an august prayer

A week before kicking off the semester with Welcome Week, the Young Life College team got together and prayed over one specific student on campus we hoped to reach and mine was Kate.

I hadn’t met her yet, but she was from Metro Detroit, where my fiance grew up, and throughout the summer, parents would come up to me and tell me about how I needed to meet her. They told me she came from a Christian family and college would be an important time for her to make her faith her own. During that team meeting, I prayed for Kate, hoping that she would want to pursue Jesus in college and not run away from the faith her parents had tried to instill in her.

I met Kate for about 30 seconds during a Welcome Week event where she walked through our crowd of people in order to get to her dorm. My fiance and I invited her to church with us that weekend and she came, taking a selfie to send to her mom. I kept praying that Kate would want to follow Jesus, not just make her parents proud.

Throughout the semester I’ve gotten coffee with Kate and continued to pray for her and try to pursue a friendship. I could feel the walls she had up, while also sensing a genuine desire to follow the path her parents had put before her. When I launched Young Life College small groups in October, Kate and her roommate were the first two people I reached out to.

In just a few short months, Kate has been the rock of our small group. She is a natural leader who has the ability to influence people. During the course of the semester, she has invited four of her friends who all now attend small groups regularly as well. During our last small group of the semester, she leaned back and said “I have a feeling this small group is going to grow” and then listed out more of her friends she wanted to invite. I was so impressed by her gift of leadership and how the Lord was working in her. I saw the Lord clearly answering my August prayer request and knew this was only the start.

Last week I was in Metro Detroit and I ran into Kate’s mom. Immediately she hugged me and told me how I was an answered prayer request. She told me how much her and her friends had been praying for Kate in college and how they had been praying for an adult to come into her life and point her toward Christ. In Young Life College, I have minimal parent interactions, so I often forget the impact on families this ministry can have. Just as the Lord answers my prayers, I got to remember that the Lord is using me to answer other people’s prayers in the process. What a gift.

— Abby Fuller, YLC Staff, University of Michigan Leader