Closing Ceremonies Part 1

Tonight I'm speaking at our last large group after a roller-coaster ride of a school year. Here's a snippet of how we're going to talk tonight about the year we've had together:

When I was a kid I was very much afraid of roller coasters—anyone else afraid of roller coasters when they were kids?

I anticipated the deep abiding, primordial feeling of dread as the coaster cranked up the hill, higher, and higher, and higher, knowing and absolutely sure that my death was waiting for me on the downhill on the other side

And it took me quite a while to finally overcome that fear and finally get up the courage to climb on and enjoy the ride, it took me a while to discover the joy of riding a roller coaster, the joy of being out of control and letting the roller coaster do with me what it will.

This is a great analogy for us tonight as we wrap up because this year for many of us individually and as a community has very much resembled a roller coaster ride.

We started out this year with one of the best first six weeks of New Student Welcome I’ve ever experienced in my 11 years in campus ministry which culminated the last weekend in September at New Student Retreat at the beach with 115 people! To give you some idea of how amazing those first six weeks were, we had 36 go to New Student Retreat last year!

And then something happened in October that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on but collectively as a chapter from early October all the way through mid-December, we hit what I’m affectionately referring to as PUGAD: Period of Unfortunate Gloom and Despair. It was like a fog moved into our chapter, and person after person was dealing with deep, personal crisis.

I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and at this point in ministry I pretty much expect about 20% of the chapter at any given semester to be having “that semester”—hard stuff with family, friendships, dating relationships, faith struggles, whatever.

But last fall, it was easily 60 or 70% of you were just in a severe funk. And it went on, and on, and on. I've never been more relieved to have a semester end.

And so we started the spring semester with a large group series entitled Hope in the Midst of Brokenness. And the fog started to lift. A bunch of us went to Emmaus and were re-charged there, 24/7 Prayer was phenomenal, a bunch of folks went on the Spring Break trip. Everything seemed to be moving forward, the ship seemed to be righting.

But then after Spring Break, we lost Jason Ray. And a couple weeks later Christie Smith was in her accident. And we felt the weight of some of the same questions from the fall: where is God? Does he hear? Is he for us? Why is this happening?

And we've had some great times these last several weeks, but as the ride comes to an end, some of us are left wondering, what was this year all about?