasn’t \”in love\” with Him yet. I started reading my Bible more often, but there wasn’t really any radical change in my actions or my attitude.

So after I received Christ in 8th grade, I started going to high school, which was a difficult time for me spiritually, followed by my freshman year in college, which was also tough since at that point I was still new in my faith and I didn’t really know what it meant to walk with God. But during my sophomore year of college some of my friends were involved with Campus Crusade for Christ, and they invited me to one of their Bible studies. When I started going to those Bible studies, I saw Christians who were radically different than anything I had seen before. They loved God passionately, but they weren’t the boring stereotypes of Christians that you sometimes see in movies. You know, like people who go to church every morning at 5 am and think that Harry Potter is from the devil. But the Christians I met weren’t like that; they played ultimate frisbee and played practical jokes on each other, and they made me feel welcome. And they were also different from the other people around me because they had joy, and peace in the face of hardship that other people didn’t have, and the reason was because they walked with God and had an active relationship with Jesus. I decided that I wanted to have that, and it was then that I would say that I \”fell in love\” with Christ.

Obviously I didn’t make that decision and immediately become some super-holy guy. But it’s been a gradual process and a transformation, and I think that I’m a very different person than I was before I made that decision my sophomore year. I’ve been able to see just how much I needed God and still need Him, and I’ve also seen that He is good and that His love is amazing. The best thing about it is that it’s not boring. Two summers ago I went to Australia on a mission trip, which is certainly not something I would have done before walking with God. I’ve also been able to form some really great friendships and relationships that I probably wouldn’t have if I didn’t have God in my life. For example, my best friend from college, the guy who invited me to those Bible studies, is in East Asia right now as a missionary, and I still talk to him every now and then and share what’s going on in our lives.

My motivations have also changed now. Before, I was always striving to please the people around me: my parents by getting good grades and staying out of trouble, and my friends by acting ridiculous. But now I’m motivated by a desire to grow closer to God, which has caused me to frustrate my parents a little bit by applying for a job in campus ministry, and I’ve also adjusted the way I act around my friends so that my actions would more clearly display God’s work in my life.

Jess Stevens

Growing up I went to church every Christmas Eve for the candle lit service and sometimes I could convince my parents to get out of bed and take me to Sunday morning service or take a break from their busy schedules to take me to Wednesday night youth group.  Eventually, I gave up on becoming involved in a church because it wasn’t normal in my family.  Throughout middle school and high school I found my place in a rough crowd of friends.  I experienced many things someone my age or of any age should not be involved in.  Senior year quickly approached and life was at an all time low.  On Halloween night of my senior year my dad and I got into a pretty heated argument that resulted in my mom walking out on him and filing for divorce.  To elaborate a little more, my dad has a violent past that came around again at this period of my life.  He let his anger get out of control and was sentenced to 18 months in a state prison.  The sentencing began May 5, 2009, about one month before my high school graduation.  To put the situation into perspective, this also meant he missed my senior dance performance, my 18^th birthday, and me leaving for my first year of college.

I used these as an excuse to spend my life going to parties and abusing substances to take away the pain I was feeling inside.  In October 2009, my mom had been dating a guy for roughly 7 months and lead her to Christ in that amount of time.  I began to notice a change in my mom but never really understood how she could be so content with her life considering how crappy her situation was.  After a very long heart to heart conversation with my mom, I pledged to try going to church with her.  Something must have clicked that day because I have gone every Sunday since.  I decided that day that I wanted to give my life to Christ.  But it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.  I feel off track quite a few times.  In January 2010, I attended Winter Jam.  This concert was so moving and I had finally figured out exactly what it means to hand your life over to Jesus and accept him as savior.  That night I fully pledged my life to him and can honestly say I have never made a better decision in my entire life.

Since that night God has been working in my life in so many ways.  God brought me to build new relationships with other believers, he has given me the strength to fully forgive my dad and rebuild that relationship, God has provided me with many great resources to turn to when I am looking for an answer, he lead me to follow my heart and get a degree in design, he has inspired me to enter the mission field and assured me that with him as the center of my life I will not fail.  My love for the Lord is continually growing and cannot put into words how excited I am to see how he uses me for the purpose he has given me life on Earth.

