At the end of this summer, thousands of young students across Michigan will take an important next step into the world on their own—they’ll be headed off to college. They’ll find themselves alone in a way they’ve never experienced before, without community and unanchored in belief.
Whether as a graduate, parent, grandparent, or friend of a college student, we’re familiar with this rite of passage. Leaving what’s comfortable and safe and beginning to chart your own course is new and scary, and everyone is going to have doubts. It’s normal, but that doesn’t make it any easier—in fact, it makes having a community focused on Jesus so much more necessary.
Here’s what my daughter Evie wrote about her first year in college:
There’s really nothing that embodies the loneliness you feel in the first weeks of college like an empty, linoleum-and-concrete dorm room. I remember thinking that this past fall when I started at Hope College. I wasn’t really alone—I was in a building packed with girls my age, and my parents were only a phone call away—but that’s how it felt. Suddenly I was responsible for myself. I was a whole person, separate from the people I’d spent my life with up until that point. I was lost. And as I started classes—started thinking—I also realized that was true in more than one way. What did I believe? Had I ever really thought about it before, or just adopted the beliefs of the people around me? And I wasn’t the only one either. I saw and heard about friends whose late nights were spent seeking answers from a soulless computer screen. I think it’s a pretty universal experience on a college campus. We all felt a little adrift, in a way.
This is why His House is on 13 campuses in Michigan—to provide a community that all students need and long for and to witness to the truth that is in Jesus. But we can’t do what we do without your help. We need a financial boost this summer to prepare for these incoming freshman—about $15,000 will put us where we need to be.
Would you consider a gift today of $200, $100, or even $50?
There are thousands of students here in Michigan desperately seeking answers and support. You can be their lighthouse in a sea of doubts. A lighthouse is the origin of the bright light that guides lost ships safely into a port. You have the opportunity to be the origin of the bright light of hope and salvation in Jesus. You can be the reason students are brought to the safety of a loving and encouraging body of Christians.
Thank you for choosing to use your resources to provide these students with community, guidance, and the Message of salvation.