Brittany, Part 1

In my most recent prayer letter I promised Brittany's story. If you've been with me for a while, this will be a refresher. If you haven't heard this before, buckle-up!

Brittany's silence spoke loudly to me as we sat in our small group discussion Friday night. I was helping lead a weekend retreat for students involved with our ministry at Utah State University (two hours north of Salt Lake). I made it my goal to draw this mysterious English major out of her shell. By Saturday morning I began to doubt my chances of meeting the "real" Brittany. Over lunch, though, the floodgates opened and she hit me with a torrent of profound questions.

That cold February afternoon has been the highlight of my Utah experience thus far. The whole conversation is a blur in my memory, but somewhere along the way Brittany realized what it truly meant to have a personal relationship with God, that she didn't have one yet, and that she wanted to change that. During the course of our conversation Brittany prayed and invited Christ into her life. Here's part of a letter that she sent out at the end of March:

"This past winter I attended a retreat...and made a life-altering decision to allow God to lead me in my life and truly devote myself and my time to Him."

After making that life-altering decision, Brittany revealed more details of her recent spiritual journey. In the months prior to the retreat, she'd spent a great deal of time meeting with Mormon missionaries on her campus. What she didn't share with me until weeks later, was that 3 days after the retreat she was suppose to have an appointment to be baptized into the Mormon church. She canceled that appointment. Her decision to give her life to Christ was more timely than I could have imagined!

Brittany's jumped headfirst into following Jesus and is taking 10 days this summer to be part of a Summer Project in Mexico. Summer Projects are our short term mission trips and are by far the most effective too we offer to students for life transformation. I can't wait to hear from Brittany about her Summer Project experience.

Thanks to that year's H1N1 virus outbreak, Brittany never went to Mexico. She decided to go on a different summer project. Instead of 10 days, she spent the whole summer working with inner city kids in Indianapolis. If you stick around for Part 2 of her story, you'll see how that turned out and how maybe the swine flu was actually good for something.