Leaving the Mountaintop
Kaitlyn Lambert // UGA Student & Community Outreach Intern
When I was first asked about writing a post for the college blog, I really thought I had the post essentially pre-written in my mind. It was going to be a summation of my summer in Athens, some paragraphs about day-to-day faithful obedience, and a few neat little anecdotes about the lessons the Lord had been teaching me recently. I hoped it would an easily-digestible encouragement in this busy college season. I even had a clever title, all ready to go.
However, I wonder if what is more useful (for you and me both) is not to share what I’ve learned, but what I’m learning—daily and constantly and with much toil. And so, this is not that original blog post. Rather, this is a story of painful failure, and the things I have done wrong, so that now I might do them right.
Let me set the scene for you: by about the end of my freshman year here at UGA, I fervently believed I had hit the jackpot, so to speak, of the Christian life. I had a bountiful community of close friends, of various ministries and churches in Athens. I had a church home I loved dearly. I was on leadership for a Christian retreat. I knew a decently large amount of the greater Christian community, and people either knew me or knew those I knew. Everything I did was alongside fellow believers, and everywhere I looked (with the kind of dim, rose-colored eyes of my freshman year) was Jesus, and people who knew Jesus, and people who loved Jesus. We all went to church together, and had game nights together, and talked about theology together, and spent (what felt like) every waking moment together. For someone who came into college broken and desperate for Christian community, it felt like a great turnaround. It felt like I had finally “won.”
Sure, I lived in a high-rise dorm with hundreds of students that I never interacted with. Sure, I had classes with people over Zoom—talked with them, responded to their discussion posts. And sure, there were people at the dining halls; around campus; at the grocery store; at the check-out counter; on every packed street I walked on and in the door-to-door hallway I lived on—most of whom were not Christian, did not know the Gospel, and had no significant relationships with those who professed to live for Jesus. Most of them probably didn’t go to church, or had never been to church, or even knew the name of a single church in the city. And sure, statistically, there are an estimated 100,000 lost in Athens, a sizable minority of them at the University of Georgia, but for me, I had so much Jesus in my life that it was nearly impossible to imagine anything but. I was trying, well-intended, to live “in the world” instead of “of it” (John 17:14), attempting to separate myself from a secular, non-Christian influence and culture while in college. It seemed like what “good Christians” did. It was what I had been told to do, just before I had left my small, Bible-belt hometown after high school graduation.
Sophomore year was much the same. I plugged in more at church, got to serving in kids ministry. Met even more believers, deepened those Christian friendships I already had. Got coffee with people and talked about Jesus and what it was like to follow Him in college. Felt like I was winning a needle in a haystack when I would meet someone new who was a believer, and I could connect with them on our shared faith. Stayed on leadership for that same Christian retreat. Joined a tribe. Looked into going on mission for the summer in Turkey or Boston. Applied for the church internship. And kept up this same routine of, sure, going to classes and living in a new apartment complex and going grocery shopping at the Kroger off College Station and waiting for the shuttle at Chicopee Complex for my off-campus parking spot and doing the necessary tasks in a fallen world, but overwhelmingly, nearly entirely, doing life surrounded by and dedicated to Christian community. I’d had more than a few conversations with some friends about feeling like I was living in a “bubble” of believers, and my Tribe had really shifted many of my perspectives on the heart of evangelical mission, and I had (rather half-heartedly) tried to make connections with my classmates and with some old high school friends. And I wore the Christian t-shirts and bracelets, and I told people I was Christian and what my church was, and I smiled and said, “Have a good day!” everywhere I went and attempted to live with a kind of Christ-exterior that people might notice. And at the time, it really felt like it was just enough effort, even if my Google Calendar looked like a color-coded translation of commitments and tasks best titled “church” or “Christian” or “avoiding secular pursuits.”
It took until May of this year, some twenty-one months of living in Athens and going to college here, when on a sheet of paper I was told to write down the names of people in my life I could share the Gospel with, and I found that I couldn’t.
Now, if the task had been to write down the names of people that I knew, I could jot down a decent number. Co-workers. Old freshman year roommate. High school friends. A couple of family members. People I sat next to in class. The shuttle driver I rode with every day. My neighbors at my apartment complex.