Lauren Ehlers

Hello! My name is Lauren Ehlers and I am a sophomore in architecture here at Iowa State. I grew up in Des Moines and my parents took my sister and I to church every Sunday. But I was taught about Jesus as just a guy who lived a long time ago and died a sad death, not as someone important to my life personally. We never really got connected with my youth group so from about elementary school on, I didn’t really see my faith as a priority. My family always taught me to be strong and independent, so I thrived at being the best.  Sports, music, theater, anything, I wanted to be the best. However, the independence and strength that I was fighting for turned into selfishness and pride. As I pushed harder and harder in these things people started to notice me, remember my name, and I started to build somewhat of a reputation for working hard and being “the best” at certain things. As my high school years went on I really began seeking gratification in the good things people said about me, awards I received, and, sadly, in seeing other people fail to achieve things I had. I wanted to get laughs from people and to hear them tell me how good I was at things. I also had set in my head on the people who I should be friends with, who could get me places and make me look good. I wanted to be included in certain groups and only those groups. I thought I was in control of my life, but I had become my own God.

I kept this going until senior year in high school and then things started catching up to me. I just felt exhausted from pursing empty things. I started to realize that the people who I worked so hard to please didn’t care and the people who didn’t care whether I was the best or the worst were the ones who would love me unconditionally. When I got to college it started to become the same routine again. I fell back on trying to be the best at schoolwork, sports, anything I did. And pretty quickly I was feeling exhausted and alone. It became very apparent that at a school so big I couldn’t be the “best” at anything. I looked back a lot on the friendships I had in high school and why those were strong and began to realize it was because God was present and those people had been putting themselves after others. I had always been taught that God would love me unconditionally, but since I was so caught up in worldy things that I could touch and feel, I had dismissed God. So I decided to turn to God as a Plan B. I joined Cru and a bible study and those people began teaching me that I needed to be searching for God first. I felt accepted and loved by these people.

Over the past year it has been a pretty slow process putting others before myself, but God has been teaching me a lot, though the Bible, other people, and especially at TCX that I cant find happiness in the way I used to be living. By letting God lead, its not that He has given me more opportunities to make friends than before, but almost like blinders have been lifted and I have genuine friendships that I would have passed up before. I still care what other people think, but those thoughts aren’t controlling me. I feel like God has given me the guidelines for my life in the Bible and when I strive to follow those I can really be myself. Even when I fail to achieve certain things, I find that I can’t disappoint God because Jesus has already paid for all my sins and failures. It’s a constant struggle, but I am discovering daily that my significance is not in how others view me or being the best, but by significance is found in God.

