It’s surreal to me that I’m one of the older mentors at our church here in Santa Barbara. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2018, which means it’s been about 10 years since my freshman year. Now I’m married and a new mom, but being a mentor to college students really brings me back to what it was like when I was in their season of life. I remember when a simple thing like grabbing late night tater tots or going to open gym volleyball could be such a magical, memorable experience. What makes it so golden in my memories is that I was with people who’d shown me love that I’d never known. That’s ultimately what got me interested in the whole God thing.
At eighteen, I’d had a few trips around the sun. I was used to a certain dynamic of dealing with people, and I’d come to understand the terms. If I had something to offer - being funny, smart, appealing in some kind of way - then I was granted the right to a friendship. I’d say I had a fun-loving and cheerful exterior as a teenager, but I was deeply insecure about whether I was loved. I knew I wasn’t funny enough to be the funny one, pretty enough to be the pretty one, so I tried becoming the easy-going, likable friend. That was my angle - that’s what I was going for. The thing was, I never felt like I’d gained any ground. No matter what kind of approval I was able to gain from my friends, the next day I’d wake up and have to do it all over again. But I didn’t know there was any other way of being.
There are lyrics from a Future of Forestry song that captured my reality so well during those years:
Would it change your mind if I did good?
Would it change your mind if I did bad?
Would it change your mind?
Where is love?
I’m so tired of working
For so long to be loved
I’m so tired of working so long
Oh, I’m tired of working to be loved
When I came to college, I expected it to be the same game and I was ready to play. I just wanted to make a lot of friends and live it up. A handful of my closest friends were also incoming freshmen at Berkeley, which was a relief - because at least I knew some people and wouldn’t be wandering around by myself for those first few weeks. One of them invited me to check out a church service with her the very same day we moved in, and although I wasn’t too excited about it, I figured I didn’t have any better reason to say no. I had no idea that when I said yes that day, it would change the trajectory of my life.
The people at church were genuinely interested in me as a person. I didn’t have to craft some persona or be impressive. They were curious about my life and wanted to spend time with me, had me over in their homes and cooked me meals, remembered my birthday… just seemed to grant me dignity and worth without any effort on my part. I can’t tell you how compelling this was, how different it was from everything I’d experienced in life so far. If church was where I could find these kinds of people, and where I felt loved, then I wanted to know more about it.
I started coming to every church-hosted event I could and dove right in. I learned about the intellectual arguments for the existence of God, the answers for why there was pain in the world, why God couldn’t just show up if He wanted people to believe in Him. I learned about sin and saw how it manifested in my own life, and I couldn’t argue with the fact that I was a sinner. I learned about Jesus and how he died on the cross, and how the cross showed not only the severity of my sin - the same way a verdict reflected the severity of the crime - but also how much God loved me, if He was willing to take the punishment for me.
I knew I needed to respond to what I was learning. I couldn’t keep living the way I was and pretend that there wasn’t a God who wanted a relationship with me… but I was scared. I knew that this would mean that everything would change, and I didn’t know what it would look like.
On April 2, 2015, I was reading a book by an author named C.S. Lewis, on a stone bench outside, while I was waiting for my next class. That day, I had reached the end of the book and read these words:
“The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
I felt like the words were lifting off the page. I remember feeling a buzzing in my ears, and my heart beating really quickly… I don’t remember if I went to class, but I do remember a short while later sitting at a sticky little wooden table at Caffe Strada and journaling a prayer, surrendering my life to Jesus. I knew that when I tried to run my life the way I thought was right, I never felt in control, was daily fighting to keep fear and insecurity at bay. But the past year, when I had experienced what life was like if I tried to live for Jesus, had yielded the most joy I had ever felt. I knew these words were true, and that’s what I wanted for my life.
When I looked up from writing that prayer, the world looked different. I can’t describe it. It’s like I was seeing in a different spectrum of color. It’s like I was seeing things for how they truly were, and each person around me wasn’t an indifferent bystander but a soul that needed to experience God’s love the way I had.
10 years later, I’ve only found the “principle” to be more and more true. I’ve never regretted giving my life to Jesus, and when I have given something to him, I’ve found that he only asked for it because he wanted to give me something better. Now I get to be in the business of seeing students like me have their own lives be transformed.
Kelly Nguyen is currently serving as a college mentor at Acts2Fellowship Santa Barbara.
thanks for sharing this! it's neat to see how God has been at work in your life since the decision you made in college 10+ years ago! :)