But I wasn’t asked that. Instead, I was asked, “Who in your oikos could you share the Gospel with?” The word “oikos” being Ancient Greek for “sphere of influence,” or “household”—that is, people you actually have relationship with, that you interact with and truly know. That is, not just superficially intersect with, but that you have genuine influence over. Not just people you could text after months of not speaking, but that are present in your life.
And my answer was, to my sudden and piercing shame: I didn’t have any. There was no one for me to share the Gospel with, not without me falsely pursuing sudden relationship with people.
I could’ve given dozens of names of lovely, dear, and Proverbs 27, iron-sharpened Christians, but as for the lost around me, those living without any knowledge of the carpenter that died for them, I didn’t even know them.
That moment, a blank sheet of paper staring at me with just my name written down in the center, was a realization of a series of failures as a Christian. I really thought I had done it right. I got the Christian community, and I grew my Christian community, and I did everything involved with my Christian community, and I held onto that community with tightened fists, prioritizing it above all else. And it was good. And it was for God. But eventually, what was intended to “stir [me] up…to love and good works” (Hebrews10:24) had become what was hindering me from following what Jesus had directed to His disciples on that Galilean mountain: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).
And my failure has not really been that I had no one to share the Gospel with, but that I had so deeply integrated myself in a man-made kingdom of Christ-followers that I had forgotten that there is a Kingdom to come (Matthew 6:10), and that this world this is not my home (Hebrew 13:14). That there is an entire earth of created beings, an entire city, an entire state university, of people who do not know that Jesus has hung on a cross for them and has given them new life apart from this broken existence, and yet I did not allow myself to realize that I had been hiding away in the midst of the richest harvest.
If I were to go look for Jesus in the days of His ministry, if I really wanted to search for Him, I would not have gone to the synagogues and the temples (though He did spend time there). I would go to the countryside hilltops, where He told parables of things no one had ever heard. I would go to the dinner tables, where He sat with people who did not even love Him. I would go Him gathering with the disciples, perhaps along the road for a rest, where He told them, “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?” (Matthew 18:12).
Could I? Leave my ninety-nine friends? My church? My home? For that one sheep (that I have been), so lost and tender and worth knowing, beyond the confines of our white-washed Christian walls?
How many times am I walking past the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4)? How many times am I rushing through the crowd of Pharisees with stones in their hands and a woman who does not know she has been forgiven (John 8)? How often is there a Zacchaeus in my path, leaning out of a sycamore tree, searching for sight of Jesus (Luke 19)? How often am I eating with the tax collectors and sinners of the modern world (Mark 2)? How often am I pressed in-between a dozen students on a UGA bus, impatient to be on my way to my household of already-saved, Christ-loving girls? How often am I checking the clock in my class of thirty people whose names I don’t know and already thinking about church that night? How often am I viewing the earthly life I live as a distraction to endure instead of the purpose for which I am made?
There was a time when I thought I had “made it” as a Christian. I really believed I had succeeded in what my community and lifestyle was meant to exhibit, what its purpose was meant to be. I have spent the months since learning how to be the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), rather than the light of those who have already been made to see. Trying to make my oikos a picture of genuine relationship with the lost and broken, rather than those who are already found. I don’t know how well I do it even now, preaching as I am to myself. I think I will spend my entire lifetime learning. Learning how to do it right, how to do it wholeheartedly. Cherishing my Christian community and its Proverbial iron-sharpening, but in order that I might better cultivate the Kingdom-to-come, rather than the kingdom that is here.
I wonder if I don’t see Jesus all the more clearly in the harvest-field, away from all the comforts and pleasures of the home I’ve precariously built on the mountaintop—nothing but the pure, unflinching brokenness of the world He has called me to love.
He loved it too. He died for it, and He has called me to live in it.
May we all love our world, our every breath and opportunity and interaction and person, well. May we love one another so well, that we are all on hands and knees in the dirt, looking around us and finding that the laborers for the Gospel are ever-increasing, that they look less like our friends and more like “a great multitude that no one [can] number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9) at the end of all things.
Kaitlyn is a third year English major with minors in Religion and Public Policy & Management at UGA. She has been attending Watkinsville FBC since January of her freshman year, serves in WatKIDSville, and is a Community Outreach/Hospitality Intern. On Thursday, she hangs out at the Jones Tribe. She can’t wait to see how Athens can become a college town that is on fire for the Gospel!
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