Alex Zuercher Junior Culinary Science

Growing up I went to church on Sundays with my family, I was in a bible study, and also did service projects through my church. However my attitude always fell back to treating it like another course at school. At my church we had a Wednesday night class throughout middle and high school and we had to fill out these sheets during Sunday service so I created a system where I would keep reusing the same answers week to week so all I had to do was get the sheet done and didn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the week. I found myself moving further away from the church not because I didn’t want to believe but because I was missing the message entirely and didn’t realize the true value of what I actually had.
Before coming to college I was the overweight kid of my friends and in my classes. I never could seem to escape from it because everywhere I went I was constantly reminded of my weight whether I was being teased or my friends were joking about me. I fell into a bad cycle my senior year of high school that lead me to have a one track mind about my weight and that was all I could focus on. I lost about 100 pounds over the summer before college which seems like a good thing but the habits I fell into were far from it and it only got worse from there. I found satisfaction in the ability to control that aspect of my life but in reality I was losing it and my weight started to control my actions. Eventually I faced a hard reality of how far I had drifted away from where I thought I was. I really started to take a look and realized that wasn’t who or where I wanted to be. My girlfriend had been going to CRU for the past year and it was really through her that I started to venture back into seriously thinking about Christianity. When I first started coming to CRU I was shocked and a little overwhelmed that everyone there had a deeper connection towards their faith because all I had known was my attitude that If I said and did the right things I would somehow pass the test and get an A in religion. I started then to realize that there was a lot more to being a Christian than filling out the right answers on the sheet over and over again.
Once again it was time to reevaluate were I was and once again It was time for a change. Instead of being my old self and being stuck in my past I wanted to start moving forwards. I filled out one of those comment cards at CRU and said I was interested in a bible study and try to get more involved. It wasn’t until I got the chance to talk to Adam about my spiritual life I realized how much of the message I was actually missing. In Romans 6:23 the first part of the verse says for the wages of sin is death. Which for the first time hearing it I was like well I am not a bad person and I try to do good things, but then it threw me because the second part says but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ. Which for me was the Duh moment where I realized it’s not anything that I can do or just fill in the answers to. I accepted Christ that day in the MU which is actually comforting to me because it allows me to know that it can really happen anywhere. After accepting Christ I have actually seen a lot of change in my life. I have found the strength to switch majors, join clubs, do bible studies and I finally gave up my control of my weight and that isn’t a problem in my life. Just three months ago I wasn’t even the same person. I have seen a large change in the attitude I have toward myself and instead of the quiet kid in the background I am trying to challenge myself to speak out. My outlook on my spiritual life has also changed. I am more motivated to gain knowledge and not to just pass it up. I find myself more and more giving up that control that I used to desperately hang on to. I now know even from just 2 months that taking a seat in the back doesn’t mean you are trapped. Now I apologize for my top gun reference but I like to think about it like this. For those who haven’t seen the movie you should cause it’s a classic but it is about Top Gun which is an elite US Flying school for advanced fighter pilots and its set back in the 80’s were they were using the F-14 Tomcats. One of the duos in the school is Tom Cruise as his usual crazy self playing maverick the pilot and his navigational officer GOOSE whose job is to sit in the copilot seat and navigate the plane but anyways. I now look at control in my life as just letting maverick fly plane and I can take Goose’s role In the back seat navigating my path and watching out for danger. Now even though maverick seems a little crazy sometimes he always takes that fly by past the control tower which makes me realize why I’m not the one in the pilot seat. I always used to want to take that role as pilot but I realize now I know I can’t fly an F-14 and I don’t have to.
I’m also not saying that there are no problems in the back seat either. I still have struggles in my life, but I now don’t have to put all of my struggles back onto myself I have someone who can take them away and help me get through them. I have come from trying to create the system all on my own to get an A when in reality it was a partner test all along and he has the answer sheet so why not take the test with him?

Collin Klingbeil, Sophomore in Agricultural Engineering

Growing up, I went to church with my family every Sunday and knew and believed in Jesus and what He did for me from a young age but I really couldn’t grasp what that meant in my life. I went to summer camps and prayed and all that but I just didn’t realize all the things I was missing. All I cared about was getting what I wanted regardless of what that meant for anyone else. I was negative pretty much all the time and got easily disappointed. Once junior high came around I noticed myself becoming someone I really didn’t want to be. I seemed to develop an extreme worry about all the things in my life including things that really weren’t important at all.
I think in the back of my head I knew something wasn’t right and I was missing something important but I didn’t actively search for that “missing link” until my 8th grade year. I realized that I was being a pretty bad person and I decided one day to make a complete change in the way I lived my life. In a nutshell I thought if I’d make myself into a “good person” by human standards, I’d feel much better about myself. Changing myself into this different and so called better person didn’t happen over night and was a long process to say the least. After a couple years of being a “good person” I realized that it just wasn’t cutting it. Something still wasn’t there. So late in my high school career I kind of had a duh’ moment when I realized I had held the answer in my grasp all along. The whole time I had been relying on my own power and putting huge amounts of pressure on myself when none of it was necessary. Jesus says this in The Bible; “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” I had already trusted that Jesus paid for my sins on the cross and that I had eternal life in that fact but I hadn’t allowed Jesus and the Holy Spirit to make me whole. The Bible sums up what the Holy Spirit is in this; “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
I wasn’t living according to the will of God and now it’s just really clear why I felt so empty. When I started living my life for God, trusting in his Spirit, knowing that He is with me in all the good times and the bad, and that no matter what happens I can still find joy in the Lord, everything changed. It still wasn’t easy for me to trust God, as I had spent so long trusting only myself, but gradually I placed more and more of my trust in the Lord. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the process of how my life has changed as a result in trusting God and pursuing a personal relationship with him and I’m really excited to see where God takes me in the future. The thing I love about all this is that it’s for everyone.