Crossing KCU

Prayers, Pals, and Preparation

A few things changed after my return from Russia, and upon my arrival back at Kentucky Christian University. Before I can continue with the story, I need to pause for a bit and explain a little of what these changes entailed. Up to this point, the story I’ve told has been mostly about my own transformation and struggles in learning to know and follow Jesus Christ. From this point forward you will notice a small shift away from this theme as I begin dealing with what my own journey meant specifically for the campus of K.C.U. This doesn’t mean that I stopped growing spiritually, or that I had everything figured out by the time I came back from Russia. There were many changes in my life still to come, and many things that I had not yet learned from the Lord. I expect that this statement will be true until the day I die. But the thing that sets the rest of this story apart from what I’ve told already is that by the time I came back to the campus after spending time in the motherland, God had prepared me to deal with the social and spiritual illnesses of the campus. I knew then that my time in Grayson was drawing to a close, and that the entire struggle I had endured previously had prepared me for the confrontations which would come during my last two semesters at the school.

This may sound a little ominous to someone who has never been to Kentucky Christian University, and more than a little extreme to those who have been there. All I can say in my defense is that being in Russia had fundamentally altered the way I viewed my mission to the campus community. I was convicted now, in my own heart and mind that it was no longer acceptable to sit idly by and watch the spiritual decay all around me. The Lord had begun impressing upon me the need to confront the spiritual darkness that had enveloped the school for so long.

The Russian experience had broken me down so much, torn me apart from so many angles, and hammered me into the dust to such an extreme, that I was finally able to act out of compassion for my fellow students, teachers, and the administration of the campus. The injuries of the past were now erased, and all that remained was a grim determination to take a stand against the demons that were running the school like a prison. They were the real enemy, and had been all along. It was time to challenge them, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, to move against their schemes and the wickedness they had wrought among so many of God’s children.
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Moving back into my dorm room was a difficult transition. More than that, getting back into the swing of American culture was enough for me to deal with on its own, but I had the extra bonus task of also getting back into the Christian, evangelical subculture. As hard as my time in Russia had been, by the end of that time I had grown extremely comfortable with my environment. I had adapted to their way of life in ways that I thought were impossible when I first arrived there. And though I had missed my home, and my friends, and my country a great deal when I was away, it was heart-wrenching to leave Russia behind. All the friends I had made there were gone. Even the other American students had all been from different parts of the U.S., so within hours of our arrival back in New York they were gone as well. Just as God had been my only lifeline while I was suffering and struggling during my first weeks in Russia, now God was the only one still with me who understood everything I had gone through, and how much it had changed me inside.

These transformations that had taken place within me were too difficult for me to articulate to others, and this very quickly began to drive me a little nuts. Many people were interested in what had happened to me there, but few of them were willing to listen to me give more than a five minute answer. It’s difficult to fit four months worth of life changing experience into a five minute conversation, so eventually when people asked me how my time in Russia had been, I just began telling them that it was good.

My first several weeks back in the U.S. were really depressing actually. I was heart broken and spent most of my time sulking around, trying to make sense out of the conviction God had given me to begin doing some real work there on the campus. The truth was that I didn’t even want to be there anymore. I had seen the world now, and this little Christian university bubble life was beginning to suffocate me.

Jeff was still there, and while I had been away, he and Jason had begun meeting together in one of the academic buildings to pray. A small group had gathered around them and this would eventually become the only real consistent Christian fellowship I had the chance to experience while I was there. It took me awhile to start going regularly, but once I did, I became aware of how necessary it was. We would meet together about five days a week and spend a couple of hours reading the Bible and praying. As I became more committed to doing this I began realizing that this was the way that God had wanted me to fight. Of course it made sense—prayer. But it’s one thing to know you should pray, and another thing to actually start doing it on a sustained, regular basis, for very specific reasons—in this case, to help free those who were caught in the grip of demonic oppression and still enslaved to their sin. Our small fellowship group encouraged each other to continue doing this, and it wasn’t long before I began finally settling into a routine, and moving forward in my walk with the Lord. Russia had been an important step and an important experience, but it was time to leave that all behind now. And then one day I met a girl named Julia from the Ukraine.
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I called her Julia for short. Ironically, Julia was Russian (half Russian, and half Korean, but raised in Ukraine) and she had just come to the U.S. and to the university. My study of Russian culture and the time I had just spent there gave us a small foundation on which to interact with each other. I found her to be very beautiful and very interesting, but she had no relationship with Christ. For some reason she found our prayer gatherings really interesting and eventually started going regularly. It was amazing how curious and filled with questions about God she was.

