About Me
When I first started as a freshman studying journalism and German at Northwestern University, I was a timid Christian looking for a Christian bubble to be absorbed into. Somewhere safe, nice, familiar. Instead, God surrounded me with students who were involved with a group I'd never heard of before, Cru. And these people weren't safe at all. They didn't just want to read the Bible in a comfy room together once a week and go to church on Sunday. They wanted to talk about Jesus with other students who didn't know Him. Wrestle with what the Bible says about God and what it says about us. Figure out what it means to follow Jesus with their whole lives.
I think I knew early on that following Jesus in the context of a secular university needed to be all or nothing. These people seemed to want to give Him everything they had, and I wanted to be like them. They invited me in, agonized with me over my questions, doubts and fears, took me with them to talk to others about my faith in Christ and loved me deeply. So I stayed, and I grew in my faith more during those four years than I ever had thought possible.
Sometime in the middle of my junior year when God began tugging my heart towards doing an internship in Germany with Cru, I'm pretty sure I audibly told Him NO. But He didn't give up on me, and (as He has been known to do) began to dismantle the barriers I thought had been standing in my way. Somewhere in that process, He moved my heart to want to follow Him anywhere He would lead me, even into full-time ministry. And so shortly after my graduation in June of 2008, I moved to Berlin to intern with Cru for two years. At the end of my internship, I discovered that God had set my heart on fire. He had turned me from a college student who kicked and screamed every time I was supposed to invite my non-Christian friends to an outreach into someone who wants nothing more than to be in full-time campus ministry talking to lost students every day about the best thing in my life, Jesus, and the hope we have in Him alone.
To find out how you can help make that happen, click on Get Involved!
Interests: Jesus & His glory, laughing, learning to play guitar, Lindy Hop, cover bands, biking, Up North (Michigan), telephone pictionary, snowball fights, puzzles, words, watching images emerge on photo paper in the darkroom, breaking into spontaneous dance parties
Favorite Music: Switchfoot/Jon Foreman, MercyMe, Phil Wickham, Jason Mraz, Adele, Michael Buble, Josh Groban, Colin James, Jamie Cullum and just about anything I can swing dance to
Favorite Movies: Crash, Waitress, Dead Poets Society, Good Bye Lenin, Heaven, Clue, Shawshank Redemption
Favorite Books: The Bible, The Reason for God (and anything else by Tim Keller), The Great Divorce (and anything else by C.S. Lewis), The Poisonwood Bible, Devil in the White City, Freakonomics, Anna Karenina, and the humor of Dave Barry or A.J. Jacobs when I need a good laugh.