I think if the campus environment was anything of what it should have been, or what it was meant to be, our close interaction with Julia would probably not have happened at all. But the spiritual climate of that place was so dark that God would send to our fellowship, and to our prayer meetings, anyone with a desire to seek him, and it was this one fact about Julia that led her into our midst. With very few women around who were capable of any kind of real discipleship, the task was left to us, specifically Jeff and I.

With these things in mind I kept my relationship with Julia on a strictly spiritual level. This wasn’t really difficult to do. I had the support of my close brothers around me at all times, and we all held each other accountable in these areas. There were too many of our friends ending up in bad relationships or getting divorces for us to take these matters lightly. Just being friends with a girl on a Christian campus was a serious thing because people were getting engaged left and right. We even used to joke around that the first couple of weeks of every new school year was “freshmen mating season.” I know it sounds pretty horrible, but if there was one area where students on that campus were completely out of control it was in the area of sex, dating, and getting engaged. I remember one couple who met, got engaged, were married, separated, and divorced all within six months. Because of stuff like that, the few of us who were involved in this mission to the campus were serious about not portraying the wrong things to those we were trying to minister to—we wanted them to know we were different, and more focused on our relationships with God than with members of the opposite sex.

I learned a lot from Jeff about being a brother to the girls there on the campus, and seeing them through God’s eyes. In Jeff’s culture in India they have arranged marriages, and the more he told me about it, the more convicted I became that God was going to be the one who arranged my marriage, someday. Jeff and I knew that getting into a relationship with a woman was something that God had to bring about. Following Christ wasn’t always very easy, and if we were going to get married at some point, we knew it would take the kind of women who already had a strong relationship with God and were following Christ in their own lives to make marriage something more than a burden weighing us down and destroying our ability to minister effectively. We had seen friends who were serious about following Christ, end up married to women who were not, and the consequences were disastrous.

For these reasons I took my friendship with Julia very seriously. It was awesome to spend time with her, and being able to share with her all the things I had learned was a blessing. I enjoyed the time we spent together, talking, praying, and taking walks around campus. She was open and receptive to everything she was learning about Christ and she loved reading and discussing the scriptures. Later on she told Jeff and I that we were the ones who lead her to Christ, just by pointing the way to him through our words and actions.
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That semester was also the time that Jeff and I met William Kiel Nation. Kiel was a freshman who had come to K.C.U. that fall while I was in Russia. Somehow he began showing up more and more on the periphery of our interactions with the other students. Then one day he came to Jeff and me and asked us the million dollar question, “What’s up with this school?” He was one of the most intelligent, perceptive kids I had ever met, and as such he was quick to pick up on the spiritual darkness that saturated the campus. I was only just beginning my friendship with Kiel during my last couple of semesters at school, but he has since become one of my closest friends. Through a process that could have only been orchestrated by the Holy Spirit, he ended up down in my room more and more frequently, asking me questions about everything from the spiritual state of the campus, to demonic activity among the administration, to my specific philosophy on being a resident assistant.

I mentioned a little back in chapter nine about how I came to be an RA on the campus. They had put my position on hold while I was away, and allowed me to continue with the job once I returned. The whole saga of my time as a resident assistant is a story all by itself. It was my experience as an RA that eventually moved me into direct conflict with the campus administration yet again. Except this time, I was prepared for the confrontation.

“’Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified by them, or I will terrify you before them. Today I have made you a fortified city, an iron pillar and a bronze wall to stand against the whole land – against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests and the people of the land. They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you,’ declares the LORD.” –Jeremiah 1:17-19